LiSA (Lessons in Social Advertising): An Event Review

LiSA (Lessons in Social Advertising)

When: Wednesday, May 28, 2008, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM, the same day that Portland Lunch 2.0 @ Vidoop was taking place, though I attended the networking an hour prior and then left for Strands Beta meetup 45 minutes after the panel started.

Where: Hotel Deluxe.

What It’s About: Panel discussion about viral/nontraditional advertising through social media (does it work? To what extent?) which, while may seem a bit late (hello, this is what social media consultant has been doing for the last two years,) is also a subject that’s ripe for the picking now that it has moved into the ‘Best Practice’ area (But I want a Facebook, Hi5, Friendster and Orkut account for our Research and Trend department, too.)

Speaking of which, I suspect that the reason why a particular social network succeeds in one region but not the other (Facebook, for example, doesn’t find heavy adoption in Asia, while MySpace doesn’t with Europe) not only has to do with adoption rate, but ultimately with feature that’s suited to that region’s culture. The question is, what features in specific?

Anyway, as with any panel discussions, this one features a moderator and four panelists:

• Hashem Bajwa from Goodby Silverstein and HP.
• John Furrier from furrier.org, who LiveTweeted the whole thing and even bounced some questions to his followers.
• Michael Berkley from SplashCast, a social network video sharing service that Hillary Clinton apparent uses in her campaign.
• Dave Allen (yes, the ex-bassist of Gang of Four) from nemo design and Pampelmoose, one of the better record labels out there.

This is where it gets interesting, because two of them are agency folks, and the other two comes from the tech industry. This backgrounds reflected on their answers.

Note: I was only able to attend the first 45 minutes of LiSA, and thus am only able to post this passing note. Please feel free to contribute to this (Gaia Brown, I’m looking at you)

*** BEGIN VERY INCOMPLETE EVENT NOTATION, WITH MUCH APOLOGIES TO HASHEM FOR NOT BEING ATTENTIVE ENOUGH TO TRANSCRIBE HIS RESPONSES ***

Ken Lewis, Moderator (M): What is social media?

Dave Allen (DA): Social media fulfills a basic human need for connectedness and validation that manifest in the form of staying in touch with family and friends. In the social media space, brands needs reach out to certain groups of people. But who are those people and how can brands reach them?

Michael Berkley (MB): Social media can benefit brands if it can be inserted into the conversation. It has the ability to ambassadors among consumers. Advertising on social media means leveraging your consumer base to tell your story and be evangelists. The risk: it can backfire, because it’s about brands being invited in by consumer (not pushing in onto the consumer,) or, at least, accepted into the conversation.

John Furrier (JF): There’s one thing that’s different about Web 2.0. Web 1.0 is about website and personalized, self-serve advertising (‘self-serve’ means that audience can click if they like to or not click if they don’t. Clicks generate leads.) On Web 2.0, it’s still personal, but also about relationship with your peers and group—in other words: not self-service. Very random and disaggregated.

M: Give examples where client uses social media beyond traditional content.

JF: I’m live tweeting this question and gets answer back. THAT is social media.

MB: Can banner ads on Facebook be considered ‘social’ or ‘spam’?

*** END EVENT NOTATION ***

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: Think of it as a primer and best practices in social media advertising. A lot of the discussion are comprised of common (yet rarely practiced) senses. Assuming that you join one or several social networking website (and if not then pray, tell, what’s wrong with you?), technicality shouldn’t pose a problem.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: If you’re an ad guy or creative, go for the information. If you’re a geek, go for the networking. This experience may be an eye opening one for creative professionals, but not so much for the nerds among us—because we practically live and breathe it. Again, not that one approach or format is necessarily better than the other. Had you go to a more nerd-like social media panel, the discussion will get way more technical and subject specific, thus deterring creatives to contribute.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
It’s about facilitating conversations, not advertising.

