Planet PDX

Launching JEDEC.org isn’t the only reason we have standards setting organizations and associations on our minds lately.

This week is the ASAE Technology Conference & Expo 2010 in Washington D.C. and Cloud Four is going to the conference for the first time.

Despite the snowpocalypse plaguing the city, John arrived safe in D.C. earlier today after a long flight from our home base in Portland, Oregon.

He’ll be in town all week. If you’re at the conference, we please say hello. If you’d like to set up a specific time to meet with John, please contact us or connect with John via Twitter.

When we’re not working on mobile projects, there’s a good chance we’re working with a standards setting organization or an association on their public web presence.

More often than not, we’re building that site using Drupal. We believe Drupal is a perfect fit for organizations and associations.

Before we started started Cloud Four, Aileen, Lyza, John and I had all worked for several years at Kavi which is focused on providing software for organizations.

John was one of the co-founders of Kavi. Lyza was one of the first employees. And Aileen and I had been at Kavi for over seven years.

Needless to say, we have a lot of experience working with these organizations.

After we left Kavi, we searched for a new web platform that would fit the needs of these organizations. Our experience had taught us that while there are some common characteristics of organization web sites, that each organization has unique goals and functionality that they need implemented on their site.

With that experience in mind, we tried many different solutions before settling on Drupal. Drupal provides:

• Top-notch content management features
• Support for simple or complex user management
• Foundation that provides for future expansion
• An active development community
• Ability to build custom solutions on top of Drupal if needed
• Integration ease including the NTEN favorite membership management suite, CiviCRM¹

In addition to these core features, we found that Drupal supports other things that organizations often talk about such as:

• Revisioning
• Authoring Roles
• Content Syndication
• News Aggregator
• Tagging
• Localization
• Blogging
• Forums

All of this goodness wrapped in an open source platform that is widely used by both companies and non-profits.

We’ve been talking to our customers and partners for quite some time about why Drupal makes sense for organizations, but have been waiting for the perfect showcase site to make the point to a larger audience.

As you can see from the recently launched JEDEC.org site, Drupal makes it possible to build beautiful and powerful web sites that accomplish the objectives of standards-setting organizations and associations.

If you’d like to learn more about how Drupal can help your organization, association or your company (Yes, it works well for corporate sites as well!), please contact us.

We’d be happy to talk to you more about how Drupal can help your organization.

1. As an aside, if you run an organization and haven’t looked into CiviCRM, we highly recommend that you do. It is a full-featured, open source membership tool that integrates fully with Drupal. Not only that, but our friends at raSANTIAGO + Associates provide a great service called CiviServer and are experts in helping organizations utilize CiviCRM effectively.

Last week, we finally got to take the wraps off of one of our favorite projects of the last year: JEDEC.org.

While on our blog we mostly talk about mobile, we also do a fair amount of traditional web site development work.

In particular, we’ve helped many standards-setting organizations and associations like JEDEC with their public web sites.

JEDEC came to us with substantial issues that needed to be addressed. The current site had long outgrown its information architecture and had three different navigation systems and site maps.

We performed a full content audit and combined web analytics with information architecture analysis to create a new site structure that focused on helping people find information more quickly.

In particular, web analytics showed that the majority of people coming to the site wanted to download standards. The new design brings the search interface right onto the newly designed home page.

The search interface was reworked to provide people with the ability to narrow their searches. When documents are uploaded to the site, they automatically show up on the related committee pages and other sections of the site where the documents are relevant.

We worked with JEDEC to define technology focus areas that help people new to the organization understand the current hot topics for the organization and get a quick sense about what JEDEC does. These technology focus pages are all dynamic are constantly updating with new information as documents, press releases, and events are added.

We also collaborated with other vendors to integrate event data coming from another system and to provide a single-sign on strategy with a membership management system.

Perhaps most importantly, we had a great time working with JEDEC and its staff. In particular, Emily Desjardins and Arnaud Lebegue became part of our extended team over the last few months. We’re grateful for the opportunity to work with them and to see their vision come to finally come to life.

Beaverton-based Merix Corp. said this morning that its shareholders have approved the sale of the company to Missouri-based Viasystems Group Inc. Merix said it expects to close the deal "in the next few days."

If there’s one thing people in Portland love to do, it’s muck with technology. Sometimes, that mucking results in something interesting. Sometimes, that something interesting has enough potential that it could become a full-fledged company. But then there’s difficult transitional period. How do you find co-founders? How do you get the idea off the ground? What is going to force you to actually make something happen?

All good questions. And you might find the answers to them at Startup Weekend Portland.

That’s right. After a little hiatus from Portland, last year—and a stop in Corvallis near the end of last year—everyone’s favorite startup starting sprint is headed back to Portland. The event will be held March 5-7 at NedSpace Old Town. Tickets are $75 each.

Hold the phone. What’s Startup Weekend, you ask?

Startup Weekend is a 54-hour startup event that provides networking, resources, and incentives for individuals and teams to go from idea to launch. Get connected with local developers, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Build community. Start companies. No talk. All action.

In other words, it’s an intensive bootcamp for helping you bring your startup idea to fruition with other like-minded folks.

What kinds of companies come out of startup weekend? Well, the most impressive alumnus of Startup Weekend Portland has to be Portland-based Mugasha, the best way to listen to electronica online. And there were a number of other Portland projects started that still may become going concerns one day.

But arguably, launching companies may be secondary to gaining the experience and making connections with peers whom you might not otherwise meet. So if you’ve got an idea, definitely show up. And if you don’t have an idea yet? Definitely show up.

Still looking for more details? Stay tuned to Startup Weekend Portland, join the Startup Weekend community, or follow Startup Weekend on Twitter. I’ll keep you up-to-date as more details emerge.

Related posts

• Startup Weekend Corvallis will start up tonight. Will you be starting a startup there? (2)
• Portland Startup Weekend valedictorian Mugasha opens sliced and diced DJ sets to everyone (2)
• Mugasha adds a slew of new sets (2)
• Portland Startup Weekend: Five startup projects launched in 54 hours (10)
• Portland Startup Weekend now being held at Vidoop offices (2)

Inspiring images, books and people to help you create a colorful garden.

Color Inspiration

floato

Martin_Heigan

La Citta Vita | Martin_Heigan


UGArdener

Colorful Gardening Books

San Francisco Bay-area artist and garden designer Keelya Meadows encourages the use of bold colors in her book Fearless Color Gardens: The Creative Gardener’s Guide to Jumping Off the Color Wheel.

More Books

The Ever-Blooming Flower Garden: A Blueprint for Continuous Color

Garden Color Book

The Gardeners Color Palette: Paint Your Garden with 100 Extraordinary Flower Choices

Color Garden Guide (Color Garden Guide: Easy Mix and Match to Annuals and Perennials)

Gardeners to Follow

treesandshrubs | yougrowgirl | gardensupermart | plangarden | dkprinzing | ShawnaCoronado | kissmyaster | margaretroach | janeperrone | Indygardener | hipchickdigs | compostman | ZanthanGardens | EwaInTheGarden | in_bloom | bussogardener | thegardenshed

Last week happened. I think. I had a sinus headache on Saturday that made everything from earlier in the week seem vague and hard-to-remember, so I’m stuck looking for pictorial evidence. This is a sketch I made on my phone (using Brushes) at the pdx.rb meeting while Igal was talking about why he uses rcov. His [...]

February 08, 2010 Virginia has recently spearheaded efforts to preserve working farmland. One key method to preserve farmland is to pass the farm to the next generation. In order to help current farmers through this transition, the State has created agriculture license plates to raise money for workshops – thus keeping the small farm active, viable, and in the family.

h/t @susancato

Go to Original Post…

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• Preserving Local Farms in Oregon
• A City Looks Toward Defining Its Future
• Farmers, conservation groups join to preserve farmland near Portland’s suburbs
• Dr. John Boyd on Martin Luther King, Jr., Black Farmers, and President Obama
• Urban Growth Boundaries: The Reserves Process (Video)
• Coalition of Farming, Conservation Groups Provide Alternative Vision for Region’s Growth
• Urban Growth Boundary: Oregon Agriculture, Economy, and Managed Growth (video)
• Red Truck Farm

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February 08, 2010 Virginia has recently spearheaded efforts to preserve working farmland. One key method to preserve farmland is to pass the farm to the next generation. In order to help current farmers through this transition, the State has created agriculture license plates to raise money for workshops – thus keeping the small farm active, [...]

