If there’s a Portland conference this summer that you don’t want to miss, it’s Portland’s Internet Strategy Forum. Where else will you be able to meet top-level experts and analysts like Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research, or Katherine Durham, VP of Marketing at Hewlett-Packard?

For less than $200, you gain access to a class of experts that will only be in Portland for a day.

Event Tracking with StreamGraphs

Last year, I used StreamGraphs to visually track buzz around Internet Strategy Forum 2008. This method allowed me to see which speakers had the most audience support and interest. This year, I’ll be doing the same thing, and my results will be made available two days after the conference (check back here for a complete report).

Follow the Visualization

If you want to follow my progress as I track and visualize the conference, feel free to follow me on Twitter @caseorganic, or subscribe to Hazelnut Tech Talk by RSS.

Event Details

The conference occurs on Friday, July 24th from 8:30Am - 5:00 Pm, and check-in begins at 8:15 Am. If you don’t yet have a ticket, you can get one at the Internet Strategy Forum website. The conference will be located at the Governor Hotel, which is at 614 SW 11th Ave., Portland, OR 97205.

Out of Town?

You can attend Internet Strategy Forum remotely too, and the cost is just $175.00.

Need More Information?

For more information, call 971-223-3838 or E-mail events@internetstrategyforum.org

Speaker Bio - Jeremiah Owyang

Jeremiah Owyang is a leading research analyst in the social computing industry and is the author of the influential Web Strategist blog. He ranks #2 on the Twitter Power 150 list.

TOPIC: The Future of the Social Web (based on new Forrester report)
Although social networks have caught the attention of brands and consumers, today’s social landscape is a primitive series of unconnected islands. Expect new technologies to emerge that connect all systems and communities together –that allow communities to spread and share from one another. This simple technology changes the web landscape as consumers rely on their peers to make decisions, any web experience can now be personalized, and social networks become as powerful as CRM systems. Marketers must be ready for the drastic changes to come as power shifts to micro-celebrities, communities, and social networks –not traditional marketing. Jeremiah’s presentation will cover these changes in detail.

Speaker Bio - Katherine Durham

Katherine Durham is the IPG-A Vice President of Marketing. In this role she is responsible for building the HP brand and driving demand for imaging and printing products with Consumer, SMB, Enterprise and Public Sector segments across the U.S., Canada and Latin America. In addition she is responsible for Environmental Leadership — compliance, sales support and marketing — across the Americas.

Since joining HP in 2000, Durham has held a number of positions in the Americas marketing organization. From 2005-2007 Durham was the Director of Business Planning, Market Insight and Operations where she re-architected the market insight team to deliver more differentiated customer insights, established TALC (technology adoption lifecycle) for the region and built a global delivery team in India. Before that Durham was the Director of Communications for IPG’s consumer and commercial business as well as the PSG’s consumer businesses, responsible for advertising, in-store execution, on-line communications, events and more. Durham also held roles as the e-marketing manager and NA brand manager for IPG-A Marketing.

Kent Lewis recently interviewed Katherine Durham about her keynote at Internet Strategy Forum.

Credits

Photo of Jeremiah Owyang courtesy of brad_crooks.

You can register for Internet Strategy Forum 2009, or learn more at the Internet Strategy Forum website.

—–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media Consultant based in Portland, Oregon and elsewhere. You can follow her on Twitter or Contact her at caseorganic at gmail dot com. She wrote her thesis on how mobile phones and their growing role in human interaction. Read The Cell Phone and Its Technosocial Sites of Engagement.

This morning I met with Brooks Gilley, Partner and Managing Director of 52ltd Portland’s only locally owned and operated full-service staffing resource for the creative industry. We had a great discussion on how marketing is changing, and how some companies really ‘get it’, or at least attempt to experiment with this strange new medium, while others are left behind.

We were meeting to talk about a creative event that will be occuring on May 27th at Univeristy of Oregon’s White Stag Building in downtown Portland. The event will feature four panelists from fields ranging from advertising, social media and sociology/anthropology. I’ll be on a panel discussing cyborg anthropology, new media frameworks, and changes in marketing in the digital era.

Panelists

I’ll be speaking with a variety of others, including an executive from Crispin Porter + Bogusky (the agency that worked on the infamous Facebook Burger King Whopper Sacrifice campaign).

