Blog: Social Media

Social Networking, Privacy, and Independent Performing Art This Week in Washington, DC

After a long holiday weekend filled with the requisite barbecues and fireworks parties, it's time to get back into the swing of things at work. Why not ease into the work week by indulging your hobbies after hours by attending some local tech events? It might even help you avoid the pesky evening thunderstorms that seem to hit just as your leaving the the office.

Here's a look at what's happening in the world of tech in Washington, DC this week. A full listing of tech events is over at DC Tech Events. 

Tuesday, July 8

Noon to 1:00 pm

Lunch 2.0: Lunch with other technologists to talk about - what else - technology. It's a great way to escape the office for a midday reprieve with people that get what you do. 

Wednesday, July 9

6:00 pm

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

International Development, Agriculture, and Smarter Tools

I just landed in Rome for the Web2forDev conference where I was invited to speak on how social software can be used to connect geographically diverse teams. The timing of the conference is fantastic. It’s eAgriculture week here in Rome, so I suspect that many of the 350 participants will have a lot of on the ground experience. 

There are a lot of great presentations in the queue that I want to sit in on. The session Cairo Concept: Village to Village Knowledge Sharing sounds fascinating – it will discuss a project that links small town together in an online network to help them better share knowledge, news, and expertise. I’m also excited to learn more about USAID’s Amazon Basin Conservation Initiative, which not only sounds interesting and necessary but is also of special interest to me as one of our very first clients back in 2003 - Amazon Alliance - worked in this area.  I’m also looking forward to catching my friend Tobias’ session explaining how African civil society organizations are and could be using blogs, wikis, and social networking tools to better use their limited internet connections.

I arrived in Rome straight from Barcelona, Spain and DrupalCon, which was a spectacular conference overall. I came away from it very energized about the future role of Drupal in international development.

After many conversations with Jose (who I was able to work with for most of September out of his Leon office) and Gábor  (who I talked with at both FrOSCon and DrupalCon), I’m extremely confident that Drupal will be a leading multilingual platform.  We are standing behind future investment in making Drupal multilingual by working on the i18n module that makes Drupal multilingual and getting more of this functionality into the core of the system. We’re also really excited to be working more closely with Gábor to make it easier to translate Drupal into more languages.

Our not so hidden agenda is to follow the huge aid investments for improved connectivity in developing countries made over the last decade with a few open source publishing platform that will make it simple for people all over the world to generate local content in their native language.

From a Blog to Traditional Media, Then Back to Blogs

Who would have thunk that Fidel Castro could be a buzz leader in the U.S. blogosphere? Well, not me at least. But he sure was when he published his thoughts on the invincibility of a Clinton Obama ticket in 2008 - it positively rocketed around the blogosphere.

I took a quick look at a Blogpulse trend report on the phrase "Clinton Obama ticket" and got the graph below. Check out the large spike in the term's use right around today. Wow, right?

You can’t really tell on this image, but the traffic on that term was almost nil on August 27th and then spiked on the 28th. The spike is even larger if you look at the posting traffic for the last 6 months.

Obviously, Castro was hardly the first person to think, postulate, or write about the possibility of the two nominees joining forces, but why would his article in a Spanish-language paper lead to such a burst of discussion?