Lunch 2.0 @ Vidoop: An Event Review

Lunch 2.0 @ Vidoop

When: Wednesday May 28, 2008, 12:00 – 2:00 PM

Where: Vidoop, where last week’s Portland Startup Weekend was held.

What It’s About: Like what I suspected of AIGA and SEMpdx monthly socials (‘suspected’ because I have not attended either one, although I would very much love to if you could offer an invitation) Lunch 2.0 is one of the best way to meet people in Portland’s thriving tech scene—the other being BarCamp Portland and Startupalooza.

My friend, Aaron Hockley from Another Blogger, had noted how the first Lunch 2.0 composed of “pretty much geeks,” the second was less so, and the third, at Vidoop, has a really good mix of nerdy and cubicle (pardon the pigeonholing) types.

As a creative who dabbles in technology, I originally came to these events in hope of bridging the gap that the two industries currently have. What I found out is that more people also recognizes this problem (or think that hanging out with anyone who Tweets more than 500 times a day will double their social media chops.)

I am happy to report that you’ll recognize faces that you previously only interact with via a 40×40 pixel avatars at Lunch 2.0. I also think that “hey, you’re so-and-so on Twitter! Nice to finally meet you in meatspace,” sounds like a great introductory sentence.

Technicality: ☝
Translation: I wanted to put zero, because you don’t have to work in any industry and have any sort of expertise to enjoy interaction that happens in Lunch 2.0—but then you also need to have some sort of an online presence to be able to connect with your new friends after the Lunch.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: if anyone see me with a plate that afternoon, they’ll see that I hardly ate what’s in it (save for the bacon-wrapped date, of course), this is because connecting with people and learning all sorts of new things—which includes two yet-to-be-launched web startups, a strategy to not get lynched at Werewolf games, a podcast’s audio problem, The Oregonian, a shirt design involving a physical element and an elephant silhouette, and the power of social media to cause change in society—is really, really fun—all while you’re enjoying a relatively uneventful lunch with your Interactive Media Designer at Old Town Pizza.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Have you upgraded your lunch today?

Startup Weekend: An Event Review In Pictures, LiveTweets

Portland Startup Weekend

See the play-by-play LiveTweet from this event.

When: Friday, May 23, 6:00pm – Sunday, May 25, 2008, 6:00pm, wherein I got the chance of participating in the entirety of the first day, the last third of the second day (including an impromptu Wii party that ensued due to the thunderstorm outside, culminating in two fierce games of Boxing, won by me and my opponent, respectively) and the second half of the third day.

Where: Vidoop, who shares a building with eROI and what I call the “Golden Triangle of Geekdom”: Backspace, Just Be Toys and Ground Kontrol.

What It’s About: Portland Startup Weekend was, to my knowledge, the 17th Startup Weekend event held during its first year. The concept is not revolutionary (build a web startup over a 24-hour working hour), but the dynamic is. Each audience:

1. Comes in with his/her idea
2. Pitches it to the crowd
3. Gets together with likeminded individuals to refine
   
4. Re-pitches it to the crowd
5. Gets it voted up or down, which in our case yielded 5–6 ideas
   
6. Converges in groups based on these ideas
7. Promises to burn the midnight oil for the next day or two

Ideas that the Portland Startup Weekend participants (there are about 30 of them) ended up with, followed by the name of their products:

• A wants stuff that B has. B wants what C has. C wants what A has a.k.a the Junk Trader project. Discuss: TreasuReCycle.
  
• I have a dream of going to a conservatory, but alas, both my parents died when I was 6 months old and I am now living with the proverbial ‘Cinderella’s stepmother’ on a wellfare—a.k.a the Dream Funder project: LifeGrant.
  
• I want to listen an individual song within a huge, seamless DJ set a.k.a the DJ Set Archiver project: Mugasha.
  
• I want to plan a meeting sometime next week, but my officemates happens to have the attention span of a 5 year olds with a to-do list so full they might as well adopt Polyphasic Sleep a.k.a the Schedule Syncer project: Get Gathered.
  
