Portland Social Media

Flex your GUI muscle in the new year

pdxphp will be hosting a talk given by Pete Makie on “Using Adobe Flex 2 to Provide a Rich Client Experience”
Date: Jan 2nd, 2007

Time: 6pm

Place: Freegeek

More Details: pdxphp.org

This should be quite an informative talk. Actually no PHP knowledge is needed to use Flex, all who come should benefit. Thanks to EdgeLink for the Pizza sponsorship and to Adobe for providing SWAG which will be raffled of during the meet.

Using Global Media

There’s a great blog over at Urbanhonking (more on them later) titled Using Global Media. The blog is an addition to a class, of the same name, run by Matthew Stadler - a novelist and co-founder of clear cut press; among other things.

Using Global Media is self-described as:

…for writers, artists, and activists who want to reach (or help create) communities near and far, this workshop provides tools for using interpersonal, material, and digital media globally.

It is a ten-week workshop that meets one evening per week in Portland; the current session is in full-swing, but the next session begins in late January, 2007. The workshop is full of writers, artists and activist (as described above) but they also spend they sessions engrossed in and in the discussion of technology. The workshop’s Digital Media topics include:

creating a web presence, web masquerades (making companies, institutions, and others on the web), creating and maintaining interactive web communities, finding and linking to fellow travelers,and minimal interventions — how to make sites that others activate.

I know there are people in the Social Media group that are passionate about the power of decentralized communications and of activism, so I thought this blog and workshop is a great resource for those interested. I’ll give you a slight glimpse into a discussion that took place at Workshop #7 regarding (in my summation) the idea of Blogs vs. The Culture Industry:

Marcus drew our attention to aspects of the culture industry that might now be undermined by peer-to-peer, user-made cultural work. Adorno and Horkheimer describe “few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points,” a circumstance that is changed today. Marcus passed out statistics showing 26.6 million blogs on a growth curve turning exponentially upward. Philip, playing devil’s advocate, wondered aloud if anyone reads these blogs.

Lastly, to tidy things up, Mike Merrill of Urbanhonking was the guest of the latest Workshop, where the group discussed the online, social group blog, Urbanhonking, money and more Adorno and Horkheimer. Urbanhonking is a collective of people (50!) that blog, video blog and give life to many different, vast conversations about life, music, Portland and much more. Their Ultimate Blogger competitions were an excellent practice of social media and pop culture mixed together; their hilarious weekly videos reached people all over the world, and their love and equal-parts satire of reality television brought a crowd searching for originality and authenticity. So there are two communications for you to check out on your Monday afternoons.