Eric'o'theque

Is this thing on? Well, the answer is yes if the post appears.

Time to kick the tires and light the fire! Fires? Just wondering what an old blog means in the age of Medium.com.

Hit a really weird problem today and I knew was related to some repartioning I did to my laptop.

I was going through my external hard drives, looking for one with space to backup my laptop.

I plugged the first one in and it never mounted a drive.

But I could safely unmount it from the “Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media” tray icon. But no disk appeared mounted.

I right clicked on My Computer and said “Manage.” Under disk management, a hard drive was listed but no drive letter was assigned. And I couldn’t do much to it.

I mumbled: This is not how I want to spend my free Saturday time. And I walked away.

Every one of my external drives acted the same way. The only big difference from the last time I had used the drives: I had repartioned my laptop’s hard disk to have a new partition for Windows 8.

Eventually, within the disk management console I right-clicked on the drive and assigned it a letter. This is where I realized that they all probably used to be E: and now E: was my new Windows 8 partition, and for some reason Windows 7 didn’t auto-assign it a new drive letter. Now it’s F: and I had to go through each drive and manually mount with the new drive letter (maybe I should have chosen M: or something further down the line) and then move on to the next drive. When replugged back in, the drive is mounted as F:

And of course it ends up that none of them have enough space to backup my computer. At least I didn’t burn all of my Saturday’s free time on the mystery. I hope this might help the next random person save some time.

Rough notes and links from Day #2 of Gnomedex 2010

Saturday August 21

• 8:00 AM Registration and continental breakfast
• 8:30 AM Doors open
• 9:00 AM Announcements
• 9:10 AM Bill Schrier
• 9:20 AM Amy Karlson
• 10:00 AM Shauna Causey and Melody Biringer
• 10:30 AM Break
• 10:45 AM Larry Wu
• 11:05 AM Scott “Spot” Draves
• 11:40 AM Scott and Alex Mueller
• 12:15 PM Lunch in the Harbor Dining Room
• 1:30 PM Melissa Pierce
• 1:55 PM Violet Blue
• 2:20 PM Jason Barger
• 3:05 PM Steven Fisher and Michael Dougherty
• 3:40 PM Break
• 4:05 PM Tim Hwang
• 4:30 PM Matt Inman
• 4:55 PM Seattle Wine Gal on Wine Tasting How-To’s
• 5:05 PM Joe and Judy Pirillo: 10 Years of Gnomedex
• 5:15 PM Closing remarks
• 6:30-9:00 PM Seattle Wine Gal presents After Party, @ Emerald City Trapeze

Bill Schrier



@billschrier – CTO City of Seattle. Grew up on a farm in Iowa – John Deere. "Steve Ballmer has come to Gnomedex!" The Chief Geek of the City of Seattle. City is a hotbed of innovation. Dam powered electricity. Boeing. Starbucks. Microsoft. Amazon. Startup community. Government has not gone untouched.

Data.gov, Data.seattle.gov – published government data. Future: crime, police 911; already have fire dept 911 dispatches. It’s data – it’s not information. Someone has to turn that into something useful for citizens. Open Government hack-a-thon – Tropo & Socratta.

Perspective: lot more interesting stuff comes when private companies / people do it.

Amy Karlson



Amy Karlson is a researcher in the Computational User Experiences (CUE) subgroup of the Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment (VIBE) research area at Microsoft Research, focusing on HCI and user experiences within mobile and multi-device environments.

She received a B.A. and M.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. She received her Ph.D. from University of Maryland, College Park in Computer Science, where she specialized in HCI and one-handed interaction with touchscreen-based mobile devices, and for which she was awarded a Microsoft LiveLabs Fellowship. Prior to earning her Ph.D., Ms. Karlson worked for several years as a research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Looking at improving work-flow. Visualization & Interaction Group. Review of all the devices touched during the day – the transition from one device to another is an opportunity. Can you improve these transitions. Each device is still sort of isolated. How do you, for instance, make the relationship between phone, laptop, and desktop better. Logged usage for two weeks.

Different across people but internally consistent to an individual.

"How many times have you read an email on your phone and then forgot to respond when you get back to your desktop?" 75% of the audience. Come back to your inbox and those emails are undistinguishable from all the emails you’ve already read @ the desktop.

"Mark as Unread" is something very common that we do. Amy: once the user has to do something like that then the system has failed to bridge the worlds between devices.

Slide Overview of disruptions uses devices: Network | Output | Input | Missing Function | Environment | Cost/Benefit

Cloud as part of solution: push back. Email is the cloud. Still have to step in regarding actions between devices.

Shauna Causey & Melody Biringer





Tech Mavens: Women in top technology positions are scarce — but they’re out there. They just need a safe space to rock out, rally the troops, and share success stories. The vision for Tech Mavens is to create a crashpad. A launchpad. An inspiration station, advice center, event hub and force for social change.

Shauna Causey – Co-Creator of Tech Mavens and Digital Evangelist for Ant’s Eye View. Her pervious roster includes the Comcast, FOX, Fox Sports Net and the Seattle Mariners Baseball Team.

She is the creator behind Voluntweetup, she leads Twestival Seattle, speaks around the country helping non-profits with social media and serves as the Vice President for the Social Media Club Seattle board of directors. In the last year, Shauna has been featured in TechFlash as one of the 100 Top Women in Tech, as well as in The Los Angeles Times and The Huffington Post.

Melody Biringer – Co-Creator of Tech Mavens From strawberry shortcake to home furnishings to a fitness business, she has trotted down virtually every entrepreneurial trail in existence. With 23 business ventures under her belt — a few of them even successful! — you might call her a lifelong “start-up junkie.”

She’s the founder of the CRAVEcompany, which connects savvy business owners with stylish consumers through networking events, symposiums and a series of smash-hit city guides. Melody was recently featured on PDXfm.com and on the cover article of Seattle Woman Magazine.

@TechMavens – "How many people have had an idea to help the community" Entrepreneur Girl meets Corporate Girl. Biringer’s Farm. Schlepping around strawberry short-cake – took into wholesale cookies @ QFC. Latest with Crave. Support small women business – in 20 cities. Bring small-biz like-minded women together and talk about why to be, say, on twitter.

Start-up Weekend: http://startupweekend.org/ – whole bunch of programmers need markets etc. Both went. 20 women out of 100. Friday: do a big pitch, get into teams of 10 each and then by Sunday night launch it live on stage. Won @ Digree -> Crowd Hop. Talking with Monica Guzman – writing a book, Monica is on board of directors.

http://www.techmavens.com/ – http://twitter.com/techmavens – create as non-profit. Created mindmap. Slide: Gender & The Internet – women are ruling a number of online experiences. "There aren’t enough woemen entrepreneurs because they don’t see enough woemen extrepreneurs ahead of them that are successful." – The need for role models. (Video)

Betsy. Carol Tran – Chic Meets Geek – science geek. Kathy. Robin. Shauna: "Not a dating site."

Website launched – looking for mentors, speakers, and nominate profiles for women in tech.

Larry Wu



Larry Wu brings over 27 years of brand and business development experience to the SmartCup Board of Directors. He is currently the VP of Product Development for SK Food Group in Seattle, and most recently served as COO for Bossa Nova Beverages.

Larry joined Bossa Nova from Iconoculture, Inc., where he served as VP, Consumer Strategist. There he led food and beverage consumer consulting projects for key Fortune 500 clients in the Consumer Packaged and Restaurant industries. Mr. Wu also spent two years leading research and development at CH Guenther and Son, Inc. where his team was responsible for the development, production and launch of key foodservice products such as the McGriddle.

Consumer-Based Innovation – Chris introduction: discussing the Smart-Cup mini-French-press disposable coffee experience. One of Larry’s billion inventions. Food geek – 27 years. Starting work w/ Safeway to build-up store eateries.

Products: please go to http://www.iconoculture.com/Index.aspx for more slide background. Metatrends < macrotrends < trends < observations. Been working for the man, now on own. Watch things happen in the worlds and put 2 & 2 together and get 5. When you can link threads / trends together it becomes macrotrends – and when they collide that’s the end of the world. Trending-watching framework: time vs. stability. Observations from the world are coming in and being tagged.

Creature Kingdom: 50 years in the making. Pet cemeteries / urns. K-8 Water / Pet Urns / Doggie Daycare. Trend: Humanization of Pets. Healthcare for pets, travel, etc –> Creature Kingdom: pets controlling human behavior. Next? Eateries for pets. Social networking for pets (Facebark).

Macrotrends:

• Artisan: return to handcrafted one-of-a-kind objects etc.
• Cultural Fusion: experience cultural hybrids – people want to experience more than just their own culture (easiest: food + music). Trying to figure out the growth of different ethnic food love in USA. Historically is post-war and soldiers wanting to re-enjoy food they had experience. Now? Internet: can read about food from all over.
• Fingerprinting: personalization – why Starbucks works. Psion: you can build your car online.
• Health Monitor: light / low-cal / high fiber / anti-oxidant. Self treatment.
• Hyperlife: multitasking barrage.
• Memory Marketing: history as an active resource to take a nostalgic trip through time.
• Merit Badges: people are collecting experiences – mission trips.
• Read, Set, Go! Innovation + convenience.

