Robert quipped that he was happy that he stuck to his guns regarding longform videos of this type. He isn’t alone.

Not too long after the Twitter video was recorded, at Web 2 Expo in San Fransisco, I was fortunate enough to record an episode of LunchMeet with Eddie Codel.

Here is that episode (in the Viddler player because PodTech’s embed no longer works):

You may argue that Viddler hasn’t had the cultural impact that Twitter has had on the world – but you’re not sitting in this chair. Viddler has done amazing things since that day with a meager budget, only a small percentage of the man-power, and from locations that many think out-of-touch.

Many of these stories are about to be told on The Viddler Spotlight. Stay tuned.

If there is anything in the culinary world more centering than pizza I don’t know what it is. We all have our favorite toppings, styles, and even ways to eat it. Folded in half, the way all true New Yorkers do, maybe two pieces on top of each other, or even eating it backwards crust-to-tip.

No matter what kind of pizza you like, you will always hunt down your favorite style no matter where you go in life. I remember when my brother moved from New Jersey to South Dakota (don’t ask). He had a laundry list of things he missed in New Jersey. On the top of that list was, of course, pizza. Kyle Slattery says that his family often picks up a few pies of their favorite pizza in a completely different state to take it home on the plane to warm up later!

My favorite style is New York style. Thin crust, tons of grease, served with attitude. When I was in San Francisco in July of 2007 for Wordcamp I searched my then newly purchased iPhone for “pizza” on the Google Maps app. The moment I saw “New York Style pizza” pop up I practically jogged the few blocks to Arinell Pizza.

Upon entering Arinell Pizza I knew I was in the right place. The line was out the door and halfway down the block. The music playing in the background was some sort of late-80s hard rock. The guys behind the counter only accepted cash, rarely washed their hands, and had hair well below their shoulders. Oh, and they gave you about 8 seconds to make up your mind about what you wanted.

A woman in front of me had called in her order. Two large pies with a single topping each. “Twenty five bucks.” said the longer haired guy taking the money after he had just tossed a new, fresh batch of dough into the air for the next few pizzas. The guy behind me, who hadn’t gotten his pizza yet, asked a few questions and was kicked out. Literally. I knew I was right where I needed to be for good pizza.

I was not disappointed. The pizza was delicious and I plan on stopping at Arinell Pizza every time I visit San Francisco and have a craving for really good, New York style, pizza.

I’m not sure what reminded me of this photograph I took with my iPhone of the sign at Arinell Pizza, or why I wanted to be sure I posted about it on my blog. But something did and so now I’ve done just that.

Arinell Pizza is at 509 Valencia St. in San Francisco, California. I highly recommend you have a slice. Bring cash and order quickly.

Today I did a search on my site for Vader and came up empty-handed.  I just couldn’t stand for that and so I’m posting this photo of me, taken by Daniel Nicolas, with a storm trooper, Darth Vader, and Boba Fett.

As a side note: I paid them $5 to take this photograph.  Vader, Fett, nor the unnamed trooper are friends of mine.  I roll with the Rebels. 4eva!

A sea lion?

Yesterday I saw my friend Daniel Nicolas twitter; “there was a seal at the beach! yes i got pictures”.  I knew once he published the photos I was going to link to them.

But then I got to thinking – did he really mean seal or did he mean sea lion?

Once he had the photos up I began doing a little digging to jog my memory about the differences between a seal and a sea lion, both of which are Pinnipeds, or “fin-footed mammals”.  It is a pretty simple classification really.  If you have a fin as a foot, you give birth to live young, feed your young with milk, are warm blooded, and have hair on your body – you’re a Pinniped.  However, the main difference between a sea lion and a seal is that sea lions have ears and can walk on all fours.

But, you might be saying, but so can fur seals.  This is where things start to get a little muddy.  The number of species of seal are actually quite numerous.  California sea lions, for example, are the most common species used in circuses and the like, but there are suborders of both seal and sea lion ranging in the hundreds.  Australian, Japanese, Galapagos, and Stellar are just a few suborders of sea lion.  New Zealand, Antarctic, Subantarctic, Northern Fur, and Cape Fur are just a few suborders of seals.