Other panelists will include the Directory of Interactive Media for the Portland Trailblazers (whose community engagement strategy has been quite impressive), as well the possibility of a professor of Sociology from Portalnd State University, but I am unsure of his name yet. All told, the event should be a great chance for all of us to share different perspectives and strategies with each other and an audience of creatives, freelancers, and marketers.

More Information

I’ll post more details as the event nears, but it should begin at around 6:15 Pm at the White Stag Building on NW Couch street. There will be ample time for networking, so if you’re excited to meet new people, come on out. It is a free event too, so you’ve got nothing to lose. Check the 52ltd website for details as May 27th approaches, and if you’re looking to hire a creative or looking for a creative gig, consider making an appointment with them.

If you have any questions you’d like us to cover on the panel, feel free to E-mail me at caseorganic [at] gmail [dot] com, or simply reply to me at @caseorganic on Twitter.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Friends, Until I Delete You (nytimes.com)
• Online communities as engagement tools at the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris (thecustomercollective.com)
• Interesting snippets for agency types from SXSW (sparkthedebate.blogspot.com)
• The Future of Advertising. WTF? (slideshare.net)
• Social Media Firm Room 214 Hires Online Community Manager (readwriteweb.com)
• The Most Innovative Companies in Advertising & Marketing (scotttesta.com)

I was talking with Julian Chadwick of PDXPipeline this Monday about the tools he uses for search engine optimization. We recorded a podcast that will be posted Monday night on Hazelnut Tech Talk. However I wanted to pass on some of the information he gave me regarding the SEO plugins he uses for Firefox. I’d like to review the SEO Quake, as it has been very useful to me.

Basic Information

There are a few baseline pieces of baseline information that any SEO beginner. One of these is Page Rank, or Google’s consideration of what a given page is worth. Page rank varies from site to site, and there are a number of factors that contribute to pagerank. One of them is the amount of websites linking to a given website. This is called ‘inlinks’. One can find out this information by going to Google and entering the string “link:http://www.yoursite.com”.

The amount of links from a site to you website show up differently in Yahoo! Search vs. Google search vs. MSN. Obtaining this data takes a while without a good tool to help you find it. There are additional metrics one can find about a site, such as the page rank, sitemap, alexa rank, and whether the site has been indexed in search engines or not. Site indexing is different from checking inlinks.

If the pages of your site are not indexed by search engines, it is difficult for searchers to find them. Making sure your website has a sitemap and submitting it to Google Webmaster tools is an essential baseline step in the SEO process. You can generate an .xml sitemap for free by using the free tool provided at XML-Sitemaps.com.

SEO Quake for Firefox

SEO Quake is a plugin that adds another layer of information on top of your brower’s basic information. Instead of having to search for inlinks, the inlinks are displayed right on top of the site for you. You can also choose what information you want displayed about the site. There are plenty of options (accessible from preferences) that allow you to view any information you want about the page you’re on. There are Yahoo! inlinks, links to domain, Alexa rank, Page Rank, inlinks from MSN, compete rank, sitemap, and the robots.txt file, just to name a few.

Using SEO Quake rocks. It’s super-customizable and generates a ton of rich information without the need to click. Plus, you can click on the information and download into a spreadsheet or text document for later use or data analysis. Highly recommended.

Download

This is a link to the download site for SEO Quake. Again, it is only available for Firefox browsers, so if you aren’t using Firefox (which you most undoubtedly should), then you’ll be missing out.

Resources

Thanks to Julian Chadwick for mentioning this plugin. You can check out Julian’s site at PDXPipeline or follow him on Twitter @pdxpipeline.

For more information on SEO, Julian and I both recommend SEOMoz.org, a Seattle-based company providing an extremely comprehensive database of resources and tools for beginner, intermediate, and advanced SEO specialists. Try the free Trifecta tool on your site for starters.

——–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

What’s creative and groundbreaking, and capable of topping iPhone buzz on Twitter?

It’s Cre8Camp, the inaugural unconference that brought 50 creatives to SOUK, a coworking space (322 NW 6th Avenue), this Saturday. Within the first hour of introduction and networking, about 24 topics were developed for discussion, and groups of creatives went off to various conferences rooms and hallways to delve into some of the most intense dilemmas, new media techniques, and social prerogatives that currently exist.

The event was covered masterfully on Twitter, allowing the rankings for the hashtag identifier #Cre8Camp. There was so much buzz involved that #Cre8Camp trumped mention of the newly released iPhone 3G on Twitter. By the end of the day, #Cre8Camp was second only to Dark Knight.

