Linux Journal’s Shawn Powers shares a little secret with hardware vendors. This is a bit of a departure from his usual antics, but worth watching. This one’s serious! Ok, mostly serious.
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Archive for the 'Technology' Category
So last night Geri and I trekked up to The Woodlands, Texas to get our new favorite wine book signed by the coolest guy in wine, Gary Vaynerchuk.
After loitering a while at Borders for the book signing, we were lucky enough to accompany Gary to a wine bar down the street, Cru (which I have discovered is a chain interestingly enough). We made ourselves comfortable in the back room with a group of Vayniacs, and Gary picked some bottles. There were 9 of us in total, and it was fantastic. By the end of the meal, I figured out why Gary Vaynerchuk is making such a name for himself… everywhere. He makes the people around him feel like rock stars. That’s what it boils down to. This man knows his shit. He knows wine like few others, but shares his knowledge without pretension. His enthusiasm for life is infectious, and you come away feeling fantastic and in love with life somehow (ok, part of that was the wine 
). Honestly, it is a damned good thing Gary is not a cult leader because I would TOTALLY drink THAT kool-aid!
He gets technology and web media in a way few non-geeks do. If you are involved in any way with online media, you should be reading his blog and paying attention. Just do it. Trust me on this, and you’ll be glad you did.
The following video made my day yesterday. Watch it and go from there. I couldn’t embed, so you have to click through.
How do you know you have a community?
So I discovered yet another web app, Plurk, that may or may not be the next big thing. Whether or not that is the case is far less interesting to me than the amusing phenomenon I witnessed tonight as Twitter displayed a “database maintenance” message with an ETA of 3 hours. Like rats in a sinking ship, I watched as one after another twitterer established an account on this new-to-them site. All it took was a couple “big” twitterers to plug this new service, and the floodgates opened a bit. I will be anxious to see what the usage is like in the morning.
Fortunately, Twitter was back up in a jiffy. Coincidence?
Whether Plurk can handle the onslaught also remains to be seen, and this does not bode well (although I haven’t seen any evidence of it being down yet). Here’s a funny post on the subject from the Plurk blog.
Regardless, if you wanna join in the fun, I can be found here.
Another great video from Linux Journal.
Yay, there’s a new video up today at LinuxJournal.com! Thanks, Shawn.
I tagged along with my husband on Friday night for the early brainstorming stages of Startup Weekend Houston, an event that brings together like-minded tech entrepreneurs to start a company over one weekend, and I am pretty impressed with the idea we came up with. I say “we” even though I had to flake out and leave town for the remaining sessions, but I feel like this is a testament to the community mentality propagated by “main man” Andrew Hyde (very nice guy).
The project for the weekend is tipdish.com, an online directory of sorts intended to connect bloggers and new media types with cool new info, and vice versa for those wishing to get the word out.
Go check it out. It’s the next big thing.
I had never been to a BarCamp until today. I am so glad I remedied that!
Not knowing what to expect, I was not certain how my perspective and background might mesh with the rest of the crowd. Would I have anything at all to talk about? That said, I did in fact have a great time. I met so many smart and interesting people, and best of all, I am now filled with a great sense of pride that my hometown has so much local brainpower.
To all those I met today: drop me an email! To all those I did not meet today: MAKE SURE to drop me an email!
To the organizers and HTC: THANK YOU! Your enthusiasm and community support is appreciated by many.
So I am really trying to understand the twitter phenomenon, but so far I don’t. Perhaps my life is too boring, or I just don’t have enough friends, but I have been clicking around reading this random junk on twitter, and I am just not feeling it. Am I missing something? Please let me know if I am. I found a blog post that fairly well articulates my impressions, and the irony is that I came across this blog while… looking at Twitter. Hmmm….
I was reading something about beta sites that are invitation only, and how some seem worthy of such exclusivity whereas some don’t. Justified or not, there are a bunch of cool new-ish things out there that require an invitation. Joost comes to mind, as does Natuba. I already have a Natuba page (thanks Richard), but I thought I might like to try some other nifty “Web 2.0″ thingamajigs out there, so enter inviteshare.com. It is a site simply devoted to passing out invitations. Cool. Got my Joost; trying 8apps. You never know what useful new tool you may find, so give it a shot. Then again, maybe I should have kept it to myself… less competition for the oh-so-coveted invites. Or not.