So what did Danny shoot?  I’m sticking with sea lion – partially because of my close examination of the photos, and partially because I know that Danny is from somewhere near San Diego.

What do you think it is?

Source: Flickr: Photo uploads from May 20, 2008 by djloche.

 

To be more specific, Open Road TV visits San Francisco’s Presidio, which is now a National Park, and goes on to explain its many changes over the years.  One of the places they stop, is at George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic campus.

“Explore San Francisco’s fabled Presidio, now a national park, and go behind the scenes at George Lucas’ new and spectacular Lucasfilm and LucasArts production facility.”

“Spectacular” indeed.  The majority of the video ends up being about the campus.

Source: Open Road – Visiting San Francisco’s Presidio.

San Francisco from Dolores Park in July 2007. Another beauty from the iPhone archives.

Date taken: December 1, 2007 |  My friend Daniel Nicolas in Hollywood, California.

This is one of my more favorite photos that I’ve taken with my iPhone, and only one of several of Danny.  What reminded me that I wanted to post this photo is that I wanted to recommend you taking a look at his photos, as well as his site (which is currently under a bit of construction).

Date taken: December 1, 2007 | McDonald’s – Hollywood style.

Date taken: December 1, 2007 | E.T. phones home. Maybe he didn’t like the movie.

Date taken: December 1, 2007 | Dan, shooting some of these photos. Taken with iPhone.

Date taken: December 1, 2007 | They have a better view than I did.

This morning I was, finally, able to begin uploading some video from WordCamp onto Viddler. I noticed I was having a few hiccups while doing so, but wasn’t sure where the problem was; between my computer, the Internet connection, and Viddler itself. Turns out, Viddler is now being used by Download.com. Combine that with the amount of traffic we’ve been seeing lately, and with a few of our videos ending up on Lifehacker, Digg, and a few other popular destinations lately – and you can see why our network is being put to the test. But these are good problems…

Today I’m meeting with the CFO of Opera to discuss some things about community. The My Opera Community has recently surged passed 900,000 users – so congratulations to their team.

Between work, play, San Francisco, trying to be a tourist, meetings, and the traffic issues – today has been pretty crazy.

How is your day going?

10:45am – The first session of the day HyperDB and High Performance WordPress lead by Barry Abrahmson and Matt Mullenweg focused on making WordPress run smoothly when dealing with high traffic sites or even small personal sites that end up getting on sites like Slashdot and Digg.

A few tips if you do not use any caching and yet you’ve found your site down because of a Digg. There are a few options that were suggested. The first is to modify your .htaccess file and limit access to your site to only your personal IP Address. Then, create an index.html file of the post that is getting all of the traffic. Next, FTP into your site and create the same directory structure on your file system as your post has (i.e. /notes/wordcamp07-day2/ for this post) and upload the index.html into that file. Don’t forget to edit your .htaccess file again to allow everyone back in again.

After that I’d suggest installing WP-Cache, a free plugin, so that this type of thing doesn’t happen again.

11:00am – “Blogs at the New York Times” by Jeremy Zilar is focusing mainly on the struggles of training people to use WordPress, upgrading multiple copies, and just general workflow for their authors and how they use WordPress at the New York Times.

Something interesting that the New York Times blogs does is have “comment of the moment” which spans across off of the New York Times blogs. Many social networks will highlight specific content but not usually highlight comments. I like it.

11:15am – Designing massively multiplayer social systems lead by Rashmi Sinha, Ph.D. is focusing on how to design massively social systems like SlideShare. (View her slide presentation here.)

Notes: Interaction occurs around objects not “just connecting” like; coffee, concerts, wordcamp, etc. Even tag searches are “objects” that people virtually “gather” around. I don’t like that she is limiting interaction models to only four, though she didn’t say they are the only models.

Side notes: Slideshare was built as “the Flickr, or YouTube, of Powerpoint presentations…”. “Did you know that 5th graders do their homework in Powerpoint?” Church 2.0 (clergy are using them in churches). “Powerpoint pornography, does exist”.

