As an entrepreneur trying to get a fledgling startup off the ground in these challenging times, having the opportunity to meet and interact with awesome people is essential to spreading the word. There are many events in the local Seattle area and the tech scene is alive and well.
However, each year, there is one single event that rises up above them all. While I've only had the privilege of attending one of these events, I can tell you with certainty, that Gnomedex is a special event. Chris Pirillo takes it to new levels each and every year. Now granted, there have been some controversial talks, and heated discussions in years past, but what he's put together over the past 10 years is truly special (has it really been that long?).
I was quite upset that I missed the opportunity to attend last year's Gnomedex event due to a conflict with my summer vacation. That said, I'm definitely going to be around this year, and look forward to attending.
The reason why I feel I deserve to Tungle with Chris is that I'm pouring every last bit of effort into getting my startup (StratusQ) off the ground. We are self-funded at this point, and our battle-scarred team of four are pouring every extra penny we can spare to grow the business. As such, it's harder and harder to hop on the conference circuit without having the backing of an employer or other source of funding to help subsidize costs. I'm not a serial entrepreneur, but I've been waiting patiently for over 10 years for this opportunity (see: The Art of Bootstrapping in 2010) and having the ability to network with other like minded individuals at an event like Gnomedex is what I live for.
I also happen to be a user of Tungle.me (see: http://tungle.me/brianeisenberg) , which hopefully puts me in a favorable position to win a free pass to Gnomedex. If not, I'll continue to save my precious pennies and maybe scrape up enough $$ to purchase a conference pass.
Kudos to Chris and the rest of the Gnomedex volunteers for putting together the 10th installment of this special event.
Respectfully yours,
Brian Daniel Eisenberg
@infinitelymeta
While initially intrigued by the announcements at the Facebook F8 developer conference a few weeks ago, I've had some time to digest what it means, read some really good blog posts (here, here, and here), and spent some time playing around with the new Graph API.
I've come to the conclusion that while I don't like what they are doing one bit, I do see the genius behind it. I don't have a problem with them making my information public, as I post a LOT of my data across a wide range of social networking sites like Friendfeed and Twitter. I also share many of my online accounts on my Google Profile.
Where I think Facebook crossed the line is their strong arm tactics, opt-out strategy, and move to begin monetizing the social graph. They are essentially forcing me to make my profile, interests, and other personal information public by linking to public pages from my profile. If I choose otherwise, they remove those sections from my profile altogether.
I see this as move as a re-incarnation of Beacon, a brilliant monetization and brand-marketing strategy, but completely wrong due to the privacy implications. The average Facebook user is probably not even aware of the fact that simply stating you like something on a public page, in your profile, or "Liking" something in your news feed is an implicit product/brand endorsement.
This new strategy effectively allows Facebook to take their ad platform to the next level and begin monetizing the social graph through implicit product/brand endorsement. Just because I "Like" a picture or post that contains a product/brand name doesn't mean that I endorse that particular product/brand.
This is not what I intended my personal data to be used for.
With over 400 million users, I certainly understand that Facebook has every right to try and push their agenda, but this time I think they've gone too far. Others seem to agree as evidenced by this post last night on Friendfeed, this post on the EFF site, and this petition just launched by Moveon.org.
As a result of these changes, I'm decided to strip my profile down to a bare minimum for now and may go so far as to deactivate it altogether.
Am I wrong in being concerned about what Facebook is doing with my data and social graph? Let me know what you think in the comments below or join me in the conversation on Friendfeed or Twitter.
I want to own my data. All of it. Period.
Rather than relying on external sites, services and aggregators, I'm going to try and use my blog as the dumping ground for the meta I speweth into the river. I realize that there is no silver bullet or perfect solution for this, but I'm hoping that with a few new tools, APIs, services, and techniques, I can piece together a reasonably complete archive. Once I have the archive, I can continue work on the LifeSplicing Engine I conceived a few years back.
Just an early sketch from a couple years ago.
To start, I'm looking at the Lifestream WP plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lifestream/) to see how many services I can pipe in for free. For services, sites, and data sources that don't readily make themselves available, I've got a few ideas I want to try using some RSS/ATOM/OPML trickery to normalize the floe.
This is likely going to be a very messy, noisy, and disruptive exercise. Please forgive any unwanted noise I spill into the river and remember that you can always block/delete me from your social graph if I become too much of an annoyance.
My day started at Zoka Coffee in the University District.
Coffee, breakfast, and some light coding / app config. Then bailed for home, which is where I'm at right now. As it's a holiday weekend, where many our out squeezing in one last extended summer weekend, I'm pretty well tied up with the reality that are my unavoidable deliverables. I've got no problem spending my weekend this way, as I know I am working hard towards something much bigger. So with that, here's a list of what I've got on tap this Labor Day weekend.
What are you all doing? @infinitelymeta me on Twitter or *Like* this post on Friendfeed to get in on the conversation. That's where I tend to hang out on socnets these days.
Happy Labor Day everyone!
Brian's Uber List
- New range/oven delivery for unit 2214 (one of my new tenants stove broke so I replaced it with this:
- Put out For Rent sign for my soon to be available 1BR apartment in Eastlake, Seattle WA 98102. It rents for $1400 and is the entire lower floor of an historic Victorian home that was built in 1908. An excellent spacious unit with great lighting. Email eastlakeassociates at gmail if interested or call 206.328.3379 and leave a message.
- Java/JSF/AJAX - I'm putting the final interfaces and code tweaks in place for a project that I've spend a quarter working on. Final interfaces in place, but still have 75+ line item bug list. Need to go code complete by Monday evening to begin FTP transfer of Development VMware image from one side of our network to an internal only host. Still have A LOT of work ahead of me to finish this project and go into team only beta next week with Public Beta (internal corp net) on Sept 8.