Celebri-Me: four years ago. Look at me, listen to me, but don’t get too close. Consumers creating their own 15 min of fame. Consumers who don’t want to wait for fame to find them. How do you market to that?

Food truck trend. Mexican + Korean. http://kogibbq.com/ – and there’s a line etiquette and the crowd will boo you if you break etiquette.

Scott Draves



Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot is a visual and software artist living in New York City. Draves is best known as the creator of the Electric Sheep, a continually evolving abstract animation with over 60,000 daily participants. Draves’ award-winning work is permanently hosted on MoMA.org, and has appeared in Wired and Discover magazines, and even as an official skin for Google Chrome.

When not working as a full-time artist, Draves has worked for a series of technology start-ups. Draves is now an engineer in the mapping division at Google Inc. Spot started VJing at underground parties in the early 90s and still performs live.

Screensavers – Electric Sheep. Requires network connection. Started programming in 78. Working on computer graphics. 1991: Fuse – takes some images as input & creates images as output. Creates tiled mosaic. Tries to make overlap between tiles match – visual associative memory search. Could also take a gold image to reconstruct an image out of other images. Now a plug-in to GIMP – "Patch-based Texture Synthesis." http://draves.og/fuse – galleries there, too.

Flame: open source visual language – 1991 – organic + fluid. Expressive. Working in Tokyo at the time and had a supercomputer to self. Play video – The Open Source Culture of the Flame Algorithm.

Bomb: interactive visual musical instrument. VJ performance tool.

Youtube user: spotworks. http://www.youtube.com/user/spotworks

Electric Sheep: http://scottdraves.com/sheep.html – distributed supercomputer. 1999. Based on Flame Algorithm. Voting into genetic algorithm. AI learning to satisfy human desire. Editor for editing existing sheep.

Play Generation 243 – commissioned by CMU. Problem: flashy, trashy sheep got the most votes (Las Vegas effect). "Dreams in High Fidelity" – go through 1,000s of sheep and pick out the few he think is beautiful – send out to network for re-render in high-def.

(Compare to neon @ http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/lightsynths.php )

Interference patterns: Geometric resonances between planes.

Would love to get an installation / show in Seattle (gallery, museum).

Scott Mueller and Alex Mueller



Scott Mueller is a quirky-smart thinker with leadership experience ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. He’s passionate about helping people see their true potential and getting them to places they never thought possible.

Scott and his wife, Alex, started an experiment in life and living, called Moosicorn Ranch, east of Spokane, WA. Through the help of friends and colleagues, they hope to make Moosicorn Ranch a sustainable home and farm. But there are even bigger dreams in the works including providing a place for workshops, seminars, and even a place for artists to live, learn and create.

iPhone toting homesteaders. Can’t make phonecalls, but that’s not the iPhone’s strong-suit anyways. Going to build own cottages, including one for artist (free room & board). For advice, called out to twitter & ning. iPhone just as handy in a rural environment. Animal tracks / birds / recognizing wildlife. Makes experience more educational – become a better steward of the property.

In phase micro-converter. Vs 20-30K mega-inverter investment. W/ this you can order one panel. Under $1K you have all the equipment you need. You can then organically grow your solar panel investment. Next device: can monitor power production & report it. Next: remote control switches for managing power in house… remotely.

Tied to people w/ social media outright. Food movement: watch Food Inc.

Things people can do: (1) throw a solar panel on your roof. (2) backyard gardens – start with the food. (3) home automation stuff – green things to your home. Smart Labs Inc. (4) CFLs / lights.

(Great flickr photos – http://www.flickr.com/photos/moosicorn )

Melissa Pierce



Melissa Pierce is the producer of the interview documentary, Life In Perpetual Beta. Every day, she asks people questions to help them discover who they are and what they are passionate about doing, and then help them do just that, because that’s what she’s passionate about.

Life In Perpetual Beta is about listening to your authentic self, unleashing your creativity, and living in the moment, every moment. It’s a documentary told by everyday people, about how technology has changed the way we think about ourselves and enabled our lives to be more spontaneous and less planned.

(Another Prezi presentation – text 5 x 11). Text becomes context. We’re kind of in a revolution of somesort – a Contextual Revolution. Revolution review. You don’t realize you’re in the middle of it when it’s happening.

Conclusion: revolution is about access – not just to information but to other people. "Every click is an act of co-creation. Every click reveals something about yourself."

Previously a life coach. Game: what’s your preference. Decide between two things. Every preference matters. Interviews: got recommendations and asked to interview. And show up. No vetting. People flew me all over the world – get $30 at a time help from people passionate about what the project was. "Life begins when you get out of your comfort zone." – Neil Donald Walsh.

"We really like your rough-cut and want to talk to you about a deal." "Rough cut? It’s fucking done, dude!"

Violet Blue



Violet Blue is a Forbes “Web Celeb”, a high-profile tech personality and one of Wired’s “Faces of Innovation.” She is regarded as the foremost expert in the field of sex and technology, a sex-positive pundit in mainstream media (MacLife, The Oprah Winfrey Show, others) and is regularly interviewed, quoted and featured prominently by major media outlets.

Violet has many award-winning, best selling books; her books are featured on Oprah’s website. She was the notorious sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. The London Times named Blue one of the 40 bloggers who really count (2010).

"What about if they’re bi?" tinynibbles.com (nsfw). Problems. Noticed in over 10 years – unable to make stable social media structures. (background – author, crisis help line, frontlines of sex education). Google tech talk on abstinence education. Kids are going to Google for sex education. Saw two perspectives on sex: (1) it’s a bad and scary thing, or (2) it doesn’t exist at all. Goal: sex positive message.

Social media: best way to distribute message vs. via locked down traditional media. Had handcrafted blog. 2005: ended up in a bet w/ Adam Curry – ended up being the first female podcaster. Very popular. Reaction was strong. Podcast: @ this point, 8,000,000 strong. History: tribe.net – social media hang-out: Smart Girls Porn Club. Tribe.net changed direction & became more conservative & the club was yanked. Fragile. To check the fragility of a facility: make a subject area about sex.

Facebook is WalMart for your communities. Just had a page taken down on Facebook. Wrote a book: Smart Girls Guide to Porn (chapter three on Oprah’s site). Made page on FB – flagged by conservatives & gone. What happened to us that we’ve handed over the decision making to these gatekeepers? "All I get is Terms of Service."

Harm reduction approach to Social Media – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_reduction – letting groups decide what’s harmful & not vs. the gatekeepers.

Jason Barger



Jason Barger is the author of the book Step Back from the Baggage Claim: Change the World, Start at the Airport – featured in the NY Times, ABC News.com, National Geographic Traveler, and many other wonderful spots.

Before taking off to sleep in airports and observe human behavior, Barger led over 1,700 people to construct 125 houses internationally for families living in poverty. He also implemented the Streets Mission Project to serve the homeless on the streets of Columbus, Ohio. In 2004, he was one of five people in Columbus, Ohio, to receive a Jefferson Award, a national award given to “ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

Baggage claim: travelers form a human wall of entitlement. It’s in the small actions that we solve the biggest problems in the world. Changing the world one small thoughtful act at a time. Pass out books and ask people to pass it on to others.

Travel gracefully. http://www.stepbackfromthebaggageclaim.com/default.aspx

Story: family with two smart carts that made a fortress right infront of the carousel. Frantically tried to keep people out of their zone while people were trying to get their bags. Observed behavior in seven cities in seven days. What does this reveal about us as people? "What we put out into the world changes the world."

Study: 90% of our interactions with people are negative: we spend time & energy complaining about something. 80% of our self talk is negative. What would that mean to reframe the things we’re thinking about. Why do we do what we do and what is it we want to put out into the world?

Plato: what is honored will be cultivated.

Ideas can spread, but relationships is what flourishes.

Spending time w/ lost boys of Sudan in Ohio: "I believe technology is going to save Sudan: a) more people are going to hear about what happened, and b) more people will help."

"This isn’t the easiest thing to do in heels!" – travelling gracefully.

Steve Fisher and Michael Dougherty





Steve Fisher is co-creator and producer of Browncoats: Redemption and can’t believe he is actually making a film this awesome. During the day, Steve is Managing Director of AppSolve, a software application and online media development firm. He is a serial entrepreneur and has previous experience launching successful web and new media properties.

Steve is an author of the upcoming book Rules for Entrepreneurs and writes about innovation and entrepreneurship at RulesForBusiness.com, Outright.com, GrowSmartBusiness.com, SolutionsArePower.com and on his blog StevenFisher.TV. He currently resides in Herndon, VA and you can also find him on twitter @stevenfisher.