• I have an idea for a web startup → ??? → Profit!
  Elaborate “???”: Startup River.
  

Most participants do it as a challenge to push themselves and see how much they can get done in a weekend. Some take it as a complete business. This reflects on their working style. Those who want to push fast (i.e. Mugasha) focuses on rolling out a working prototype as soon as possible. Those who want to build a business (i.e. TreasuReCycle) starts with an implementation/project plan. No approach is right or wrong, but they have to achieve something by Sunday at 6. So this was Friday.

On Saturday, the teams work on their respective projects, with three check-up/progress report meeting along the day. The day was originally rather uneventful.

That is, until the thunderstorm that happened at around 9:30 deterred everyone from walking to their car or biking home, much less getting out of the building (one individual decided to brave the element with an extremely tiny umbrella, and one other, John Watson, biked up St. Johns. Bless their hearts.)

But what about those of us on bikes or on foot, who may not have an umbrella, or a heart as big as Mr. Watson, you ask?

Those people decided to go back up the Vidoop Headquarter and play Wii Sports while simultaneously consume copious amount of PBR and Bud—which inadvertently lead to much trash talk and four very intense Wii Boxing matches.

Anyway, A play-by-play LiveTweet from this event is available courtesy of Summize, wherein you will find the reports from Startup Weekend’s eleventh hour and final presentation. Reading suggestion: starting from last page, in reverse order.

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: Obviously, you have to lend a hand at one particular area to participate, but this can range from back/front end coding, web development, graphic/interactive design, user experience to business, marketing and advertising planning. This makes anyone with any kind of startup-company skill valuable.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: This is akin to saying “I bet I can climb Mt. Kilimanjaro if I set aside a weekend to do it.” You may succeed at actually creating a prototype or a venture; you might probably fail thanks to the sheer level of complexity that your project entails, but that’s beside the point. You’ve pushed your limit, and that’s what matters most.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Lacked buzz. But rats, should’ve participated.

PDX Critique: An Event Review

PDX Critique

When: Monday, May 19, 2008 at 7:00 – 9:00 pm, followed by the obligatory after-meetup at The Side Door.

NOTE: After-meetup is a social gathering that happens after an event is formally over, usually at a casual, sit-down bar nearby, populated by the event attendees. It is distinguished from after-party by its tendency to encourage good flow of ideas and unusually inspiring conversation, instead of bad decisions and copious amount of alcohol. After-meetup happens because event attendees actually enjoy each other’s company so much that they prefer to huddle in a non-event, social setting. For this reason, the very idea of after-meetup is uniquely suited to Portland.

Where: CubeSpace, a venue so commonly used for creative/tech events around Portland, I practically ran out of clever quips to describe it about a month ago.

What It’s About: I originally assumed that PDX Critique is nothing more than a 20-minute presentation slot where one gets to present his or her work or idea to a panel full of highfalutin designers, wherein they will reply with how “Saul Bass won’t like your improper use of Helvetica, sucker” and “your three-column layout is unrefined. Yes, you should really move it an eighth of an inch to the left” and “my colleague at AIGA thinks that Modernist design is so 1950.”

I’m glad that I was wrong.

Because PDX Critique was filled with the most brilliant and kind designers and information architects around (my memory registered @notbenh, @staceyanderson, @reidab, @tingey, Erik Mork, Monica Mork, and one designer whom I sadly forgot the name of.) And, most importantly, wasn’t just about critique. It’s also about open discussion and lively banter. And instead of the structure that I elaborated above, that night looked more like this.

1. You can has project?
2. Discuss.

I learnt about Soak Your Head, a web game adapted from a recently released white paper that could drastically increase one’s quotient after nineteen days of twenty-minute training. Erik and Monica Mork, the couple who designed the game, wanted feedback on the user interface, wherein the panel brainstormed solutions that decreased clutter and enhanced usability. Believe me, the game was so deceivingly complex, I felt more intelligent just by watching it get Demo’d.

