My mind is filled with questions as I ponder the history, culture, and current events of the region. I’ve heard so many positives and negatives, and it is with a great sense of curiosity and excitement that I travel to Israel and Jordan next week. In particular, I am anxious to meet some people from the tech community, although the timing is not great since most will be busy for year-end holidays and festivities. Still, I’ve been able to contact some thanks to the serendipity of Twitter, and hopefully this will reinforce bridges across the Atlantic. After all, looking at this picture of Tel Aviv, you’d think you were in Miami!

Last night we celebrated another great year of RefreshMiami meetups (slideshow here).

During the year, our membership doubled as we accomodated about 35 presentations by South Florida new media startups, entrepreneurs, and freelance professionals. Our meetups were attended on average by 50 people, with some events drawing about 100. We’re particularly grateful to Yahoo! Hispanic Americas and to Brikolodge for hosting most of our meetups, as well as to our sponsors for providing the catering.

What’s in store for next year?

As the new media community continues to grow, we plan on providing more services throughout the year. This means we’ll look into incorporating as a non-profit early in the year, building a team, and setting objectives. It has been a rewarding adventure so far, and we look forward to our next stage of growth.

Thanks for taking part!

BlogOrlando gets better each year, I’m very glad I went. I of course enjoyed reconnecting with friends who flew in from across the country, seeing the Orlando tech community again, and meeting new people.

One of the highlights was getting firsthand case studies from the teams that manage(d) social media at major corporations: Jeff Rubenstein and Josh Hallett presented the Sony Playstation strategy; Paula Berg spoke about successes and learnings at SouthWest Airlines; and Jake McKee recapped his experiences at Lego.

The schedule was full of good topics, making it hard to choose which track to follow:

Leah Jones of Edelman Digital presented advanced search techniques, including the search engines and Boolean searches she makes. Here’s her presentation on Slideshare: “Going beyond Google“.
Nik Wilets, aka @tiburon, explained the difference between a photographer and a photojournalist, and had great examples of his own and other’s work. He was later followed by Etan Horowitz from the Orlando Sentinel, who spoke about the use of Twitter in Journalism.

Phil Gomes, also of Edelman, shared his experiences, tips, and techniques on giving internal education on social media within the large PR firm.
Spike Jones and Geno Church gave excellent presentations on “WOM and social media” and “Movements, activism, and social media“, respectively. Most interestingly, Geno spoke about creating and building the Fiskateers community, for one of the oldest companies in the world, Finnish scissor maker Fiskars. Community is not about the scissors, it’s about the higher purpose.

I’ve been going up to Orlando tech events, and each time it’s reassuring to see the tech community grow and organize itself. They’ve made great progress in the last few months since BarCampOrlando, which was the catalyst for many of the groups and initiatives. Pictured are Alex Rudloff, Ryan Price, and Gregg Pollack, who summarized the history and the many things going on. Here’s a video of their 30-minute preso.

I also saw David Alston from Radian6 speak about brand monitoring (disclaimer: I co-founded StartPR), but unfortunately missed David Parmet’s session on education and Jake’s session on identity.

Overall, it was great to meet up with such brilliant and engaged people, and best of all, it happened in Florida

Update: Some of the sessions are archived here on ustream.

I’m honored to be counted among the people invited to give new impetus to the Social Media Club. Through conversations with companies, organizations, local universities, and interactive agencies, I’ve experienced the growing interest in social media and the increased demand for industry practitioners. By bringing together those who have an interest in seeing the industry improve and evolve, SMC provides the much needed forum for sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy. [1. We are in the process of relaunching Social Media Club in South Florida]

The interim board will establish the guidelines of this association, to create the necessary framework before the SMC grows further on a national and global level. Once the framework is agreed on, local boards will be established with interested corporate and non-corporate members. Please read the full press release if you’d like to know more.