Michael Dougherty is co-creator and producer of Browncoats: Redemption as well as the writer and director of the film. He spends most of his free time dedicated to this project. During the day, Michael currently is Emerging Media Manager of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a non-profit focused on promoting the Chesapeake Bay.

Michael has background as an entrepreneur working in the interactive media and entertainment industry for the last 10 years.

He has worked on many film and stage productions and this is first feature film. He currently resides in Baltimore, MD. You can find him on twitter @wickedjava or managing the Browncoats: Redemption twitter account @browncoatsmovie.

Browncoats Redemption – http://browncoatsmovie.com/ . How we crowd-sourced our way to a feature film for charity! (movie preview trailer – new crew for a Firefly class ship.) Got community buy-in, now we need permission. Like our day jobs & not getting sued. Not going to use anything from the series at all other than a continuation. Studio: fine. Joss: call Fox to speak Joss Whedon – goes through 7 levels – "Natalie in Joss’ office – can I help you?" – send me a detailed outline about what you want to do. Give her two year plan, 45 days later got Joss’ blessing. Got Joss to sign @ comic-con.

(memo: imdb Michael Dougherty)

Chose charities relevant to the original Firefly cast/crew. 501 3c. Facebook group script review / table read. Production crew was 100% crowd sourced. 162 people showed-up. Got three weeks in frontier town.

Opened selves up to what volunteers would bring. Leveraged social media to get Red-1 replacement camera. Jones Soda on bottle – Adam Baldwin with t-shirt & Jones Soda. "Gonna open a big old can of whoop-ass at Gnomedex." Fundraising without shame. Getting t-shirt out and pictures taken with former cast / crew. View video mash-up "I am a browncoat"

DVD has gone to press. 9/4/2010 premier. "And what you can do…" get off your ass.

This is more than a bunch of guys running around with lightsabers at the state park.

Tim Hwang



Tim Hwang is the founder and current director of the Web Ecology Project, a research community dedicated to building an applied science around measuring and influencing the systemwide flows of culture and patterns of community formation online. He is also currently working on Robot, Robot, and Hwang — a legal startup that seeks to bring quantitative analysis and geek methods to the practice of law.

On the side, he is the creator of ROFLCon, a series of conferences celebrating and examining internet culture and celebrity. He Twitters @timhwang, and blogs regularly at BrosephStalin.com. He likes Choco Tacos.

Chris: ROFLCon. Tim is an evil genius. Gathers together anyone momentarily famous on the internet. Founder of "The Awesome Foundation" – institute on higher awesome studies. Lasers & dinosaurs & such. http://awesomefoundation.org/

Playing Databall: Online Influence and the Future of Social Hacking.

Book: Moneyball – Oakland A’s: Bay Area b-ball. How do you become a winning team w/ a small amount of money? Vague: rules of baseball success. Subjective: to assess value – scouts would scour the country looking for new members – visual assessing of people.

Social Wargaming: can you do it? Nice: graphing the distortion of social space connection caused by attempted influence. Identify promising clusters of people.

Social as Data: underlying feature is a huge amount of data about people. Rise of the Quants. Start having both influencers and people that prevent influence. Implications?

Brosephstalin.com – http://brosephstalin.com/

Webecologyproject.org – http://www.webecologyproject.org/

Robotandhwang.com – http://www.robotandhwang.com/

Bots using Amazon Turk to get twitter messages – e.g., bot gives the context for the tweet and passes it on.

Q: Looking for personal analytics.

Matt Inman



Using a combo of keen business sense and real-world comic familiarity, the man behind The Oatmeal— 27 year old Matt Inman — draws, sketches and codes his way to a successful business making people laugh.

His site, receiving more than four million unique hits per month, was recently named in Time Magazine’s Top Blogs of 2010.

Behind his wit and unassuming presence, Matt has a powerful story about his journey and how social media played a role in his success. His experience includes co-founder of SEOmoz,and founder and creator of an online dating website which he later sold, Mingle2 (the entire site from concept to launch was built in only 66.5 hours). He now focuses his energies full time on The Oatmeal.

http://theoatmeal.com/ – @oatmeal – comedy website. Doing well – talk about maybe why. Started mingle2 on the side and got acquired. How did I do this & get attention? 100,000 users to 1,000,000. Started engaging polls / blogs: "How dating my ex was like playing Doom II on nightmare mode."

"How Geek Are You?" – two minute quiz. Give you a badge for your site. "How Many Cannibals could my body feed?" The link in the html badge back to site caused high google results of "Free Online Dating". "How much is my dead body worth?"

Started making comics – types of crappy kissers. "10 reasons it would rule to date a unicorn" Fake dating site: Zombie Harmony.

"Is your cat plotting to kill you?"

"8 ways to prepare your pets for WAR." "How to use a semicolon" "5 reasons bacon is better than true love."

Tricks (to getting some viral love):

1. Find a common gripe. "How to suck at facebook"
2. Pick things everyone can relate to.
3. Create easily digestible content.
4. Create an infographic.
5. Talk about memes and current events.
6. Incite an emotion.

Q: artful google bombing. How long did that last? Got #1 in "Cash Advance" in 6 weeks. Pisses Google off. Would not at this point recommend quizzes.

Barbara Evans



Seven months ago, Barbara Evans started tweeting about the wines she loves to drink and the people who make them. She had no intentions of marketing anything, and claims to not know what the heck she’s doing. However, in a very short period of time, she has become known as a “marketing guru” of sorts.

She’s been interviewed on nationally syndicated radio shows and newspaper columns. She has been pegged to speak and appear at may local events. She is truly a success story of a self-made self-branded online marketing campaign. It doesn’t hurt that the woman loves a good glass of wine! You can connect with her @SeattleWineGal on Twitter and at www.SeattleWineGal.com

How to enjoy wine. @SparkmanCellars and more. Borat: "How Not to Wine Taste" The 3 Components of Wine Tasting:

1. Look – Tilt your glass and check for color and clarity.
2. Smell – stick that Shnoz right into your glass baby.
3. Taste

How to Look Pretentious –

1. Take a medium sized sip of wine.
2. Hold it in your mouth
3. Purse lip & suck a little air in.
4. Swish the wine around your mouth.
5. Swallow.
6. Think about the finish of the wine.

Tasting room etiquette

Quick notes from the first day of Gnomedex 2010 – very dry but with links.

Friday, August 20

8:00 AM Registration and continental breakfast

8:30 AM Doors open

9:00 AM Welcome to Gnomedex 10 by Chris Pirillo

9:15 AM Brian Solis: Opening Keynote

10:00 AM Trish Millines Dziko

10:35 AM Break

10:50 AM Charles Brennick

11:30 AM Austin Heap

12:15 PM Lunch in the Harbor Dining Room

1:30 PM Announcements

1:45 PM Tom Nugent

2:15 PM Todd Welch

2:45 PM Break

3:00 PM Willow Brugh

3:30 PM Johnny Diggz

4:00 PM Rob Knop

4:05 PM Audience-voted Presentations

4:40 PM Surprise

5:00 PM Announcements

6:00-9:00 PM After Party sponsored by Banyan Branch, @ See Sound Lounge

9:00 PM – ?? Tech Karaoke After-After Party @ Hula Hula

Pasted from <http://www.gnomedex.com/schedule/>

Day One of Gnomedex 10

Just quick, light notes about what the presenters said that was interesting enough for me to write down.

Chris Pirillo Opening Remarks

Gnomedex Keywords: Influence, Ideation, Illumination, Inspiration, Interaction, Illustration – Human Circuitry

On the Real Networks vuvuzelas distributed through the room – "Use those sparingly."

Small idea: Star-tags: rating what you’re tweeting about: *0 (you hate it) to *9 (you love it)

TypeWith.me for Collab.

The end of Gnomedex: This is it for Gnomedex. This is the last Gnomedex, without a major sponsor it can’t go on. Look forward to future geek events (e.g., Geek Week, Wine Geek, etc).

Brian Solis



Brian Solis is globally recognized as one of most prominent thought leaders in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, Solis has influenced the effects of emerging media on the convergence of marketing, communications, and publishing.

He is principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning New Media agency in Silicon Valley, and has led interactive and social programs for Fortune 500 companies, notable celebrities, and Web 2.0 startups BrianSolis.com is ranked among the top of world’s leading business and marketing online resources.

Keynote, looking at Gnomedex and considering this age of digital privacy and contextual personal networks.

If the Elite have Ted, the geeks have Gnomedex. "This is about #you" Welcome to the EGOsystem…

Movie: "We Live in Public" – http://www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com/ – hey, it’s on Netflix and available for Instant Queue: http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/We_Live_in_Public/70112751 – added to my queue.

Jeff Jarvis – privacy scare; writing a book.

We cast a digital shadows with ever tweet, post, etc… Then we complain: how Facebook is invading our privacy. We are the last generation to know privacy as it was. Privacy is now something that will be taught. Private life, public life, secret life. Social "Me"dia

Introverts as digital extraverts.