The conference was organized and sponsored by @stevegehlen, @CarriBugbee (Big Deal PR), @feedia, @brampitoyo, @7thscreen, @sadiemedley, @julsd (Owner of SOUK) Great Lunch from @turoczy (of @siliconflorist), @ahockley (amazing photos of the event to come soon), and the Art Institute of Portland and ISITE Design.

It was live-Tweeted online by @StevenWalling (Wikipedia/Wiki God), @CarrieBugbee (amazing job) Me @caseorganic, @sadiemedley, @staceyanderson, @notbenh @feedia, @brampitoyo, @Theinfovore, @lilbutterfly, @JeanAnnVK, @unclenate.

The event was mind blowing and incredible. It will probably take me a week to fully digest and analyze the information gathered.

If you have information you’d like me to include in future updates on the information gathered during Cre8Camp, please E-mail me at caseorganic@gmail.com.

Today there was a Lunch and presentation at Nemo on using Ning for customized social networks. Dave Allen, Director of Insights & Digital Media at Nemo, introduced Rachel, who demonstrated the customized functions of Ning.

Dave Allen:
The purpose of this lunch and demonstration is to create a sort of town hall meeting.

Nemo is a 11 year old company that is unique in that it has managed to develop itself professionally without any sort of Press Releases or major media at all.

We have 5 blogs that function outside of Nemo, as well as an Private internal networking that we’ve been using to demonstrate the capabilities of blogs to our employees. It is a place for experimentation and messages.

We feel that in Social Media everyone is running around on different race courses. All are doing their own thing, but no one knows where the finish line is.

The five outside blogs are not integrated with each other. We hope to use Ning’s capabilities to create PR 2.0 and Social Media for Nemo.
We’ll be releasing the new version of Ning in September that will network all of these blogs together, and will serve as a force to expand Nemo’s online presence and capability.

BLOGS:

• Pampelmoose

• Social-Cache

• StudioNemo

• Strangebeautiful

• NubbyTwiglet

We hope to add:

• Ink Show

• Yourblog.com

And:

NemoHQ.com (coming soon)

In addition, other blogs will be linking to Nemo, and these blogs and our own will run through Ning, which provide linking to everyone in the world.

The Ning Presentation:

Rachel:

I’d like to talk about how you or a brand can use a social network. People are currently using social networks to connect with other people. The Internet can be used to replicate any sort of media. Newspapers, television, art exhibits and flyers can be duplicated and be functional online.

The truly native behavior of the Internet is two-way. So is a social network. In media terms, the Internet is the only place where people have a depth conversation of two way in many forms of media. In photos, media, discussion forms, and blogs.

Because of this, people are responding to social networks in huge numbers.

The early days of the Internet saw two major services; AOL and CompuServe. AOL was a fantastic service for the general public because it taught people how to be online — how to use chat and E-mail..

And when a company like Nike wanted to be on the Internet — it would post its page on AOL.

Then Netscape came around and allowed people to jump on the Internet from site to site without constraints.

Now we have Facebook and other applications that teach us how to be social online. They allow us to post videos photos, news feeds.

Ning is a platform for the creation of your own branded social network.

It allows you the opportunity to control and expand your brand to your biggest fans. When you have a Myspace page, that page’s community is comprised of Myspace members and friends, but the data is owned by Myspace. You don’t get to keep data on your own community, and your visitors are constrained to Myspace’s look, feel and format.

By having your own social network, you can show what your features will be and your member’s social information. You can have your brand really expanded.

You can thus have your own online hub. If you think about a brand, it’s really spread across the net. It allows the people who are talking about you on Youtube, and those who have found you through promotions with companies like Eventful, Facebook and Myspace.

General online fan groups comprise a very fragmented image. You don’t have any centralized space to really collect your tribe.

Centralization of data allows them to meet each together while connecting with you. It eliminates the barriers that divide fans up into different social services.

You can then use those different touch points across the web, on those different blogs, to gather them into a tribe on your own social network. Then you can give them access to RSS feeds, embed codes, and they can spread your image across the web as your own personal street team .

We’re three years old, based in Palo Alto California.