After 75 idea submissions, and long, hard toil to narrow the field down to the 20 talks we can fit on stage, we’re proud to present you with the 20 amazing talks that will be burning your mind at Ignite Portland 8 on March 3:

• Andy Beach - Drink Your Way to a Better You

David D. Levine - Mission to “Mars”

Selena Deckelmann - How to un-rig an election

DeeAnn Sole - Travels with Our Cats: A Lazy Person’s Guide to Taking the Trip of a Lifetime

Audrey Rose Goldfarb - The Gatekeeper Phenomenon

Matthew Douglass - Legends of Rock

Jean MacDonald - The Beginner’s Guide to Psychiatric Hospitalization

Erik Chevalier - A Fabber In Every Household

Phillip Kerman - Video Production on the Cheap

Beverly Fields - 5 Behaviors That Will Keep My Hot, Smart Friends From Dating You

Sheetal Dube - The Bag Lady

Liz Argall - How to Hit Writer’s Block in the Face with a Shovel

Gene Ehrbar - Dr. Seuss and his Secret, Evil Mind-Control Plan: A Cautionary Tale

Steven Walling - Why Wikipedians are the Weirdest People on the Internet

Kristin Webb-Tomson - Ugly is the New Beautiful

Sarina Rodrigues - This is your brain on people

Maxwell Radi - How to be Unemployed

Amber Case - An Introduction to Hyperbolic Geometry

Lee Williamson - Deadwood, South Dakota’s most notorious madam, Influenza Pandemics, and why I’m probably alive today

Scott Rogers and Bob Ladewig - How to Write Sketch Comedy

We want to extend a big thanks to all of you who took the risk of sharing your burning talk ideas with us, especially to those of you whose talk idea didn’t make it this time. Don’t be discouraged! Competition is fierce, and time is short. We’d love it if you submit your talk idea next time!

We hope you’re as excited as we are about the lineup - it’s going to be a great night!

February 08, 2010 If you are a food grower, it’s that time of year, again! Either you’re anxiously awaiting your seed order delivery, or you’re still pondering what will I grow this year. It doesn’t really matter if you only have a few pots on the patio or several beds in the backyard…planning and planting is imperative. And so goes it for this journalist, Sara Lipka. With a love of seed catalogs and a keen urge to grow food, she (and her boyfriend) find some ground via his alma mater, and begin the process – to not only grow food for themselves, but primarily for the school kids!

“We paged through the catalogs again and again. Carwile’s Virginia Peanuts, it turned out, had been given by a traveler to an eight-year-old boy around 1910. St. Valery carrots, sweet and tender, dated back to 1880s France. Black Mexican corn was derived from an Iroquois variety. And the tomatoes—oh, the tomatoes. The pages of delicious descriptions were so tempting that in order to keep from getting overwhelmed or carried away, I had to stop. Close the catalog. Take a deep breath.”

What a great idea! Maybe this will catch on for other farmers-without-land and schools-without-farmers.

via @Atlantic_Food

Go to Original Post…

Related Posts:

• Farm To School: A Conversation with Marion Kalb-part 3
• An Urban Farm Sprouts in the Heart of Shenzhen
• Farm To School: A Conversation with Marion Kalb-part 2
• Farm To School: A Conversation with Marion Kalb
• Building A Bridge To Somewhere: Farm To School
• In Latino Gardens, Vegetables, Good Health and Savings Flourish
• White House garden ‘ex-seeds’ expectations
• Think Global and Eat Local

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It’s time for a new site theme! It’s time for a new site theme! Lyza.com in the coming weeks will be focusing on a new area: the heavens. Astronomy, astrology, planets and phenomena. I have a few ideas for topics up my sleeve, but now is the time to let me know if there is a relevant concept you’d like me to research and post about.

Leave me comments with any ideas or, um, concerns?, and I should have the first heavens-related post sometime this week.

In the end, we were left with a whole lot of oysters. After all, this party for my stepmother Christie in her Lake Washington-side home in Renton, Wash., came with its own oyster shucker, who at the end of the night fastidiously packaged all of the leftovers for us: kumamotos, Olympic something-or-others, some variety from the Hood Canal, mignonette, horseradish, cocktail sauce, prawns larger than human ears. This morning, David breaded the larger oysters in crushed saltines and flour and deep fried them in canola oil.

I should have parties catered more often. Gourmando, a Seattle catering company, knocked this one out of the park, tastiness-wise. The bartender served special, Patron gold-based Phoenix rising drinks, dusted with gold foil. The head chef kept adding beautifully browned and meticulously constructed hors d’oeuvres as they came piping off of the kitchen stove.

This was a celebration for Christie, and my sister Maggie flew in from Washington, DC, to be there, too. We got gussied up and Christie’s cousin Marian, a hairdresser from Cincinnati, did very impressive things to the coiffures of both Gardner sisters. The evening was atypical for me; I am standoffish when it comes to both family and females as a general rule. This is not for lack of love, but for lack of interactive grace. My sister always apologizes when she hugs me, and makes it quick. Last night I did my best—sticking my vulnerable neck out—to be more integrated and human-like. I hope it worked. I quite enjoyed myself. Despite likely trampling on various conversations and asserting too many opinions and/or gagging on my own foot.

See the rest of the photos on Flickr

I finished reading “Unlocking the clubhouse” on Saturday, finally. The book is only about 150 pages long, but it’s full of useful information about increasing participation of women in computer science.

The chapter that most stuck with me was chapter 6, “Persistence and Resistance: Staying in Computer Science.” I have said more than once, in a tongue-in-cheek way, that Code-n-Splode’s mantra for men who think that we should not have the “dude token” policy should be: “It’s just not about you.”

My feeling is that establishing a culture where female voices dominate, rather than are assimilated in, creates a social environment that’s fundamentally different. And that that difference is *good*. I wouldn’t say that the book totally supports that notion, but it points out situations where women found peer groups that did not conform to a male hacker stereotype, and that foundation of social support helped them stay in their course of study.

The students referred to in the paragraph are undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon University:

Women who accept the prevailing culture as the norm and who continuously compare themselves to this norm and find themselves coming up short are the ones who suffer the most.

The majority of women struggle to find a place where they can feel comfortable in the prevailing culture…

Ironically, it is in this area of relationship to culture that international women may have an edge. The international women do not as readily use the U.S. male hacker as their reference group. Since they are not fully part of this culture, their reference group is elsewhere. Many international students have alternative success norms and social bonds that protect them. Other priorities are dominant, and with these come other scales for self-evaluation.

So, rather than bringing their cultural norms to the hacker culture and modifying it, the international women have their own social structures which exist outside of the dominant culture. “Cultural resistance” was the title for this section, and it’s a great way of characterizing the lack of assimilation.

I have more than a few times heard women-specific groups discouraged because of they emphasize differences that the dominant culture feels should be unimportant. I’m interested in further research that discusses the effects of splinter groups, particularly when they are created for women.

The second interesting topic in this chapter concerned learning communities.

Former University of California calculus professor Uri Treisman (1992) believes that a supportive learning community is critically important for the success of minority students in math and science.

The story went on to describe Professor Treisman’s observation that Asian students tended to socialize *and* study in supportive groups, which tended to help students stick with the courses and get better grades. He established similar groups for Hispanic and African American students, and found across several universities and colleges that these groups helped retention. Our observations and the resulting user group for women mirrors that Professor’s experience.

There’s a special connection created when you live and engage with material in a supportive learning community. They take time to create, and are a bit harder to maintain outside of an academic context (where life, work and diverging interests can be a bit more challenging to coordinate).

Code-n-splode has been fairly quiet about its successes, but I think now is the time for us to start talking a bit more about how well the group has succeeded.

Photo courtesy of DrPantzo under a Creative Commons License.

Forrester has recently made a decision to limit blogging activities by analysts to Forrester branded blogs for any topics related to their research coverage area. Forrester analysts can continue to blog about vacations or other personal topics on their own blogs, but they will only be able to blog on the Forrester website for topics that they also cover as part of their role as a research analyst.