- Landscaping & trim to prep for fall. Luckily, I really enjoy this task. Especially when my 5.5 yr old nephew Logan joins me. He makes some pretty good coin and he's a GREAT helper.
- Working with my friend Thom, the Ichthyogenius on our latest project, Reef In A Box that we are looking to launch in the coming months.
- Working on the YTranslate.us engine. Coding in PHP/mySQL/Python/etc. Toying with new SMS gateway (thanks to Mona' Friendfeed post).
- Meeting with contractor on some fix-r-up-r projects for 3 of my apts in preparation for Fall/Winter.
- Looking for electrician to install some motion-sensor aware lighting in my back alley and in between my building to deal with my unwanted-persons-on-my-property challenge.
- Water changes & general maintenance on my 300 gallon reef tank.
- Prep/meet with GC on new reef tank project. Wait till you see what I'm going to build. It's gonna pop!
- Shade garden v2. Part of the landscaping stuff I suppose, but definitely worthy of mention.
- Replace fire extinguisher in common area to be in compliance with recent Seattle City Fire Department inspection.
That's all I can remember for now.
As I continue to juggle what is roughly the equivalent of three full time jobs, I'm starting to run up against that magic barrier that is the space - time continuum. I'm going through a significant amount of change right now at my day job, am having to go through an eviction process with one of my tenants (night job), and I'm still feverishly trying to get Infinitely Meta and YTranslate off the ground. Needless to say it consumes nearly every waking hour of my life. I'm not complaining, as I am already hyper-efficient in managing all of the things I CHOOSE to spend my precious time on.
I think right now I need to continue to focus, not lose track of what is most important, and constantly assess and re-assess my priorities in how I spend those 24 hours each and every day.
With that, I'm off to meet Sarah Lacey and friends for her User Generated Book Tour - SEATTLE.
Tomorrow I have a VERY special meeting with one of my advisors who is going to give me a personal tour of what he is working on. I'll take lots of pics, ask questions, and blog it when I get back. Then it's off to the Tweetup and finally the Gnomedex 2008 kickoff.
Hopefully this torrential rain will let up soon. Currently looking strikingly similar to the Pineapple Express weather pattern that we had back in 1997. Time will tell. Personally, I don't mind the rain. What I do mind are the CRAPPY Seattle drivers who seem to not know how to drive in it.
Onward!
- ∞ +
10. Seattle is the new San Francisco
9. I've had breakfast AND lunch with Scoble.
8. I once strapped a camera on my head and pretended to be iJustine.
7. I got better Gadgets than Nik Cubrilovoic.
6. I got .flv video clips of Mike, Shel, Nik, Loic, & Calley talking all sorts of nonsense on Qik.
5. http://federatedclouds.com
4. http://reefinabox.net
3. http://infinitelymeta.com
2. http://refriend.me
1. http://ytranslate.us
0. UPDATE: I had to unblock Jason McCabe Calacanis before I sent my @reply on Twitter.
- ∞ +
I predict this will be the buzzworld du jour today and in the weeks/months ahead. "Everything as a Service". Makes perfect sense to me. Cloud computing, which really started to take off when Amazon launched it's AWS platform, is here to stay.
Today, Techcrunch broke the news that they alluded to over the weekend. Essentially, a partnership between Intel, HP, Yahoo!, and a few others to build a new cloud computing platform to allow developers and researchers to test the next generation computing model.
This is a very important development that holds promise for Infinitely Meta, and the engines that we want to build and deploy to the cloud. Our original plans were to leverage Amazon's AWS cloud and Google's App Engine (and related sites/services) as the deployment vehicle for our engines, but this new project may trump both Amazon and Google. Remember that we can't yet discount Microsoft, as they are also working on building their cloud under the Mesh umbrella.
As we continue to build our prototypes, we will likely deploy our engines to whatever cloud we feel will meet our needs. Most likely we will deploy our engines across all available clouds for the highest degree of fault tolerance and redundancy.
I find it VERY interesting that the last domain I registered was http://federatedclouds.com
<∞>
After reading this conversation thread on Friendfeed, I started to comment, but did a quick cut and paste into this here blog post. What follows was my original comment (not posted) that I would like to expand upon here. Then I'd like to get your feedback on Friendfeed, Twitter, or whatever stream you like to post your comments to. I really could care less where you reply, just make it findable!
Regarding my use of Linked In -
"I must admit that I have a LI account, but I have not updated it in probably 6 years. I've been working with the same team for 8+ years, having weathered 4 M&A events and countless reorgs. I've come to ignore Linked In because after having gone through the first M&A event, the only time I would get Linked In email would be when friends are riffed and forced to move on to other new positions in the industry."
*Expanding on comment here*
This became a recurring pattern after a while, where the only times I'd ever get email updates From Linked In were from people who were let go or less often just quit for other opportunities. I found myself trying to avoid accepting any of the "friend requests" or whatever their term is for adding people to your network, and I just stopped using it altogether.
I haven't logged into my account in years and if you check out my profile, you'll see that the last position I posted was "Senior Product Manager", which was 2 companies and three job title's ago.
I'm tempted to login to Linked In and update my profile, just so my stuff is accurate, but I have this recurring fear that all those people who tried to "friend" me and all of my CURRENT colleagues are going to come out of the woodwork and start picking my profile apart.
Many of my professional colleagues are not on Twitter, Friendfeed, or most of the other social networking sites I use regularly, and I'm not sure that I want them to "invade" the communities that I participate in outside of my dayjob.
I'm all for transparency, but I'm having a very hard time figuring out the right balance between personal vs my professional uses of these socnets.
What do you think? I'm very curious to hear what other people think and where I'll find the most valuealbe advice.