Designing for the individual: Usability. Can you find information. Quickly access what you are looking for. Documentation clear, concise.

Designing for groups: How are people interacting? How will people share? “Group think”, or Wisdom Of Crowds, says that you can intelligent decisions being made by a group of people only if certain rules are kept and followed. The system must encourage everyone to be individuals, yet work together. Popularity is one of the most important things on social networks. Unfortunately: The rich gets richer.

11:45am – Almost time for lunch. I’m starving! I just posted my MeToday video, that I did this morning before WordCamp was really full.

Regarding Apple, Inc. “They do invidual design very well. They can’t do social design at all.”. Wow. I’m not sure I get this blanket statement, and I suppose I should take it with a grain of salt. Maybe I will email her.

“Any other activities, besides favoriting and tagging, to gauge popularity?” Favoriting and tagging “go together” on Slideshare. If you favorite something, you are asked also to tag it. (I like this feature). “You don’t get the same credit for favoriting, as you do for commenting.”

Rashmi is taking questions from the audience.

BBQ Lunch!! Wow. That was some delicious BBQ! It felt good to be able to eat, unlike yesterday.

2:15pm – I’m recording parts of Dave Winer’s discussion about the Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing which has touched on some very interesting points. He touched on future-safing your data/content as well as opening up social networks so that users do not get “siloed” into using the service. Example: Facebook’s APIs all point inward, and not outward.

The video for Dave’s presentation is now available on Viddler.

5:15pm – The last few presentations for the day included Liz’s presentation on how they are going through the WordPress admin testing it for usability issues and planning the next (or 2.4) version that will, hopefully, feature many improvements to the WP-admin.

Matt Mullenweg did a presentation on “The State of the Word” (video now available here) updating everyone on what has happened with WordPress since the last WordCamp in 2006. Impressive numbers, huge growth, and many plans for the future. (I have a good portion of this on video and will be publishing it on Viddler the moment that iMovie “does its thing”).

Fantastic weather!

However, the entire first morning was pretty good, panel wise. The first panel on Podcasting was a cross between telling novices what a Podcast is and an advertisment for PodPress, a WordPress plugin to help the Podcaster. Not that PodPress isn’t worth its own session (it seems to be a pretty large project), but it seems that people wanted less milk and more meat and potatoes.

The session on Blogging vs. Journalism with John C. Dvorak and Om Malik (iPhone photo here) was an enjoyable discussion that involved the audience a lot more than I thought they would. Kudos to Om and John for involving everyone as much as they did while keeping the topic at the forefront. I’m hoping to get a short interview with Om Malik today.

When lunch break hit, I was hurting pretty badly. So I ended up sitting just outside the Swedish American Hall for a while and finally, while Om and I were speaking outside, Om said: “Go get some rest buddy.”. Good advice.

I hope today goes much better, I’m looking forward to getting into the more developer side of things today and hopefully I can get some content up on the WordCamp tag on Viddler today.

As you can see from this list of attendees I won’t be alone either! WordCamp looks like it is shaping up to be a really great weekend jammed full of great information.

I’ll be in San Francisco from Friday evening until Tuesday morning. I’m looking forward to meeting up with all of the WordCamp attendees as well as some of my friends in the San Francisco area. I’ll also be meeting up with the Viddler iPhone contest winner Edwin Villanueva to personally hand him his iPhone! I’ll have some free time in the evenings and on Monday so if you’re going to be in the San Francisco area and would like to say hi, drop me a line.

Also – if anyone is going to be near SFO on Friday evening around 5pm EST and wouldn’t mind picking up someone from the airport, that’d be cool too.

Kyle Neath has kindly allowed me to hitch a ride to the Avalonstar miniPrix right after I get off the plane. Thanks Kyle! You rock.

See you in California!

As with other overviews I’ve written I want to take you back to the time I first downloaded Skitch and met its designer Cris Pearson. I was sitting at a table in the Mashroom at Web2Open in the Moscone Center (which was caught by Scott Beale in this photo). Cris pulls up a chair next to me and begins enjoying his lunch provided by the Expo and we get to talking about Skitch. Details are a little fuzzy because of the number of conversations I had at that table but he quickly launched his Dashboard and was able to create an account for me which then emailed me a link to download Skitch for myself. I was thoroughly impressed with the way he setup his account activation process so I knew I was in for a treat with Skitch.