As we collaborate on on organizing SMC for the future, Chris Heuer, founder of Social Media Club and Partner at The Conversation Group, acknowledges that:

“Our core mission will remain the same: promotion of media literacy; support of industry standards efforts such as Creative Commons licensing, Microformats, Data Portability and OpenID; discussion and promotion of ethical behavior; and sharing our knowledge among our members and the industry community at large.”

The newly named members of the interim board, some of whom are friends and others who I look forward to meeting, include:

• Lee Aase – Social Media University, Global
• Rohit Bhargava – Influential Marketing Blog and Personality Not Included
• Richard Binhammer – RichardatDell
• Michael Brito – Britopian and Conversations Matter
• Chris Brogan – ChrisBrogan.com
• Mike Chapman – Austin Social Media Club and Every Dot Connects
• Megan Cole – MeganCole.org
• Alex de Carvalho – alexdc.org and Social Object
• Todd Defren – SHIFT Communications and www.pr-squared.com
• Serena Ehrlich – Business Wire
• Jason Falls – Social Media Explorer
• Maggie Fox – Social Media Group
• Jon Gatrell – spatiallyrelevant.org
• Howard Greenstein – HowardGreenstein.com
• Francine Hardaway – Stealthmode
• Josh Hallett – Hyku
• Annie Heckenberger – pikpr.blogspot.com and redspurs.com
• Chuck Hester – Intellicontact
• Chris Heuer – ChrisHeuer.com
• Sherry Heyl – Mind Blogging
• Tara Hunt – HorsePigCow
• Bill Johnston – Forum One
• Jennifer McClure – Society for New Communications Research
• Mike McGrath – Dogpatch Dispatch
• Jake McKee – CommunityGuy.com and Ant’s Eye View
• Gregory Narain – SocialTwister
• Lee Odden – Online Marketing Blog and TopRank
• Erica OGrady – ReinventingErica.com and Peanut Butter Media
• Jeremiah Owyang – Web Strategist
• David Parmet – Marketing Begins At Home, LLC and PerkettPR
• Jackie Peters – heavyBlog
• Doug Pollei – pollei.com
• Pierre-Yves Platini – Yoono
• Douglas Pollei – Pollei.com
• Connie Reece – Every Dot Connects and Austin Social Media Club
• Chris Saad – ChrisSaad.com
• Andy Sernovitz – Word of Mouth Marketing and GasPedal
• Brian Solis – PR2.0
• J.J. Toothman – jjtoothman.net and Red Pill
• Todd Van Hoosear – Tech PR Gems
• Des Walsh – Des Walsh dot Com
• Kristie Wells – KristieWells.com

On Wednesday, May 2nd, we celebrated the two-year anniversary of RefreshMiami! When a few of us first met at a Starbuck’s in South Beach on May 5th, 2006 (Brian Breslin, Chris and Rebecca Saylor, Robert Murray and I), little did we know how significantly the RefreshMiami community would impact our lives. As Brian writes on the RefreshMiami blog:

"So its been 2 years. Wow. In the last 2 years I have either met or interacted with hundreds of great people in the south florida tech community. Lots of people have gotten jobs, made friends, and had a great time. So with that in mind, I think its time we celebrate."

Celebrate we did! Here are some photos. Michael Tangeman compares RefreshMiami to the First Tuesdays and such of the early dot.com days (see also comments on his post):

"It is so refreshingly unlike the dot.com days here in Miami. No suits, no VCs just flown in from the Valley, no investment bankers looking to take somebody public, no lawyers handing out cards and wanting to get in on the deals. The talk is about technology and apps and projects and what people are up to, not about shares and options and exit strategies."

If you’re new to Miami and looking to meet and connect with other web entrepreneurs, developers and designers in South Florida, here’s how to participate:

1) join the 220 member strong RefreshMiami Google Group for discussion on local tech issues, job postings and more;

2) join our group on Facebook;

3) if you’re on LinkedIn, we just started a group there. Here’s the link to join;

4) Subscribe to the RefreshMiami blog;

5) Come to our next meetup! Our next event is on May 28th in Coconut Grove … see you there!