I learnt about Calagator’s new redesign, its slick underbelly, and its great use of color to emphasize, and subtle grid to organize information—albeit for only 10 minutes for lack of time.

I also had the opportunity to pitch my idea about holding a BarCamp-like event for creative professionals sometime this year (which you should contact me at bram@brampitoyo.com because I need somebody who’s better than me at running this.) Not only did the panel asked critical questions, they also gave me directions to possibly take this event to, and agreed to help out and be partners-in-crime.

All this over the course of just two hours—not including the inspiring conversation that ensued afterwards at the Side Door. What a night.

Technicality: ⅛
Translation: No legal design cred needed to enter. Just bring your best mind.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: As one who work in the ad/creative industry and hang with people from the tech scene, I got the perfect balance from PDX Critique. This means that if you’re a creative, you’ll love it—and not for the usual reason.

This is because going to PDX Critique is the equivalent of bidding traditional ad/creative industry “networking mixers”—where all you care about is giving out business cards or landing the next job through strategically meeting the right creative director—bye-bye. At PDX critique, things are done more organically. Like, way more. Through conversations, you’ll get to know each individual as a person, not an interactive designer from so-and-so agency. And that, if you ask me, is a better way to know people.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Good folks. Great ideas. Better IQ’s.

Portland Web Innovators – Ward Cunningham Revisualizes The Wiki: An Event Review

Portland Web Innovators – Ward Cunningham Revisualizes The Wiki

When: Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 6:00 – 8:00 pm, with a little dinner at The Side Door afterwards discussing, among many things, the merits and pitfalls of newspaper journalists relying on reader’s tips on Twitter as a starting point to conduct full-blown reportings—which proved to be somewhat apocryphal, since Business Week decided to try a concept like this the morning after.

Where: AboutUs, which yet again proved my general inability to navigate to any event in Portland (I circled the block several times before being noticed by one of the staffs standing outside, who then motioned my to “go up to the fifth floor and then go all the way to the left.”

What It’s About: Critical discussion on the present and future of the Wiki as a medium to dissipate information across cultural and language barrier. I’m going to let the event notes that I took continue this.

*** BEGIN NOTATION. ***

(Please note that bolded words indicate overarching topics that the forum discussed, with thoughts and subtopics below them.)

“We’re going from the user to the technology, because if we go the other way, we’ll never reach the user.”
–Ward Cunningham

Revise entrenched processes
New Users
We want to make a space where the aggregated knowledge (even those of strangers) can increase infinitely, even when a particular user is not there.

Would your mom be comfortable attending this meeting?

Wikis have never been a process list to start out with.

When I started the Wiki, I:

1. First made several pages that are just designed to demonstrate the Wiki contributing process.
2. Then encourage new users to start out by editing their own profile page.

This is done so new users can learn not just by seeing but also going along. This is analogous to the fact that a video game has to teach you how to play the game while you’re playing the game.

As a new user, how the contributing process is structured will shape what he or she brings to the Wiki.

Can Wiki have a “factual” and “revisions” modes? This way:

1. If a user want to get straight to the facts, the system would direct you to a more factual version of the page.
2. Whereas If he or she wants to see all changes and go a little deeper on this part, it would direct him or her to a revision-friendly version of the page.

There’s a big barrier of entry for new users. Late comers can come and just say “what the heck is going on here”?
For example: figuring out a Wiki formatting syntax, which might not be a familiar to everyone (for example: me!) but those with programming background. And some people might not be able to get past that (like, ever.) What will happen is that, after he or she publishes with the wrong syntaxes, every other users suddenly hate him/her for ‘ruining’ their properly-syntaxed works.

Can we have something that gives experienced users a ‘nudge’ to welcome new users and continually remind them that Wiki is continually going to grow and they must learn to accommodate these users?

