Next week, a hair less than a week from today, Redwerks, Colleen Coplick will be hosting a summer social media BBQ with Freshbooks:
Summertime BBQ: The true Canadian social media Wednesday, June 25, 2008 5:30 PM – 10:00 PM Redwerks Rooftop Patio 321 Railway Street, Suite/Buzzer 106 Vancouver, British Columbia V6A 1A4–Summertime BBQ: The true Canadian social media at Redwerks Rooftop Patio (Wednesday, June 25, 2008) – Upcoming

Will you be there?  Looks like it will be a great kick off to a social media summer.

Following Mack Male’s Twitter stream this morning (through the web, ggrrr) I caught his blog post with the announcement of the finalists for the New Media Awards:
Most Promising Company of the Year: * b5media, Toronto * Filemobile, Toronto * Viigo, Toronto—Live from nextMEDIA: 2008 Canadian New Media Award Finalists | Techvibes Blog

Of course all I have to say about that is: W00t!  Our fearless leader Jeremy Wright is there (he was speaking) as are other b5-ers.  So I expect to be able to blog the winners when they are announced.

Fingers crossed…

While I couldn’t be at Casecamp 7 recently, I saw an accordion as the still image for the video report from Rahaf Harfoush on Foush Reports on CaseCamp7 » ThomasPurves.com.
Let’s see, unconference in Toronto, dealing with tech … well it has to be Joey deVilla.
Yep, of course it was.

Great video.  Man I wish I could make it to more events like this.  Vancouver seems so, so far away sometimes.

Last Friday my friend Colleen Coplick presented to the Vancouver chapter of CPRS (PR people group) on blogs and social media.  I got a sneak peak at her slides Thursday night (she asked for feedback).  I think she was right on the mark and didn’t have too many (26, about right for an hour).
However it seems that not everyone enjoyed it:
You have to be honest. You have to be transparent. You have to join the conversation. Hang out on facebook.” After a half hour of this it was clear that she couldn’t really fill the rest of the half hour …read more

By luck and happenstance (love that word) I was able to go to the Victoria Entrepreneur’s Lunch yesterday.  Great time hanging out with techies for a while and talking tech.
The lunch is organized by Rian Bowden of DailySplice.  Rian said it started small and informal and is now growing every month.  There were 24 folks there yesterday.  Which means if a truck drove into that corner of the Old Spaghetti Factory, Victoria’s tech sector would be pretty much wiped out in one fell swoop!
I say that it’s luck that I went because I happened to decide that yesterday would be …read more

After the success of Thursday’s DemoCampVictoria01 and reading Mack’s post today about getting a tweetup going in Edmonton–EdmontonTweetup anyone? at MasterMaq’s Blog–I think it’s time we have one of our own.
There are certainly enough geeks and techies in Victoria and if this Twitterlocal pull of twitter users within 20 miles of Victoria (that’s about 30 km, btw) is any indication, well I think we could have a great time.
My preference would be a good coffee place with WiFi, but hey who knows right?
Okay Victoria twitterati, let’s get this going!
BTW, I’ve also created a VictoriaTech Diigo group for us Victoria people …read more

When you launch, launch with a bang: DemoCampVictoria01 Rocked
Last night I live-blogged Victoria’s first DemoCamp and it was a huge success.  The place was packed.  We were in the presentation centre for the new Juliet condos that are going up on Blanchard Street.  The presentation centre is a lovely, lovely venue for event and thanks to Dave Chard, Wendy Pryde, and Jessica Pryde for being amazing hosts.
Mark Lise told me that he expected more than the 48 people there were chairs for and yep, that was true.  It was a packed house.  When this DemoCamp was being planned, Mark had …read more

We’ll be starting shortly here at the Juliet show-demo centre.  Geeks aplenty consuming wine and cheese…
This is, without a doubt, the swankiest location for a DemoCamp…awesome kickoff for Victoria’s first DemoCamp.
It was a great time. My Flickr photoset from Victoria’s first DemoCamp is uploading

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One of the best parts of conferences lately is giving people 15 minutes to intro their company or announce a new product.  Mesh, coming up in May, is no different and Mark Evans has posted how you can apply to get your 15MOF:
Looking for the mesh Spotlight? | Mark Evans  Annotated
tags: conferences, markevans, mesh, meshu, toronto

One of the most popular parts of mesh over the past two years has been 15 Minutes Fame – in which six entrepreneurs each get five minutes on stage to talk about what they’re doing and why it matters.
We’re doing 15MOF again this year so …read more

Darren Barefoot and Vancouver-based Nitobi posted a survey recently asking developers about their choices of development platforms.  While there wasn’t an overwhelming platform of choice, open-source tools ruled the day:
The interesting aspect is that there’s no one dominant language or platform. What does dominate the survey is open source, which comprises 80% of the platform responses, 84% of the Ajax framework responses, and 59% of the development tools responses. With the tools, Dreamweaver remains popular among designers, but a quarter of the responses were simple text editors. When asked what causes the most pain in web development, the first answer …read more