We raised 60 million dollars back in May. If you build a social network on Ning you’ll know that you’ll be online for a long time. We’re not just going to evaporate. We have about 65 employees, almost of which are geeks. Your network is up fast, and runs smooth. We have a large engineering team. This team is always thinking about what social networking features you need in order to have the most social network for your brand.

—-
Case Study: The ImSaturn Social Network.
Saturn simply went to Ning.com and created their own social network without even calling us. Saturn has really created their own social universe.
Events and Bloggers

They have a lot of events they sponsor. For instance, they’re a sponsor of Project Runway. They recently sent one of their advertising directors out to blog about the experience. They have a Saturn blog/event/picture of the day. They’re running many different groups. There’s the Saturn Tuners Club, which was actually started by Saturn blogger. His blog is advertised on the front page.

The Saturn community space is really respectful of the Saturn community and helps them to get their own words out. They’re very respectful of the universe of different bloggers and clubs. How can they take these different groups who are part of different parts of the web and bring them all into this world.

Saturn sponsors a lot of events. You can see these events “Rally Customer Appreciation Day” on the event calendar.

At this point a freelance designer sitting next to me said, ” ‘Have a Saturn experience!’ That’s marketing right there.”
Widgets

Then there is a page to give their members all sorts of different widgets. Photo, video, and music players can be added to your site as well. These allow your brand’s supporters to share your videos on Facebook, or add them to MySpace.

——-

Case Study: AskPatty.com

Kiss my Astra (Patty is a women’s car dealer blogger. She’s pretty popular, so you can start to create news about what you’re doing on your own social network.

–

Case Study: Greekster.tv

Greekster is a Pizza Hut branded social network. It’s just targets to college students and those who are a part of fraternities and sororities—the ones most likely to order pizza. It’s very event focused. There’s a Hot or Not section for that allows members to become stars on the front age.

—-

Case Study: The Good Charlotte Network: Beating Paparazzi to the Punch

Good Charlotte’s main website is actually built on Ning. Two members of Good Charlotte are using their blog while on the road. They are also currently dating Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. This means that they are constantly getting harassed by camera crews and media.

To combat this, they’re blogging and taking pictures themselves and posting them on the social network in order to control their own stroy. By controlling media first, through Ning, they are beating Paparazzi to the Punch.

Now news outlets like Press Magazine are going back to the Good Charlotte to get the news, instead of taking the news themselves.

The latest blog pot is about a move about the Bra Boys, a epic about Australian Surfers. They use the Ning portal to point to the Bra Boys website from Ning, thus acting as a promotional interface.

Merchandise

They use the social network to sell all of their own brands, like the DCMA Collective, and band merchandise is linked to their Ning Site.

Good Charlotte’s page uses Ning’s capabilities to form the questions that one can asks their members when they set up their profiles. You can ask certain questions to really let he members to express themselves.

People are allowed to modify their own CSS on the page.

Then there’s the Good Charlotte Facebook page. This page links back to www.goodcharlotte.com, and a Ning photo player shows the GC’s photos on the Facebook network page. They work in unison to for more powerful promotion.

Case Study: Maloof Money Cup

Maloof Money Cup, the World’s Greatest Skateboarding Competition, is based in Orange County.

They embedded a bunch of YouTube videos come from their social network which runs on Ning.

And there’s my.maloofmoneycup.com that only allows people who are competing in the skateboarding event to become members of the page.

There’s the latest activity feed. Just like on Facebook you can see what your friends are up to.

Case Study: The SXSW ‘08 Insiders Guide.

Those who were attending South By Southwest were able to use the website I created by Ning as a community device.

Another good part about the database is that you can export all member data by .CSV and import it into a php email database.

People fill that out and you can export it into you own CRM database.

http://www.SXSW.ning.commain/feature/add

There are tons of featured widgets that allow you to bring pretty much anything into the applications. From the main page, a widget can be edited or modified.

In the end it adds up to a very concrete CMS.

It really gives you the ability to make your own experience online and really bring people into your own space.

—-

Questions from the Audience

CMD Agency:

You look at the big sites like Myspace/Youtube/Fllickr. That’s where the eyeballs are. Lots of clients want their own community, but there’s a question of how to balance the control you get from a privately branded site like on Ning vs. the social focus that is available on Myspace (which is where all of the visits are focused).

Rachel:You have to think about what’s most appropriate for your client. They are using our photo player here to populate their Facebook page.They have 67,000 pans of Good Charlotte on their Facebook page.