The ideal is to have Wikis wherein you can see not only the result on the page, but also how it’s being made. Being able to watch it being created, or to replay its creation, or to watch the dynamics between the contributors—that’s about the dynamics itself rather than the text—so new users can learn by watching, and they’re watching stuff that they really need to know to get up to speed.

How to properly use Wiki in a meeting situation: instead of taking meeting notes and publishing it straight up to a Wiki, why not take 2 or 3 main topics you got from that meeting, and then create a Wiki page for each? Pages need to create vocabularies that are going to be extended to other pages.

Facilitating “liveness”
Content delivery problem. I can subscribe to recent changes in Wikis through RSS, but I can’t search within that RSS feed certain parts or subjects within those changes that apply to my interest.

Can better description of changes on the user’s part encourage better changes in general? Currently, the system restricts how the natural, human language describe these changes and instead display them in a very restricted, unnatural way.

The ability to do things, and then reflect on what you did, is both very human and important to a Wiki’s success.

The problem with Wiki is that it’s all about the content and information (no matter how dynamic they may be.) Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, are about people.

So, can we make Wiki better by integrating more human element? For example: can we get contributors acknowledged for their contributions and be more visible?

Why not have different Wiki pages depending on the kind of people that user likes to see? For example, I might only see A’s contribution on a page because I consider him to be accurate. You, on the other hand, might choose to only see B’s contribution page because you consider that user to be accurate and that A is not.

Expanding the Wiki Model
Today, a Wiki assumes that you are going to write a certain way, much like a blog would assume that you are going to write a certain way. The problem is, both models are new, but they bracketed the respective spaces that they occupy instead of freeing it from constraints.

On the writing front, there is a yet undiscovered but better manner and convention to write Wikis than the current way of doing things.

On the presentation front, the Wiki can really benefit by taking a more conversational approach of viewing threads that blogs currently have.

You want to do things without forethought, but at the same time want to reflect on that after you’re done (reorder, edit, etc.)

There needs to be a perspective shift among new users who is just starting to use Wiki. Wiki is a work in progress forever, not something that you write in Microsoft Word, save and send to your friend via email. In fact, you’re not done even though you’re done, because the . It is a cultural thing, because user is used to finish a document, save it, and then be done with it, not remaining a work in progress forever.

For now, I’m just glad that the word “Wiki” itself is now generalized. People would say “Wiki this” and “Wiki that.”

Visualize Metadata
Wiki is a tool that doesn’t tell us how to structure. Problem is, we are so used to having a structure created for us.

Wiki seem to be dealing with a static truth (working toward a goal) but there are also non-static truth out there (that doesn’t necessarily have a goal.) Can there different kinds of Wikis for both situation?

I want a table where I can see who wrote on this page, and what else did they write.

I want a Time Machine for Wiki. Where you can click on a block of text, then use your mouse’s scroll wheel to display the previous versions of that text.

Most social networks says “build your network first, then use it to your advantage.” Wikipedia says that “build something, the network is the whole wide world.” This is a concept that many people struggle to comprehend with—the fact that the whole wide world, not just people you know or trust can freely change things.

Can we repurpose the Wiki so that you can contribute with whatever style you choose to contribute, and the system would intelligently transcribe it to conform to the ‘Wikipedia language’ and meld it into the existing article? This is comparable to a Machinima. Machinima is a film that’s generated by computer game engines. A user don’t need to worry about mastering the game engine to make a movie. They just need to make a character, put it on the field, position the camera, program the character and camera movements, then let the machine do all the work of translating these hard informations into a movie.

Can we have a Wiki auto-translate and maintain singularity of content between many languages? For example, if make a change to an article in French, the Wiki would automatically translate it to German, Chinese, Bahasa, and every other language, and then sync it to the appropriate pages—and vice versa. This will be very hard to achieve—maintaining language’s subtlety, context and all—but the big idea is this: if we can facilitate the free-flowing movement of ideas between cultures, there can and will be world peace.

