Recap: Social Media Club DC - Chris Dorobek

Last night I battled the traffic to head down to see Chris Dorobek, editor of Federal Computer Week, speak about government and technology. Chris gave a great talk, I totally enjoyed hearing his take on government and technology. It was a really good time and as usual the conversation was terrific between all involved. Below is the full video of his talk. It was my first use of my new Flip Cam which I thought worked great. The quality suffered a bit in converting to flash as the original file was HUGE.

And make sure everyone goes and follow Chris on twitter at @cdorobek, he needs more followers from our area !

Enjoy his talk.

SocialDevCamp East: Community Power

As great as the event was this past weekend in Baltimore, what was even better was how it came together.

There was a very short lead time and David, Ann, and Keith did an awesome job pulling together such an organized event in such a short time.  But who knows, it may not have happened ??  During the week before the event I saw Keith post a message on Twitter saying that they were like $900 short of breaking even on all of the expenses.  Right away I jumped in and pledged $100 to help sponsor the event.  More people soon followed and in no time the shortage was made up. (You can see Keith talk about it here)

What an awesome feeling, knowing how supportive the community is !  And how cool that we now have the tools like Twitter that made it possible to reach out to us in an instant fashion to start the ball rolling.

I am honored to have been able to help, especially after seeing how great the day was.  And I am sure they rest of the the sponsors feel the same way.

New Twittervision Adds Local Capability

Our friend David Troy, creater of Twittervision, and host of the recently awesome SocialDevCamp East, has gone and added a cool little nugget to the Twittervision.  Whereas previouosly Twittervision showed us the tweets on a full map, we now have the ability to look a little more local.  He released Twittervision Local, for lask of a better description.  This link opens up a map of the local DC area and shows the tweets happening in the local DC area.

In my opinion, this is awesome.  The big map was cool, but I could gain no real value out of it, like the Twitter public timeline.  I dont think Twitter is good until you find that niche, which many times are people that are in the community around you.  This is where you get the most value out of Twitter.  Now the visual aid of the local Twittervision makes me aware of more people I would not have otherwise known about.  Sure I see some people I am following, but many more I am not.  I can click on their tweet and see what their all about and maybe meet them further enriching my experience.

David is a pioneer in the field.  At SocialDevCamp, he lead a great session about Location Based Services.  I was totally impressed by his depth of knowledge and how hard he is working to make the space better with initiatives like openlocation.org.

If you are not in the DC area, check out http://twittervision.com/local for a comprehensive list of other areas.

Recap: SocialDevCamp East

Much has already been said and written about the event in Baltimore yesterday.

• SocialDevCamp and the Baltimore Scene
• SocialDevCamp was a Success
• SocialDevCamp, the Future of the Social Web
• SocialDevCamp East: Awesome People, Awesome Day

I can only say that Dave, Ann, and Keith did an increible job of bring this together in such a short time.  I was proud to be able to help sponsor and even more proud to be involved and have such great discussions with all the great people.

It is great to see all the local talent come together, and like Greg said in his post above, there really was an awesome vibe.

I attended the following sessions:

• EC2 and other AWS cloud computing
• Location Based Services
• Twitter/Microblogging
• Washington area startup scene

There was not a bad apple in teh bunch.  Great discussions and interaction, I learned a lot.

I met some great people who are working on some really cool things.  Mike Subelsky, a Baltimore programmer, is working with an Austin based startup who is in semi stealth mode.  Amy Hoy showed us here totally cool “app” called Twistori, giving us a different glimpse into the Twiiter stream.

Also ran into Patti, of 600block

We’re building a new website to help you and your friends find Baltimore’s top restaurants, bars, music, shops, events and more. It’s Baltimore’s best according to the people who live here. Personalize your own page and get cool city picks just for you. Baltimore never looked better.

I am totally looking forward to learning more about them and writing more in depth about what they are doing soon.

Overall, hands down, the best event of my year so far.  I cannot wait till the fall and the next iteration.

SocialDevCamp East Video Collage

I will have a more complete wrapup of a really great event, but wanted to put up this video collage of the pics I snapped during the day.