SageCircle has a more in-depth analysis of the issue, including an official statement from Forrester. According to SageCircle:

“Forrester CEO George Colony is well aware of that savvy analysts can build their personal brands via their positions as Forrester analysts amplified by social media (see the post on “Altimeter Envy”). As a consequence, a Forrester policy that tries to restrict analysts’ personally-branded research blogs works to reduce the possibility that the analysts will build a valuable personal brand leading to their departure. In addition, forcing analysts to only blog on Forrester-branded blogs concentrates intellectual property onto Forrester properties increasing the value of the Forrester brand.”

…

“Because there are relatively few analysts at Forrester and large firms that have personally-branded research blogs, this new policy will likely have relatively little short term impact. However, policies like this might hamper future analyst recruiting efforts limiting the type of individuals wanting a job at a firm.” (Quoted from SageCircle)

Given the current economic situation, I agree that this decision is unlikely to have much short-term impact on Forrester, but the long-term effects could be devastating. I suspect that several of their analysts will leave over this decision, although they may wait until the economy starts to improve before making the jump. I also think that they will have a hard time recruiting top talent. Very few people who have built active blogs in their areas of expertise will be willing to give them up. I know that I would never consider working for Forrester under these restrictions.

With that said, I understand why Forrester is making this decision, but I don’t agree with it. I suspect that it is in part an overreaction to several recent high-profile departures from Forrester, including people like Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li. While the desire to have all of the content written by Forrester analysts in one place is understandable, there are other ways to pull in the content than by limiting blogging on other websites.

I have been reading Jeremiah’s blog for a long time, and I frequently ran across Forrester research through his blog that I might not have found otherwise. Allowing people to continue to blog in places where they already have a following drives more people to Forrester’s research. Yes, their analysts continue to build a name for themselves, which also reflects positively on Forrester, but they also provide valuable exposure to the research outside of Forrester’s traditional channels. Dennis Howlett at ZDNet provides some more insight into the value that bloggers with an established following brought to Forrester in increased revenue over the past year or so.

It was interesting to read Augie Ray’s perspective. He recently joined Forrester as an analyst, and here are a few of his thoughts on the issue:

“Am I thrilled at the prospect of giving up Experience: The Blog, my personal/professional blog?  Well no—it’s become part of my digital identity and represents thousands of hours of time and effort.  But I also understand Forrester’s reasons for the changes.  There are obvious benefits to the company of aggregating intellectual property on Forrester.com, including Search Engine relevance and creating a marketing platform that demonstrates the breadth and depth of analysts’ brainpower and coverage.”

…

“I’ll be sad to see Experience: The Blog go, but I’m also looking forward to digging into the new Forrester blog platform.  There, I will continue to do what I’ve been doing for years on my personal blog:  Sharing news, offering insights, connecting with others, asking for input, and—most importantly—continuing to build my reputation within my field.” (Quoted from Experience: The Blog)

This decision is generating some high profile criticism, and I hope they reconsider this decision. These types of restrictions just aren’t practical in today’s environment where our jobs and personal lives are becoming blended, particularly through social content on blogs and Twitter.

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Part of the reason pesticides are widely used in agriculture comes down to the general preferences of the average American consumer. Farmer Don, a local Portland farmer who grows and sells a variety of fresh foods explains the fussiness some people exhibit toward fruits and vegetables—they won’t buy if something is blemished or has any insect holes. As he tries to explain, imperfection is a part of nature, and an insect boring into (say) an apple causes only a cosmetic harm. Using less pesticides reduces the risks of contamination to the surrounding environment, and also less exposure to farm workers, and ultimately to eaters.

Check out this related video about farmer Don: Sunflower Seeds Forever

Related Posts:

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• A Sustainable Farmer Talks Corn
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• A 21st Century Social Contract Between Agriculture & the Public
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• The Cutting Garden
• What does Sustainable Food Mean to You?
• A City Looks Toward Defining Its Future

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The Last Thing You Want To See:

For a truly heart-stopping firmware upgrade, throw in an impenetrable error message in broken English, then appear to have worked successfully.

Also I don’t know why Flickr doesn’t respect transparency in these screenshots sometimes.

I’ve been meaning to share links to some of the blogs I’ve been coming across a lot lately and really enjoying. Check these out, you might like them as much as I have been. Got suggestions for other blogs that readers here and I should be subscribed to as well?

• Locationmeme is some good writing about the hot trend of social software based on location. See also Checkin Blog.
• The Next Web is an up-and-coming tech news blog, a competitor to ReadWriteWeb. These guys are really, really fast on a story. Hopefully once they’ve made all the more of a name for themselves for speed, they’ll settle into writing more about what they think about the web. They’re certainly right in the thick of things online.
• Mixergry is an awesome series of video interviews with entrepreneurs who have interesting stories.
• Augmented Planet is all about Augmented Reality. I’m a big Games Alfresco reader, but Augmented Planet is looking like a regular must-read as well. See also Tish Shute’s Ugotrade.
• Finally, these might not be blogs but they are some of my favorite news sources of daily information. Two iPhone apps that I’m just in love with. The app for Newser offers a great summary of top news stories. It makes really efficient reading. And my absolute #1 top new favorite? Etsy Addict!

Yup, those are my (roughly) 5 favorite new blogs. How about you? Anything you’ve discovered lately that is becoming a must-read?

I just noticed some posts around the web questioning my characterization of Mark Zuckerberg’s on-stage declaration that the age of privacy is over. I left a comment on one of those blog posts that I thought I should post here as well. I thought pretty hard before posting that coverage of Zuckerberg’s statements that I did. I asked myself: is this a fair way to characterize what he just said? I concluded that it was and I stand by that still today.

So just for the record, here’s the rough transcript I posted last month of Zuckerberg’s literal comments, followed by my justification for why I’ve summarized them as I have.

“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’
“And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

“We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

Here’s why I believe he was saying, in those vague but important words, that the age of privacy is over.

Zuckerberg did say that the era of privacy is over, he just said it one step away from literally and directly. He said this: our new privacy stance (X) is based on where we think the world is today and if we were to launch the site anew today, then that policy (X) is how we would have launched it.

What is X? It is a policy wherein your profile photo, friends list and most importantly fan page subscriptions are irrevocably public and a variety of other types of user data are now by default public. He doesn’t say “the era of privacy is over” directly, he says “our new privacy policies reflect the way the world is today” – but the phrase “our new privacy policy” equals: no more privacy about some things and public by default on others.

It is a fundamentally more public position on privacy and one that Facebook team members have told me point-blank on a press phone call – yes, they are hoping to move people towards being more public and less private.

So let me know, am I mischaracterizing things? I don’t think I am. I don’t think I’m putting words into anyone’s mouth, I think I’m doing journalistic work interpreting the meaning behind public utterances regarding a topic I’ve been paying close attention to for a good while.

Here are a few interesting things from this week that I wanted to share …

Gartner Reveals Five Social Software Predictions for 2010 and Beyond

Few Companies Have Policy for Employee Use of Social Networks

Filtrbox Plus Jive: Like Peanut Butter and Chocolate

The Social Customer Will Be Mobile

Mobile Internet Market to Eclipse Desktop Internet

Minding the Gap

Stanford Social Innovation Review: The Effects of Joining the Conversation

A beginner’s guide to building a presence on Twitter

Social Customer Case Study: OK Labs Hits 150% of Customer Community Target

Right and Wrong of PR Pitches

6 Ways To Spread Thought Leadership Content (Without Blogging)

Random rules for ideas worth spreading

You can find all of my links on Delicious.

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Green

Thank You Bag by Ina Weise

Buy

When it comes to plastic bags things are pretty black and white.

"I’m not crazy about telling everyone not to use plastic bags. I know they can be very useful. But since I’ve been living in the US it is very hard to ignore the mass amounts of plastic bags everywhere. Everyone keeps them stuffed into one that hangs from the pantry door. They line trash bins. They carry food even if it is just a single pack of gum. They flutter from trees. They float in the breeze. They clog roadside drains. There are so many everywhere that no one really treats them as if they’re worth anything."

Art

Sarah Gee

Potfolio

Via Hello Bauldoff

Nancy Herman

Potfolio

Visual Music

Textiles

Kathryn M  Ireland

Link

Via Design*Sponge

A little while ago I was catching up on the news, and I noticed that every site I visited was publishing celebrity gossip along side significant world events. It’s been bothering me ever since. Why do these two things share the front page of reputable news organizations and aggregation sites?