*** END NOTATION ***

Technicality: ☝ ☝
Translation: Though attendees often spoke with programmer’s language at times, the subject of Wiki that was discussed was more abstract and conceptual rather than concrete and technical.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: Think of it like this. You’re in the year 1992, and somebody decided to put a group of awfully smart thinkers in the room to think about a method to best to navigate, visualize and make sense of the then-wild frontier of the hypertext, err, I mean gopher.

While the discussion was highly conceptual and sometimes indiscernible to my non-technical mind, Ward and everyone was talking about something big. I can feel it coming. And I’m glad that it’s happening right here in Portland.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Humanity and technology, closer than ever.

BarCamp Portland 2008: An Event Review

BarCamp Portland 2008
(All session post-it images are taken by Selena Deckelmann)

When: Friday, May 2, 2008 at 6:00 pm to Sunday, May 4, 2008 at about 3:00 pm, not including the impromptu after-party at Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub and 5 minutes of suicide drink-making act involving the full accoutrements of CubeSpace’s soda machine and syrup bar—“so,” one of the mixer said “you can confidently answer your friends when they asked ‘when did you have your last suicide?’ with ‘in 2008! What about you?’”

Where: CubeSpace, where Startupalooza was held two months ago.

What It’s About: Conference run by participants on various topics, ranging from Pirates Paying Artists to PostgreSQL, XFN to Lying With Statistics, followed by after-dinner Werewolf games—wherein I got hooked but remained very bad at convincing other that I was indeed a villager.

Personally, BarCamp Portland was one of the best events that I have attended in Portland. The atmosphere was both very collaborative and conductive to ideas. The people, extremely smart. And the most important thing of all was that, to me, it seems that participants were there because they wanted to be there, not because they had to. To the attendees, technology may or may not be their day job (in fact, there was a good number of creative and ethnographer types attending as web/graphic designers and market/user researchers, respectively) but it is their passion. And I believe that getting together with people who share the same passion is very important.

When you clearly see that every participant have brilliant ideas just waiting for the right kind of community to adopt and execute them, you simply can’t help but get excited.

BONUS: I see this atmosphere lacking in the creative/advertising community meetups, and would love to organize one. Tweet or email me if you would like to collaborate. Also, if you’re the talented designer in a Titanium Powerbook that came up with the Word Processor app working model that I totally dig (it was based on logical flows of the writing process instead of, uh, a blank sheet of paper,) but for some reason forgot to give me your business card, I would love to hear more about that.

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: Some sessions are technical, some are not (others are uniquely Portland.) Best of all, you get to pick and choose.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: I’d give it twenty bazzillion fingers if space permits. BONUS: @portlandpolice hinted an alleged appearance to every #Bacon session attendees’ shock and awe.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
More creative energy/sq.ft. than your digs.

Social Progression In Twitter

Lately, I noticed that a lot of Twitterers have been trimming their followings or putting texts that signify allegiance to a particular color team (or side of town, in the case of Portland.) This, along with Jason Grigsby’s Twitter First Posts article, made me think that these phenomena can be summarized into phases in a user’s social progression in Twitter.

NOTE: this document will be revised as the medium evolves and matures, and at your hat tips and suggestions.

Here we go.