This makes Good Charlotte capable of gathering an audience on their Facebook page and gather their audience which also happens to be on a Facebook page.

A lot of Saturn members are blogging. Saturn found some Saturn members that were good bloggers, so then they featured the blog posts of these members. Ning allows you to use your community to generate content for you.

AlphageekTV: Why did the skateboarders lock the community to members of the competition only?

Rachel: I imagine they anted to make the competitors be the celebritities of the site and have hte members forcus in on them ..

Big Deal PR: What I’m always curious about is the flexibility of a system. What kind of programming help do you need in house in order to adapt it, and how adaptable is it? Is it at all possible to optimize it for search engines/?

Rachel: We’re constantly updating all of the tabs and widgets like so that search engines can always find it. When we upgrade we don’t just do it once — we constantly improve it, so that because search engines are always changing.

If you know a little or a lot of CSS, or you’re a PHP developer, you can use our API’s get access to our source code and really ad in your features.

That’s our job, to really help link you into your community through a completely customizable interface.

Angie, Freelance Designer: How long does content remain up and live, and the space parameters?

Rachel: Content goes up as long as you want to. Not sure of the dimensions, bur can ind out that information for you.

Question: Bandwidth limitations on your site?

Rachel: Secret: We’re not charging for bandwidth and storage right now. Everyone will get 100 gigs of free bandwidth and 10 gigs of storage. After that, you’ll be charged $9.99 a month for an additional 100 gigs of bandwidth and 10 gigs of storage.

Question:
As an Admin can you limit the size of uploads that users can upload?
Do you also have the ability to link back to other sources to use their bandwidth?

Rachel:
We give you 10 text boxes, and you can embed in any third party information in them. We’ll be putting our fill weight behind OpenSocial. We’ll be supporting third party social applications. The members of your social network will be able to add an open social app onto the first page.

Question: Can you do custom Javascript in those text boxes?

Rachel: Yep — custom javascript, custom hacks … hack away!

—–

That was the event. Overall, I learned a great deal about how brands can use multiple sites to set up campaigns/communities across formerly disparate social networking sites.

On Wednesday, July 16th, Bram Pitoyo and I realized that we both had three tech events scheduled on our calendars. There was Lunch 2.0 at SOUK from 12-2Pm, pdxMindShare from 5:30-8:00Pm at Paddy’s, and a surprise Tweetup with Charlene Li, author of Groundswell (note: this event was later canceled, due to the fact that Li’s flight was delayed! We were all very sad).

But wait! There’s one more!

There was an extra event on my calendar. It was a Meetup for novice, intermediate and advanced bloggers to provide each other writing advice. It started at 6:00 Pm at the Kennedy School in NE. Bram and I realized that between biking and networking, it was going to be an extremely intense day.

In addition to 4 networking events, I also had an entire day of work to do. With only a 1 hour lunch break in the middle, I’d only be able to attend Lunch 2.0 for 30 minutes. I started my morning at 7Am, ate breakfast and got ready for a day of work, networking, and hardcore biking.

Below is a recap of the three events. Bram Pitoyo reviewed the series of events in separate posts and they are available on Link en Fuego. Jake Kuramoto also expertly reviewed Lunch 2.0 at Silicon Florist from a distance, hence the title Bot Recap of Lunch 2.0 at SOUK. Doug Coleman attended and blogged about Lunch 2.0 and Writing for the Web, and his reviews are here.

Event #1: Lunch 2.0 at SOUK

I arrived at the Portland Business Accelerator early and set myself to work. Before long it was time for Lunch 2.0! I rushed down the stairs and out the door, to my bike, which I strategically parked directly outside the PBA the night before.

I careened down the steep hill that led from the building and to the waterfront, where I zoomed by other bikers and lunchtime wanderers. I went under the Morrison and the Hawthorne bridge, and then headed into the heart of the Pearl District, and arrived at SOUK at exactly 12:01. I thanked myself that I’d beta tested the space before, else it would’ve been quite difficult to find. It’s sort of a secret space, but one well work the look. A coworking/rental space doesn’t really get better than this.

The place was packed! Tons of new faces! Exceedingly delicious Thai food from a block away. I saw @donpdonp, my friend from high school (who is an iPhone app developer), @xolotol, Melissa Lyon and her partner, founders of PDX BackFence, @ahockley, @geekygirldawn, @tisque, @bobuva, @selenamarie, @ekki, and @julsd, the founder of SOUK.