Photos in the collage courtesy of:
Jeff Kubina
Shashi Bellamkonda
Jared Goralnick
Jimmy Gardner

SocialDevCamp East

Made it to Baltimore for the SocialDevCamp East.  We are getting into the voting on the sessions and about to break out into the sessions.

Make sure to follow the hashtag #socialdevcamp, or look to flickr for the socialdevcamp tag.

Also we will try to get up some Utterz for your listening pleasures.

Technosailor Birthday Bash !

I wanted to take a moment to give a “shout out” to our good friend Aaron Brazell, the Lead Editor of Technosailor, whose blog is about to turn 4 years old.

In theses days where blogs come and go, it is a true testament of Aaron’s staying power and his continued growth and influence in our space.  I have come to know Aaron more and more recently as we both mingle around the local DC tech scene and it has been a pleasure to come to know him and learn from him at the same time.

So in honor of his blog’s b’day Aaron is having a little bash at Austin Grill downtown.  All the details can be found here at the eventbrite page.

The event is limited to the first 50 peep’s so make sure you get over there to sign up as soon as you can, it is sure to be a sell out !

Congrats Aaron, looking forward to celebrating with you.

Twitter Use #298: Interview Questions

No I don’t really know of 297 twitter uses, but it seems like there is a lot.  At SXSW, we saw Twitter used by the crowd to start a mini-twitter riot during the Zuckerberg interview.  Well at the Web 2.0 Expo the other day, Tim O’Reilly used it in another fashion during an interview with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz , well at least he tried.

Apparently at the last minute they found that they were not set up to take questions from the audience via a microphone.  So Tim had a great idea, have the audience Twitter in their questions to his twitter account.  Genious.  As it turns out, he had his Twitter account set only to view @ replies from his followers, but nonetheless it was a great idea.

It was later through Tweescan that Tim actually saw the questions that were twitter’d in.  He compiled them and sent them over via email to Jonathon who then took the time to answer them, which is pretty cool in and of itself.

These social media tools make everyone so relevant.  They allow many of us unprecedented access to others we would have otherwise never had the opportunity to contact in the not so distant past.  The playing field has evened out for everyone.  Take full advantage of it.

Coporate Social Media Done Right

Okay, I guess I cannot uphold the Twitter writing ban that Allen Stern of CenterNetworks proposed for this week ..

As many of us know, more and more companies are using Twitter as a means to reaach out to their customers.  We have seen JetBlue, Soutwest Airlines, and Comcast.  Comcast has gotten a lot of good press lately in helping out some complaining customers, to include one Michael Arrington.  I even saw this tweet earlier today form a customer fed up with their dsl and asking @comcastcares what they had to offer.

But I was not aware just how entrenched Zappos was into Twitter and using it to their advantge until I read a great post over at ReadWriteWeb.  Zappos has developed a great reputation in their customer service making some fanatical fans.  And obviously they get the fact that they can use tools like Twitter to make their service and customer outreach even better.

According to the post, Twitter has 198 of their employees on Twiiter anc very active.  Zappos has even gone so far as to dedicate an entire section of their website to Twitter.  They have one page that shows all the tweets with mentions of Zappos, a Zappos exmployee tweets page, a leaderboard of Zappos employees and how many twitter followers they have, and even a Twitter Quick Start Guide out up by their CEO, Tony Hsieh !

Other companies would do well to follow the lead of Zappos.  I am convinced it is the way of the future.  It seems the “flattening” of the world is removing some of the insulating layers between these corporations and its comsumers.  They are being forced to listen as the widespread use of tools like Twitter and blogs give the average consumer a voice that must make the old guard of these companies shutter in their corner offices.

Yet Another Cool Twitter Tool: Twitter Timer

Okay okay, I know, enough with the Twitter crap …

But this one I found pretty cool.  It is your very own Twitter timer.  Simply follow timer and your all set.

Send timer a direct message with a message something like :

d timer 30 Doctors appnt

and in 30 minutes you will get a message back to remind you.  Its that easy.  Try it out and let us know what you think.

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