I suspect the answer is straight forward: they report on the topics that people want to hear about. This is not an unreasonable proposition — why wouldn’t a news organization provide broad based coverage? Shouldn’t the power and influence of the major news networks be used to help people become better informed about the things they care about?

On the front page of every news site there were articles about the Grammy Awards, along side news about the Haiti earthquake. It didn’t sit right. The juxtaposition of wealth and devastation was distasteful, but that wasn’t the problem. The thing that gnaws at me is the editorial decision to present an entertainment event with the same importance as an unfolding humanitarian crisis.

Don’t get me wrong — the Grammys are an important entertainment event. If you’re in the business, it’s a huge deal. If you enjoy following the fashion and social entanglements of the artists and industry, it’s an annual high point. Hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars slosh through the financial ecosystem of The Grammys.

Never the less, news about the Grammys is entertainment on the grand scale. Some jobs are on the line for a select few, but for the rest of us it’s simply entertaining — the drama, the spectacle, the fantasy, the occasionally unruly guest. It’s a welcome break from the humdrum of ordinary life, something we click through on our coffee breaks and after work. For the vast majority, participating in the Grammys means watching the television and chipping in to the office pool.

On the other hand, the earthquake in Haiti is a significant world event: hundreds of thousands dead, ruined cities, refugees, poverty, corruption. The relief effort is a very complex task, undertaken by dozens of governments, and hundreds of volunteer staffed aid organizations. Responding to emergencies like the Haiti earthquake is a moral imperative in a civilized world, requiring us to pay attention and contribute what ever it is we’re best able to contribute.

I struggle with the editorial decision to promote entertainment to the same level as moral imperatives.  I think news organizations fail us when they only report on the topics that people want to see, by measuring their success by the number of eyeballs consuming the information. They no longer serve to inform the people about what is important — they simply serve to entertain.

Finding the Grammys on par with Haiti indicates to me that our largest news organizations should simply be considered players in the entertainment industry, not bastions of responsible journalism.

Is this a fair litmus test?

It is a failure of the fourth estate when “all the news that’s fit to print” is printed because they know we’ll read it, not because we need it.

Portland's own Linus Torvalds doesn't like to take calls, but he's happy with what Google's doing.

Like many other states, Oregon has a new handsfree law.  This means we are now disallowed to drive while holding up a mobile phone to our ear.  The new law, effective 1 January 2010, requires all drivers, except for a few exceptions, to drive with a Bluetooth or other headset.

As a result, I’ve received many requests for suggestions on Bluetooth headsets from Oregon folks and others who want to go handsfree.  Today, I’m featuring another option that doesn’t involve sticking an awkward headset into your ear.

Introducing the BlueAnt S1

The BlueAnt S1 could easily be confused with a normal garage door opener.  The S1 is a Bluetooth speakerphone that clips on to your sun visor in your car.

At first look, the S1 looks pretty intriguing.  It has 4 buttons on the front that facilitate four separate functions: call send, call end, volume up and volume down.  The buttons send button doubles as the power key as well.

Features and Capabilities

The S1 has a whole slew of features that try to win you over.  First of all, the S1 tries to make sure you don’t have to take your hands of the wheel by enabling you to use your voice as much as possible.  For example, when paired with your phone, when a call comes in, you can simply answer the call by saying the word “Answer”.  Also, if you have voice dialing on your mobile phone, the S1 supports this feature as well.

The BlueAnt S1 features A2DP streaming capability.  Like Bluetooth headphones and some other devices, you can stream music from your iPhone or mobile phone to the S1.  This might be of use if your speaker system on your phone is not up to par (which is very likely).  Also, this enables you to utilize the S1 with your dashboard GPS such as a Garmin Nuvi or TomTom device.

The S1 has phenomenal battery life.  BlueAnd advertises 15 hours of talk time and 800 hours of standby time.

BlueAnt equipped the S1 with noise cancellation, to cut down on noise whilst in your car.  This is an important factor for noisy cars, such as my Honda Civic.  Lastly, the S1 features “multipoint” technology – meaning the device can be paired with multiple devices, even 2 devices at the same time.  This might be useful for two folks who have a phone each and want to utilize their phone while in the car at the same time.

Setting up the S1

After you open the box, the S1 requires to be fully charged.  Once you charge it, the S1 is ready to pair with your mobile device.  Setting up the S1 is very easy, as fluid as pairing any Bluetooth headset with your handset.  I was able to easily pair the S1 with many different devices, including a Motorola Droid, iPhone, Nokia N900 and N97.

Using the Device

So, the S1 has all sorts of great bells and whistles, but how does it sound while making calls?  In a word, it sounds OK.  When I called folks on the S1, they sounded pretty good to me.  BlueAnt did a great job of making this Bluetooth speakerphone very capable as a speaker phone for you, as a caller.

However, when I had folks call me from the S1, the sound quality left me wanting more.  When my wife, who drives a relatively quiet Ford Escape, called at low speeds, she sounded distant and at times, I had to really concentrate to understand her.  I was able to hear her words in most cases, but BlueAnt needs to refine the noise cancellation on the S1.

One area the S1 shines is battery life.  I can’t verify the 15 hours of talk time, but in my estimates, I have easily gotten 13 hours of it on a single charge.  It is so nice to be able to just leave the S1 on at all times and not fuss with having to turn it off and on.  The S1 has such remarkable battery life that there’s no need to concern yourself with having to manage the power settings on the S1.

I was able to utilize the multipoint technology, which was nice as I was testing a Motorola Droid recently and it was nice to be able to pair with both of my phones.

Conclusion

All things considered, should you buy the BlueAnt S1?  One must consider the great features including music screaming, long battery life, and ease use.  With these advantages, you must balance these against the OK audio quality.

Above all this, you must consider the price point.  A recent search revealed that the S1 is available for around $50 US.  I would say at this price, the S1 is worth the money.  Not everyone wants to fuss with locating their Bluetooth headset, putting it in your ear, and shouting into your car so that folks can year you.

The S1 is a no-fuss solution for talking on your phone, freeing you from headsets, bad battery life, and awkward looks when you have a headset in.

For those looking, the S1 is available from Amazon for about $54.

Post from: Techcraver.com | Craving Tech, Craving Life!

Review: BlueAnt S1 Sun Visor Bluetooth Handsfree

We had our first volunteer sprint of 2010 at the Daily Cafe in the Pearl today.

We had about 13 people show up over about four hours, and got off to a great start with the many small and large tasks required as we build up to our call for proposals!

Things that people worked on:

* User group contact spreadsheet update
Jason and Scott started the process of updating our user group database in the google doc! They got though verifying over 50 user groups that were contacted last year.

* Draft #1 to announce the call for proposals to user group participants
Additions, suggestions and revisions are welcome. The URL was posted to the mailing list.

* Processing of audio
Ed worked a bunch on processing the audio from last year’s conference!

* Specification of the workflow for registration
Igal, Eric, Selena and Reid went over requirements that were documented from a meeting last week by Sherri and several people created detailed diagrams.
A group of us then worked through exactly how the registration is going to work, and determined that a newly-discovered third party service would likely meet our needs, as long as we could extract money from it weekly (they currently only offer money extraction *after* the event ). Reid will check in with the service on Monday about this.

* Marketing progress
Christie documented a ton of tasks for the call for proposals release, and helped us refine our processes a bit.

* Sponsorship contacts
I spent a little time following up with sponsors.

* Open Conference Ware
Audrey made fixes to rake tasks and improved the documentation!

Thanks everyone, and look forward to another volunteer sprint announcement in the next day or so!

Photo courtesy of bushtick via a Creative Commons license

SILICON FOREST BLOG: More money is apparently coming from other sources, too, to help ambitious companies get off the ground.

It's been a while since the link in our store for t-shirts died... and after trying a out several different on-demand printers we finally decided that to get the best quality prints we were going to have to make the shirts ourselves. So now you can rep the color love offline too.

Sponsored Members: Check your love notes for a special thank you 20% off coupon.

Holding t-shirt inventory isn't cheap so for now we're only stocking the black shirts. If in the future there is enough demand for white shirts we'll order some of those too...