I only had time to talk to a few people, but the discussions were excellent, and everyone seemed to have an very engaging experience. Before long, it was 12:50, and I leaped downstairs to my bike for the ride back to the office.

I careened down to the waterfront as fast as I could while avoiding end-of-lunchtime vehicles. When I made it back to the office, I was drenched in sweat, but was very happy.

Event #2: pdxMindShare, 5:30Pm, Paddy’s Bar. Downtown Portland

At 5:00Pm I cleaned up my desk and wrote the tasks I had to do for Monday on notecards. Then I ran to my bike and rode back downtown to Paddy’s, where the monthly SEMPDX pdxMindShare event was going to occur.

I first attended pdxMindShare back in January when I was finishing up my last year of college. I’d just been introduced into the world of search engine optimization, marketing, Google Adwords and Analytics. My mind only knew Anthropology and Sociology then, and I’d just finished writing my thesis on “Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Being”. The event left a big impression on me, though, and I was excited to show up again, this time as more of an expert than a novice.

I arrived early enough to see that Kent Lewis, President of Anvil Media was still in a meeting, so I grabbed my computer and begin doing some Analytics work. Presently, Kent warmly welcomed me to the event, and a lot of people began to arrive. A women who used to be in the translation business but who wanted to enter into the advertising world sat down with me, and I mailed her a list of Portland networking events that could help her with her job search. She was very kind, and a little nervous to meet so many new people. I introduced her to a few people, and she began to really enjoy herself. Yay!

8 out of 10 Collaboratory Members Made an Appearance

Bram and I spotted Allison McKeever, Brian Davidson, Christine Vo, Heather Schwartz, Mary McPherson, Megan Nuttall, Whitney Bard, and Kim Karalekas. This was awesome, because they were able to see a really vibrant part of Portland’s networking community. According to their blogs and Twitter writings, the members really enjoyed the event!

While waiting for my drink bill, I had a fantastic discussion with an Ajax/Flash developer about Usability. He didn’t have a card, which made me sad, but I’m sure we’ll meet again at another event.

Event #3: Writing for the Web Meetup Event at the Kennedy School

Bram and I realized the time. It was getting really late, and we still had to bike all the way up to NE Portland to NE 33rd for the next event! We made a hasty exit and got to the Yellow Line Max right as it arrived at the station near Paddy’s. The ride was fast, but we still had 40 blocks to ride to get to the School, and the details of its actual location were rather fuzzy.

We dashed those 40 blocks and arrived at the event a full hour late. But it was still going on! And during the middle of it, we were notified by Twitter that the Charlene Li Tweetup had been canceled due to a flight delay! Darn! We ended up ordering food. We were about to pass out from exhaustion and starvation.

Marilyn Schwader. the Meetup host, gave great tips on blogging and writing copy. She taught me a lot about considering demographics, and keeping things simple. @dariusmonsef of Colourlovers was there, as well as @dougcoleman. It was a great time, and a good source of inspiration to the aspiring and advanced bloggers present. Doug Coleman showed us his awesome recording equipment too, and we talked about Podcasts.

When the event was over, Bram and I explored the amazing hallways of the Kennedy School. Vintage photos and detailed paintings lined the walls. After viewing the dipping pool, we regretted not bringing swimming suits. Then we discussed the idea of a hot tubbing bike/tweetup! Hooray! This should happen soon.

Conclusion

We biked back from the Kennedy school to SW Portland, where we split paths at the waterfront so Bram could catch the MAX, and I could head back to my car at the office.

Although exhausted, I jumped into hyperspeed on the Internet when I got home. As usual, Twitter and Analytics consumed my time. I set my alarm for 6Am so I could get ready to attend the Internet Strategy Forum in the morning, and fell asleep listening to a Sci-Fi podcast. Intense Day in Tech #1…Complete. Tomorrow would be twice as intense, but I didn’t know it yet. A review of Thursday, July 17th to come soon.

Today I live Tweeted the Internet Strategy Forum at the Governor Hotel in Portland, OR.

A few days ago, @infovore of Twitter sent me the link to NeoFormix, an experimental Twitter processor. I was really happy about this, because I love infographics, and I love to mess around with new types of data presentation. The NeoFormixTwitter StreamGraph was built by Jeff Clark, a brilliant developer. You can follow him @JeffClark on Twitter.

