I’m going to the first quarterly Blogger Blood Drive today. If you’re in the SLC or Utah County area, I hope you’ll join me. If not, I hope you’ll consider starting one in your own area for next quarter.
See the Serenity Foundation National Bloggers Blood Drive page for more general info.
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I’ve blogged before about why I think America is in trouble. A Ron Paul presidency would have gone along way toward fixing some of those problem (or at least prevent them from worsening), so I was sad to see that he clearly wasn’t going to win. I’m amazed, however, how his candidacy brought these important issues to the forefront, and I was pleased to see loads of passionate people mobilize around his message of liberty.
As Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign officially came to a close, I was enthused to see his longer-term Campaign for Liberty initiative replace it. It had upwards of 50,000 people sign up over the weekend, but membership growth has slowed somewhat since then. Regardless, I’m glad to see a this more permanent fixture of liberty come into place; and I hope that it will be effective in promoting the principles of liberty, sound money, limited government, free markets, and non-interventionalism for years to come.
I think we have a long way to go, but I’m relieved to see people still rallying around this excellent cause. I hope you’ll join us to help make America a safer place for liberty, prosperity, and peace.
I don’t really consider myself an inventor per se, but I was impressed by the Utah Inventors‘ inaugural meeting I mentioned earlier and have been wanting to report on it ever since.
The presenters (including Dr. Dinesh Patel) were stellar, and the meeting was well attended (especially for a first go); but I was surprised at the lack of Utah business presence. There were numerous inventors, IP lawyers, and representatives from local not-for-profits; but I didn’t really see anyone from the entrepreneurial, marketing, or finance communities –the very people these inventors need to take good ideas (or good products) and make them into good companies.
Anyway, it was obvious that Vaughn North and crew have put a lot of work into getting Utah Inventors off the ground, and I think they’re going to make it work. They have a solid (although small) management team, a reputable Board of Advisors, and they fill a niche that I’m convinced is important for Utah industry. They won’t be able to do alone though; UtahInventor also needs (and has specifically requested) active participation from motivated volunteers if they’re to become a long-term force for good in Utah economy. I hope that some of you will step up to the challenge. Working with inventors is a little like herding cats (everyone’s got a better way to do everything) but I think they’re a good bunch, and I’m certain that there will be legitimate business opportunities for anyone who cares to get involved.
I apologize that I haven’t posted in a while; I’ve been pretty busy with a number of things: my day job as website manager at Overstock, a lot of website contracting and consulting work in the evenings, my usual slew of volunteer projects, and most recently (and notably) setting up the new version of ConnectBlogs –which is not live yet, but should be very soon.
ConnectBlogs will be moving to more of a syndication model, which I believe is more in line with what the Utah blogging community (myself particularly) expected. So in addition to the current “resident writers”, the upcoming version of ConnectBlogs will encourage Utah bloggers to post on their own blogs and have their content aggregated based on how they tag (or categorize) it. ConnectBlogs will be an ad-free gesture to the Utah business and tech communities. We’ll get your content in front of a lot of people, and we’ll also provide plenty of backlinks.
So if you’re a Utah business or technology blogger and would like be included in ConnectBlogs, drop me a line with your name, URL, and feed URL (if you know it). There are some basic (and yet unpublished) rules on what and who can be syndicated, but I think most people who read this will qualify.
Janet Meiners posted about an upcoming Wasach Online Marketing Association (WOMA) meeting with CJ (Commission Junction). It sounds like WOMA does some really fun stuff, but for being all about internet marketing, I’m surprised that it has basically no internet presence at all. Month after month I’ve been waiting for a WOMA website to appear, but alas, nothing. If it weren’t for Janet constantly keeping us clued in, I would never have heard of WOMA. That’s bad, considering that I’m probably its target audience incarnate.
WOMA, let me help you set up a simple blog site to give some credibility to the fun & interesting things you do. It makes no sense at all not to have one, especially for you. I’m sincere about being willing to help because I love Internet Marketing and really think Utah can benefit from a group like this; but nobody will be benfited if nobody knows you exist. Please setup a website so Utah can know what’s going on. If you want help, there’s a contact me section on my blog; I could have it up for you in 15 minutes if you give the URL.
Tags: Commission Junction, Internet, Janet Meiners, Online Marketing, Volunteerism, Wasatch Online Marketing Association, Websites, WOMA
Business, Technology, Utah | Jordy | 
October 24, 2006 2:02 am | 
Comments (3)
I’m a co-founder and trustee of UVLUG, a local Linux User Group that will be holding elections soon. If you’re a UVSC student or are a member of the local Linux community here in Utah, you really should read this announcement and consider helping out. LUG leadership has been a great opportunity for me. I’ve learned a lot, met a lot of great people, and I feel like I’m a part of something cool. So can you!
On a related note, Utah Valley’s Inter-Lug BBQ 2006 is this Saturday. Be there or go hungry!
A few days ago, Dave posted about Software for Starving Students on Digg, and the downloads started coming immediately. With well over 20,000 downloads the last time I checked (a couple of days ago), the project has become a major success. We’ve transferred over 11 terabytes of data and our seeders have held up fine, although a lot of that was done through xmission and other generous mirrors. We also learned a valuable lesson: to turn off wiki and other high computation areas of our site beforehand next time.
We’ve had about 10 people volunteer to be distributor liaisons in schools all over, as well as several interested in helping with translation and distribution for versions in Italy and Cambodia. It’s incredible how small the world has become because of the flattening force of internet. It’s amazing that a few volunteers can work on a little project and have it distributed all over the world, instantly. And that’s one of the reasons that open source is thriving: it leverages free labor from skilled workers distributed all over the world, then redistributes contributions almost instantaneously around the globe. I have a lot to say about the dynamics of open source but will do that later. I’m just glad to see the SSS have seen such tremendous success. After many late nights, it’s rewarding to see our efforts pay off, and it feels good to give a little back to the open source community after so many years of quality mooching.
Tags: Dave Turnbull, Digg, Internet, Online Marketing, Open Source, Software, Software for Starving Students, SSS, Volunteerism, Web Traffic, Xmission
Not For Profits, Technology, Utah | Jordy | January 7, 2006 2:54 pm | Comments (0)