1. Introduced to Twitter and its concept. Extremely confused at its pointless, navel-gazing capabilities.
2. Finally convinced to join. Created username similar to last email address in order to aid memory.
3. First Twitter post. Usually about figuring out “what this Twitter-thing is all about.”
4. More posts as one adds more friends and is convinced that Twitter was really pointless, after all.
5. Regretted joining in the first place. Temporary withdrawal (usually measured in months.) NOTE: not everyone will experience this phase.
6. Either:
   • Rediscovery, usually through peer pressure or event, or
   • Elimination of a barrier of reentry through a Twitter client (in the case of Allison McKeever [@allisonm], it was twhirl), followed by rediscovery.
7. Convinced to start using again with bits of skepticism. May or may not proclaimed “Hello world. I’m back.”
8. Added more friends, usually ones who are responsible for bringing the user back into Twitter, or have attended events with, or ones located locally. I think that real-world connection with Twitter followers (E.g. commenting, sharing and making inside jokes about events) are very crucial to success at starting again.
9. Participated in memes (E.g. Superhero Week, Color Wars, East/Westside battle, recontextualizing Tweets, etc.) and, somewhere along the lines, recognized Twitter avatars as a tool for personal branding (credit: @ahockley and @reidab.)
10. Social life enhanced thanks to Twitter. Started going to more events, meeting more people following them. I think that a user reaches the ‘point of no return’ when he/she finally meet another user offline. At this point, the user realizes that the said meeting happened purely due to Twitter, and therefore must continue using it to maintain further communication with the person and seek out more people to connect with.
11. Somewhere along this points, realized that “there is only so much anyone can pay attention to. otherwise the experience is ruined” (credit: @pixelmatrix.)
12. Started self-talking innocuously.
13. Trimmed followings.
14. Used Twitter-specific vocabularies, usually mashup of a noun or verb with the word “Twitter.” Ie. twavatar, twawkward, etc. (credit: @ahockley.)
15. Started referring to non-Twitterers with ‘@’ prefix.
16. Used hashtags (ie. #pdxst, #inno, #bacon, and more recently, #waffle.)
17. Began to drift back into real life. Infatuation with Twitter dwindles as one settles into a real relationship. E.g. Don’t need to stay up all night talking anymore, don’t need to sleep all cuddled up, and don’t need to tell each other every move we make. (Credit: @gwalter)
18. Following list unknowingly grown. Didn’t realize that self has potential in following more followers than what she has prior

Anybody have ideas or revisions to this list?

Why Non Geeks Should Go To This Weekend’s BarCamp Portland

I’m a newcomer in Portland tech community. Actually, no, I’d rather call myself a ‘n00b.’ Except that that would make me be perceived as more of a geek than I would like to otherwise, but on to the topic.

I don’t work with technology for a living, nor do I belong in a startup company. I am, by trade, a Brand Strategist, which in a nutshell involve talking with people to find out how a product or service can better serve them. I am secretly a nerd, too, but with dismal technical ability* (in an uh, what exactly does ‘ls -l’ does in Terminal? kind of way,) I stand no chance with all this programmers, developers and tech workers.

But I decided to attend all these events anyway, from Mobile Portland, Portland Web Innovators, Beer and Blog, Innotech to Ignite Portland (check out the review series if you plan to attend one.)

This is where it gets interesting.

Because I learned that, while this community is united by technology, they don’t speak geek all the time. My preemptive judgment about great, now they’re going to stuff me silly with xHTML or can we please stop talking about data portability tonight? was quickly shed and replaced with living and saving for retirement as soon as possible, moving to Portland last month and surviving the rain, or why everything on the menu at Pho Green Papaya is amazing (credits to respective authors of these statements.)

But what’s even more amazing is the fact that I learned not just about what they do, but also why they wake up every morning do the things that they love, be it tech or not. I made a lot of new friends and get to taste the best pomme frites in town. So, all in all, it wasn’t that bad.

This eye-opening experience made me believe fimly that BarCamp is a gathering of people that may or may not work with technology, but are united by the fact that they are passionate about it (or another thing entirely, like, um, bikes.) For us non-geeks, I think that the value of attending BarCamp this weekend may not be about discovering how the geeks work, but about why they do what they do, why they love it, and what could we share together to make Portland a better place to live in.

Don’t go as a non-geek. Go as a human being. As spinner or yarns and connector of people. Go for the inspiration and flying sparks. The conversation and ideation.

Go as a Portvangelist. Bring your willingness to share, and prepare for the best. I hope you’re ready for a ride.**

* Todd Kenefsky had mentioned that, while I might not necessarily be a computer geek, I am one when the subject of typography pops in a conversation.
** (if by “ride” you mean “a night of Mario Kart and Werewolf.”)

Good night.