My goal was to track Twitter volume, speaker quotes, and general buzz around the event of every attending Twitterer in the audience. I did not want to have a sheet of messy or relatively non-granular data like Summize or Tweetvolume provide. I wanted to show volume over time, and for this I determined that graphic output was needed.

There were two hurdles I had to bypass before being able to adequately gather uniform data. The first was that the tracking hashtag for the ISF was not stable. Tweets of attending members migrated from @summit to #ISF08 to #ISF, and thus data that coverage was spottier than necessary.

In order to solve this problem, I began to gather every Twitter user that was attending the ISF into a text document. Then I sent out Tweets welcoming them to the conference. At the end of each welcome Tweet, I signed it @summit #ISF. As I welcomed more Twitterers and gained more followers, I dropped the @summit and Tweeted as much as possible about the event with others, using simply #ISF to sign my post.

By around 10:30 Am, the #ISF hashtag was well on its way. Once this hashtag standard came about in a uniform manner, I was able to run much more accurate analytics on the data. I was then able to use the word ‘ISF‘ to track top word volumes related to most of the Tweets concerning the Internet Stragety Forum.

What It Shows:

The period of time that the graph shows begins during the middle of Geoffrey Ramsey, Co-founder & CEO, eMarketer’s speech, covers the speech of Dan Stickel (CEO, WebTrends) speech and ends a little before the end of Nancy Bhagat Vice President, Sales and Marketing Group; Director, Integrated Marketing, Intel Corp’s speech.

What Was Shown:

The conversations bursts worked just like sine waves as audience began to engage with the material of each new speaker. As memorable quotes were released into the audience, a lot of tweeting and retweeting coverage occured, melding some of the terms into like-groups. The graph shows that people tweeted about the speaker during the middle of the speech as opposed to at the beginning or end of the speech.

The First Burst:

In the first Twitter lump, Geoffery Ramsey talked about ‘FOG’, or the Fear of Google. You can track it in this graph! Fear shows up, as well as Google. During this time, attendees were using @summit more often than #ISF to track the conference, which shows.

I am trying to determine why “life” showed itself so often, but “social, network, online, trust, marketing and show” made a lot of sense.

The Second Burst:

Presenter Dan Stickel was not as quotable, but the Twitter reporters recorded his name, and the fact that he was speaking. At first they used both his first and last name to ID him, and then used his last name, for the sake of brevity.

The other lumps show that there were tweets during this time, some attributed to his name, but none that were unified. I.E., many Twitterers did not quote the same parts of his speech at the same time, or in enough volume in order to show up on the graph as an actual word.

The Third Burst:

Nancy Bhagat of Intel Corp’s Keynote spurred a lot of Tweets about Intel, and thus her name is associated with it.

There was also @summit, presentation, marketing, great, Nancy, and bhagat. Most of the Tweeting was done towards the first of her speech, as well as the discusion of her status as an Intel worker.

Conclusion:

There are many graphs like this available online. Most are made by students at colleges, and a lot have to do with graphically displaying content volumes. I found this analytics visualizer to be exceptionally powerful because of its ability to track word volume over time.

The applications for this type of visual presentation of information are vast. During the ISF after party, I determined that these graphs would be an invaluable tool for examining PR statistics over time, or, as I discussed with Dan Gaul, Kent Lewis and Geoffrey Ramsey, the highlights of one’s speech. If I sat down and pulled apart the code with someone, it would be fun to develop this graphing system into an extremely granular tool for online reputation management.

After the conference, Kent Lewis of Anvil Media suggested that I demonstrate the report to Geoffrey Ramsey, because the graphics allowed a quick and easy way to show him the highlights of the speech he gave. When I showed him, he was really excited about the results, because he did not know how to gauge the success or failure of his speech.

Instead of digging through pages of Twitter data, even through Summize.com (with the search term #ISF), the method I developed allowed him to see just his speech, and exactly the topics that hit the audience the hardest.

Data Dimensions:

My research depends on attending conferences because my current focus is on visualizing data with 4 main dimensions.

1. Time
2. Volume
3. Keyword
4. Event/Person

In this way, data becomes more like an audio file, and even closely resembles it. It is a friendlier way of viewing trends, and is more accurate (because of the added dimension of volume) than

Tool Limitations:

Currently, the tool I am using is Java based. It does not yet allow the user to set periods of time, and does not have the server capabilities to store server data. It is a brilliant data analytics tool, and if it were to allow a greater amount of granularity (in terms of keywords), as well as time range, it would prove to be an invaluable tool for tracking Public Relations. Currently, it is possible to do this, it just takes a longer amount of time to do so.

