(jeff)isageek.net

There is a HUGE event coming to the Kansas City area Wednesday October 29th in Kansas City, MO. called Highlight Midwest. What exactly is Highlight Midwest you ask?

Highlight Midwest showcases the entrepreneurs, innovators, and early-adopters using web technology to grow their businesses, advance their careers, and enrich the regional economy in new ways.

Three of the area’s up and coming social media strategists will present an overview on how the web is changing their cities for the better and how new opportunities for innovation are expanding the importance of web-based technology in the Midwest.

Focused highlights: 9:00am - 4:00pm at the Record Bar Some of the region’s finest entrepreneurs, technologists, social media experts, and new media success stories presenting.

I am really excited for this event as it is a great way to find out some of the great projects going on in our area, meet some of the people behind those projects, network, and overall just meet others that have similar likes and interests in the tech community.

Talking to some of the organizers of the event they are wanting to get some social media exposure at the event as well so if you are interested in maybe talking about a project you have in the works or just wanna talk about the social media landscape here in the midwest or all over definately feel free to contact the gang over at the Highlight Midwest site.

For me events like this are just great ways to mingle and learn about different aspects in our area from develpment types, social media types, and pretty much hanging with the geeks from around the midwest. I will say it is looking like I will probably be doing some video stuff for the event, live blogging/twittering, and of course geeking out hehe.

I hope everyone is able to attend and by all means lets get some great discussions going while we are there about new technologies, new services you are really into, the emerging mobile web, social media topics, ect. the ideas are endless and stuff like that will just enhance the event.

Below is a little information on the event to give you an idea of what is going on at this time. I hear there is more and more stuff being added as planning continues upto the 29th.

Reasons for having Hightlight Midwest

* To highlight the best and the brightest web-related success stories in the Midwest
* To connect nearby communities
* To demonstrate local innovation in a rapidly changing economic landscape

Focused highlights include (more to be added soon)

The region’s [Kansas City, Omaha, and Des Moines] finest entrepreneurs, technologists, social media experts, and new media success stories.

* Fresh Ideas, Sharp Angles, Zachary Cobb
* Infegy’s Social Radar, Adam Coomes
* Leveraging Amazon’s FPS, Jon Crawford
* A Better City Web Site, Dusty Davidson
* Myriad Tech for the Enterprise, Ryan Flannagan
* Sustainable Giving through Real Estate, Joe Frost
* The Formulator’s Search Engine, Bruce Ianni
* Comics on Rails, Scott Kahler
* Introducing Urbata, Dan Melton
* Humanoid Robotic Demonstration, Mike Overstreet
* Bringing a Japanese Phenomenon West, Elissa Rose
* Sojern Demonstration, Matt Secoske
* Scalability from the Start, Matt Secoske
* Tiovivo, Pete Thomas

Where can I check out all these great presentations and network with everyone?

** Reception: 5pm-8pm
Kauffman Conference Center
dinner and cocktails provided

4801 Rockhill Rd
Kansas City, MO 64110

Get Directions
(816) 932-1000

[View Map]

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** Focused Highlights: 9am-4pm
lunch provided

The Record Bar

1020 Westport Rd
Kansas City, MO 64111

Get Directions
(816) 753-5207

[View Map]

Updates on Highlight Midwest on the Interweb

Blog
Twitter

REGISTER : Make sure you register for both events to ensure you have a seat available

So do you plan to attend? Maybe you are doing a presentation or discussion? Let me know your thoughts on the event or what you might like to see added. Comment away and see you there!

If you are a FriendFeed addict like me you hate to ever leave the site as it has become the hub for my interweb connection.   But what if you need to go to sites like Brightkite, Seesmic, Diigo, ect?  You gotta leave FriendFeed for that right?  NO!!!

I just found a new greasemonkey script called FFWorkSpace that puts 26 preset favicons at the top of your FriendFeed page so that you can access the services right in FF.  Now you never have to leave!!! hehe

Comes with the following presets:

Communication
BrightKite, Gmail, Greader, Hellotxt, Identi.Ca, Jaiku, Ping.Fm, Plurk Mobile, Pownce, Twitter

Social Sharing
Buzz, Del.icio.us, Digg, Diigo, Mixx, Propeller, Reddit, StumbleUpon

Social Media
Disqus, Facebook, Last.Fm, MySpace, Seesmic, Veoh, Vimeo, YouTube

note : developed to make icons visible on most 1024px or wider monitors.

Its that time again…time for another blogger meetup in the kc area.  I have been wanting to go to one of these but have had to miss them for various reasons.

This month though I will make sure I get there!!!!  I have never been to the blogger meetup but have met a few people at other meetups and look forward to meeting some of the others who show up.

If you wanna join us here are the details (Wed Sept 24th @ 5pm)

112 Missouri Ave
Kansas City, MO 64106

(816) 421-3505

Come find us on the patio!