Being incredibly busy during events such as the Expo I was unable to give Skitch a thorough run through until I got home. Since then I’ve been using Skitch pretty regularly for both work and play and I’ve been loving every minute of it.

Me wishing my salad was made of Skitch.

Skitch’s features

How can an application, with the primary purpose of taking screenshots, quickly become one of my favorites? I think it is a combination of the user interface and how well thought-out Skitch really is. Skitch is jammed packed with features yet the interface for those features never gets in your way or becomes overbearing. This is the result of a ton of research, trial and error, and well thought out design by Cris and his team. Here are the main features of Skitch as I see it:

Quickly take a screenshot in just about anyway you can think of. The Mac OS has some really great shortcut keys for taking screenshots. You can select a specific viewable area for your screenshot, select a specific window, or capture your entire screen space. Skitch wraps all of these into an easy to use UI that then lets you “do something” with that screenshot.

Then you can annotate a screenshot once you’ve captured it. By adding shapes, arrows, text, etc. you can quickly highlight and draw attention to the specific parts of the screenshot that you’d like to. Or, you can put earrings on dogs. I remember doing this type of thing in Photoshop for years and what a pain that was! Not only was I forced to open an application that is far too complex for this type of simple annotation but it hogged all of my memory!

Sharing your screenshot with the world is probably Skitch’s strong suit. Skitch is not just an application but it also connects to a hosting service provided by plasq called MySkitch. MySkitch gives you a simple way to share your screenshots without worrying about saving, emailing, or FTPing those files to those you want to share with. With one-click your screenshot is available for the world to see! You don’t want to use MySkitch because all of your friends use Flickr? No problem because Skitch supports MySkitch, .Mac, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and of course Flickr. I’m fairly certain that this list will grow before and after launch of the final product.

Taking photos with your webcam is dead simple. Skitch does not come equipped with all of the effects that Photo Booth does, but if you need a quick way to take a snapshot with your webcam, annotate it, and share it – Skitch is for you.

The little things

The main thing that separates the good applications from the great applications is attention to detail. Skitch has a few ‘little things’ that both surprised and impressed me.

First was the delete feature. Skitch saves an entire history of your screenshots (which in itself is great), but the history remembers where you shared that file. So, when you go to delete something out of your history that you may have shared via Flickr, Skitch will ask if you’d like to delete the local file, the file that you shared on Flickr, or both. How cool is that?

Howdy, from Skitch.

I suppose the second would have to be the ability to drag the “drag me” file from the bottom of the window at any point while you’re editing the original screenshot. Instead of saving and sharing what you’ve done so far you can quickly drag that “drag me” file into an instant message, email, onto your desktop, or into a document. This saves a lot of time and also saves your Skitch history from having multiple copies of unfinished work.

Resizing screenshots has always been a hassle. Perhaps you’ve taken a screenshot of your entire desktop which spans thousands of pixels in every direction and you’d like to share that with someone via email who may not even have the same resolution as you do. Simply resizing skitch to be the size you want your screenshot to be (which is indicated in the bottom left hand corner) will resize your screenshot automatically.

There is a lot about Skitch that I’m leaving out. Really I wanted to provide a general overview of why I like Skitch so much and why I recommend that you register to be notified of Skitch’s public release. Also be sure to read what everyone else is saying about Skitch so that you know I am not alone.

Want an invite to try Skitch?

Cris was kind enough to allow me to give away five invites to use the latest Skitch beta along with getting yourself a shiny new MySkitch account. After noodling it for a bit I’ve decided on who is going to get these invites. The first five people to write a blog post about how they’d use Skitch (linking to both this entry and the Skitch site) will receive a MySkitch account and a beta copy of Skitch. Be sure to trackback this entry so that I see it and if you don’t know how to do that send me an email (which is on my about page).

Happy Skitching!