Photo: hash tags as a gang sign.

Social networks. Contextual networks. Niche networks. People are connecting around keywords / topics. Context becomes king.

Nicheworks.

Dunbar’a number in anthropology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar’s_number Average person on Facebook #130 connections.

Social graph theory: believes numbers will double. Social currency based on how we behave – "Like" – reputation, trust. I follow you for a reason.

"Now there’s a credit score for the fucking web." Klout Score. http://klout.com/ – oy, mine sucks. Andy Warhol: 15 minutes: this saying is now dead. Influence is the new metric of social authority. Klout: influencers get free flights w/ Virgin & free coffee from Starbucks.

Fast Company Influence Project: not influence, popularity. "Vote for me, vote for me!" That’s not influence. You are more influential than you know.

http://danzarrella.com/: scientific analysis of how to get retweeted. http://danzarrella.com/the-science-of-retweets-report.html#

"Anyone who says they are a social media expert is fucking lying to you."

Keep Gnomedex alive in all you do.

Trish Millines Dziko



Trish Millines Dziko founded Technology Access Foundation in 1996 after spending 15 years as a developer, designer and manager in the high tech industry. Her successful career brought her to Microsoft in the mid-1980s, just as the pioneering software company was set to become a worldwide brand.

In addition to her work at TAF, Trish remains a committed, proactive leader and serves on the boards of several organizations that focus on children and education. Trish has received dozens of local and national awards for her work improving the educational opportunities for children of color.

How We’re Going to Reboot Public Education

"Ah, this is a Mac… can you tell I’m not a Mac person?" www.techaccess.org @DegreesMatter #trishdex

Public schools need some help. Want to know more & look at data? "A Right Denied" – presented by Whitney. Link below to PDF slide show.

At Microsoft, moved into the Diversity Program, working with High Schoolers interning (e.g., Garfield High). Left Microsoft and started the Technology Access Foundation. Slide on data for US school achievement – our brightest students. U.S. ranks near the bottom in the world, particularly in Math & Science. However, students today "Seem to be very confident in their perception of how smart they are." but in college they have to take remedial classes, meaning they are paying for what they should have taken in High School.

(@EricRi remark: GenY is full of overconfidence but typically mediocre skills / abilities.)

Movie: "Waiting for Superman" – it’s an amazing movie.

(Mac disruption moment: no graphs. "This is why you have a *PRINT-OUT*" – reviews graphs) Bellevue High is night & day compared to Cleveland High.

What are the causes?

"You can have a small class with a crappy teacher in front of them."

Reviewing implications of being a high school drop-out: jail rate, mortality: their woe does affect society with a cost & impact (public assistance).

Good slide: "We Know What Works" – raising expectations, Leadership, Measurement, Accountability

(Switched to a PC: "Well I don’t have anymore graphs now…")

TAF: social entrepreneurs.

Goal: by 2020: on an annual basis, educating 20,000 kids to HG graduation, to college, & subsequent college graduation. Tiny org that can’t do on our own. Supporting elementary teachers, not replacing them. TAF Academy. Teach21: scaling up – located in White Center.

Learn More: www.techaccess.org / subscribe to the TAF MediaLab newsletter / download "A Right Denied" and devour the data.

"A Right Denied" PDF: http://www.techaccess.org/tafpdfs/medialab/achievementgapdata/TheCriticalNeedforGenuineSchoolReform.pdf

Get Involved: volunteer, visit TAF academy, offer a high school internship, write legislators, talk to your network.

Questions: roll of parents?

"It is not an honor in the United States to be a teacher."

Charles Brennick



Charles Brennick is founder and director of InterConnection. Prior to founding InterConnection in 1999, Mr. Brennick worked as a park planner, an ecotourism planner in Costa Rica and as an environmental education teacher with the Peace Corps in Paraguay. Charles received a Masters degree in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Oregon.

InterConnection.org – Creating opportunity through computer reuse. Computers: 8% in S. America, 1% in Africa.

Refurbishing: wow, really thorough.

If you donate a computer, they wipe the hard drive. Some large companies insist donated drives to be punctured / crushed. Certificate of data destruction. Doing smartphones now.

Donate a PC & email xbox@interconnection.org – drop off biz card, too.

Austin Heap



Austin Heap is one of the founders of the CRC and the organization’s Executive Director, as well as an entrepreneur, technologist and activist whose work centers on developing Internet-based technologies to facilitate the rapid transfer of knowledge between people, groups, and organizations.

He is the recipient of several honors, including the First Amendment Coalition Beacon award. Prior to establishing the CRC, Austin was a Chief Technology Officer at an Internet firm serving Fortune 50 companies where he developed technologies that simultaneously optimized users’ networking and personalization within and between online communities and organizations.

On recent cover of Newsweek. http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/06/needles-in-a-haystack.print.html

Twitter revolution – lot of hype, overused term. Record on video cameras – takes a while to get out of country. Gets out, eventually gets back into country via pirate transmission. Twitter allowed faster sharing of information.

Slaying Dragons: playing WoW & seeing Iranian trending topic. Post instructions to setup proxies.

Leveraging twitter – put out tweets for information / help: e.g., needed a pro-bono lawyer – w/in a few days had an excellent lawyer.

Got internal doc regarding Iranian network – created Haystack:

• Encrypt out going data
• Obfuscate to look innocuous to the region

Sanctions brought Haystack to a halt – time to go to DC.

Don’t be a touron in D.C.

Brought whole team – had problems (e.g., being a tourist, handing out unsourced tweets); had to lock down the team. All but one are gone.

Hillary: One corporation given permission to export anti-censorship software to Iran.

Not trying to get elected, so I can show up and not be diplomatic.

Other project: Neda’s assassination. Family not interviewing. Train someone to look like Persian tourist & film an interview & get out of Iran. Got interviewer & partner out & get asylum.

Trailer: Every Monday. HBO films. For Neda.

"I feel like people look at Iran as 70 million terrorists."

How to make this go viral in Iran?

After Torrents, got access to satellites to illegally broadcast "For Neda" into Iran. Started: got reports that electricity was going out in Iran. The government didn’t want the story going out.

Neda’s family is untouchable.

"Lot of people I talk to in Iran are just scared."

How people can help: work w/ government to update how we regulate technology.

Work outside of the US? Considered Panama since they don’t answer US subpoenas.

Tom Nugent



Tom Nugent is the Co-founder of LaserMotive, where he is working to develop ways of recharging unmanned aerial vehicles, such as the “drones” used by the military. Tom previously served as Research Director for LiftPort Inc. –- one of the pioneers in the development of the modern space elevator concept. While at LiftPort, Nugent led the research team that outlined a realistic path to space elevator development, as well as working on a variety of milestone tests of robotic lifters.

Nugent’s other space development work includes liquid-fueled rocket engine development through the MIT Rocket Team, and advanced fusion propulsion research at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Invisible extension cord to spaaaaaaaace. Dreams of Space interrupted by Reality of Economics. Space elevator: conclusion: "Not on Earth, Not in my lifetime." Nasa looked at competitions like Xprize. Space Foundation partnered with Nasa.

Power beaming: 60-70s: Microwave. 70-80s: Lasers. 90-00s: lasers more capable.

Competition: you had to have a robot vehicle climb a wire powered by nothing more than the power source you designed.

2007: everyone failed.

2009: a small laser can put out 3hp of light (what does that mean?)

Nick on the team manually tracked pointing the laser on Otis the climber.

Testing: built a vertical treadmill for the climber to simulate 1k, 2k climbing. Hardware on the cheap: eBay, industrial auction sites.

Video: climbing up – 8x speed, with elevator music. Trying to get to faster than 5m/s: forgot the "million dollar nut".

http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/09/lasermotive-finally-wins-nasas-elevator-2010-beam-power-challen/

Todd Welch



Todd Welch is the author of the book Trust, How to put “it” back in business. Shortly after Gnomedex 9.0, he started a thousand-day journey studying trust and learning from his experiences to share with others.

He co-founded Charter Partners, a company that uses Cooperative Entrepreneurship to organize hundreds of entrepreneurs into creative teams. He also founded the Charter Partners Institute and WINGS to provide hands-on learning experiences that have taught thousands of high school and college students the concept of Cooperative Entrepreneurship.

"it" – Integrity & Trust. Subject of the heart. Trust ecosystem. The lack of trust is the #1 issue in the world at this time. 1,000 day journey.

Slide: corruption perception index of the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

Day 25: Seth Goldman Honest Tea: decided to create his own tea, brought to Whole Foods & got subsequent orders. Now #1 organic tea in US. What is the brand? Trust.

Day 102: Joe McDonough. Started organization B Positive (son’s blood type was B+): bepositive.org.

Day 104: Larry Holmes.

Day 160 / 161: Prudence. Best documentary – former producer knocked winner off stage. Tell me about this disrespectful experience. The real story is Prudence.

Day 249: Kenny Moore – was in monastery for 15 years.