Color Love Blind Test

COLOURlovers Logo Tee

Show Us Your Love

If you honor us by buying one of our shirts, send us a photo of you wearing it and we'll add it to our online gallery... We may even offer some prizes to the most colorful and creative submissions.

Thank you all for continuing to support our efforts to grow the most supportive and creative community.
+Darius

Startups need milestones. They need goals. And indicators of progress. And sometimes, they need to take a moment to stop and revel in some ridiculously huge numbers that remind them that what they’re doing might—just maybe—have hit upon that idea that will change the world.

For Portland-based Urban Airship, this is one of those times.

Last night around 5 PM, Urban Airship hit one of those ridiculously huge numbers that make you stop and think. It happened when their Apple Push Notification Service odometer rolled over to 100 million push notifications served.

That’s right. One hundred million.

Hmm. Your jaw didn’t drop quite the way mine did. Maybe I should provide you with a little more context?

Again, Urban Airship has now delivered more than 100 million messages—to more than 10 million mobile devices. Why is that a big deal? Well, this whole 100 million thing becomes a lot more impressive when you have a little more detail.

You see, Urban Airship was founded in May 2009. Founded! In May! That’s like nine months ago. When they started. Square one. And they’ve now sent more than 100 million messages. With a team of four people.

Just take a second to think about that. That’s nine figures. In nine months.

So forgive me if I’m a bit effusive. But I think that’s kind of a big deal. I mean, I don’t know how long it took McDonald’s to serve 100 million burgers, but something tells me it took a little longer than nine months and a few more folks than four people.

Yeah. I know. I hear you. They might be on to something here.

So a huge congratulations to the Urban Airship team. This is definitely a milestone worth celebrating.

And here’s looking forward to the next 100 million messages coming a great deal more quickly.

For more information, visit Urban Airship, follow Urban Airship on Twitter, or read the Silicon Florist post I wrote about Urban Airship in June 2009.

Related posts

• iPhone developers rejoice: Urban Airship launches push notification beta (1)
• Tap tap: Urban Airship celebrates launch of iPhone OS 3.0 with Tapulous deal (0)
• Urban Airship: Providing air cover for independent iPhone developers (2)
• When you absolutely, positively need to push millions of iPhone messages in milliseconds: Urban Airship Priority Push (3)
• The Oregonian on Apple, iPhone, and the Portland mobile scene (0)

It’s Friday. And that means it’s time for another installment of Strange Love Live tonight at 10 PM. But maybe you can’t wait that long. Maybe you’re a little antsy. I mean, seriously. When you know that Nate “@xolotl” Angell is going to be on, it’s really really difficult to wait.

Well, have no fear. I’ve got something to distract you. It’s last week’s episode of SLL, featuring Christine Kistner. And I promise, it will tide you over until this evening. So kick back. Slide into Friday afternoon. And spend an hour getting to know more about Christine.

So let’s get to it.

Like what you saw there? Well, there’s more. You can subscribe to Strange Love Live and get new episodes delivered right to you with no additional effort. Almost magically. What’s that? You’re more into the whole audio thing? No worries. You can subscribe to the SLL audio feed too.

Related posts

• Portland’s Frenetic Friday: Get your rest because you’re crazy busy tomorrow (3)
• Strange Love Live: Gadgets, geegaws, and more stuff from CES with Brian M Westbrook (0)
• Strange Love Live at 30 hour day: Wherein I do my best Ed McMahon or Andy Richter imitation (0)
• Joining Strange Love Live Productions and announcing we’ll be doing 30 hour day all over again (9)
• Portland’s rollercoaster year: Recapping the 2009 startup scene and looking forward to 2010 (5)

SILICON FOREST BLOG: Also -- central Oregon hopes for a "Facebook effect."

Africa Series by Amsterdam born and based photographer Viviane Sassen.

“Kana Hakkliha” is older than the hills in Internet Time, but it’s so good it’s worth trotting back out every couple years.

Original Recipe Kana Hakkliha

And from the remix competition on my blog five years ago this month (wow):

Dave’s Extra Crispy

Jake’s Cajun Style

Stephen’s(?) Country-Fried

Dr. Temple Grandin, Associate Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University talks about her approach to helping livestock handling facilities provide more humane treatment of farm animals. This is an excerpt from her talk delivered at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Sustainable Foods Institute in Monterey, California, in May of 2009. Her understanding of farm animals has led to a revolution in their care and handling, and has helped the entire industry improve their handling facilities, and provide more consistent humane treatment to livestock.

Related Posts:

• As We Sow: The Corporate Farm
• USDA Grant to Create Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development Center in Arkansas
• Dairy Farmers Are There For Their Cows….24/7!
• Obama Nominates New Undersecretary for Food Safety
• Agriculture Secretary Vilsack announces $310 million in Recovery Act funds for rural broadband projects
• Dr. John Boyd on Martin Luther King, Jr., Black Farmers, and President Obama
• States ban practices that support CAFOs
• Seeds of Life: David Vs. Goliath

Share and Enjoy:

Here is this week’s summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs:

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

• Do What Works for You

Intel Software Network*

• Red Hat’s State of the Union
• Open Source Makes an Impact in Haiti
• Accenture’s Take on the Benefits of Open Source Software

Legion of Tech*

• Legion of Tech Board Elections Update

The Crazy Neighbor*

• Christmas Tree in a Truck…in February
• Gargoyle House 2

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

*Disclaimers:

• GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily: I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
• Intel Software Network: I provide consulting services to Intel, and these blog posts are one part of my consulting engagement.
• Legion of Tech: I am a board member of Legion of Tech (a non profit organization)
  
• The Crazy Neighbor: This is a Fast Wonder LLC venture.

Sharing is good

While listening to recordings of DJ sets is great, nothing beats hearing a DJ spinning a set live. But for many of us, getting out to the spots where that’s occurring—where the DJs are doing their thing—can be challenging at best. What’s not quite as challenging, however, is finding time to sit in front of a laptop.

If only there were some way to combine sitting in front of a screen with seeing a DJ live. Well get ready to be happy. Because the folks at Portland-based Mugasha are working to bring some of your favorite DJs to your favorite Web browser—live.

That’s right. You’re already used to going to Mugasha to find great electronica. Now, you can start visiting the site to see and hear that electronica as it’s being created in clubs around the world.

Thursday night, Mugasha streamed the Tritonal show from Ruby Skye in San Francisco. And tonight, they’ll be bringing you the Myon & Shane 54 set live from Washington, DC, starting at 7 PM Pacific time.

Sound interesting? Make sure to swing by the Mugasha Live area of their site tonight for the live set. And stay tuned for future concerts as Mugasha continues to step into more of a promotional role for these up and coming artists.

Related posts

• REMINDER: Like the electronica? Make sure to head to the Mugasha launch party tonight (0)
• Portland Startup Weekend valedictorian Mugasha opens sliced and diced DJ sets to everyone (2)
• Mugasha adds a slew of new sets (2)
• Startup Weekend Portland: It’s back! (March 5-7, 2010) (1)
• Startup Weekend Corvallis will start up tonight. Will you be starting a startup there? (2)

A million people live there and it’s the second-largest city in Great Britain. I lived there briefly in 2000-2001 for an ill-advised tilt at graduate school at the University of Birmingham. The poor city: it’s mostly reviled by the British and ignored by the rest of the world.

Birmingham natives have one of the most easily-recognizable regional accents of the entire English collection. And it has about as much cachet as New Jersey. The “Brummie” accent (Brummie is a general epithet for all things Birmingham-ish because, see, you can’t really make an adjective out of Birmingham easily) is distinctive and quite often ridiculed. People from Southern England especially dislike the sound of it, leading a guy in a video called “Birmingham: Reputation vs. Reality” to claim that the city consists of “a million people with a speech impediment.” How tolerant.

I think Brummie accents are kind of endearing. Hallmarks of it (at least to my rather un-nuanced ear) include a lot of “ai” sounds and a tendency to rise in tone such that the speaker often sounds like he or she is asking a lot of questions mid-sentence. Finding solid examples of it online is hard because the vast majority of accent-related videos on YouTube are people imitating accents. The most classic expression of it I ever heard was when I was walking, glumly, one night in the mid-winter along the canal near the university and a grizzly middle-aged man walked past and said, out of nowhere, “Cheer up, love.” Yes, they say “love” quite nicely. It is, as a young woman says in the video, like “Brummies sing at people.”

