Brevard county now has its own FloridaCreatives.com group, thanks to the initiative taken by Lawrence. We even have a logo that doesn't look like the second life logo (hah, couldn't resist Ryan.)

The group is up to 16 members right now on the wiki, and discussion is getting started on the when's and where's of getting a happy hour going. It's looking like a healthy group coming together over here on the coast.

So who is it for? What's it about? The Florida Creative meet ups have really been about bringing together people from various sides of the creative field under one roof. Get together for a drink or three and meet some interesting folks. If you're in marketing, design, theater, music, web design, programming, whatever. It's a great way to meet fun/like minded people in the area.

Check it out.

Since I came back to Orlando from DC, it's been obvious to me that there is a growing tech scene here in town. It's always been here, but for whatever reason things started mobilizing and coming together over the last couple of years.

Barcamp, refresh, coworking, florida creatives, happy hours, meetup.com groups, whatever -- all of these smaller communities have flourished and formed vibrant "sub-communities" within the larger scene. One of the conversations that inevitably always comes up is the need for an association -- a non-profit organization that exists outside of various social cliques and can bring together interactive professionals in the central florida region.

A handful of people have come together to make this happen, and it looks like a great foundation is being laid. It's still in its early stages, but thanks to some folks at Izea and people like Mark Kruprinski, there's is already a great community coming together around the concept.

If you work in the tech field -- whether its coding, design, marketing, whatever -- and live in the Central Florida region, then you really should create an account on Doterati.com. When you do, make sure to add me as a friend! Here is my profile page with cutesy wedding photo.

UPDATE: So, I sent out a bunch of invites to some friends for Doterati, and I'm already getting emails back saying they won't sign up because it says it's a "Ted Murphy" project on the bottom of every page. I totally missed that, and agree that it's completely lame. That's not how the site/concept was pitched to me though, and I'd suspect its more relating to the actual website aspects of it all (I hope). If it's another orlando-local-builds-an-ego-project, it probably won't last. My impression though, is that this is intended to be above all that. I guess we'll find out ;)
UPDATE 2: I've been told that whoever creates the Ning group gets their name on the bottom like that. Probably should have had somebody who's not blogosphere public enemy #1 create the group. Ted's a nice guy, but man.. I'm getting hit with messages from people who've never even met the guy that are brutal. Yikes.
UPDATE 3: Lawrence Salberg wrote a post re. Doterati that sounds an awful lot like some of the stuff people were telling me. It's worth taking a look at if you are in the doterati community and want to know the types of things its up against. He doesn't have to be right, as it's an impression that seems to be shared by some folks.

Johannes Grenzfurthner from MonoChrom (or maybe Boing Boing would be a better reference for some of you..) will be talking/presenting on some of their recent projects at Red Light Red Light tonight out in Winter Park.

Johannes is based out of Vienna, Austria and here on vacation. It'll be a rare opportunity to see some pretty neat artsy/tech projects right in our own backyard. He joined us for Florida Creatives last night and is a really enjoyable guy.

If nothing else, Red Light Red Light is a great beer joint ;)

8pm tonight, above Dexter's in Winter Park.

Yep.

See you there ;)

MacBook Air

I remember when Apple killed the floppy drive, and thinking they were out of their minds. Then there's the infamous Slashdot reaction to the iPod. Now they're releasing a laptop without a cd drive, no ethernet and only one usb.

This time though, I think I'll reserve judgment knowing that Apple tends to have a knack for this sort of thing.

Thinking of my own laptop usage, I almost *never* use a cd or a dvd, I'm almost never plugged in to my network, and I'm only rarely using more than one USB and it's generally when I'm doing something I normally wouldn't be doing (backing up to an external drive or something).

The MacBook Air is a damn sexy device. It's absolutely perfect for the vast majority of my traveling and I'd say a large portion of home use. I need wireless internet, a terminal, a headphone jack and streaming radio. Give me this in an ultra-light carry on package and I'm good to go where ever work needs me.

The big problem is the price tag. $1800? Yikes. $1250 and this thing would be taking over every coffee shop in the country. Apple tends to not adjust price much but ya never know. For 1800 bones I'd pick up a full on MacBook instead.

Time Capsule

I just bought a 500gig external hard drive on Sunday. Is this thing a full out NAS, or is it just a back up device? If it's a NAS, I think I'll be taking back the drive I bought and pre-ordering Time Capsule. Wireless N, Wireless printing, and plug-n-play hard drive action. Perfect.

