If you couldn’t attend MagicRuby in Orlando, Florida you can view some short and sweet video interviews with some of the attendees and speakers over on Viddler.

We’ve set up a special page on Viddler just for Magic Ruby to help let people know some of the things we’re already doing with the Ruby community. We hope to learn a little about Ruby, to let attendees know about Viddler, and to enjoy the weather.

Viddler’s offerings to developers aren’t limited to only Ruby. We’ve got a fantastic API that has been recently overhauled and wrappers for just about every language. We power some of the biggest brands online and our platform has been used to power web sites, applications, iPhone and iPad applications and much more. I personally hope to help Viddler grow in this area in 2011.

If you’re a developer and ever have any video needs – consider using Viddler for your next project.

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be speaking at LessConf in Jacksonville, Fla. on October 17th. The title for my talk is still tentative but the main subject will be about how startups should measure success.

I have a lot to say about how startups measure success in a global market like the Internet. Too many times I’ve seen startups that try to compare themselves to companies much larger than themselves because they are building similar products. The Internet has shrunk the world to such a degree that unfair comparisons are drawn every day. I will be ranting about that and how I think that start ups should focus on themselves rather than the rest of the world when they are measuring the success of their products and business. I’m really looking forward to this opportunity and I hope that everyone in attendance is interested in this too.

Although the above is true I was really sucked into taking the opportunity to speak at LessConf because the Web site for the event sports random Star Wars characters and Thor on a chariot with an electric guitar. I mean, dude.

Thanks to the generosity of Allan and Steve I’ll be giving away two tickets to the event on my blog next week so if you’re interested in going to LessConf stay tuned for that giveaway. (It will have to do with video.)

Podcamp Philly opened my eyes to a completely different way to help grow Viddler’s community in new directions, and to help me do my job better. Solve the problems of the community you want.

We’ve got an incredible community on Viddler. Loyal, active, bright, and fun people that are willing to help us through our growing pains, partially because we strive to fulfill their requests as we move forward. Listening to and acting on requests is vital to growing a strong and sustainable community.

But what if we’d like to also attract a completely different Viddler? How do you branch out from your core community into a different community? Some may say education is key. Going out and educating ‘that other community’ about your product. This is true, but only partially true. The main strategy should be to strive to help the new community as much as you’ve helped your core community. Figure out the main problems of the new community and adjust to meet their needs.

The typical active Viddler is someone that enjoys conversation and actively participating in community activities. This is a great community to start off with. This will mean that as new ones join the community, it won’t seem inactive, stale, or unwelcoming. But rather they will be immediately accepted as though they’d been there all along.

The typical podcaster is not one of these people. More often than not they are community leaders themselves. They have an audience that they speak and interact with. In order to help podcasters you really need to either become one yourself, or immerse yourself into an event like Podcamp Philly, to really see the daily challenges these producers face. Don’t just speak to this new community, listen to them when they speak. And that is what I tried to do at Podcamp Philly; listen.

“Who is new to Podcasting?” (credit: CC Chapman)

Here are two main points I took away from Podcamp. Neither of these things where revelations to me but both were definitely solidified in my mind as very important points to remember.

1. Even though our technology for “citizen journalism” (or podcasting and videocasting) has improved 100-fold in only a few years, we are still very far away from making this as easy as it could be. Producers, editors, and everyone else involved with creating a really great podcast has a huge learning curve ahead of them when they are first starting out. Once they get rolling they face many daily challenges. They are constantly changing strategies until they find the perfect mix to get their “show” out and into your hands. Once they find that perfect mix they generally stick with what works. This all takes a lot of time and their time is valueable.
2. Most video podcasters do what they do because they love doing it. If your service inhibits that passion in any way, you lose. Sure, a few podcasters are now making a living with their podcast, this doesn’t mean its all business. Podcasters may put up with crappy service to earn a living for a time, but in the long run they’ll end up finding a better way. Be that better way.

I really enjoyed myself at Podcamp Philly. I’m happy that Viddler had the privilege of being one of the sponsors so that everyone in attendence could get all of this information for free. The more people that know how to do a podcast well, the more podcasts we’ll see, plain and simple. I’m looking forward to other Podcamp events in the future (there is one in Boston I might make it to). And I’m really looking forward to next year, when everyone in Philadelphia has had an entire year to learn, grow, and teach even more people about this wonderful world of self-publishing.

Oh, and the parties were great too.

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!

Rob will be giving a presentation on Viddler and three other presenters will be demoing some of their stuff. I’m looking forward to all of the presentations, but mostly I look forward to making Rob laugh in front of 300+ people! Aren’t I a great friend?

If you are in New York City, or can get there before tomorrow, try to make it to the meetup just to say “hi”. But you’ll need to RSVP pretty quickly, since there are only about 84 “slots” left as of my writing this. You can RSVP via Meetup.com.

Looking forward to Video 2.0 and hopefully seeing you there!

Update: I’ve got Eliza, Mike, and Andrew in my car already. And, “rumor” has it that I’ll have a few more friends coming that you may want to meet – stay tuned…

Another update: Guess who is crashing Video 2.0? Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV. Now you’re getting your calendars out and erasing that business meeting you had tomorrow night, aren’t you?

[tags]video 2.0, meetup, new york city, event, viddler, rob sandie[/tags]
[slug]event-nyvideo2[/slug]

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]

Chris at Ten Stone Bar – April 15, 2006

So far Eliza, Mike, and Chris are coming with me. It looks like Rob, Tom, and Marisa are definitely going. Andrea and Jason might be going. And sadly Tony G. can’t make it. Update: Happily Tony G. is able to make it!

And, it appears we’re going to have a fairly full house.

If you are in the Philadelphia area (heck I’m 2 1/2 hours away and I’m still going) and you’d like to meetup with some great people to discuss WordPress, blogging, Viddler, or just sit back and enjoy a beer – sign up to the meetup and we’ll see you there.

Note: You can add this event to your calendar program of choice since this post is marked up using hCalendar. Enjoy.

Note addendum: It appears that the above link won’t work for Outlook users? Not sure why – probably because Outlook sucks?

[tags]philadelphia, meetup, webloggers, blogging, wordpress, event, pennsylvania, viddler, rob sandie, chris fehnel, mike stickel, colin devroe, eliza devroe, tom kim, marisa mcclellan, andrea, jason santa maria, tony green, microformats, hcalendar[/tags]
[slug]meetup-021706[/slug]