Day 266: Admiral Grossenbacher. Ran entire nuclear sub fleet.

Q: Where’s the space for forgiveness?

Trust Tour videos on vimeo: http://vimeo.com/user1442997

Willow Brugh



Willow Brugh is a transhumanist, a traceuse, and an organic chat client. She believes all systems are malleable, and should be acted upon. She also believes in dirty hands; community; and the inseparability of neurons, bits, and atoms.

She has organized and moderated transhumanist discussion groups since 2006, is director of Jigsaw Renaissance (an emerging member-based maker space), and has just started a motorcycle courier service called Va-Va-Vroom.

Prezi presentation. Free at www.prezi.com – @willbl00 – st.imul.us www.jigsawrenaissance.org – Russian Cosmism

(Holy Frak, Prezi is really freaking different!) – http://prezi.com/x2hsiwmz8m2a/transhumanism-101/

Integrated augments.

(This is pretty information rich – there’s no way I could keep up typing – Prezi slate is the way to go.)

Modafinil – keeps you awake – developed for narcolepsy.

(Wow, this is a Mondo 2000 flashback)

Nootropics – http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=1740&page=1#Item_0

Embedded magnets: http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/cyberpunked-living/experiences-in-body-modification/

See follow-up slide for various sites / topics.

Follow-up

• grinding.be
• less wrong
• Shane Hope
• humnanityplus.org
• Universal immortalism
• TransfIgurism
• News Real
• http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=45185947838

Johnny Diggz



Johnny Diggz is a musician, filmmaker, entrepreneur and the Chief Evangelist at Tropo.com. In 1995, Diggz launched iPost Universal Messaging, the world’s first Internet-based unified messaging platform. In 2001, he co-founded Voxeo, the industry leader in unlocked communications.

He produced the indie feature film, The Karaoke King, a musical comedy which premiered in 2007 at the Cinema City International Film Festival. Since 2008 he’s performed as dueling piano player at Howl at the Moon in Orlando and is the co-host of the award-winning Drew Show Podcast.

In 2010, Diggz launched Geeks Without Borders, an international humanitarian organization of geeks working together to assist people whose survival is threatened by lack of access to technology or communications due to violence, neglect, or catastrophe.

IRDG – made iPost – universal messaging system. Gobbled up. Started voxeo. Huge network of data centers around the world. Tweet3po – making twitter useful. E.g., taking police response XML feedback and mapping from district to neighborhood & tweeting it out.

+) Geeks without Borders. http://gwob.org/

Launch date: 10/10/10 @ 10:10 AM PST.

(10-min Break)

Open Presentations

Darrin Barefoot: http://tcktcktck.org/

Bringing the Open Source Philosophy to Activism.

Approach revolutionized by www.350.org

Kyle – how social media is affecting the volatility of decision making

"The Challenger Accident" – the Wisdom of Crowds was able to quickly react. W/in 5-15min the trading of the companies started to shift. Thiokol Propulsion (manufacturer of the faulty o-ring) dropped much more.

Frank – "Why is my digital privacy a marketable commodity?"

No way to get free stuff w/out consequences. You can lie. You can hide. Your biggest enemy is cut-and-paste.

Mr. John Donolly – What Can Non-Geeks Do to Have a Clue?

Omni-Tech News young men – Why should we pay attention to kids in Social Media? http://www.omnitechnews.net/

15% of twitter are teens.

Social media makes lifelong friendships.

Kids don’t obey the laws of logic as much as adults do.

Rob Knop

Seattle Rep. A play about Steve Jobs. "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" – includes going into China and gaining access to FoxConn electronics & talks to the workers. April 22nd – May 22nd 2011.

Eric Richards – Resume 2010: HTML, PDF, and Word.

I finally took my own advice to update your resume during the annual Microsoft review cycle. I hadn’t updated it since moving internally inside of Microsoft from Office over to Windows Live, some three and a half years ago.

As always for me, it’s pretty wordy for a resume. One page? Nah. Anyway, the time in Windows Live has resulted in some very condensed experience: three releases in just over three years! I joined in the middle of Wave 2, and have been there for all of Wave 3 and the soon-to-be-done Wave 4 (out in Beta as I write this). We’ve managed some exceptional features during that time, the big one being adding People to Photo Gallery, up-to-and-including Face Recognition. I’m also thrilled by the excitement that Photo Fuse is generating.

Wow, here I am getting ready to attend Gnomedex 10 and seeing that my last post here was about Gnomedex 9.

Ahem.

Well, there was this little interruption known as Kendell.

He’ll be eight months next week and is doing great. That certainly took time over posting anything substantial. As for sharing non-substantial things, hey, that’s what Twitter is for!

During my leave I did active the Linux site that’s part of my domain and install WordPress and import all the old posts over. Now it’s just a small matter of updating the old posts to permanently redirect to here.

And see if I can get in a few more posts before writing about Gnomedex 10 – which would seem to be the last of its kind of Gnomedex’s (-dexi?) so I’m going to do my best to enjoy it to pieces. I’m even thinking about lugging the Canon 7D along with me and snapping a bunch of candids.

The following is my random some-what delayed thoughts after attending Gnomedex 9 in Seattle. I attended on my own dime so these thoughts begin and end with little ole me.

This is my second Gnomedex, the first being in 2006. Having missed the last two, I put Gnomedex 9 on my schedule as soon as possible so as to avoid missing it. Last year was bittersweet: as my Sweetie and I pulled our luggage behind us on the way to the Victoria Clipper for a wonderful getaway weekend, we passed by the Chris Pirillo signs to Gnomedex 8.

It was a great trip to Victoria (hi, Sweetie!) but I sure missed Gnomedex.

Gnomedex 9 was pretty different than 6. Blogging and “New Media” of course were big during Gnomdex 6 as was the emergence of Firefox and the burgeoning Mac laptop community. Since then, we’ve had three big things:

• Facebook,
• Twitter, and
• The ever connected Jesus iPhone.

This year: no Blake Ross. No Crazy Uncles. The replacement? The social media crowd. The lovers of Facebook, Twitter, and the devices that let them Tweet and share and experience like crazy. In the end, I felt that the crowd – a very engaged, smart crowd – was more about leveraging technology than the creation of the technology. More on that at the end.

Some interesting answers from the crowd:

• First timers? Seemed like 85% of the crowd was new. Wow. I’m glad Chris was able to pull such a large, engaged crowd together this year, economy and all.
• Mac users? 50%. I read someone Tweet that they saw more PCs this time than last year.
• iPhone users? 90%.

The presentations were all Mac laptop driven and the Macs demonstrated while they certainly aren’t perfect (power and battery lifetime, odd Keynote playback issues) the users are willing to forgive them for being rascals.

Surface. Microsoft Surface was a *hit* with the audience. Who ever came up with the idea to bring Surface to the conference deserves a big bear hug. It was also a hit to ensure there was digital ink on the back of the conference card such that you could slap your registration card down on the table and have it pop up UI, like to bring up your digital business card which other people could drag to the sphere around their conference card and “add” to their contacts. Ba-rill-yant. People loved that, and they also loved the background flickr / Twitter #gnomedex feed that people could grab, examine, and then let flow back into the river of pictures and tweets. The pictures you could add to your card by dragging them over to your card’s sphere, but not the tweets. You should be able to add the tweets – that would be sweet.

But anyway, for the Gnomedex crowd (given the usage of flickr and Twitter) it was the exact right social combination.

People enjoyed bringing up the different applications for Surface, too. It’s as if Microsoft got an Apple-quality product out first, so it’s quite the curiosity and something delightfully foreign to the attendees.

Now let’s hope that they remember to log-in and get their contacts and pictures off of their card later. Because it’s doubtful most will run into a Surface again anytime soon. (Hmm, just visited my card site. Okay, I have ideas on how to make this all a bit better.)

Microsoft Bing was there, and, well, didn’t get as much love as Surface. On day one only ten people turned in their vote for the Bing contest / raffle. They should have held that raffle (darn it) because I was one of them! Ah, well. Chris had to stick it to the crowd several times to vote, probably saying something about the attendees, too, and their loyalty (heck, even our MSNBC guy, Jim Ray, during his presentation said something along the line of “I definitely recommend you use Google and not our stuff”). Probably if they had spent 10 minutes actually showing people the contenders live (oh, that might have taken a PC) then the attendees would have jumped in to vote.

Presentations. This year the presentations seemed like a mini-TED. Some science, some perspective, personal stories, and a general sense of high aspiration with some inspiration. So a mini-TED… with F-bombs. Maybe the real TED has F-bombs, I don’t know, but I do hope this year’s was the F-bomb peak for Gnomedex’s lifetime. I have a couple of quick notes about the various presentations here:

1. http://www.ericri.com/et/blog/2009/08/random-notes-from-first-day-of-gnomedex.aspx
2. http://www.ericri.com/et/blog/2009/08/random-notes-from-second-day-of.aspx

There’s also a CNN summary of the conference here: http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/08/24/gnomedex-puts-the-human-face-on-tech/ .