My goal is to approach the tools’ inventor, Jeff Clark, about collaborating with him to create a more robust version that would incorporate a larger time frame, clickable data formats (I have a paper prototype of all of this), and a zoom feature. A sort of map of time, or an audio burst.

The interesting part about visualizing data in this way is that it shows that there is an inherent difference between what a speaker says and the audience “hears”. Hearing, in this case, is defined by how the speaker’s name, company, and words are picked up by microbloggers and re-tweeted online.

Future Considerations:

If tech conference attendees were prompted to provide their Twitter id with their conference registration, tracking processes could be preformed more easily (this was the case at Gnomedex, a conference I was invited by Chris Pirillo to attend).

More Projects:

This project is just one of the experiments I’m working on. As it is most easily done during conferences, I have to wait for conferences with a substantial amount of Twitter users.

I’d like to be able to show this in real life, because its more enjoyable to get really excited about the data. There are so many great potentialities with a tool like this, because being able to visualize data over time with an extra dimension of volume is really exciting.

It’s also great to be able to discuss new methodologies with people because so many more conclusions can be gleaned from discussion. I recently presented this technique to a group of Portland tech people at a sort of software demo session. There was a lot of great feedback there, and new ideas gleaned from it. It’s amazing, the value and speed of digital communities.

In Essence:

I’ll be applying this tool to the crowd and will be trying to trick it out, or hack it to be able to show more statistics over time. I’ll be doing the standard audio recordings of the entire conference, so that I can compare and contrast what was Tweeted vs. what was said in real life. I’ll probably be taking about 50 graph samples, so that the relative volume and interest in each speaker can be tracked. There will be a lot of write-ups about the uses of this type of visualization, and how it can be applied to PR campaigns.

Now What?

Systems are optimal when the amount of time and space it takes to get pieces of relevant data from one person to another continues to decrease. Those designs/processes that exemplify this paradigm will be successful in the future economy.

About:

Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist, internet marketer, and speaker from Portland, Oregon. You can contact her at caseorganic at gmail.com, or on Twitter at @caseorganic

When compared to the lines in New York for the iPhone, the Downtown Portland Mac store line was pretty manageable. While I didn’t get a phone myself, I wanted to provide some highlights.

dannysullivan Lines are funny. remember how in russia they were a symbol of failure. change context and suddenly a sign of success about 17 hours ago from mobile web

.

iPhone App Roundup

Thanks to WebMonkey - The Developers Resource for an overview of the various iPhone applications available. I’ll be attaching a truncated overview of Michael’s article here, but please read his article if you’d like to learn more.

iPhone Flashlight
Ever use your cell phone in the dark to find things?
Lightenhances your ability to do this by turning your iPhone or iPod’s screen into a flashlight by generating a bright white screen. A webapp version is here: vFlashlight.

Price-matching

Checkout Smartshop ($5) has bar code reader software. Take a pic of any UPC and the app will find the best deal online instantly. Shop owners who claim to “match any price” will hate it. It pulls up reviews, too, for on-the-spot purchase decisions.

On-the-go Paypal Integration
Use iPhone’s

PayPal integration to send money to anyone with a few taps of the screen. It’s great for iPhone-enabled Craigslist purchases — hook up online, meet up in meatspace to check out the merchandise, then seal the deal electronically on the spot.

Resource/Food Detection

Point your iPhone in any direction within WhereTo’s ($3) circular interface. The application pings the phone’s GPS to find nearby restaurants, pubs, auto repair shops, hospitals, shopping centers and airports.

Capture Anything

Evernote comes with the iPhone. Yeah, the software that you can use like a cookie cutter to cut reality. Business cards, signs and notes on napkins can be converted to text.

.

ravenzachary: Guy from Brazil desperately wanting to pay me cash to buy him a phone and break contract. Nope. (From the Portland, Oregon iPhone line).· Reply · View Tweet

.

Conclusion:

Expect an entire suite of iPhone apps from sincere and money-dazed people. I was told that some people in the line were taking notes as to the iPhone’s app offerings in an attempt to find the holes and fill them with their own products. Will they charge for this service, or will some be free? I suppose it depends on the developers.