Here’s part one of the Reputation vs. Reality series. I find it fascinating, but then again, I lived in Birmingham. Interesting coverage of accents starts a couple of minutes in.

While we’re on the subject of accents, this video of a woman imitating 21 accents is fairly eerie and nifty. She doesn’t quite nail all of them 100% but it’s pretty impressive:

http://mobile.multichannel.com/article/447702-Less_Than_8_Of_Consumers_Would_Cancel_Pay_TV_Survey.php?rssid=20059

See article above. Recent survey says only 8% of pay-TV subscribers (cable & sat) would consider canceling their subscription in favor of online video, over-the-air TV, and/or DVD services. Only 10-20% of those who consider it will actually end up doing it.  So the numbers are still rounding errors. 

That said, I'm not sure I'd give any one survey too much weight. This should not be viewed as comforting for the MSO's - they still need to compete much better at the product and pricing levels to keep their subscribers over the long term.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

This is a bit late, but I want to thank Sam Lemonick for including .51 in his recommendations for that you should be reading. That said, let me just mention that I think “Under The Microscope” should be added to your reading queue as well.

While the focus of “Under The Microscope” is similar to .51, it provides information specifically on women in science and STEM-related fields.

(And yes, I really should make these posts longer, don’t you think?)

Related posts:

1. Two Posts You Should Read
2. Dr. Kiki Wants Your Help
3. What Women Are Writing In Science: Irene Klotz & Jennifer Ouellette

TechAmerica cited Tripwire's 19 percent revenue growth and Johnson's involvement with the Oregon University System and the ONAMI nanotech research center.

SILICON FOREST BLOG: In yesterday's earnings announcement, FEI attributed slender margins to "some issues" in its relatively new life sciences business.

Now that the nomination period has closed, we wanted to give you a quick update on where we are with the Legion of Tech board elections. As we’ve mentioned in our previous blog post, we hope to have 5 to 7 total board members in 2010, and we will be electing our new board at our next board meeting on February, 11, 2010. We will announce the results of the election on this blog within a few days of the election. Here are the candidates:

Running for re-election

• Josh Bancroft
• Dawn Foster

Running for new board seats

• Nate DiNiro
• Christie Koehler
• Jason Mauer

Continuing to serve the remainder of their 2-year terms (not up for re-election):

• Amy Farrell
• Chris Pitzer

Adam DuVander and Raven Zachary will not be running for re-election. They have both decided that they need to devote more time to their growing businesses. As founding members of the Legion of Tech board, both Adam and Raven have been instrumental in making Legion of Tech a success, and they have worked tirelessly on many of our events. We wish them both the best of luck.

Hey all of you Portland tech types. It’s Thursday again. And you know what that means, right? It means it’s time for another riveting episode of memePDX, where we cover the hottest tech stories in Portland… and beyond.

This week, Cami Kaos and I discuss Open Source Bridge’s dates and volunteer sprint, Portland Mayor Sam Adams on Twitter, Oregon Film hosting Portland Lunch 2.0, Ustream getting a ton of funding, and Marshall Kirkpatrick pontificating on Facebook’s future as a news reader.

But, as the sage Mr. T often says, “Enough jibber jabber!” Let’s get to it.

Want to subject yourself to this torture on a regular basis subscribe to this podcast? Get the video feed or the iTunes feed for the video of memePDX. We’re also on Vimeo, because of the whole Portland connection. And of course, if you’re interested in staying in touch, you can always follow memePDX on Twitter. Or you can become a fan of memePDX on Facebook.

(NOTE: For those audiophiles, iTunes finally booted the broken memePDX audio podcast out of the store. And that’s good news. Because now we can fix it. Stay tuned.)

Related posts

• memePDX 021: Portland Ten and the PDC, Rogoway on taxes and tech, Open Source Bridge, AboutUs to host Lunch 2.0, Apple tablet, NYT paid content play (1)
• memePDX 2009 recap: If you only watch one podcast in 2009, watch this one (0)
• memePDX: Portland tech news for those short on time and/or attention (16)
• memepdx 020: Jive and Filtrbox, StepChange, AboutUs and Jyte, Beer and Blog, Lunch 2.0, Mercy Corps, and Google (0)
• Portland’s rollercoaster year: Recapping the 2009 startup scene and looking forward to 2010 (5)

While perusing CNN.com recently, I saw a list of “America’s Biggest Rip-Offs“.  Number one on the list is text messaging (or SMS for those outside the U.S.).

The markup collected by mobile carriers such as Verizon and AT&T, according to CNN, is 6500%.  While that sounds like a huge number, it’s true.  Here in the United States, we pay around 20 cents per message, coming and going!

Additionally, since SMS takes virtually no overhead to service and deliver, this number is pure profit to our mobile carriers.  This is why so many of us opt for text messaging bundles, whereby we pay $10 for 1000 message and so forth.

Apparently, the U.S. mobile carriers are trying to guarenteed a monthly revenue stream by making texts seem inexpensive by bundling them into packages.

I have been saying for years that SMS is way too expensive in the U.S. and it’s nice to see the mainstream media picking up the theme also.  My hope is that with enough people complaining about it, change may happen.

(Photo credit: Flickr User Wayan Vota)

Post from: Techcraver.com | Craving Tech, Craving Life!

Press Now Recognizing That Text Messaging Is Spendy in the U.S.

February 4, 2010 A class action lawsuit has been brought against The Kellogg Company for allegedly engaging in deceptive advertising practices regarding its Nutra-Grain Bars it claims are healthier to eat because of their ingredients.

The company is being sued in the US District Court of Southern California for violations of the Lanham Act, Unfair Competition Law, Common law of Unfair Competition, False Advertising Law, and the Consumer Legal Remedies Act. In their adverts, the company suggests that Nutri-Grain bars allow you to ‘Eat Better All Day’ because they contain calcium and whole-grains, but the plaintiffs insist that those claims are invalidated by the presence of trans-fats, which contribute to diabetes and heart disease.

This is part of an ongoing industry-wide practice of adding supplements (in the form of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients), often accompanied by high levels of sugar, and promoting these products and juice drinks as being healthy food choices. Michael Pollan speaks directly to this marketing practice in his book, In Defense of Food, and also in this short video for CUpS: Food News before a live audience.

Go to Original Post…

Related Posts:

• Society Starts in the Dirt
• How Do Americans Eat?
• High Fructose Corn Syrup Pronounced Innocent!

Share and Enjoy:

A colorful menu of cocktails from the "Adventures in Amateur Mixology" blog, Sloshed, and flickr.

Bada Bing

2 basil leaves, chiffonaded 3 pitted Bing cherries 1 oz Plymouth gin ½ oz simple syrup ½ oz maraschino liqueur ½ lime juice 3-4 oz champagne

See Instructions

Sleeping Giant

1½ oz fresh orange juice 1½ oz unsweetened pineapple juice 1½ oz light rum ½ oz sweet & sour ¼ oz orgeat

See Instructions

Summertime Sunshine

.5oz campari .5oz lillet .5oz batavia arrack .5oz cointreau 1oz rum 1oz fresh lime juice, splash rhubarb bitters muddled fresh basil (best to muddle right in the cocktail shaker)

Shake the above hard as you can with ice and pour over ice into a tall glass leaving about 20-25% extra space. Top up with ginger beer. Sip in the sun.

Blood Orange Margarita

1½ oz fresh blood orange juice 1 oz fresh lime juice 1 oz Cointreau 2 oz blanco tequila

See Instructions

Stewart's Cocktail

1 part absinthe 1 part rye 1 part strong ginger beer 1 dash angosutra bitters

Snowshoe

1½ oz bourbon 1½ oz peppermint schnapps (Rumpleminze)

See Instructions

Green Tea Toddy

4 tea bags 24 oz boiling water* 1 lime, cut into ½-inch rounds long zest of 1 small orange 1 3-inch piece of ginger, cut into 8 pieces 4 tsp sugar 8 oz white rum

See Instructions

Squashed Frog

Add a dash of Advacaat to a small measure of Midori, add a couple of drops of grenadine and layer with Baileys for a creamy finish. Pretty nice drink, this. Not very strong for a shooter, colourful and sweet.

Header image by nerdling.