For me, the most touching was “My Cancer is Social” by Drew Olanoff (hey, I just received my yellow #BlameDrewsCancer shirt!). It was a tale with two takes on dealing with cancer: a private “I’m going to deal with this on my own” take, and a public “get everyone to blame their woes on my cancer” take. It also showed what is meant by leveraging social media in an open, real, short-term way. Entropy will ensue. What will the longterm impact be?

The talk which proved a twitter-backchannel stream can be brutal was Christine’s “Life Extension for Geeks” talk. How can presenters get some sense of the mood of the room via social media while they are presenting? Will they need an assistant texting them real-time suggestions?

The twitter-backchannel stream was also a bit brutal for Firas Khatib’s presentation on the protein folding game, http://fold.it/. Hey, I’ve known about those scary-ass prions for quite some time and this stuff is cool, so I was into it. But I’m an engineer geek, not a social media geek tech lover. A lot of tweets were “I don’t get it” and Chris Pirillo, seeing the audience struggle, came to the rescue to help redirect the talk to the basics of, well, why one should care: “Because you’ll help cure diseases.” Ah. It probably would have been good to start there, even to scare the bejeezus out of people talking about prions a bit more.

The best pulling together past obscurities goes to Chris Brogan for the “Rise of the Trust Agents” talk. I say it that way because part of his talk demonstrated how attention is needed to build anysort of leverage in the social media world, and how quickly it can dissolve. I’ve, uh, given grief to the concept of attention before and how it was the Next Big Thing (a few years ago) but now it certainly makes sense: in a world constantly filling with a flow of bite size content, it takes something special to achieve the attention of an audience; those with that attention must built reputation and trust to keep it and to build on it.

Bre’s MakerBot (1.0?) was cool — I think when they make the designs mashable so that people can add thei
r own logos to the stuff they make (plus make it come out smooth) then they’ll really get interest going. I think Dave Winer made a comment back in 2006 about everyday folk being able to create their own stuff. Anyway, if I was a kid and I had a MakerBot and some 3D design software: I would be fabricating monsters All Day Long.

Conversations: the connections and conversations at Gnomedex is just as big as the presentations. Three parties to two days of presentations. I enjoyed chatting with Kathy Gil and learning about her UW class’ twitter book coming out soon. http://twitter09.wordpress.com/ . I also had some endlessly fascinating conversations about health care policies and how best to manage the complex political and corporate forces swaying it (administration to administration, to boot). Then of course the techie stuff, Canon vs. Nikon (no contest), chatting with fellow ‘softies, wishing I could hear better in noisy bars, learning about Austin (lots of former DC folks), hearing how iPhone development was like, and hearing lots of perspective from frequent Gnomedexers on how it has evolved over the years.

The conversation I brought up a few times had to deal with “where do digital memories go?” Specifically, we, our friends and people we respect are creating memories we’d one day would like to reflect on. Is it all just tears in rain, to quote one Roy Batty? If five years from now I want to think about the good times at the Gnomedex’s I’ve been to, how successful am I going to be conjuring up the tweets, perhaps weighting the ones most often retweeted or linking to the same resultant URL? How will I pull the hash tags together into some related interesting thoughts auto-organized for me to enjoy and easily explore? People who were my friends then and who are my friends now: what did they share?

Sure, there’s a lot of noise. But there’s a lot of beautiful signal in there, too, waiting to be enjoyed again and allowing us to tumble through a treasure of related memories. Again and again.

Spam = Success: twitter is a success. How do I know? The spammers are freaking all over it. As soon as the #gnomedex hash tag became a trending topic, the spammers and their tools went to work and we started seeing random tweets for grocery gift cards and movies. And “hi theres” from alluring young women who, yes, are probably some large dude in his parents basement.

Build the Future: The software developer quotient was lower than I expected, evidenced by Amazon recruiting struggle to award Code Ninjas for folks who could solve their code puzzles. I think they realized it’s not an ideal recruiting venue (maybe that will change in the future). Ah, well, I got my little ninja dude; now I have to find an interesting place to take his picture… ooo, Mr. Ninja needs to go visit RedHook!

Looking forward, I’d like to see some of the tech creators some back and talk and engage with the Gnomedex crowd and have that public conversation. In order for the next round of technology to emerge, you need to see the current problems and pain points. And opportunities. As I wrote above, I see people creating a bunch of throw-away memories. Where goes your tweets? If five years from now you have a quiet moment to reminisce about this summer, would there be some set of memories jogged up to the surface if you had your tweet stream there, weighted by the re-tweets and hash-tags and shared tags and tweets with your friends and followers of the time? A lot of it might be throw-away and transient, but some not. Some might make you smile. Or cry. Like a good memory should.

That’s my takeaway, as a developer, having attended this year’s Gnomedex. There’s a lot of content out there, and I want the lifestreams important to me to stay close, not only for today and tomorrow, but for all of my tomorrows.

I hope to you see you at Gnomdex 10!

If you find yourself strangely unable to open video files, like WMV (Windows Media video) from a web page, you might need to implement the fix in KB974538.

What happened for me on my Vista laptop is that I decided to click on a video review for the new Xbox 360 Batman game (please don’t judge me). And as a result, I got an IE8 error page with the message “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” and then a little “What you can try: [Diagnose Connection Problems]“.

I had opened plenty of WMV files recently. What changed? Oh, I had recently installed the latest version of Windows Live so that I could enjoy the wonderful new Windows Live Movie Maker. All sorts of great and good changes happened in that update. Including, however, an itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny break in video type registration.

So I went to KB974538, Video Files do not play back as expected in Windows Internet Explorer and other applications after installing, upgrading or uninstalling Windows Live Photo Gallery. There’s a little snippet of registry goo between those dashed lines that you need to save as fix.reg and then double click and apply.

Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, it’s all working again. Nice.

I hope this helps anyone else that runs into the situation.

Follow-up from yesterday: slides of Drew’s “My Cancer is Social” from Day 1 (Random Notes from the First Day of Gnomedex 09): http://www.slideshare.net/drewolanoff/gnomedex-2009-presentation-drew-olanoff

Chris kick-off:

www.arsights.com – augmented reality http://www.arsights.com/ – download and printer paper template and then you can download google earth models and play around with moving them. Coverage yesterday: King5. Geek centric time-wasters. Social media focused. http://www.king5.com/business/stories/NW_082109BUB-gnomedex-KS.102ad175e.html . Mark Glasser: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/08/gnomedex-90-tech-conference-looks-deeper-at-social-media233.html

#1 A Twitter Top-Ten List (with Humor!) – Frank Eliason

Comcast cares. http://twitter.com/comcastcares – When phone volumes in customer care spikes, the first thing the look for is what’s happening on Twitter that might be related to the phone call spike.

Top ten:

• 10 Employees: Your employees are on twitter. People are going to talk.
• 9 Customers: Your customers are on twitter.
• 8: I work for Comcast.
• 7: It all starts with a Tweet. YouTube: look for Motrin Moms. Response: on web site for two months, drawing additional attention.
• 6: Sometimes you just need a break: Fail whale.
• 5: To go with your break: free stuff.
• 4: All businesses need: a social media experts.
• 3: Your brand is Trending. And what do you have to say?
• 2: We hear of businesses on Twitter all the time. Always same brands? Tools.
• 1. Make New Friends: YouTube Telemarketing video by Chris Pirillo. This space is all about relationships. Can turn your detractors into your biggest raving fans. Back to Chris’ video: telemarketer called Chris to adopt internet service (Chris was already on it).

#2 Hacker Journalists – Mark Glaser and Jim Ray

A brief history… and a live specimen. MarkGlasser@mediatwit, JimRay@jimray. Challenge:

1. Check out the projects
2. Come up with your own project
3. Must combine mashup – inform public. Maps + Multimedia.
4. Just an outline, an idea
5. Winning ideas features on PBS MediaShift.

Patron saint: Adrian Holovaty. http://chicagocrime.org/ – picked up crime data, pull it in, and show in maps. Journalist’s job: gather info, distill info, present info. Next project: http://www.everyblock.com/ for news around the block.

PolitiFace.com – truth scorecard on politician statements. Won a Pulitzer for the truth-o-meter.

Located media: see a cell phone number marked for a site: call that number and get some history. Example: Bronx Rhymes. http://turbulence.org/Works/bronx_rhymes/

Jim Ray at MSNBC.com. Anthropology storytelling + compsci @ UNC. Flickr stream. Degree: multimedia story telling. MSNBC just purchased EveryBlock. What is MSNBC really buying if the code is already open sourced? Adrian did Django.

Reviewing various projects: Political Maps, Hurricane Data. Hurricane Tracker. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26295161/

Snark market: post on the article that you get and parts you don’t get. Too much background information / historical context. http://snarkmarket.com/blog/

Twitter and tapping into the zeitgeist. Info / twitpics.

