Portland Social Media

Twitter Updates for 2007-05-17

• PDX Social Media Group Wiki was just updated w/ this month’s event info: http://tinyurl.com/2fj8qm #

Etsy

I love the idea of Etsy. I love that it exists. The site was started by young entrepreneurs for artists and crafty people to sell their creations to others. Etsy started in 2005 and has since grown to over 250,000 members with 50,000 sellers and there are over 500,000 items for sale. Etsy isn’t an auction site, or a sleazy affliliate, internet marketing, sell-you-something website. Etsy only accepts handmade items that will be listed on your own store on the site. It’s very cool.

Etsy has a great relationship with their members and they hold a monthly Workshop. This site and community around it is a great example of passionate people sharing and selling what they love.

The video below is a short HOW-TO created by Etsy for others. Check it out, you can even download the template, print it out, and tag-up Portland with Etsy’s logo Oh I kid.

Register to Blog Here

One way to be more involved with the Portland Social Media Group is to become a resident blogger here.  There’s no crazy initiation ritual but there might be some light hazing - Mr. Ruby would be the point man for that

If you’re interested in writing about Social Media, broadly, or about social activism, the Internet, technology, the Media, social networking, etc. then please Register.  All you need is an email address.

If you have any problems, just leave a comment or email me.

Tuesday Night: “Problems and Solutions in Social Media Production”

For this month’s Portland Social Media meeting I (Marshall Kirkpatrick) have volunteered to be the host for the evening and have put together the following belatedly promoted plan.

Time and Place: Tuesday, May 22nd, 7 PM at Wieden and Kennedy, 224 NW 13th Ave (map).  We’d love it if you would RSVP. Feel free to pass this URL shortcut to this post to a friend: http://urltea.com/khs?pdxsocial. Email list sign-up for future sessions is here.

Theme: Problems and Solutions in Social Media Production

Agenda: A night of interviews with experienced social media producers about some problems they’ve solved in their media work and some problems they haven’t.  Each interview will be followed by a short group discussion, hopefully including ideas for solving the vexing issues brought up.  I hope that it will be a valuable, exciting night of knowledge sharing for everyone who attends.

Guests to be Interviewed:

Tim Germer, co-founder of the Portland Social Media group and the man behind the local music podcast Northwest Noise.  Tim is a high energy, lovable guy and long time local tech organizer.  He was, as I understand it, the primary force behind the Portland Podcasters’ Group - the predecessor to the Portland Social Media group.

Audrey Eschright, author of Dyepot, Teapot and co-editor of Yog’s Notebook.  Audrey is an active user of many new social media forms, a craftsperson, a sci-fi writer, a photographer and was one of the key people behind the recent Portland Bar Camp.  She is also a professional Ruby developer.

Renny Gleeson, Global Director of Digital Strategies at Wieden + Kennedy and author of Ouroboros.  Renny is a web savvy marketer at one of Portland’s leading marketing firms  (our gracious hosts) and he is a relatively recent East Coast transplant.

Hopefully (update: confirmed!) Benjamin Diggles, Sales and Web Director at local small business DB Clay and the mind behind EvilBackwards.com.

Finally, we may have a mystery guest come - though at this late date we’ll probably just have to think about other people to invite to future events.

Media:

Hopefully we’ll have both live and recorded video of the event.  If live streaming video happens we’ll set up a chat here on PortlandSocialMedia.com too so off-site viewers can participate in conversation.  We can archive recorded media in a handy SplashCast player (that’s my employer and a cool service) on a post on this site and anywhere else you’d like to share it. What other media would be good for such an event?  A twitter group?  Aggregating blog posts afterwords?  We’ll see how it goes.

I hope that the event will be fun and productive for everyone who attends - so feel free to pass this URL around (by shortcut: http://urltea.com/khs?pdxsocial ) to friends who might be interested in attending or (hopefully) watching the event on live video.  

Location:

If you attended last month’s event at Wieden + Kennedy, you probably remember that the acoustics in the room we used were less than ideal. Hopefully we’ll be in a better space this time.  Why W+K at all?  We really appreciate the company being gracious enough to host us and the people there have a strong professional interest in new forms of online media.  

If this is your first time checking out the Portland Social Media group, you might want to check out SocialMediaClub.org as well.  The Social Media Club is a very loose international association of people working on and interested in new, online social media.

I hope you’ll RSVP or just show up and join us on Tuesday for the event.

Update: Here’s a video below that I recorded to kick off the discussion before the event. I wrote about the tagging idea specifically on the SplashCast blog but haven’t been able to figure out how to keep this particular WordPress installation here on this site from stripping out a SplashCast player. So I just put it in YouTube.

Twitter Updates for 2007-05-15

• May’s Portland Social Media Workshop information; read if you’re planning on attending; http://tinyurl.com/2k2zg2 #