Nashville Tech: Jackson's Take

Jackson Miller, local contract software engineer and purveyor fine second-hand hipster gear, does a really nice job offering up his thoughts on Nashville as a Technology Hub

Nashville's Tech Mushroom...

Nice article here from VentureNashville.com (mushroom? really? does that evoke the right image?) about the various tech-oriented groups around town that have been meeting. And another post here at the VentureNashville blog that re-emphasizes the point of the article.. that these informal and institutional groups (i.e. Nashville Geeks vs. the Nashville Tech Council) don't seem to naturally co-mingle.

As someone who's attended events hosted across the spectrum, and also as a technology manager from the institution to beat all institutions, the great State of Tennessee, I have a few thoughts about this:

1) nothing against the NTC, but the few of their events I've attended have largely been about Tradeshow floors. Vendors trying to sell me something. Sponsors trying to get their 'impressions' quota. And lots of business card trading.

2) NTC events seem to largely center on DATABASE SECURITY. Just my impression. Nothing empirical to back it up. Not a lot about application development, user experience, UI design, or new technologies. Again, just an impression. I could very well be wrong.

3) like most professional associations, the conversations at NTC events are mostly alot of "this is what I do; now what do you do..." it's like a series of mini-interviews. Not very comfortable. Not very natural.

4) The Nashville Geeks events are largely about socializing. Informal, yes. Not a lot of collared shirts-- mine is sometimes the only one. And not exclusively a technology audience. There are artists and musicians and writers in the group. And lots of marketing folks. Tech-oriented, certainly. Folks who like to get their geek on with the latest WordPress release or tinkering with the latest social-networking-fad-tool of the day. And lots and lots of digital photography. And cutesy business.. er, calling cards. Lots of those as well.

To be honest, in some ways, I've felt a little out of place at the Geeks events only because I'm the only person (or one of the few) there who works for a large technology shop in a fairly formalized, not-too-cool, not-yet-too-open-source environment. My group's not blazing any trails with PHP or Rails. We're building enterprise software for a large, highly proceduralized government agency. Not a lot of the other folks at the table at Noshville are in that game. And yet, all that being the case, I feel very at home there.

What's ironic is that the social/digital media crowd at the Nashville Geeks events-- the breakfasts, the Barcamp Crew meetups, the bourbon nights-- the talk at those events is a lot about products and marketing and getting messages out to consumers-- this is what social media's largely about after all, isn't it-- but the atmosphere is more collegial than commercial. I'm not being sold something at Barcamp. I'm part of something.

Interesting that Digital Nashville's first mixer the other night appears to have been the first event that crossed this apparent boundary in any kind of significant way.. and everyone, even Dave Delaney, was wearing collared shirts!... and I missed the dang thing. Ah well, I'll be sure to catch the next one.

Exciting times to be in this industry in Nashville.. Looking forward to what's to come.
God, I love this town.

When worlds collide..

Found this video of my old grad school buddy, Mark Marino. We were in the English Dept at Notre Dame together back in the day.
Mark has gone on to become a professor at (the otherwise much hated) University of Southern California.. from what I've seen of his work, he's been doing some interesting research into the nature of narrative and exploring how an internet-enabled world is affecting how we think about stories.



But this presentation kind of turned my head. Perhaps if he's reading this, Mark can comment on his scholarly trajectory here... source code as literature.. interesting, but, speaking as a software development guy and former literary poseur, I have to ask..
can you guys be serious?

iPhone: the wait may well be over...

The features, the 3G, the integrations with my Mac, the *price*.. and of course the age of my old Hello Moto Pebl.. all this adds up to a big hunk of geezelouiseitstimetobuytheiPhone...
Here's the WWDC Keynote in 60 seconds (courtesy of MahaloDaily):

Twitter in Plain English

Once again, the good people at CommonCraft-- Lee and Sachi LeFever-- bring order to the chaos and give us the words and images we need to explain something so simple and yet so incomprehensible to our friends and relatives..
On second thought.. I'm not sure I want my relatives a) reading my Tweets; or b) Tweeting themselves.

All the same-- this is awesome.