Apple TV

Finally looks attractive/useful to me. Sure would make a dandy birthday present..... (ahem)

iPhone Update

Locate me is hot. If we would have had this in Memphis, it would have been hella useful. Customizing the home screen? Eh. It'll be useful when Apps start coming out in February. I just want access to the SDK so I can try and find time to play. I wonder if iPhones have X-Grid built in like the rest of the OS/X family? :) I don't know why that seems intriguing, but distributed computing taken to a mobile level seems like it'd be.. well.. pretty frigging awesome.

It's funny. As technologists, we're supposed to be privacy nuts. That's part of our stereotype, our schtick. We know just how vulnerable our personal data is and it scares the bejesus out of us.

But our actions certainly don't back that up. At least, not mine. I use the latest websites in my daily routine, I blog, I use twitter, flickr and just about everything else publicly. I stopped creating accounts under aliases and prefer to speak openly as "Alex Rudloff" most every where online. My reasons are fairly straight forward (anonymity brings out the worst in people), but yet there's a certain element of creepiness associated to things like facebook's beacon. I don't blog about specifics when it comes to business or work encounters or what I've been searching for on Google or buying on Amazon. Not only is it often in poor taste, in this day of profiling, I guess it's just the notion that there are certain history books best bought with cash, ya know? Privacy has become this strange, mixed up concept. We're really sensitive in some ways, but completely not in others.

I started thinking recently about the amount of data I've given about my life and my habits. I think the tides started to turn with Google making larger and larger headway into our lives. GMail was the specific catalyst, but only because its the most obvious privacy related thing. Long before GMail, Google could track our every move on the web via search and AdSense widgets on what seems like a majority of sites.

We expect things on the web to be free. At the same time, we know that very little in the world is actually free, it's just monetarily free. A web company's goal is to create something that is so valuable to you that you are willing to overlook certain questionable things, like scanning emails for relevant ads (initially seen as super creepy). I checked out GMail though, and decided that I really liked it. The ads became less important. In fact, they almost became kind of neat. Gavin and I will bounce company ideas off each other via e-mail sometimes, and on more than one occasional, Google has displayed an advertisement for a company doing the same thing that we didn't know existed. Lazy man's research.

Ultimately, I've traded an element of my privacy in exchange for a service that I find great worth in. It's not a free service, I'm just not paying for it with my wallet. My privacy is the currency.

Facebook has increasingly shown an unwillingness to put user concerns first in their thinking. They'll release something incredibly invasive and then apologize when their community freaks out. We all know how that works, the whole "it's better to apologize than ask permission" thing. All Zuck has to do is smile pretty, apologize, and scale the feature back a tiny little bit and people calm down and move on. It happened with news feed, it's happening with beacon -- but those are just the two things people noticed. What else is facebook doing with our data? Should we care, or is facebook worth the cost?

Beacon had me so freaked out that I walked through what would happen if I simply removed my account (my natural, gut reaction). The fact is, I'd lose contact with a lot of people instantly. There's no easy way for me to take my data out and apply it somewhere else. There is no friend export and there isn't anywhere suitable for me to go. I'm paying the currency because I find worth in facebook the same way I find worth in my cable company. I want the cable, I just don't want it from them. Unfortunately, I have little choice (for now).

How many people who signed up for Mint.com, a site where you add all of your financial accounts in exchange for advice on how/where to save money, are still finding value in it? Would anyone feel comfortable letting others (say, a social community) see their search terms if it meant a better search experience? Or do we just trust google with that information?

I guess the question is, at what point does something cost too much when it comes to privacy? Who are we comfortable paying with privacy, and what level of trust defines that?

I'm not sure what my answers are yet, but I'm curious to hear other folks' thoughts.

Wow. Jason Hawkins is super duper talented, and this video totally captures the complete awesomeness of the event. Well done again to everyone involved in organizing this thing (esp. gregg / larry ). Fired up already for the next one!

So.. At our lunch get together last week, we tried to come up with a name for the "event". Something we could refer to it as and repeat in the future.. Afterwards, Dan came up with "lunch_fu". Immediately, it made me think of an ass kicking sandwich.

