Blue Bootstrap

SoCon07 droppings

Pics:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/socon07/

Amber & Rusty at the Georgia Podcast Network are capturing the conference:
http://amber.tangerinecs.com/

Josh Hallett is blogging too:
http://hyku.com/blog/

FYI, I'm on GoogleTalk  - josh.watts@gmail.com

First Session: How Web    2.0 Will Affect You

Interesting discussion overall but I felt it devolved a bit into the old "vi vs. emacs" debate except  now it's "IE vs. Firefox", "technorati vs. unwashed masses". Does it really matter if you use IE or Firefox? Not really - what really matters is that you're using something to get involved in the discussion, creating content, or pursuing your passion. James Harris had a great quote -  "Think beyond the screen".

Collective intelligence is great but one thing I just thought of is that group decision making fails miserably. Why is that? At times, why are all of us dumber than any one of us? Forgot to ask that question.

Second Session: Keynote:    Trends that Will Change Your Profession and Life

Chris Klaus of Kaneva is presenting. Reading a slide titled "Social Media enhanced with Virtual Worlds". How about "Social Media enhanced with Your World" or "Social Media enhanced with Beer" (aka fraternity parties).

Apparently South Koreans rock the online virtual worlds. I, for one, welcome our new South Korean virtual overlords.

To be honest, I feel like I'm hearing an investment pitch. I respect Chris for what he did at Internet Security Systems but.... this session is dragging.

Oh wait - he said "paradigm shift" - now I know I'm hearing an investment pitch.

I just said that the harder companies try to control their brand and image these days, the more people are pushing back. It came out weirder than what I had in my head. This unconference stuff is a little hard if you're doing it for the first time. I have these great, thought-out things I want to say but it seems to come out sounding like Porky Pig or Foghorn Leghorn. Josh Hallett, sitting to my right, is great at this though.

Breakout Session: Entrepreneur 2.0

A little frustration about the start-up scene in Atlanta - to be expected.

When an investor is looking at your start-up, remember you're competing against other start-ups he/she is looking at, not your start-up in relation to your particular industry.

Five stages of a company

1. brilliant idea
2. flesh out into a product
3. a few paying customers
4. scaling up
5. building enterprise value

Lots of talk about building a management team, that different people are appropriate at different stages of the company.

A good board of advisors is really important - adds accountability on the management team.

I'm here

Drinkin' my coffee, blogging, snapping pictures, connecting - brilliant!

Blue Violin Launch at SoCon

I've heard that good things come in 3's. After reading that Tony Stubblebine is launching CrowdVine
and Mike Schinkel and Ben Coffey are announcing T.oolico.us, I've decided to round out the trinity and launch the public beta of Blue Violin as well. Bitchen!

For those of you who are new, Blue Violin is tool to help test your website. Testing websites can be a tedious process - lots of clicking and typing. Lather. Rinse. Repeat over and over again. Automated testing tools, which record you using a website and replay your actions, are great because they can run your tests whenever you want. What could be better than that? How about an automated testing tool that you don't have to install, runs in your browser, and (during the beta period) doesn't cost you anything. I'm really excited about this and think it's a product that has a lot of potential. I have some great ideas for using it for collaboration and load testing.

For now, it's only available in Internet Explorer and the ActiveX control I'm using isn't signed by a real code signing certificate so you'll have to install Ascertia's root CA certificate (I need to get my tax refunds in order to get the Authenticode code signing certificate). It doesn't handle all of the AJAX-iness on web pages these days but it handles most cases you can throw at it.

For those at SoCon, if you're interested in a demonstration, give me a holler and I'll be glad to show you.