SMX Advanced networking party at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle.

There is an exceptional line up of speakers for the upcoming Blogging for Business (B4B) 2008 Conference this Friday, June 6, 2008 in Salt Lake City. Registration is $299 and you can sign up at http://regonline.com/b4b2008. I’ll be at the event, and I am looking forward to networking with the B4B crowd.

Food, foosball, and Nerf were the main themes (well, besides Fedora & Ubuntu) at last night’s Ubuntu/Fedora Release Party at Code Greene. Here are some pictures from the party posted on flickr.

The inaugural PodCampSLC 2008 took place on Saturday, March 15th, 2008. The turnout was pretty good. There were a few glitches with building entry and wifi, but all-in-all it was a fairly smooth unconference I suspect. I had great fun meeting people and listening to interesting conversation and one very well done, very educational speech on audio engineering by Mike Wiseland. I also was pleased to meet Jake Spurlock, who works on skiutah.com blog as part of a school project. Very cool stuff. While browsing the blog, I saw this truly gorgeous ski photograph by Grant Gunderson.

Some really cool things I learned at PodCampSLC were:

• The Zoom H4 is a dynamic and superb little podcasting tool.
• The Sure SM58 is a common mic you can get for ~$100.
• The AT4050 is a great mic (three mics in one: cardiod, omni & figure 8) that retails for $999, but you can probably get it for around $550.
• The biggest problem with lower end video cameras is hum from the tape.
• Vegas is a really great professional podcast editor that also does video.
• VisualHub is great video editing software.
• I really like startcooking.com (mentioned by Doug from Podango).
• 50,000 downloads/month is not enough reach to attract sponsorships, 50k might be enough for niche advertisers.
• If it takes 1 hour to create a 13MB audio podcast, it probably will take 10 hours to create a 50MB video podcast.
• Blogging is a great search engine tool. (I knew that one!)
• The best mic situation for a group setting (i.e. users group meeting) is a Zoom H4 type device to record the speaker plus two table top mics for questions from the audience.

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PodCampSLC 2008
Learn, Share, Evolve.

Bloggers, podcasters, videocasters of all skill levels will come together on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 to mix, mingle, and enlighten the Utah community about podcasting. PodCampSLC is a free event open to the public. Tracks include Podcasting 101 and Advanced Podcasting. Registration/networking for this free event begins at 9:00 am. Event is from 10am to 4pm. Please come, learn and share.
http://podcamp.pbwiki.com/PodCampSLCSessions

Sign Up for PodCampSLC at Upcoming.org
Saturday, March 15, 2008
10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Registration/networking begins at 9am
Neumont University
10701 S River Front Parkway, Suite 300, South Jordan, UT 84095
GPS Point: 40.5585 N 111.9104 W

It was extraordinarily cool to meet WordPress creator and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg at a Utah WordPress Meetup on Saturday, February 2, 2008. Matt is an all around nice guy who is unassuming and very laid back. Despite his reserved nature, I think he has a million ideas in his head at any given moment. His ability to really listen to and get to know people was evident as he mentioned about a thousand past conversations he’d had with many people I know of (and many I didn’t). At 24 years old, he’s only created one of the most-loved blogging platforms ever (WordPress), built one of the coolest companies on the planet (Automattic), raised millions in venture capital, and managed to put together a phenomenal team dedicated (pure and simple) to developing free and open source web software for all.

A media darling with serious geek appeal, Automattic quite expectedly makes my list of most-favorite-companies-in-the-world because they manage to combine extraordinary developer talent with a business model built around open source all the while maintaining blog, anti-spam, identity, wikis, forum software, and more via a world-wide spread of developer locations from Australia to Bulgaria. Talk about breaking the barriers of a normally prohibitive job market demographic… don’t let geography get in the way of hiring the most talented developers! I would love to hear more about Matt’s thoughts on his process for hiring such an amazing team. The Automattic outfit completely fascinates me.

Special thanks to Joseph Scott, Automattic’s brilliant “Bug Exorcist,” for organizing the lunch.

I am officially a Web Directions North affiliate. What a fantastic resource! If you’re a web developer and you haven’t heard of Web Directions… you have GOT to check it out.

Web Directions North | February 6 - 10, 2007

An Aussie creation that spans the globe, Web Directions is a mecca of veritable web talent brought to you by Dave Shea, Derek Featherstone, Maxine Sherrin, John Allsopp and including speakers like Kelly Goto, Andy Clarke, Adrian Holovaty, Douglas Bowman, Dan Cederholm, Joe Clark, Molly Holzschlag, Derek Featherstone, Veerle Pieters, Jeremy Keith, and others.

Workshops will cover Ajax and Javascript, CSS, Microformats, mashups, standards based web design and development, accessibility, web app development, XHTML and HTML and more. Top that off with two optional days of skiing and boarding at Whistler, and Web Directions North is 2007’s web design and development event not to be missed.