Blogging about not blogging …

So I haven’t blogged in a while … or rather I’ve been on Twitter alot.  As it turns out, to rephrase Hugh MacLeod, "Blogging Tweeting is a great way to make things happen indirectlydirectly."

David Berkowitz blogged how Twitter makes blogging better … and in one way worse:

"One prominent blogger, who I won’t call out here, includes a daily summary of his Twitter posts on his blog. Very few of those posts are worth syndicating. They only make sense if you follow him. I find myself reading his blog less now because of it."

I’m not the "prominent" blogger in question   but as those of you reading the feed know, I’m equally guilty of reposting daily tweets here. The postings were archived and did not show up on the front page of this blog, but were regularly shipped out on the feed. This served a few purposes, including:

• Using the blog as a journaling and archiving system so that years from now I could look back and find what I was doing on any particular day, through the archived daily tweets here. Twitter has no archiving mechanism and it’s currently very difficult to find your tweets from any single day: you have to scroll back in your twitterstream to do so.
• Posting daily tweets to my blog helped keep this blog going at a time when I’ve been particularly busy and haven’t found the time to blog. The last three months have been very hectic, starting from before organizing  BarCampMiami, to leaving Scrapblog, to the various things I’m doing today and which I’ll describe in upcoming posts.
• In addition to keeping the blog alive with content, the daily postings kept Google’s spiders crawling and indexing this site for these past few months.

However, daily postings of tweets are difficult and/or boring to read and as David points out, they only make sense if you’re following them on Twitter as they occur, in which case it’s redundant to see them on Twitter, on the blog and aggregated with my other activity on socialthing! and FriendFeed.

I’ve been active elsewhere

Speaking of which, I’ve been active on many other services as well. I’ve added the social networks and sharing services I use most to my blog’s navigation and sidebar and have thus reclaimed my blog as a central identity hub from which to find me online. These services are listed under my picture on the sidebar, and are reposted below. If you’d like to connect on any of these services, please leave a brief comment describing how we know each other or why you’d like to be connected (see note below*):

Updates on Twitter
Facebook profile
Flickr photos
LinkedIn profile
del.icio.us links
Upcoming events
Tumblr lifestream
Trips on Dopplr
Dugg items
Shared on Google Reader
LastFM radio
Jaiku lifestream
Skitch screenshots
Presentations on Slideshare
MyBlogLog communities
Friendfeed lifestream
Technorati profile
ClaimID identity
Netvibes universe

*Note: I accept most friend requests, although I connect mostly with people I already know or have met on Facebook, Dopplr, Tumblr, Jaiku Google Reader, NetVibes, ClaimID, LastFM, SlideShare, del.icio.us and Upcoming. I’m more open with connections on Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed and Flickr, although I reserve the right to not connect for whatever reason – please don’t take it personally if I don’t reciprocate a connection request.