Nashville Geek Breakfast

Ben Folds & Kelly Stewart
Originally uploaded by kelstew

Took another headlong dive into the local tech/new media/blogger/social networking scene this morning and sat down at the 2nd Nashville Geek Breakfast over at Noshville over by Vandy.
Had a great time-- old friend Tom from back in the PBI days showed up as well-- and got to meet a number of the good people I've been corresponding with since this past summer's BarCamp Nashville.

As you can see, the company was pretty luminary this morning. Ben Folds jumped right up and took this opportunity to have his picture taken with Kelly Stewart.
No word yet from Kelly on who'll be appearing at next month's Geek Breakfast, but I'm sure he'll line up a hum-dinger.

Thanks again to Dave, Kelly, Marcus, Jackson, Kate, Ginger and everyone else for making such warm, welcoming bunch of good people to have coffee (lots of coffee!), talk a little business, and have a few laughs with.. looking forward to seeing everyone again soon.

Next up: PodCamp Nashville is February 9.

Want to go to the next Geek Breakfast here?
Keep tabs on the plans in the Facebook Group (http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=7035651703&ref=mf)

"I smell an astronaut!"

Hey Manundso.. don't ask me why, but when I saw this, I thought of you...

Social Bookmarking

One of many great videos from Common Craft explaining somewhat technical concepts in easily received terms. Why can't more of my folks at work think like this?

Moment of Realization

Realization: I've almost completely stopped listening to podcasts since my poor old iPod went kaput a few weeks ago...
I guess I could sit in front of iTunes and listen... but really, who does that?

Dog Days of Summer-- time to start buying ND Gear...

My neighbors are probably sick of seeing me in my endless series of ND t-shirts...
Hey, it's not my fault they're just the best, most comfortable casual shirts I own!

Anyway, the guys at HerLoyalSons.com have a pretty hilarious 'book review' of the new ND Bookstore catalog that arrived a week or so ago.

Money quote:

The reader turns over the cover of Sideline, and, ah, yes, there he is. The
man of the hour. The hero of our story, who will guide us through the twists and
turns of the pages ahead: Charlie Weis, looking so fashionable in a navy
colored, 97/3 poly/spandex blend golf shirt with white sleeve trimmings. It’s a
shirt that says it’s wearer can have fun, but kick ass while doing so.

Calacanis Rants

Jason Calacanis has an interesting rant here about the evolution (or is it the extinction) of the newspaper trade..

Up late...

Up late tonight.
I had the kids tonight while SleepyMom went out with some of the other Moms in our neighborhood (BTW, every day I love our new neighborhood a little bit more!). The boys were good as gold-- although I wish we could get Bryce to eat more lately. Aidan must be going through a growth spurt, but Bryce seems to be in a lull.. based on his appetite.

So we ate dinner, the boys played, and then put them in bath and bed-- finally around 9:00. I fell asleep with them after storytime (Charlie and Lola and Where the Wild Things Are) and just woke up around midnight, around the time that she came home.

Tried to go back to sleep, but to no avail.. so here I am, reading more about:

• the EMI/DRM story
• Leo LaPorte left Twitter today-- something to do with concerns over the name? Conflict or confusion with his TWiT network of Podcasts? Strange move. But then again, I don't own any trademarks.
• Took a look at Jaiku and I'm just not digging it. Doesn't have the same old-school, clunky feel to it that Twitter does.

When Reporters Set the Agenda

See this note from Michael Gartenberg and then tell me if you still think there's no bias in the media.

(Hat Tip: Merlin Mann)

Is the wall coming down?

Great post here by John Gruber about the announcement by EMI that, beginning in May, they'll be selling DRM-free versions of their licensed music on iTunes.

$1.29 USD for drm-free music with twice the encoding quality. And full albums stay the same price. And iTunes offers upgrades of existing purchased music.

The cracks in the wall really started back in February when Jobs wrote his (maligned in some corners) position paper on DRM and posted it to the Apple website. There were lots of people (Cory Doctorow chief among them) who questioned Jobs' sincerity in that move-- surely this was just another way for apple to increase it's monopoly.