One of the good examples of scaling communities mentioned was Flickr. Obviously they’ve become the community poster-child and rightly so. They’ve put a lot of thought and hard work into making their communities thrive, grow, and in some ways scale very nicely. However, there is still a limit that any community will hit and then it is forced to divide regardless of the feature-set that the service offers.

Online communities reflect their real-world counterparts so lets use New York City as an example of community division. Everyone that lives in New York City is part of a community. They all feel it. They all take pride in it. And in some way or another they all take part in it. However, none of them are familiar with everyone inside of their community. Most of them will never meet face to face. But each one of them has their own much smaller communities that they belong to. Maybe they work at a company, or visit the same coffee shop everyday, or play basketball with their same five friends in the park on Saturdays. Regardless, they’ve divided themselves from the much larger community and created or taken part in a much smaller community inside of the one that surrounds them.

Flickr has given some really great features to its group administrators allowing them to setup their own communities under the much larger Flickr community. That’s the first divide. Flickr has worked really hard to make those communities work well whether there are only two members of that group or ten thousand. But, is there a limit? I feel there is and it might be different for every community.

Once a group gets too large, other groups begin to emerge that may do things very much in the same way as the much larger group – yet they divide in order to find elbow room. To help themselves separate the signal from the noise or even just to pull their friends along. I’ve done this myself. I belong to both the 365days group and the MeToday group. However I’m far more active as a MeToday group member than I am a 365day group member because the MeToday group seems like its my friends getting together and posting their 365day shots. I’m a member of the enormous Macintosh group but I also belong to the Macbook and Apple symbol groups.

On Viddler I’ve noticed other divisions occurring too. We’ve not released any group type features, though we plan to, and yet already groups of people are banding together to create their own social groups. This is done a combination of ways and obviously marking each other as friends is one way, or tagging videos the same way is another. But then we have our forums where small grass roots efforts to form communities (like our newly formed Viral Marketing Team, which is too freaking cool) are taking place. This is the first divide. I’m sure we’ll begin to see others in the near future and I can’t wait for those days to come.

When you put people into the same place with similar interests they all band together with common goals. When that group reaches “the community limit”, they begin to divide while still being loyal to the larger group. I do not think that any set of features can help to stop this and I don’t think too much time should be put into trying to stop it either.

While in California for six days I actually ate pretty well. And by well I mean a decent amount of food. When I went to Texas on business it seemed that I was skipping meals because I was far too busy. However, having the entire Viddler team in California made my job much, much easier so I was able to relax a little and eat normally.

Since I’ve been back I’ve been pretty active. I’ve been playing frisbee and basketball quite a bit over the last few days and it feels great to finally be outside again. Winter here in northeastern Pennsylvania is simply far too long.

This week I weighed in at 188.4 pounds, for a loss of exactly 1 pound from two weeks ago. I’m looking forward to getting back to the gym starting tonight, since I’ve missed the last week or so being away. I’m not sure my muscles are looking forward to it, but they’ll just have to live with it.

Something I definitely need to work on is being consistent with workouts even while away. Finding a few minutes for a jog or time in the weight room of a hotel shouldn’t be too difficult and the only thing holding me back from that is laziness. I’m always excited to get back into my routine though, and now that the weather is actually enjoyable – I don’t think I’ll have much trouble sticking to an active routine for the next few months.

[tags]diet, weigh-in, the-diet, california, texas, exercise, basketball, frisbee, ultimate, weather, gym, pennsylvania, viddler[/tags]

Boy am I glad that we waited until the Web 2.0 Expo to do this, since Viddler launched version 2.0 only a day or so before Eddie and I sat down to record an episode of Lunch Meet. This meant I was able to show off Viddler’s latest features instead of just talking about them.

Eddie is one heckuva nice guy and really shows Viddler off well. We had some horrible wi-fi while in the Moscone Center, and we encountered a few bugs and mishaps due to that bandwidth problem, but Eddie did a fantastic job to show off Viddler in its best light. Since this interview there have been numerous bug fixes going on at Viddler (which I’ll note soon enough).

Thanks Eddie and the entire Podtech team for treating us so well. Comments welcome.