Having said all that …

… I’m blogging again

• 11:27 Twitterpoll: do u find it anoying when someone reposts their tweets to their blog? @davidberkowitz doesn’t like it tinyurl.com/6ahxb4 #
• 11:35 @nateritter @hmason @jrwoodward @charris1980 @alexdesigns Thanks. However, blog is a good CMS for journaling tweets by dayand Twitter isn’t #
• 11:37 I suppose compromise would be to start another blog just to send daily summary tweets to, to keep daily / weekly / monthly archive of doings #
• 11:41 @alexdesigns FriendFeed + Socialthing won’t store ur stuff forever.How do u search by date? A blog is safer. And a blog may be a lifestream! #
• 11:43 @jtnt @mailourmilitary Thanks … so far the response has been overwhelmingly against reposting daily summary of tweets to the blog #
• 11:52 @mailourmilitary Loudtwitter ships a daily summary of tweets to your blog. Tweeterboard will give you links posted by users. #
• 11:55 @swhitley For instance, you can favorite your own important tweets and then grab the RSS feed for it … #
• 12:02 @mailourmilitary Yeah, tweeterboard only gives you the last 30 you’ve posted. You’ve got to grab the RSS for it. #
• 12:13 @swhitley Also, while on the favorites page, the RSS feed is an auto-discovery that’s twitter.com/favorites/[[some number]].atom #
• 12:15 @devinreams Point well taken. I’m starting a new blog — for my own benefit — to capture a daily / weekly / monthly archive of my tweets #
• 12:16 If Twitter scratches Ruby for PHP, let’s hope they’ll fix some of the annoying stuff along the way and give us new features as well #
• 12:18 My wishlist for Twitter: better contact management; grouping, sorting and tagging features; private and public tweets; archival process #
• 12:22 @newmediajim Dunno … I saw it on TechCrunch tinyurl.com/6g93om but Twitter’s denying it twitter.com/ev/statuses/801530348 #
• 12:30 @glowbird By private, I mean I’d like to send private tweets to a *group* – not to an individual. I’d like to do so w/o using GroupTweet #
• 12:33 @_nateritter For posterity. When older, sitting by fireside, I’d like to see what I was up to on a particular day. Twitter is good for that. #
• 12:40 @couch Indeed, the combination of Twitter, Flickr and blog makes for an interesting historical archive … a new autobiography of sorts … #
• 12:43 @nateritter Wow … Have you checked with @extraface though? He might have setup a non-hasthag retweet of your tweets on @__nateritter #
• 12:48 @couch @aerodi Most dramatically, airplane crash affected lots of Brazilians on Orkut. Suddenly accounts became historical archives-Very sad #
• 13:04 @davidberkowitz Thanks for bringing it up! And everyone agrees with you tinyurl.com/699879 and tinyurl.com/6rdd8d #
• 13:14 @reboot10 I’m glad there’s a 10th edition, I look forward to it. It’ll be my fourth time there: always been great. Will it be free? Lol #
• 18:56 TGIF. What a day … I sure am ready for the weekend to start. Hope you’ll have a good one. #
• 22:08 Think about it: a perfected Twitter-like service would display your threaded conversations, wouldn’t it? Well, dream on. #
• 22:16 @silkcharm Mobile IRC! Why not? Hope you’re well, must be a great experience there #

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• 00:19 RefreshMiami & @brbreslin thanks for enabling connections, exchange of ideas and more than a fair share of serendipity over the past 2 tears #
• 00:20 And that would of course be years, not tears #
• 13:21 Met with a local startup in stealth mode with an innovative e-commerce concept and revenue model. Miami can haz tech. #
• 14:34 Reading new comment thread on BusinessWeek listing companies using Twitter tinyurl.com/5ncmpp #
• 14:43 “The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals” -Clay Shirky, in “Here Comes Everybody” #
• 14:57 @andrewhyde You know it! But Twitter’s still unknown to most. A consumer web startup recently asked me: “should we be on Twitter?” #
• 15:09 Uploaded first set of RefreshMiami pictures from last night’s party, have about 10 more to upload tinyurl.com/57e976 #
• 15:23 @michaeltangeman writes a great post about Miami tech, incl. RefreshMiami, BarCampMiami, coworking at Brikolodge tinyurl.com/5hbkha #
• 17:08 Posted last night’s RefreshMiami anniversary photos incl. Lola, our mascot tinyurl.com/47yah9 Thanks everyone! #
• 17:47 @jrwoodward Why do you suppose golfing is embracing twitter? Know of other sports into Twitter? @pgagolf @2008players #
• 18:40 This is so cool … but I wonder how it got on @Mashable? invites.mashable.com/site/startpr @kristennicole2 #
• 19:50 Stunning sunset! Hope a local Flickrer captuted it … #
• 20:49 @brightkite You can check in but you can never leave? (ie., you can leave a place by phone but not through the website?) #

