Blog: New Media

Dry Off With Some Indoor Get Togethers

It's a soggy start to the week after a weekend of almost non-stop rain that's pouring into Monday. What better reason do you need to go out after work than a weekend spent cooped up inside? Here's a quick look at the tech events we're planning to attend this week.

Monday
7:00 - 9:00 pm

Drupal Meetup: Come out for a night of talking shop with Drupal developers and users and get to know who else is in this open source community over a few beers. This is a great event for hard core Drupal developers and newbies.

Tuesday
5:30 - 9:00 pm

Second Tuesdays New Media Salon: We had a blast at this last month. It's a great chance to do some networking with new media expert over a few cocktails.

Thursday
3:00 - 5:00 pm

Internet Advocacy Roundtable: Look into the future of emailing Congress by listening to one proposed solution on how to  deal with the onslaught of email received by Congress each day.

Friday
1:30 - 5:30 pm

Social Rockstar Workshop: No matter what your skill level, this workshop is designed to make you an superstar in leveraging new media, web 2.0, and online social networking for your organization. $15 fee.

Any day

Artomatic: Eight floors of local art absolutely free. I don't think we need to say anything else. Be sure to check out their website so you can plan your visit during live music performances and movie screenings.

Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture Exhibit: The National Portrait Gallery has an very interesting exhibit looking back at graphic design and advertising from the last 100 years - a must see for any designer. 

See you out this week!

Talking with Bloggers, Campaigners, and Progressives about Tracking New and Traditional Media

A lot of campaigners in Washington, DC for Rootscamp just got a peak at Managing News - our news tracker and analyzer tool. If you missed the session, you can check out some videos of the tool here and contact us for a seven day free trial.

The session led into a great discussion on what people in the political realm need with a tool like this - particularly extreme media analyzers and bloggers. That there's a need to track online chatter on both a macro and a micro level wasn't in question - the people in the room knew that was necessary and it's been a recurring theme in all the sessions I've been to so far today. This in itself is really great to hear because we built Managing News to do just that, and to give a snapshot view of what’s happening online around a topic and make it easy for people to take action on it.

There was some good excitement about Managing News' ability to roll a lot of what people are already doing with Bloglines, Google alerts, and manual news reading into one shared platform, and that one that automatically adds information like keywords and locations to the news it sucks in. We also heard some great feature requests - like source exclusion, clipping reports printed in various formats, and close captioning tracking - that will be keeping us busy for awhile : ) Let us know if you have a specific news tracking or analyzing need. We're happy to talk about what Managing News and other tools can do to help.

A Quick Run Down of What's Happening This Week in DC

Lately we've been keeping a better eye on what's happening out there in the great Washington, DC tech world, and what we've found is that there's a whole lot of interesting meetups taking place. Here's a quick run down of the ones we'll be at this week, along with a few we wish we could attend. For more local events, check out the calendar that Ross maintains over at DC Tech Events.

Tuesday, April 8 Second Tuesdays New Media Salon and Dot Com Networking Party: We've heard great things about this happy hour for new media professionals and are excited to check it out this week. 

Wednesday, April 9 PHP Developer's Meeting: A great chance to meet and learn from other PHP developers working in DC.

Thursday, April 10 Social Media Club Meeting, reps from the local social media platform WhyGoSolo will be presenting their product

Saturday, April 11 - Sunday, April 12 Rootscamp! We've talked about this one before, but most of us will be spending the weekend  talking tech and politics at Rootscamp. If you can't make it, read our blog for updates and head out to the after party on Saturday.

And keep Monday, April 14 open - we'll be hosting the April Washington, DC Drupal Meetup. More information on that coming later today.

Share Your Work with Mashups and Demo Your Favorites

The DC Media Makers just announced their next meetup, and it will be all about the media mashup. This should be fun. It will be great to learn about  ways that media people have put mashups to use. There will be time for people to demo what they've done, so there should be plenty of opportunities to see what's possible and to see the mashups in action. 

Eric and I, and possibly some other people from the office, will be attending. We were talking about the meetup this morning and how we're both particularly excited to find out more about what video tools people are finding most useful, specifically to add time stamps and meta data to content. Eric experimented with Viddler to do this awhile back and found it to be a great tool. I'm sure he'd be happy to show it off too : ) We're both curious as to what else is out there.

Hopefully we'll leave the meetups with a few great ideas for other mashup experiments!

Details on the meetup below. RSVP here. 

Mashup Meetup: DC Media Makers

Thursday, May 1st, 6:30 - 8:30 pm

NPR Building, 635 Massachusetts Ave NW