When Neven and Kenichi mentioned a Chiquita redesign, I was hoping for something more like this.

I first heard of the notion on LibraryThing: Publicly stating a goal of reading 50 books in a given year (50 Book Challenge) or, even more insane, 75 (75 Book Challenge). In 2007, I joined the 50 Book Challenge group and pulled it off, squeaking by with 52 books. In 2008, I didn’t join any groups, but due to a combination of illness and insomnia read a sort of mind-blowing 75 books. That’s less than five days per book—a remarkable speed for tomes of any size for someone who holds down a full-time job.

In 2009, I said, aw, to heck with this. Arbitrary read-x-per-year goals aren’t where it’s at. It can lead me to pushing more novellas and kids’ books into my reading schedule. It is probably the reason I’ve so effectively avoided War and Peace for so long. In 2009 I established no such quantity-based goal. And then promptly only read 39 books and felt under-accomplished.

There’s a trade-off here, certainly. Blunt reading quotas make me make different reading decisions, but they also help me feel energized and focused. I considered a page-based goal instead of discrete book units. But that is alarmingly difficult to track: Even if I data-mined an API for the page count of books, those totals always include indexes, end notes, appendices: sometimes as much of a third of a non-fiction book. And I don’t want to give myself credit for pages I didn’t actually read.

So this year, I’m too scared to join 75 book challenge (and it’s February and I’m merely just starting my fifth book for the year). But I will probably celebrate quantity again. Maybe I’ll track my reading here, on this site. Maybe I’ll just do it in one of my many reading journals (hand-written).

What do you think? Quantity-based goals good motivator, or pointless?

Is it worthwhile to count the books you read and/or have a quantity-related reading goal?(poll)

I started “documenting” in 2001, not “making a documentary” exactly, because I really didn’t know what it was going to end up being. The New York Times had run a series of articles about the disappearance of small towns across the Midwest, about communities drying up and farmers forced off the land. I wanted to understand what was happening, and I wanted to hear it from the farmers themselves. More…

What are the results and realities of the continued concentration of agricultural production, marketing, and retail? “What kind of a society are we going to leave for our children,” asks a farmer turned activist, “if we allow the continued consolidation—not only in agriculture—but in every aspect of the American economy where all of the wealth and power are being concentrated into the hands of a very few?”

Jan’s career in television and film production spans some 35 years. Over that time she has produced, directed, and written commercials, corporate programs, network pilots, and co-produced two feature films. Through her marketing and communications consulting company, JW Creative Solutions, Ltd., she works with a myriad of corporate clients to plan, develop, and execute communications, marketing, and corporate education programs. As We Sow was Jan’s first documentary, (and not the last) and she continues to document food and farm from her no-so-rural perch in Brooklyn, NY. For additional information about her film, or to purchase the DVD, she can be contacted at janweber(AT)aswesow.com and at her As We Sow website.

Related Posts:

• As We Sow (Video)
• As We Sow: Part 2 (video)
• States ban practices that support CAFOs
• Temple Grandin: Humane Treatment of Farm Animals
• How Cows (Grass-Fed Only) Could Save the Planet
• Industrial Agriculture and the Organic Alternative: Rachel Carson’s Contribution
• The New Film: Food Inc.
• MRSA: Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria, Pigs, and Human Illness

Share and Enjoy:

I started “documenting” in 2001, not “making a documentary” exactly, because I really didn’t know what it was going to end up being. The New York Times had run a series of articles about the disappearance of small towns across the Midwest, about communities drying up and farmers forced off the land. I wanted to [...]

We're excited to be participating in the third OpenID User Experience Summit being co-hosted by Sears and the OpenID Foundation later this month at Sears' headquarters in Chicago. As you may recall there have been OpenID UX summits at Yahoo and Facebook in the past, but this is the first event in the Midwest and hosted by a major retailer.

You can read more about the event on the OpenID wiki.

We're especially excited that there will be nearly 50 participants in this event from organizations including:

Sears, Universal Music Group, NPR, PBS, Fox News, Tribune, Kodak, Meredith, MTV, AARP, OpenTable, Scout24/Deutsche Telekom, Whitepages.com, Republican National Committee, TwitterFeed, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Facebook, MySpace, JanRain, WetPaint, Pluck, Viewpoints, Rainbow Media, NRI, Verisign, ExactTarget, Kantara ULX WG, Echo & Data Portability Project, and others.

As with prior events, the topics being discussed were determined by the participants, so we hope this will prove to be an interesting and informative session. Here's a summary of what will be covered:

• Update from major Identity Providers on OpenID plans for 2010: Joseph Smarr (Google), Allen Tom (Yahoo), Monica Keller (MySpace), Andrew Nash (PayPal), Angus Logan (Microsoft), David Recordon (Facebook). Tentative: George Fletcher (AOL), Nico Popp (Verisign)
• How to drive adoption & usage of OpenID and the resulting business & end user benefits: Brian Ellin (JanRain) - lessons learned over the past three years implementing OpenID
• Input from Website Operators on how UX should evolve and goals behind those suggested enhancements: Rob Harles (Sears) & Daniel Jacobson (NPR) will facilitate a discussion and generate feedback from participating RPs to the OpenID Foundation and OPs.
• User experience flows for "OpenID Connect," lessons learned from Facebook – David Recordon (Facebook)
• OpenID best practices including account recovery/reset, attaching multiple identifiers, mobile authentication, using WebFinger, etc. – Allen Tom (Yahoo)
• Data Management: update on SREG, AX, OAuth, WRAP, Portable Contacts, and Activity Streams – Joseph Smarr (formerly CTO of Plaxo, now at Google)
• Update from participating Website Operators on OpenID plans for 2010 – All RPs present who want to share some future thoughts and plans

We look forward to the feedback and insights from this event, and will be providing our summary of the take away messages on this blog, so please stay tuned...

I was just looking over the archives of my most recent ReadWriteWeb articles and noticed there were a number of them I was quite proud of in January. I decided to highlight them here, in case you’d like to see any you missed.

I wrote 40 articles last month on ReadWriteWeb and these are the ten that I’d be most disappointed about seeing just roll down the stream to be forgotten about. I hope you find a few you missed but enjoy a second chance to check out.

Yeah, a bunch of them are about privacy on Facebook. But there are a number that aren’t about that at all!

Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters

One hour ago, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How do I know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told me.

Facebook’s 1st CTO Launches His Next Company (Screen Shots)

Adam D’Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company’s first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora. Built by D’Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself “A continually improving collection of questions and answers.”

How Chris Messina Got a Job at Google

Chris Messina grew up in New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state. As a high-schooler in the early 90’s he held his school’s website hostage after being suspended for running an ad on it for a controversial gay rights group. Now Chris is nearing 30, today was his 29th birthday, and he just announced that he’s taken a job at one of the biggest, most powerful corporations in the world.

Why Facebook is Wrong: Privacy is Still Important

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience this weekend that the world has changed, that it’s become more public and less private, and that the controversial new default and permanent settings reflect how the site would work if he were to create it today. Not everyone agrees with his move and its justification.

PowerOne: This iPhone App Builds iPhone Apps

Elia Freedman used to have it made. He was a mobile app developer in the days of the Palm Pilot and he scored bundling deals that got his sophisticated calculator software into the hands of more than 15 million people. Differentiating his product from competitors “wasn’t something we had to deal with for years,” he says, because of the favored position his app got in pre-loaded bundles.

Now those days are gone.

The Facebook Privacy Debate: What You Need to Know

Facebook changed the world by helping 350 million people publish their thoughts, feelings, comments, photos, videos and shared links much more easily than ever before. It’s the King of social networking.

The network grew with a big promise of privacy at the center of what it offered: your information was by default visible only to people you approved as friends. In December that changed, in a fundamental way. We offer below a summary of the changes that were made and key highlights from the debate that’s raging around the world about privacy, public information and Facebook. Given the role that Facebook plays in so many of our lives, this is high-stakes stuff.

Why is Google Afraid of Facebook? Because Social Networking Could Soon Pass Search

It’s often said these days that Google and Facebook are major rivals, but how could that be if one is in search and the other, social networking? Traffic analyst firm Hitwise provided one very clear clue tonight when it published new numbers for web user activity in Australia. For perhaps the first time ever, social networking sites have surpassed the traffic search engines receive, Hitwise says. There is reason to question the company’s categorization of web traffic, but the trend is worth examining none the less.