So much for that conspiracy theory. Doctorow doesn't seem to understand that if you make things easy and high-quality, people are willing to pay for that-- not everyone, but a large-enough segment of the population to run a thriving business on. Leave the pirates be-- as Jobs pointed out, for every DRM scheme, there will be a 12-year-old kid who can break it in under 30 minutes. But making music cheap and easily available and easily manageable, once purchased-- not limiting the number of times you can burn your own music to CD, or laborious 'authorization' processes for your different devices-- wipe away all of that and let people pay for their music, and then leave them alone... the services that allow this to happen will be the big winners... Hopefully, Apple continues on this course.

Must See Youtube

Hat Tip to Daddy Galindo (a fellow SleepyDad on the West Coast) for pointing me toward this great piece of TV nostalgia..

it's all over

ZeFrank has ended his show-- The Show.
I caught onto a link to one of the episodes-- his rant about procrastination-- a month or two ago.. but I have to admit, I didn't recognize the thorough coolness of this thing ZeFrank was doing..

And now he's ended it.

Is this just a case of absence making the heart grow fonder? constraining supply to generate demand? Like Beanie Babies?

And then, as Crash Davis would say, he hit his dinger and then he hung 'em up.

Hey Manundso.. speaking of in-jokes.. this guy uses them perfectly.. creating a little in-community... his sportracers...

I guess I'll need a few more readers before I'll get sponsorships from whiskey distillers...

Zeroes

Watched the latest episode of 'Heroes' with my wife on Tivo last night.
It was an especially dark episode as they come down toward the end of Season 1.. introduced Malcom McDowell as 'Mr. Linderman'-- doing his usual menacing.. and Sylar getting the best of Suresh.. and Peter?? Oooh Cliffhanger.. and a grim one at that.

When it was over, my wife, who'd never seen the show, looked at me and said "I hate you. I'm never watching another show with you again."

This morning, the kids on Digg.com reveal that this Youtube video was actually created by NBC... good marketing, if you ask me.. is NBC on the Cluetrain?

Notes Toward a Unified Theory of the Internet, Part I

The other day on the TWIT podcast, Leo LaPorte and his crew were griping about how all the latest start-ups are cutting the vowels from their company names-- Flickr, loopt, SoonR, Tumblr, just to name a few. John C. Dvorak blamed Flickr for beginning this trend. He's not going back nearly far enough. Look to James Gleick's book, Faster-- the book with the thesis (published in 1999) that we're all so busy, we can't help but multi-task all the time.. attention spans are getting smaller and we're packing more and more activity into each day. And judging by the cover, we're all packing more and more consonants into our book jackets..

SleepyDad definitely concurs with that.. but I always attributed that to the birth of my kids and all the attendant chaos that came with them.

And since we all have to pack more and more into the same 24 hour day, what better to do than to join all the latest social networking sites-- social networking, that thing basically invented by the guys at Amazon with their user comments and recommendations features-- so enter DIGG, MySpace, Technorati, Facebook, etc, etc.

This is the stuff of Web 2.0.
Blogging, Podcasting, RSS feeds, Pipes, mash-ups. We all cease to be readers or receivers. Now we're all producers of content. Bloggers. Podcasters, Parentographers. (Hey, I've done all three of those.) Taking in information, re-formulating, recombining, and then republishing on our own sites and feeds. Three billion little broadcast stations spread out over the globe, chatting about.. about.. whatever's on our minds-- or whatever we're reading about, or whoever we're listening to... and don't worry, the irony's not lost on me. I'm right in there with them.. "Hey Leo Laporte was just talking about this.."

Enter Twitter.. this beautifully simplistic little social web app that asks an easy, and oddly compelling question: What are you doing right now? Why do I want to answer? Why did I sign up and start putting silly notes in there about the cereal I ate the other morning? Micro-blogging. Where do I think it's going? Where is any of this really going? (is there anyone out ther?) What is this thing really for?

The ClueTrain Manifesto guys (click here to read the book), said years ago (I can't believe how many now) that the internet is a marketplace of ideas-- a cacophanous conversation. So is it just enough to get your voice out there in the wilderness? To say, "Hey I'm here andd this is what I'm up to." Does it matter if anyone's reading, listening, subscribing, downloading, mashing-up, piping...

Maybe it will all add up to something. The internet becomes, at worst, a hive mind-- and endless series of Top Ten lists and 'most popular stories'-- at best, it's an incoherent stream of collective consciousness.

Freakin' brilliant!

Every now and then, you come across something so simple, yet so smart..



courtesy of Lifehacker