Current has announced that while the presidental debates are going on before the election our tweets from twitter will be streaming as Obama and McCain face off. They are calling it “Hack The Debate”.

Current is partnering with Twitter to give your feedback and voice a home — on TV as the various candidates debate. There will be four debates total, and we’ll be broadcasting them live on Current TV as well as live streaming them on Current.com.

The first debate is Sept 26th and the twitter stream during the debate will be on the channel itself as well as on current.com

I for one look forward to seeing how this little thing will work….will it be the greatest thing ever? probably not…but I think its a great way of using technology to let people share their voice…but with that said I am sure there will be some tweets that do not make the broadcast.

What are your thought on this idea? Let everyone know…lets discuss.

[story on Yahoo!]

For my birthday I decided to go with a Flip Mino as I would like something small, easy to use, and quick loading to record videos whenever I get the urge as well as maybe do a little video podcast or something from time to time.

Below I have the video of me unboxing the Mino

Here is the first video I took once I finished the unboxing

I also picked up a tripod that will help me for taking video’s that I want to be in as well.   Make sure you check out my Viddler page as that will be where most of my video’s will be stored.

Hey everyone I am having an issue.  I seem to be getting someone who is trying to setup multiple users on my wordpress blog each day.  They are just random letters so I am assuming it is a spammer or a bot.  Is there a way to shut off allowing people to setup an account?  Any help with the issue would be appreciated.

The gang recently got togather to record a new episode of The Social Geeks Podcast. In this episode we talked about Chrome, Toluu adding tags, TweetStats, Tweenky, and a few other things.

Joining in the roundtable we had IdoNotes, Corvida, Wayne Sutton, myself, Sarahintampa, and Louis Gray.

Listen Here - [episode 7 - TSG - The Ninja and Stranded at the Beach]

This weekend I grabbed me a new webcam to play around with and have started messing around with Seesmic a bit. Are you on there? Start following me. Not on there? Well then check it out and start following me hehe.

Seesmic basically is a video chat service where you can post a little video and then have other users respond to your video. Are you a disqus user? well you can use it to leave video comments or if you use friendfeed it works great with that service and embeds your videos to your stream.

pretty kool and a fun little service to play around with. One note it is in alpha so there are still bugs and enhancements to be made.

here is my little intro video I made for the service

jeffisageek’s video profile

see ya there!

That right kids Toluu announced today that tagging is now a feature for the feed discovery/sharing service.  I think this should take the service to the next level and allow users to find feeds for certain subjects they are looking for like “Apple”, “Tech”, “8-Bit”, ect.

Here are the juicy details:

*Tag Tab* On every feed page (the page with the blog post summaries) there is a new tab called ‘Tags’ . In this Tab, front and center, is a nice big text box to start entering a tag for the feed. Adding a tag is very quick with our use of ajax to power the system. You can also see all of the tags you have given the feed under ‘My Tags;. And below that, is a ‘Top Tags’ section, which shows the most popular tags for the feed based on how others in the Toluu universe have tagged the feed. When you are entering a tag, we see if you have tagged any other feeds and we suggest tags based on your past tagging behavior. This makes it faster to enter tags, and helps keep your feeds organized since you can make sure you use the same tag, technology instead of tech, for instance.

*Explore by Tag* If you click on a Tag you will see a list of feeds in the Toluu system that have the tag. You can also sort these feeds in a few different ways: Popularity, Recent, Subscribers, and A-Z. These new sort options are now available on ALL feed list views on the site as well! We heard from users that they wanted more ways to explore the various feed lists on the site; these new sort options help expose feeds of interest better than before.

*Instant Inline Tagging* Tagging is also available on all feed list pages. Logged in users will see a ‘+ Add Tag’ button when they mouse up or down the feed lists. Clicking the button instantly exposes an inline tagging interface. Users have access to the same Auto-Suggest functionality as available on the feed tag page and they can see their tags for the feed. This makes it super easy to go through and tag a large batch of feeds at once or add a tag to an interesting feed instantly.

*Feeds Tag Grouping* When browsing any user’s feeds, you will now have access to a brand new view, the tag grouping view. This allows you to, at a glance, see which tags that particular person uses the most, helping you understand what type of feeds they subscribe to. You can see if the user has a lot of ‘Art’ and ‘Photography’ feeds or maybe ‘Startup’ and ‘Web20′ feeds. This info makes it easier to discover interesting new feeds.

*Profile Top Tags* On every user profile there is a new section ‘Top Tags’. This new section will display the user’s 5 most used tags. This will help others understand the type of feeds the user subscribes to. It is also a quick way to access all of the tags the user has tagged their feeds with by clicking ‘Top Tags’.

Just wanted to say great job to Caleb and keep bring the fresh new features.