Traditional software development process (feature based) just didn’t work very well. Need to start at the Universities to get new journos up to speed on leveraging technology. Need to graduate more people who have the skills and think different so that they can be hacker journos.

#3 Nerd Craft: A Field Guide – Beth Goza

Nicely constructed presentation! Ansley Bleu: Bleu Arts: Princess Liea Star Wars “hat”. Stitch Wars. Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Strings. Television. Stephanie Bryant – mortaine on Ravelry – comic panels (handknit heroes). Lifesize knitted Ferrari.

#4 Building Influence Online – Micah Baldwin

Micah started Follow Fridays on Twitter. Measuring Online Influence. The art and science of being awesome. Ignite Micah (Mee-haw). Whats Awesome about Influence? “Who is the #1 douchebag” on Google. “Why do I care about awesome” – Started Follow Fridays on Jan 16th. Would this become spammy. Nah. In the end. Yeah.

1. Define influence
2. Identify components of influence
3. Provide a formula for influence

Influence: implicit or explicit effect on one thing (or person) on one thing (or person). Components:

1. Trust: person A will always act as person B expects them to act. “Random trust equation” – expectations.
2. Branding: is designed to create expectations about you and your actions. Be you. Personal brand shouldn’t be influenced by corporate brand.
3. Expertise: knowledge is gained, expertise is given.

Influence = Reach (Brand * Expertise * Trust)

How to build online influence (become more awesome).

1. Write like on one is reading.
2. Write when you want to write.
3. The moment you think “that would be a good blog post,” you become a blogger.

Become involved (#BlameDrewsCancer). Best part of community is feedback. Listen and learn about the things you need to change, evaluate, and change.

Content discovery and filtering: be a human filter; if you have trust, you can aggregate knowledge on your blog.

“Install Lijiit” my slides are at http://bit.ly/3PpqZs sorry I didnt get them up before! #gnomedex – http://www.slideshare.net/micahb/how-to-be-awesome-gnomedex

#5 20,000,000 vs 20: Audience vs. Impact – Jay Grandin & Leah Nelson

“We’re not geeks, but we’re trying really, really hard to be.”

Storytellers. JayGrandin; AntLeah; GiantAntMedia; BongoFilm. Fart jokes ending up helping in Tanzania to record a hip-hop album. (no sound – pesky Macs.)

Qualifications: viral vidoes: “How to shower: Women vs. Men” ==> Myspace; next YouTube “How to conceal a fart” Viral potential: Farting, Being Naked, really viral: Farting while Naked “A Date with a Giant Penis” YouTube video. Waiting on MySpace deal for content creator. Connected with MySpace friends to have places to stay / crash at around Europe. Finding: f#ck viral. Content viewership took a nose dive when starting to create videos important to Jay & Leah. Engagement, however, increased.

Created “Urban Project” and raised $8k. Tanzania.

http://BongoTheFilm.com <– final film on the Tanzania hip-hoppers. Playing trailer. http://theurbanproject.org/

#6 TBD Improv Show and Tell Time

… www.retailmenot.com – international. Find coupons. … Q: how many people have iPhones? A: 85% of the room. … http://halftheskymovement.org/ – women’s stories in developing countries. … Interesting app in crowd built maps: Waze has user generated maps, but if you’re the first person to drive through a street, it goes into a pac-man kind of mode to help map the street and you get points. … PocketMeter / Sonar Radar – uses ecolocation by emitting a sound and determining how far way something is … http://mentalhealthcamp.org/ using Social Media to assist with mental wellbeing … audio.boo app – records short
audio clips / RSS wrapped podcasts (smooth) … “Digital Ocean: sampling the sea” … http://tweetcloud.com/ – wanted to know what people were eating for dinner. Wants to track the tweetcloud trend automatically. … http://www.starfall.com/ – meant for pre-readers … http://www.kidzui.com/ – downloadable browser for kid-friendly sights for safe browsing … http://www.techcraver.com/ + South Africa. Huge amount of mobile phone adoption. … http://songtrellis.com/tunetext – can type in chords and such and have generated MIDI and a nice scroll. … www.skittlr.com to make a skittles site for yourself. … Sweetcron – www.sweetcron.com lifestream and pulls all your data into one sight to build your lifestreaming site. … www.onebusaway.org – website w/ mobile CSS. Tells you how far away your bus is, in minutes. … Buzz: oops, flashing screen … Android Tricorder app. LCARS system. … http://quip-art.com/ – add graffiti overlay for other people’s website … Snag-It for screen grabs (and for really embarrassing positions with Chris – flickr must) … http://www.educatingworldcitizens.org/ … http://marrow.org/JOIN/index.html – ask to have a Facebook app to join the registry and order a kit … http://www.girleffect.org/ – inspirational video … http://www.mustachesvscancer.org/ … Kathy Gil (UW broadcasting) Skitch for Mac – screen capture & productivity tool … http://uwtitterbook.com/ … http://openatrium.com/ – Drupal dev site … Derek Miller flickr mimiandpapa user. Took picture of sun – sunspot and Mercury. Next: apod space station going across sun.; … www.bringtheawesome.com … Josh again: auto stitch for creating pano; Pocket Universe – move around and it shows the sky and labels what you’re looking at; Geocaching

People are showing off either web sites or iPhone apps.

#7 Amazon, Affiliates & Taxes – Angel Djambazov

Amazon tax and affiliates – oops, Chris’ Mac seems to want to auto-advance the slides for some unknowable reason. PC to the rescue. – Tax law and affiliate tax. Amazon.com is a large target for taxation. “The Case of Quill Corp. v. North Dakota” – 1992.

#8 A Conversation about Social Change through Social Media – Mark Horvath

The face and voice of homelessness – Invisible People: @hardlynormal – http://invisiblepeople.tv/ – “I have two gifts: I’m loud and I’m pushy.” Traveling around the company giving a voice to homelessness. Was a TV executive. Syndication end. Homeless. Lived on Hollywood Boulevard. Average homeless person is nine years old. TwitPic’d pictures of a toddler Alexandria – two pictures, many blogs written about her quickly. Just in Atlanta: video of Angela.

“Authenticity is replacing production values” when it comes to videos being shared.

How did Angela get that way? “Beth’s story.”

“We have a perfect storm coming.”

Power of social media – needed shoes for kids – put it online and immediately had 50 pairs of shoes. Joseph: had maggots in his legs. James: at Nickelsville in Seattle; trying to build a kitchen area.”This is a community.” Came to Seattle looking for work, with Alaska for processing. Nickelsville: beautiful community. Brings James up on stage.

Mark: foreclosure ruined his credit score and now can’t get an apartment. Does giving money do more harm? Question Mark has been waiting for. I give money sometimes – you’ll know in yourself. “I’ve been conned before.” Atlanta: homeless was aggressive. The reason they are aggressive is because they are not getting food or anything. Not a good thing: donating left over food.

James: “It’s not handouts. It’s opportunity.” Two parent families are the growing portion of homelessness and they are worried about their kids being taken away, so they are not allowing themselves to be counted. http://change.org/ – recent article about Stree Papers (like Real Change).

#9 Prosthetic Culture – Amber Case

http://oakhazelnut.com/ – cyborg anthropologist. (Robot()()Cop) Aimee Mullins – prosthetic legs. Objects are also prosthetic. Phones: ears. Laptops: fingers. Study how tech augments our ability to live. Where do machines begin and humans end. When do we start to become non-human. Space is very similar to…the “Information Society” – We are all cyborgs. Graph of internet domain-based graph. Looks like a universe. “Civilization and its Discontents” by Freud. Omit unnecessary cyborgs (poor clippy).

Picking items off of supermarket shelves vs. off the trees – hunter & gathering in store. http://meatcards.com/ – wtf?

Magical cellphones. Apple store: best reseller of prosthetics. Looks like a museum. We shed our prosthetics like trilobites shed their body parts for regrowth.

Term: telenoia. Anxiety in the face of increasing integration of technology. “Facebook is one of the best spreadsheet ever to come out.” – playing a giant game of spreadsheet – updating columns. Basically database animals. We’ve become famous machines.

Steve Mann http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann – wearable computing / MIT. 1980, 1985, 1991, 1995, 1998 – all just in his glasses. Eyetap Glasses. Glogger.mobi – installs on nokia phone.

• Environment is the narrative. Marketing must learn to realign perspective.

TED: Pattie Maeas demos sixth sense.

#10 A look back at Gnomedex 9.0 – Kris Krüg

Kris has a video on YouTube on digital photography. Gnomedex 9 Awards Ceremony. @kk on twitter. Photos online. http://flickr.com/photos/kk

Very early bird price of $299 at Gnomedex 2010 EventBrite.com Aug 19th 2010. Bell Harbor, Seattle.

Eric’s super condensed Gnomedex notes for Day One of Gnomedex 09. (FYI: notes from the second day: Random Notes from the Second Day of Gnomedex 09).

Chris kick-off: Last year’s hit: Marc Canter’s presentation.