The Expo

The Web 2.0 Expo Floor

The expo floor was filled with companies of all types ranging from large companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to smaller more fun companies like Viddler, Zimki, and Piczo. Some people were being very professional and demonstrating some very high-level enterprise applications (which are typically found behind-the-scenes of more social software. ie. Analytics and monitoring systems for server grids). Others were demonstrating their next-generation web service that can take care of all your development needs from coding, to versioning, to deployment all in a social and collaborative way. Each had their pitch, each had something very interesting to offer, and each were trying to make their product/service stand out from the pack.

The sessions that I got to see (which weren’t many since I didn’t have a session pass so I had to sneak into any of the rooms by tossing Hershey Kisses on the floor in front of the badge-checker on the way in) were much more “professional” than the panels I got to see when I was at South by Southwest this year. This isn’t to say that those panels at SXSW were not done in a professional manner, but that the sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo were much less interactive and more a demonstration of some products/services/companies that stood out as doing good work in their various fields.

Web 2Open

The Web2Open Mashroom

Running adjacent to the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes and sessions was Web2Open which is a *Camp style event that run in the main corridors on the second floor. Various presentations and discussions given by people that attended and participated in Web2Open were very good. “Minutes” were taken by various people and left on the walls so that if you came late to a particular discussion, you were able to quickly catch up and be part of the conversation. If you didn’t like where the discussion was going you were able to change the topic yourself by suggesting a topic, or – you could literally get up and go into another room where maybe the topic suited you a little better.

The idea of doing Open conferences like this is still very much in beta – and the process is being refined by the attendees each and every time one of these events goes on – but they are definitely much more attractive than any other event that I’ve been to. Simply being able to steer the conversation by simply raising your hand and asking a question lends itself very well to building value for those that attend.

The Viddler team and version 2.0

Viddler had a massive push to finish Q&A and testing on the its latest version of the site and player and managed to fit in many hours of development in order to release version 2.0. There are still a few bugs being worked out as soon as the developers and managers get back home from this trip – but overall the release was a big success and was fairly well received. The roadmap for Viddler is still quite exciting and the entire team is looking forward to the next step. I’ll have some more information about this and will be asking for everyone’s feedback on some of our ideas shortly.

Viddler 2.0 Cake

We celebrated version 2.0 a little bit early with some champagne and cake. The entire team was staying in Saratoga at our President’s relative’s house. We were so well taken care of that none of us wanted to leave (freshly squeezed orange juice right off the tree every morning makes a man wanna stick around).

Meeting the entire team for the first time was awesome. Working remotely with our team is really great and is actually conducive to getting very good work accomplished without the added expense and overhead of having everyone move to one location and setting up the proper digs for such an effort. However, it was nice to finally spend some time together to get to know each other even better and fit a real personality to the people that I have the privilege of working with everyday.

Harry and I got to work on our commercial together, which has caused a little bit of a stir with some members – which is always good to know that our users are reading our terms of use. We’re looking forward to updating our terms of use to fit more inline with what we really want to be able to do — promote really good video content and display it in an interactive and valuable way.

The Web 2 Party

The moment I got a feel for who was going to be at the Web 2 Expo; namely my friends from Citizen Agency, Ma.gnolia, etc. – I decided I really wanted to have a party with a few companies to help fit the bill to really pull off something nice. I mentioned this to Larry Halff and Chris Messina and I must say – they really took the ball and ran with it especially considering my inexperience in putting something like this together combined with the fact that I’m on the east coast far away from finding out about all of the venues that were available.

Tara (unknown last name) (aka Tara 2.0) came through in a very big way and secured our venue and setup everything we needed go pull off a successful event. Having an “event planner” is really key when you are trying to do one of these events with multiple companies and tons of logistics involved. If you are thinking of doing something like we did – I definitely recommend assigning one experienced person to get everything setup properly.

The party attendees

The party, in my opinion, was a huge success and it seemed like everyone had a really great time. People were lined up outside to get in, we were “at capacity” for the entire duration of the party, and people had to be escorted out of the gallery when the place closed. I had been to a few events at South by Southwest where people leaved early, the bar tab ran out quickly, or where generally not many people showed up. Such was not the scene for the Web 2 Party and we had a great time meeting everyone who came, shooting some video, and had some great discussions.