A quick e-mail to Alex Hillman in philly, who has a friend with an art class, and a student named Alfonso Callejas. Next thing you know, we have a sketch of a sandwich that kicks some serious ass. Judson comes to the rescue and provides the colorization, and well..

We now have an official lunch_fu superhero. Created by members of the internet, for the internet, to save the internet from hunger pains. After all, low blood sugar is our biggest threat. Man.. This just brings a tear to my eye..


Now, the next step. This new crime fighting lunch superhero needs a name.

Suggestions?

I noticed a post on Jeremy Harrington's blog about an event up in Ann Arbor, Michigan called "ArbCamp". It's a commercialized, sponsor driven variation "loosely modeled after barcamp."

Loosely modeled so long as you mean, you know, not frigging at all.

BarCamp isn't about writing on walls or deciding agenda's on the fly. That's an unconference (or, as the blog* format might suggest, a variation of one). BarCamp is about taking shared values, those commonly found in the open source community, and applying it to the unconference setup. BarCamp's an open source, user generated, conference. If someone isn't going to buy into the values that BarCamp establishes, then they're not throwing an event loosely based on barcamp. They're throwing just another unconference.

In this particular case, the event organizers (a marketing company, go f'n figure) are suggesting that its loosely based on the barcamp model, but yet they're selling $2,000 sponsorships that come with dedicated speaking time and charging $65 for "full day admission." This is, quite blatantly, a commercial rip off of whats intended to be a free event model. They're taking advantage of the incredible amount of hard work folks from the community have put into creating the barcamp brand, repackaging it, aligning themselves with the brand by suggesting they have something in common with it, and then selling it for their own purposes.

Loosely based on barcamp? Psh. It's the conference equivalent of a gpl violation.

People are free to do what they will. If someone wants to start a conference and make some coin, then hey, whatever. It's just a shame to see someone blatantly take advantage of the barcamp brand like that. If you're considering attending this event, then recognize it for what it is and attend it as such: An overpriced rip-off of the real thing. You'll be forced to listen to whoever paid the most money as they try to pitch you crappy products and services instead of listening to people engage in quality discussion over topics that they're passionate about.

Seriously. If you're going to spend $65 on this event, you're better off doubling up and buying a plane ticket to attend a genuine barcamp.

Congrats to Ashley Burns for being selected as Best Local Blogger over at the Orlando Sentinel!

For those of you who don't know Ashley, he used to be the editor over at UCF Future. Even when I moved away from Orlando for a couple years, I'd read his sports column religiously. It was in the midst of our 0 and forever streak, so it wasn't always kind, but it was always funny as hell, rather truthful, and thoroughly enjoyable. I think he's writing for Axis now occasionally, but I'm not sure.

Anyhow, he has a blog called "Blumpkins for All," and was named best local blogger by the Orlando Sentinel (who shamefully didn't print the name of the blog ;). Ashley's site is generally a brash, offensive stream of lunacy and youtube links that's probably only outdone by his myspace blog. It has traces of the humor you'll remember from the UCF Future days, only completely unhinged. When it's all said and done, it's that level of authenticity that blogging is about and what makes his site stick out from the noise.

"My blog is every thought that crosses my mind regarding sports, pop culture, politics and especially Orlando - completely unedited and uncensored. Everything is 100% original and I apologize for nothing."

Heck yeah. If you haven't subscribed to Ashley's blog, and you aren't easily offended, go check it out.

His win is even more important than it may appear though. The two other finalists were a local radio station and a Sentinel columnist. Turns out, Burnsy (as most folks probably call him) wasn't just rep'n his love for Blumpkins. He was representing the "actual bloggers" category of the contest.

Scott Maxwell is a great columnist, and his Sentinel blog is of similar quality, it just seems rather strange to have a msm journalist who works for the paper be nominated. Heck, if any Sentinel blogger should be nominated, it should be Dave "Get off my lawn!" Ballentine for his outstanding, truthful coverage of the downtown area. I hate those damn birds next to Lake Eola too, Dave.

There are a ton of great bloggers in the area. Lots of folks from Weblogs, Inc, one our blogsmith networks, blog professionally from the region . Then there are local community folks like Josh Hallett, Ryan Price, Mark Baratelli, John Rife -- heck, John Rife took an RV and drove around North America for three months video taping small towns and attractions for FindingAmerica.tv. How about John Frost and the Disney Blog? Erik Hersman's new Roofable or even WhiteAfrican? The guy spoke at TED for crying out loud. And if we're talking orlando blogging, there are a slew of hyperlocal, orlando only, blogs with folks like East Orlando Life, The Other Orlando, and Living Orlando (which is awesome).