The Era of Location-as-Platform Has Arrived

The mobile location “check-in” is fast becoming the hot new status message type online. It was only a matter of time until “where you are” became a platform to build added value on top of just like “who you know” has on social networking sites like Facebook.

Canadian newspaper chain Metro announced today that it has launched a deal with location-based social network Foursquare that will deliver location-specific editorial content from the paper’s website to users’ phones when they check-in near a spot Metro has written about before. The potential for services like this is huge.

Westboro Baptist Church to Picket Twitter Headquarters

The Westboro Baptist Church, home of the best known anti-gay protest organization in the US, led by Pastor Fred Phelps, has a new target for its public outcry. This Thursday afternoon the organization will be picketing outside the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter.

Privacy, Facebook and the Future of the Internet

Today is the 3rd annual international Data Privacy Day and a whole bunch of companies are listed on the organization’s website as participants. Google, Microsoft, even Walmart. Facebook is not listed as a participant and has stirred up a lot of controversy with changes to its privacy policy lately.

Thanks for checking those out. I hope you’ll come join me over on ReadWriteWeb where I write every day and every day try to write something I can be proud of.

I created a file for labeling the pins on my Dorkboard.

One of my favorite things about having worked on Silicon Florist for more than two years is watching the progress people are making. And watching how things change. I’ve been lucky enough to watch ideas, events, and companies come and go—and I’ve had the chance to document their stories. It’s never something I intended to do. It just kind of happened.

Sometimes those stories are happy. Sometimes they’re not. But they’re always good stories. The latest story I’ve had the pleasure of documenting as it went full circle? The story of Shizzow.

What’s Shizzow, you ask? Well, it was Portland’s own foray into the world of sharing location information. Back in the day where there was Brightkite and a couple of others. It was a strong competitor to the location sharing services. And a way to be more social by knowing who was where when. Or as it was described in the first post:

Shizzow provides the technology for you to notify your friends of your location, with as little effort as possible, so you can spend more time hanging out with your peeps and less time trying to coordinate bringing them together through phone, email, SMS and IM.

I liked the idea. And I really liked the folks who were working to put it together and make it into something. I can still remember sitting down with Ryan Snyder and Sam Keen when they unveiled the idea. And then hearing Dawn Foster was going to help. And later with Mark Wallaert.

It was just a good group of people trying to build something that had a ton of potential.

I liked them so much, in fact, that I invited them to share their idea with the folks at the Silicon Florist hosted Portland Lunch 2.0 at CubeSpace.

And I wasn’t the only one who thought so. The entire Portland tech community embraced them. And Shizzow, little by little, became a community pursuit. And the Shizzow folks knew it.

I’d like to give knucks to Scott Kevton and Ray King, who served as fabulous advisors; bows of gratitude to the publicity given by Rick Turoczy at the Silicon Florist, Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal at Strange Love Live, Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web, and Adam Duvander of MapScripting; pint glass clinks to Sue Brown, Matt Gifford, Reid Biels, Bill Jackson, John Nastos, Don Park, Sam Grover, Ken Baer and the other developers who pounded on the Shizzow API; and high fives to Sam Keen, Gus Torres, Carolynn Duncan, Aaron Hockley, Ryan Buchanan, and the countless number of others who have helped along the way.

But it wasn’t all champagne and roses. Like any startup, Shizzow suffered some bumps and setbacks.

For as quickly as Shizzow took off locally, it struggled to find a following in other areas. At the time, that didn’t seem to matter. We loved it. We used it. We knew where people were. And things kept getting better and better. From our perspective.

But then the market changed a bit. Competitors got funding. Platforms grew more prominently. New people and companies began to enter the race with new ideas—and then the game changed.

And then the economy changed. And suddenly it wasn’t so easy to bootstrap a startup and work on some side gigs. And with little capital, there simply weren’t enough hands to get everything done.

New shiny objects came along. Shizzow remained a strong product, but some of the lustre began to fade.

And now, we’ve come to today. When Shizzow announced that the startup—the foray into becoming a full-fledged company—is returning to the realm of side project.

We’ve seen the writing on the wall for some time now, with services like Foursquare and Gowalla pushing forward and securing funding, that the outlook for Shizzow and its future was dim. We’ve had to admit to ourselves, after each of has suffered periods of burnout while attempting to juggle full-time jobs and this startup, that we simply cannot continue to push Shizzow forward with our current lack of resources.

So Shizzow will continue. But not with the speed and effort it once had. And it will return to the realm of side project for Mark. Not shuttered. But maybe a little mothballed.

So what did we learn from Shizzow?

It was a great effort. With many lessons learned by the founders. And many more lessons for all of us to take away for our own edification.

And yeah, it’s a little sad having to write this. But it happens. These are startups.

And while Shizzow didn’t skyrocket to the levels of some of its counterparts, it did manage some things that were far more important. It captured our imagination with its potential. It built community. And it built connection. And it did all of that at a time when those things were desperately needed.

And honestly—quite honestly—Portland is better for it—and the startup community here is better for it—for having had the opportunity to go along for the ride.

Here’s looking forward to the next startup that manages to accomplish as much as Shizzow did.

For more from the source, read the post on Shizzow’s future from Ryan Snyder. And if you appreciate what they managed to accomplish as much as I did, please leave them a comment.

Related posts

• REMINDER: Your side project or startup effing rocks (10)
• How do you get From Side Project to Startup? (1)
• Startup Weekend Portland: It’s back! (March 5-7, 2010) (1)
• Let’s not make a federal case out of it: Startup Law 101 at Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) tonight (0)
• Portland’s rollercoaster year: Recapping the 2009 startup scene and looking forward to 2010 (5)

Also, Comcast says its Portland WiMAX is an early success.

shutup.css is a custom user stylesheet you can install in your web browser which will automatically hide the comments section of many popular web sites. My gift of a quieter, saner web to you.

FEI reported record fourth-quarter revenue, though profits were down slightly and at the low end of FEI's forecast range.

Sometime, somwhere, you’ve tried to share a presentation with someone else. You know you have. And every time you have, you’ve wound up tearing your hair out, haven’t you? It’s okay. You’re among friends. You can be honest.

I know. You’ve tried that Web conferencing stuff. You’ve tried emailing them a PDF. You’ve tried simply calling them to review a hard copy. But it never ever works the way you expect that it should. If only there were a better way….

Well, now there is. Portland-based Black Tonic.

How could it be better, you ask? Well, how about the ability to completely control your presentation, without plugins and without mucking around? Just a Web browser and someone on the other end and you’re good to go.

Well, and a presentation. I mean, it won’t do that part for you. Yet.

[Black Tonic] allows users to create and manage presentations that are delivered online through a secure URL. Using a proprietary HTML broadcasting technology, Black Tonic presenters can modify the presentation material on-the-fly and choose in real-time what the audience sees on the presentation web page.

HTML and Javascript? No Flash? No plugins? You mean it just works? Why am I asking all of these questions? Yes. Black Tonic just works. And because it uses basic technology to work its magic, that means it will even run on an iPhone—for the presenter and the viewer. Which is actually pretty cool.

I mean, I can’t even write any more about the service because it’s just so simple and straightforward. And it works like you expect it to work. You put the presentation up, you send your viewers a URL, and you go. And then you change it midstream if you want. Or advance the slides however you want. Or go back. Or whatever. And they see what you see. Instantaneously.

Oh. I guess I actually could write some more.

But don’t just take my word for it. Listen to what Marshall Kirkpatrick and Jared Smith of ReadWriteWeb have to say about Black Tonic:

We’ve found very few shortcomings in our testing of the app so far and ReadWriteWeb’s own designer Jared Smith enjoyed using it a lot. “It demonstrates an awesome use of standard technologies and real-time technologies,” he says. Existing powerpoint decks will need to be exported as images and uploaded one at a time, but the company says it’s working on changing that.

Long story short, if you’re sharing presentations with clients or coworkers, you should give Black Tonic a shot. I mean, you get a free trial. What have you got to lose? And if you decide to continue, it’s only $15 a month. Which is cheaper than the Hair Club membership you had to buy after tearing your hair out last time.

For more information or to sign up, visit Black Tonic. To keep up with the latest news, follow Black Tonic on Twitter.

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