We’ve been talking about doing something in New York in the Fall so be sure to keep your ear to the ground. We don’t want to let all the west coast peeps have all the fun!

I know I’m speaking for the entire Viddler team when I say that we’d like to thank Citizen Agency for helping to coordinate the entire event, and thanks to Ma.gnolia, Scrapblog, JanRain, faberNovel, Facebook, Plasq, and WineLibraryTVfor helping us in throwing the best party during the Web 2.0 Expo. We hope you had as much fun as we all did.

The photos

Here is just a small collection of photos that I took over the course of the week. I didn’t have a lot of time to shoot many photos as I always seemed to be busy recording video, talking at our booth, chatting with friends or just generally preoccupied with other things. I recommend you look at the Viddler Group on Flickr for more photos (oh, if you have photos please put them in the Viddler group) and also watch the Viddler tag on Viddler to see any video that may pop up over the next few days from the Expo.

Oranges from Saratoga

Breakfast meeting

Chris Tingom

Viddler Palace

Lucasz and Kasper

Version 2.0 development

Viddler booth

Blake Burris

Crazy Keith

“Naked” Dustin

Joyful Jina

The gang

Firecracker Harry

Photos taken while in California

Again I wish that I had more time to take more photos than I did but I’m thankful that friends like Chris Tingom were able to take a bunch of photos during our trip.

So the next time you hear that Viddler is coming to your town or throwing a party in your neighborhood – be sure to give us a shout and come out and drink some of our beerz…

[tags]web2expo, viddler, ma.gnolia, citizen agency, chris messina, tara hunt, larry halff, scrapblog, party, event, version2, california, saratoga, san francisco, santa clara, photos, flickr, google, yahoo, microsoft, d. keith robinson, dustin diaz, jina bolton, harry snodgrass, chris tingom, food, oranges, faberlove, facebook, scrapblog, hatomic, microformats, zimki[/tags]
[slug]webexpo-experience[/slug]

Ignite was a great event. Well hosted, well executed, and was pretty interesting throughout. There were speeches about everything from openID to taking care of bee hives. Very informative and I’m looking forward to going back through the list of speakers to find all of their sites, services, and products.

Oh, I was in the front row and video taped every talk so watch the Viddler tag of ignite for all of them to start popping up.

Now we’re headed back to Saratoga to get some things done and sleep.

[tags]web2expo, viddler, ignite, moscone, san francisco, california[/tags]
[slug]ignite-web2expo[/slug]

Overlooking Denver, Colorado

So what do you do when you’re tens of thousands of feet above the Earth, looking down at nothing but the clouds that most people are seeing above their heads? Well, I write – finally – about heading to San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo.

The entire Viddler team is converging on San Francisco this weekend to meet up and prepare for a few things. The first, and admittedly most exciting thing, is the launch of the next version of Viddler’s player and web site. The second is for the Web 2.0 Expo happening at the Moscone Center Monday through Wednesday this week. And – the third is a party that Viddler is hosting with a bunch of other cool companies like Ma.gnolia, Citizen Agency, JanRain, Plasq, and Scrapblog. You can RSVP on Upcoming. Lots to prepare for, lots to do, lots of excitement.

I find the “dead” time of being on a plane the perfect time to try to catch up on writing, so hopefully I’ll be able to pump out a few posts on here over the next few days.

I’m looking forward to meeting up with some of my west coast contacts, if there is time, and really looking forward to finally meeting the rest of team Viddler. I’m also hoping to be able to see at least a small portion of San Francisco (weather and time permitting) before I head back – since this is the first time I’ve been in the city.

If you’re going to be in San Francisco over the next week or so and would like to say hi – send me an email or message on Viddler – or just find me.

[tags]web2expo, san francisco, california, on-plane, ma.gnolia, plasq, viddler, citizen agency, scrapblog, janrain, party, version 2.0[/tags]
[slug]going-to-sf07[/slug]