Hopefully by next year, we can see a number of the great writers in the area start to be recognized for their efforts. I'm really glad that Burnsy won, as it would have spoken volumes if someone from the MSM won the category instead. "Orlando Sentinel's best local blogger is... ourselves! yay!"

Wow. What a great event. Gregg, Jason, and everyone else (update: larry!) who put in the time and effort to pull this thing off -- massive props.

Taste was packed. Not just packed, but standing room only packed, but in a not all that uncomfortable way. The presentations were of great quality and entertaining. There is a massive amount of talent around here, and it's a true joy to see everyone come out of the woodwork for something like this. Can't wait for the next one.

I gave a brief presentation on coworking, or as Chris Scott suggested, "cow orking", which I used for the title (and it still makes me giggle -- thanks chris!) It was sort of a local-centric warm up for Friday's blogOrlando local session track. I tried to show the co-working video with Brad/Chris/Tara talking it up, but couldn't get sound working (thats what I get for trying to be fancy). For those interested, here's a link to a Florida Creatives post with the embed of the video. Also, here is the direct link to the Coworking-Orlando google group.

Suggestions for future barcamps:

• Probably going to need a bigger venue ;) More space for side chats would be nice. Side room worked well, but there were a lot of us.
• More interactive presentations, less talk-at-you presentations. It's barcamp. Joke around, interact, ask questions of the speakers and from the audience. Heckle. If I had any complaint, it'd probably be that. I can only take so much powerpoint.
  
• Might want to break up the lightning talks/full on presentations and intermix them. Change the pace around to keep people active.

Overall though, a very successful first barcamp.

But wait, there's more! The week is not done yet.

Registration ends Monday at 10pm for blogOrlando. A bunch of great speakers from all over the country are coming here this week for an unconference Friday at Rollins College. It'll be a great time. I'll be leading a session on the local scene. Things I plan on discussing -- likemind, Florida Creatives, coworking, user groups, barcamp, local tech startups, community building/expanding, general Orlando/Central Florida/Middle Florida discussion. My buddy Alex Hillman will by flying down, which gives us a great opportunity to ask coworking related questions. I'd love it if you could join us :)

12:30pm out at Taste. Bring a couple cans of food for donation :)

In 2006, Orlando Business Journal listed UCF as a larger area employer than Lockheed Martin. The school is home to 46,000 residents, the majority of them under the age of 23 (largest undergraduate population in FL) Each year, the school pumps out thousands of educated professionals into the local economy.

In a town not known for much outside of tourism, UCF's growth is helping to diversify our economy. The addition of a medical research facility has the potential to radically affect the area. Investments into digital media by Orlando and UCF stand to further Orlando's technology sector. UCF's aggressive push to build state of the art facilities are already attracting major acts that would otherwise find themselves in Tampa. UCF has very quickly become a key ingredient to our booming economic and cultural development.

On Saturday, Orlando's newest venue opens up with a football game against the Texas Longhorns. While UCF has been playing ball in the Citrus Bowl, the move to an on campus stadium will bring a true sense of college football to Orlando for the first time. Affordable family entertainment against a nationally ranked team in a safe, clean environment. It's not just a win for UCF, it's a win for the city.

If you're an Orlando resident, there are numerous reasons to be excited about the developments going on over in East Orlando. Imagine if someone gave you the chance to design your very own university, what kind of campus would you build? Now drive out to UCF and take a look around, because that's exactly what's going down. A modern, clean, advanced college atmosphere.

With all that being said...

It surprises me how many folks look for reasons to talk down UCF, and it seems to almost always be UF alumni doing it. For years, Orlando has been a gator town. Gainesville is only about an hour out of Orlando, and UF is the big name public university. I'm just not sure if I see the threat, the comparison, or the need for college affiliations of a local region to be so exclusive. It comes across as nothing more than defensive.