Presentations

#1 Art of the Interview – Warren Etheredge

The Warren Report. 1,500 Interviews – art of the interview. Print, radio, etc.

1. Need to listen.
2. Bring no questions to interview.
3. Win their trust.

Earn their respect.

“No offense to Texans here today. But you are idiots.”

(Warren’s recent tweet follow-up: @thewarrenreport I don’t think all Texans are idiots, just the UT rube who thought HOTEL RWANDA was a sequel to A FISH CALLED RWANDA.)

Ask something that throws them. Jumping off point for the person. No notes. No clipboard. Don’t be – James Lipton ?

“I’m sorry to turn a room off with aspeugers.”

Get their attention. Pay attention.

Win their trust.

Earn their respect.

Charlie Kaufman interview: do different. Little he’d do different.

#2 Rise of the Trust Agents – Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan

Attention wars and the rise of the Trust Agent.

Make your own game – standing out.

One of us – belonging.

Archimedes effect – leverage.

Agent zero – developing access.

Human artist – developing understanding.

Build an army – developing mass.

“The Attention Wars”

Competition with everything in the world, not just your niche.

Q: How many people w/ ADD does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Let’s ride bikes!

Awareness, reputation, trust.

Post that: goes from empathy to entropy real fast.

Trust = social capital

Sc + web = links, traffic, social proof, a big f’n network.

Lifestyle design, make your own game. 3 levels to any game. Playing. Hacking. Programming.

Find your value differentiation.

Create a new word for yourself.

Learn the systems – attuned / distorted.

One of us.

Blue Sky Factory. http://www.blueskyfactory.com/ Email marketing. Trust him. @gregcangialosi

Reaction to bad photos: “It’s an iPhone. Can someone tell Apple to make a camera.”

First 140 conference. If you can be at the beginning of a group. Weezer. Insider. “I’ve got twelve sided die.” Insider language.

Find the agent zero

Seek frictionless distrubtion

Be everywhere and create/maintain bonds

All knowledge is vocabulary

Insider

“Worst ever picture of Mike Arrington”

Leverage: take the good things you’ve done and leverage to the next level.

BillG: malaria mosquitos

Archimedes effect:

Build offyour previous success

Never start from nothing

Its all chips: winning the game is table stakes for the next game

Agent zero: Chris Pirillo – great example of connecting people.

Be the priest; build the church

Be the relationship before the sale

You live or die by your database

Be part of everyone’s 150

Human artist

Signals misunderstood on the web.

Connect people constantly

Share instead of horde

Practice simple touchpoints of loyalty

Self aware vs. self involved

Build armies

Give your ideas handles

Teach them to fish

Bring your own dialtone

Re-act with voting by our feet: “We unfollow the hot messes.”

#3 Active Skepticism Online – Phil Plait

Phil Plait – Skepticism Online – bad astronomy blog.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Astronomer

Meta-skeptics.

What is skepticism – demanding and examining evidence. Be willing to drop and idea if it’s wrong.

Optical illusions.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/

Mythbusters.

Bart Sibrel – moon landing. Buzz Aldrin. Search.

Why important?

It sucks to be fooled.

You can lose your money.

You can lose your life.

Grassroots Skepticism: stop (Sylvia Browne), skepchick.org, what’s the harm.net, skeptic’s dictionary, teen skepchick, skepticamp, young australian skeptics.

Overwhelmed by nonsense. (deep, growl-sigh): “Mating call of skeptics.”

#4 Life Extension for Geeks – Christine Peterson

Christine coined phrase “Open Source”

Life extension vs. health extension.

Health ^ 2.

“They’re made out of meat.” – short story / YouTube.

Things start to go wrong with our meat.

Fragile grey pudding. Can’t backup.

SENS Foundation.

Kronos science lab

BUCK institute.

Right now: apply available anti-aging methods.

Money & time.

Is your Dr. your friend for extension? Probably not. They are most likely in reactive medicine.

Good news: lots of things can help. Some can be fun.

Meditation: who in your life is toxic?

In 3 months, just through life extension, you can turn on & off gene markers. Baroo?

http://www.nanogirl.com/ – Dermal Display on YouTube.

Life extension is a biology experiment. Get a baseline. Kronos: for non-trival amount of $ you can get extensive analysis. Chrono-age vs. physiological age (aka Real Age). Oh, and get your insurance setup before you find out anything bad.

Supplements. What’s appropriate to take? Most people take pills indiscremently.

Calorie restrictions. Don’t teach your body that there’s a famine – it will hoard all the weight it can if you ever go up again.

TA-65 – slightly refined supplement. Claim is that telomeres will stop shortening / lengthen them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere

$$$ mucho money per year.

Inflammaging: Chris has weight loss tips. Make a DVD. HealthActivator.com; weight loss for geeks.

http://www.healthactivator.com/

#5 Personal Manufacturing: The Robots that Sharing Built – Bre Pettis

3d Printer – MakerBot.

Personal Computing ==> now ==> Personal Fabrication

Download or design things.

Download and “print”

Builds it up layer by layer.

Machine is being used to make more MakerBots.

“Egg Pants” video. DesignGlut – incredibly young ladies doing 3d product design.

Thingiverse – place to upload design files.

http://www.thingiverse.com/ -ooo, they have a companion cube!

Sharing and Fear. “Everything I do I share on the Internet.”

“But, if I give it away, <<fill in the fear>>”

Collaboration magic with shared object files: Walt Disney’s head + (a brain egg cup design)

Intern projects: http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=7726651

HackerSpaces.org ==> NYCResistor is where Bre met-up. Share ideas / experience.

http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hackerspaces

Eastside hackerspace: http://www.black-lodge.org/

#6 FoldIt – Firas Khatib

Firas Khatib http://fold.it/

Free, online protein folder video game.

Protein folding is important especially when you consider something like prion disease.

Rosetta looks for the low energy native state of a protein and cheats by knowing low energy states o ffragments and attempt to chain the low know states into the given larger chain.

Rosetta@home has 1.3m users for distribution problem solving (ala Seti@home)

(Tweets showing that this is beyond people’s background / interest; the Social Media audience effect.)

(Chris Pirillo to the rescue to put talk into context: playing the game can cure diseases.)

Alex Cho – parody of “I’m on a Boat” from SNL

Q: what about undermining SETI@home, StarDust@home, Folding@home; A: tough question. Yeah. They don’t have a video game!

#7 Todd Friesen

(metronome?)

Search engine spammer. Not an email spammer. Being #1 for viagra and stuff like that.

@oilman.

SPAM

Sites Positioned Above Mine

SEO for Nike, etc.

Search engin
e “Golden Triangle” for search result pages.

Bottom of the page is better than the middle of the page, if you’re not on the top.

RSS = Really Simple Stealing

Hired guys to write bots to scrape content before RSS. Then along came RSS. Splogs. Spam blogs.

Big right now: forum profiles.

Comment spam. Point in time that blogs had all sorts of authority. Use a bunch of proxy IDs to have 100,000 links back to sites the next morning. Guestbook spamming. Biker Guestbook spamming: great email.

AutoPligg.com

Cross Site Scripting – search term just pure HTML and it is replicated in the search results page as in-place HTML.

Real time search – next frontier (e.g., twitter “buy viagra”).

Figure half of twitter aren’t even real people.

(Hallway break time — ooo, I am now the honored owner of an Amazon Traveling Ninja Coder who, like that well-traveled gnome, is ready to have his photos taken in interesting places)

#8 Best of Ignite! – hosted by Brady Forrest

Brady Forrest w/ O’Reilly – Ignite

Youtube.com/ignite

“Enlighten us, but make it quick.”

Wish I was a little bit taller.

“My friend Elan wish he was taller” bug in product studio.

“Platform” issue; has shipped like this before.

Byron – Bike Hugger’s Guide to Bike Culture

“Freds”

“Plain clothes”

“Cargonistas”

“Messengers”

“Fixie Hipsters”

“Shop Monkeys”

“Commuter”

“Pros”

“Freaks”

“Nakeds”

“Tweeds”

“Folders”

“Talls”

Betsy – Social Media Guru.

Leave a trail.

Jay Cross – on time.

Book: “The Time Paradox”

Scotto More – a digital fairy tale

http://scotto.org/

Filmed for Ignite Seattle

Nov 3rd King Cat Theater.

#9 My Cancer is Social – Drew Olanoff

My Cancer is Social

Opera 9 release in Seattle.

Job at http://www.pluggd.com/; left for http://www.blip.tv/ – flying monkeys!

http://blamedrewscancer.com/

Even @lancearmstrong can blame Drew’s cancer (broken collarbone)

YouTube clip of Jon Bon Jovi blaming the AFL season on Drew’s Cancer.

Wyclef Jean blaming ear-ache on Drew’s Cancer.

Making the cancer something tangible.

(hugs and not a dry eye in the house)

#10 Wrap-up

The Order of the Phez

Giveaway time.