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Discovered this today ... I've blogged a number of times about the issue of having more women speakers at conferences as well as concerns about women attendees of conferences. This wiki pulls a lot of resources and great thought pieces together.
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Posts from June 2009
Two Delightful Things - CupCakeCamp and SeekingSimone
Every once in a while I still miss Toronto and all its *happenings*. Vancouver is delightful, but smaller, so we generally don't have the variety of activities here as there. In particular, I was recently very jealous of Toronto's CupCakeCamp. Sure .. BarCamp is great and DemoCamp .. also good. But CupCakeCamp?!?! Who wouldn't want to attend CupCakeCamp?
Well now, thanks to enterprising cupcake-lovers Stephanie and Victoria, CupCakeCamp YVR is happening! Friday, July 10, 2009. Tickets just went up "for sale" (they're free, but a donation is encouraged). You can also follow CupCakeCampYVR on Twitter.
Speaking of cupcakes ... my wife, Rosemary, and her friend Renee (and then a bunch of their friends) have launched a new web series called Seeking Simone.
Seeking Simone is a new lesbian web series about online dating. Follow the adventures of Simone Selkin as she dates her way through gay Toronto!
"What's so great about meeting 'in real life' first anyway? That's how Ava Braun met Hitler and look how that turned out."
Simone Selkin is single and in no way ready to mingle. Her excuses? Well, she's new to Toronto, she's trying to make the most of her big break on CSIS:ForensicSWAT and, if she's honest, she's still getting over her ex, Rebecca, who was a total skank. But back in Vancouver, Simone's best friend Audrey has a plan to get Simone back on the horse. And that plan is "online dating".
Don't fret, hets - Seeking Simone is not just for homos. It's a comedy for anyone who's ever dared to date - and lived to cringe forever over the tale.
Episodes 1 and 2 are ready and watch-able. And I hear their editor is working furiously on the third. Below is the trailer, to give you a taste of the show. I, of course, think it is charming and funny. But I acknowledge I'm biased. Still, give it a view - I'll bet you like it too!
Are trackbacks now the sole dominion of spammers?
I just spent 37 minutes turning off trackbacks on all my blog posts (if Typepad's post management tools were a little better, it would have taken me 37 seconds). Lately I've been getting 2 or 3 trackbacks a day for various drugs - all of which have nothing to do with me or my blog posts.
I looked back over my 6 year blog history and counted my trackbacks: for 925 posts I have only 81 legitimate trackbacks - the most recent from mid-December of 2008. Compare that to the 8,083 spam trackbacks trapped in my spam filter.
Ridiculous.
Seems that no one if really using them anymore - is that true? I've decided to turn them off if for no other reason than to save myself the 2 mintes every other day to delete them.
Is it time to migrate towards a less proprietary and more social system of "trackbacks"? Something like CommentLuv? I know WordPress has some nice plugins.
Or, with the advent of Twitter and the slow coming-of-age of Friendfeed, do we even need the trackback-esque mechanism anymore? Seems like the conversations have migrated to other places.
Homestead House Paint Offers a Great Example of Hyperlocal Guerrilla Marketing
A few weeks ago when I was in Toronto, I was browsing through a local bookstore spending a few pleasant minutes before the start of a movie at an adjacent theatre. I spent some time in the "eco" section, looking for some content ideas for a client, and I came across Adria Vasil's Ecoholic.
Sweet.
As I picked up Ecoholic to flip through it, it fell open at the "Home Improvement" section of the book. On the PAINT page. The page was marked with postcard from Homestead House Paint Company, a Toronto company that specializes in eco-friendly paints, stains and finishes. The other side of the postcard advertises Cycling Painters, another Toronto-based company that will apply your eco-friendly paint for you - and cycles to your location, for the good of the environment.
I thought this was pretty clever. It reaches a targeted, local, niche audience when and where they are looking for a specific product or service that the advertisers have to offer. And it's portable, so the potential customer could event take this piece of marketing with them without buying the book.
One reason this works, of course, is that everyone ISN'T doing it. I certainly don't want to have my book browsing time turned into a hybrid of Times Square billboards and "Subscribe!" magazine notices. But I thought that this was a good, highly-targeted low-cost example of what a local business can do to get the word out.
Plus, I now have a handy bookmark.
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Smaller Bites
- These are some of the images, videos & quotes that resonate with me, but I don't feel like writing a full post about. So I publish them on my tumblr. And there is a feed for these if you're keen ...