My claim may seem anecdotal, but when you consider Facility Senate member Kathleen Price voted against (successfully) awarding Gov. Jeb Bush with an honorary degree because he approved funds for other state schools to have medical facilities (that is, UCF), or when Orlando Sentinel reporter Jeremy Fowler, who rumor has it is a UF graduate, needlessly bashes the home town team the week of the stadium opening, you have to wonder what their deal is (or, in the later case, if the Sentinel's traffic is truly that bad. Hope the link helps...;). Who, exactly, benefits from bashing and attacking the efforts of UCF to enter the "big time", when the city of Orlando gains so much from them doing so?

I often find myself preaching the Orlando gospel to folks outside of the area. It helps to find cities to compare us to, usually a more club-centric (ugh) version of Austin (in terms of size and tech. sector revenue), or a less sprawling version of Atlanta seem to fit (Charlotte and Atlanta are the only two southern-style cities that have a decent tech presence that come to mind for me).

Atlanta seems to be a fitting situation, and works perfectly in context to this post. UGA, Georgia's name brand university, is located in Athens about an hour out of town. Ga. Tech, an engineering school, is located inside the city. Add in George O'Leary and UCF's uniforms and I think we have a viable comparison. UCF is to Ga. Tech as UF is to UGA.

Maybe USF/UCF is not the budding state rivalry we all thought it was after all... ;) 20 years from now, FSU will be rebuilding after Bowden fires his grand children (even if he should pass, Bowden will still be coaching FSU from the other side), USF and Miami will be fighting over the definition of South Florida and UCF/UF will be engaged in a full out turf war. When it happens, remember that you heard it here first. God knows what the Sentinel's slant will be ;)

Josh posted the session schedule on the blogOrlando site yesterday. I'll be presenting on the local Orlando scene. My thought is to basically extend the "Why Orlando" portion of my venture post (that was in response to John's announcement). From there, talk a little bit about who's here (companies, user groups, various meetups), mix in some local initiatives (a little co-working pitch never killed anyone.. ;), and hopefully a whole lot of great conversation.

I'm told my buddy Alex Hillman gave a similar talk up at blogPhilly, so I'm sure I'll bounce things off of him.. Any thoughts from my fellow yolcals though?

Oh, and Emurse is now a blogOrlando sponsor. w00t.

A couple posts ago, I reiterated the cliche that ideas are a dime a dozen. There's more to that statement than simply "there are a lot of ideas," which is true, of course. There is also the fact that whatever idea you've had, there is a huge chance that someone else has had similar thoughts already. Ideas, themselves, are rarely 100% unique (hence the importance of implementation, execution, survival and luck.)

That's probably something to do with how we all arrive at our creative conclusions. We see different factors in play across whatever industry we're a part of and we start connecting the dots with other things that we already know. Certain things online really are kind of formulaic anyhow. Search, video, content, dating, social networking, music, classifieds -- these are all features that define an idea as "sexy" (which is largely influenced by previous success more so than interest level, I'd imagine) If some new technology comes along that makes it easier and cheaper to produce any combination of those winnable ideas, you can expect a flurry of activity in that space. The chance of a million twitter clones intensifies (okay, okay... poor example).

Part of being an entrepreneur is the emotional capacity to withstand the defeat of seeing "your" idea being developed by someone else. At least, I tell myself that, because it seems to keep happening to us ;) It seems to be a pretty relateable concept though, as almost everyone with an entrepreneurial spirit has some sort of story about the one that got away. The folks with the home runs are often the ones who swung the bat the most (BTW, Cliches are cliche for a reason. Because they kick ass.) So what's the best way to counteract it?

My thought is that you have to be able to move fast. You need the resources to take action right away. The key resource being talent. There doesn't seem to be much time available these days for learning curves. In our latest case (which I won't go into detail over, doesn't seem cool to the team that pulled it off), there was a ton of ramp up time and the fact that we have pretty active day jobs. A bad combination. We could have outsourced everything, but.. What's the learning curve like on Hindi? I say that in jest, but it's not hard to guess what the pitfalls of outsourcing may have been.

The good news is that we added a new skill set to our tool belt. The world's a better place because someone pulled the idea off. It's comfortable to know that our head is still in the right place (well, Gavin's at least. I wasn't the most passionate about it). There are other directions we can take the prototype in anyhow, and well, Emurse is kicking serious ass lately regardless ;) All in all, it ain't no thing.

If you're working on an idea that isn't first to market, and you get the wind knocked out of you by whoever is, don't let it slow you down. Analyze the situation, decide if it makes sense to compete, and if not, move to the next idea. After all, they're a dime a dozen, right? ;)