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• 09:30 @ikepigott More than just lazy, it’s also sleazy, slanted and sensationalist journalism. Whatever sells, right? tinyurl.com/6xjyvn #
• 09:34 Coldplay’s song is not entirely free, they’re collecting your email. I wonder what they’ll do with it. www.coldplay.com/song.html #
• 09:45 Retweeting @jamesbuck Free mohammed, send an eCard to the consul attiyashakran@hotmail.com tinyurl.com/6m4dcn #
• 12:36 Wine wholesaler fell thru! Need new sponsor for RefreshMiami 2yr partytomorrow: ~$150 for wine, 50people attending tinyurl.com/6ocf6h #
• 13:00 @lsal77 Thanks for the Flipshake sponsorship of RefreshMiami! w00t! flipshake.com/ #
• 13:27 @quiverandquill @gregoire mapovino.com/ @montgomery @onajide Thanks for your offers and tips, it’s very much appreciated. #
• 13:30 @quiverandquill Kudos for “Rubber Chicken Social Club” in Boston! tinyurl.com/5t7kpq Informal meetups are generally the best kind. #
• 13:50 Without a moment’s hesitation and nary a doubt, he swiftly declared RSS bankruptcy and breathed a sigh of relief. #
• 13:56 @rrodgers On the contrary, it means I clicked the “Mark all as read” button. A refreshingly blank slate (screen, rather) stared back. #
• 14:01 @rrodgers Blog posts unread may rest in peace. They’re gone for good … unless someone links to them from Twitter, that is #
• 15:35 I love Twistori twistori.com/ #
• 16:35 @jpostman Visually stunning style, congrats. But I don’t agree w/ communist/socialist theme to describe social media is.gd/aaI #
• 17:05 Pre-ordered @missrogue ’s “Whuffie Factor” tinyurl.com/6bt2n9 & ordered @cshirky ’s “Here Comes Everybody” tinyurl.com/5w3r49 #
• 17:26 @jpostman It certainly makes a bold statement and will get some attention Good luck with your new consultancy, you’ll do well. #
• 17:29 @thorpus @yourdon I look forward to reading Clay’s book. I’m halfway through Groundswell – the Technographics chapter is very good #
• 17:33 Mobile Monday Miami at Myxer’s office on May 12th. The following one’s at Nokia’s on June 9th. Thanks @sass and @michaeltangeman . Rock on. #
• 17:36 @PelleB Agreed. I understand it’s meant tongue-in-cheek: twitter.com/jpostman/statuses/799845488 Take it up with @jpostman #
• 21:27 It’s really too bad you can’t customize the style of Google Reader shared items page, they all look the same tinyurl.com/4gov23 #
• 21:36 @kingsley2 I’ve got Tumblr, just added you tapio.tumblr.com/ #
• 23:36 @ashleyb33 Good point! You can comment shared items on Bloglines, but not on Google Reader. Seems like an obvious feature to have, right? #

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• 10:58 @GeoffLiving Agreed. Also, more fine-grained privacy control, app-request blocking and the new chat have breathed a lot of new life into FB. #
• 10:59 @montgomery @brbreslin You can figure out reciprocal follows by using “Twitter Karma”; Google it to find it. #
• 11:08 @BarbarKB No one disputes RL is more vital On the other hand, there’s arguably greater chance of serendipity online. A balance b/w both? #
• 11:13 @brbreslin Understood, I was responding more to @montgomery. Twubble partly does what you’re looking for, though not exactly. #
• 17:50 Nice, brief summary of the evolution of the Miami web-tech community, by @brbreslin tinyurl.com/3vw635 It’s been fun! @refreshmiami #
• 19:55 Will the Brazilian Real be on a par with the US Dollar in a year or two? (click on 5-yr graph) tinyurl.com/5oftpe #
• 20:28 @RichardAult If I think far back enough, I think I could have done this too www.flickr.com/photos/ault/1278303843 (great shot!) #

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