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PBS is holding many events at the 2009 SxSW Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. Visit the PBS area across the street from the convention center to meet with Public Broadcasting Service employees to see demonstrations of our latest tools and services, and help us brainstorm ideas for ways to make PBS more relevant.
Today I’ll be hanging out at the AMC Loew’s Georgetown theatre to watch all 5 Best Picture nominees, courtesy of AMC Theatres. Be sure to follow my Tweets throughout the day for information about the event, the films, and more!
Here are the films and times I’ll be in them:
- “Milk” – 10:30 a.m. – 12:38 p.m.
- “The Reader” – 1:05 p.m. – 3:07 p.m.
- “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” – 3:45 p.m. – 6:33 p.m.
- “Slumdog Millionaire” – 7:15 p.m. – 9:15 p.m.
- “Frost/Nixon” – 9:45 p.m. – 11:47 p.m.
Who’s ready for some popcorn and candy!?
Meet and Chat with me and other PBS Employees at the SxSW Interactive Festival March 13-17, 2009.
In just a few short weeks I’ll be headed down to the SxSW Interactive Festival (I’ll be in Austin March 13-17) with PBS Engage. We have lots of very fun events planned and lots of opportunities for you to help put the public back in public media. For several hours each day you’ll be able to chat with PBS employees who can share ideas and show off what we’re working on.
If you’re reading my blog, you probably know the best ways to find me — but if you’re unfamiliar. Hit me up via Email, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Be sure to block off time on your schedule to visit the PBS Pub (we’ll be setting up shop at the Moose Knuckle Pub in Austin). For more details and to see my schedule visit PBS.org/sxsw. We’ll be Twittering (@pbsengage and @jdcoffman), live blogging, and even have streaming live video for you to enjoy.
I’ll see you there!
I often write about Twitter, but here are some fresh thoughts on my usage, and it’s value.
Twitter’s growth has been widely reported in both the mainstream, and technology/social media spheres so I won’t get into that today, but what I do want to discuss with you is how the value propisition of the service has changed for me personally over the last year.
Not a lot has changed in terms of functionality of feature set, although I think we all mourn the loss of “Track” — it brought true real-time data from twitter. Here are some other random thoughts on the value of Twitter:
- I can only imagine what all of the journalists and news organizations currently using Twitter would be using it for if “Track” still existed.
- With the addition of Summize’s search functionality came the ability to many more people to “get it” with Twitter and begin to understand how valuable it is as a business and personal growth offering.
- I’ve now expanded to almost 1,500 followers and growing — what hasn’t changed however is what I use it for. I still use Twitter as a means to let people know what I’m doing, enjoying, and thinking about. A TON of value in my own personal Twitter usage stems from sending links that I enjoy to my followers and finding out what their thoughts are.
- Asking and answering questions is a ‘killer app’ on Twitter.
- There are WAY too many Twitter tools, and WAY too many of them are just mediocre.
- My favorite Desktop Twitter clients are Twhirl, and TweetDeck. I use Twhirl for my work account and brand monitoring, while I use TweetDeck to keep track of close friends and family.
- My favorite Mobile Twitter client is Tweetie – it is by far the best 99 cent iPhone application available today.
I’m on my way to 2,00 followers, won’t you consider following me?
Where are all the Location Aware Social Networks?
As someone who spends a lot of time reading, trying out, and evaluating social media products and services I find it very hard to believe that we haven’t yet seen a game changing location aware social network, or at least extension of an existing system.
Sure I use traditional social networks on-the-go, but they don’t actually know where I’m at — geo aware social products and services are the next frontier –.
I’ve tried BrightKite, and it is interesting for a while, but definitely does not have mass appeal yet.
I’ve tried Google Lattitude, and that’s where I’m putting my bets, if Google can’t make location cool again no one can. But, and this is a big But, Google is taking a beating on the stock market like the rest of us and just isn’t innovating at as rapid a pace as they once were (even just a couple of years ago).
I’m also using Yahoo Fire Eagle – which is a really neat idea, it’s an attempt to aggregate your location across multiple services, this is pretty forward thinking and really lends it self nicely to geo data portability.
More to come soon, but until then please let me know if you’ve found a really great mobile location aware application.
I find it fascinating to learn about how others use technology in their lives so today, I present: how retrieve and process email.
First off, I’m not a GTD person, that sounds all fine and dandy but really doesn’t work so well for me. I DO try to stay organized but let’s be honest, I work with and in the technology business and things change fast.
In an upcoming post I’ll share what my to do list looks like (hint, I use Remember The Milk and I recommend you do too).
Let’s get started journalism style:
Who: I use email primarily for business purposes. My work account gets the largest percentage of email of all of my accounts. Written communication between friends mostly happens via text message and Facebook (I wish there was a way to reply to Facebook messages via email, just so that they could all be archived by Gmail.)
When:I check personal email very shortly after I wake up in the morning, usually I just delete everything because it’s newsletters I no longer want or site/script errors. I may also take a moment to glance at my work account and get a preview of anything that may have happened over night. (no replies, I just read the headlines at this point.)
Like many people, one of the first things I do after booting up my work PC is check and respond to email. where possible I close the loop on any outstanding messages from the previous day. My goal is to keep my inbox at 30-50 messages at any given time. This isn’t quite Inbox Zero, but it’s close enough for me.
Work email is of course on an Exchange server which means no tagging, no auto archive of all mail, and horrible searching. Why is this still the case? Just like Google sets the standard for web searching, Gmail sets the standard for Email.
As urgent emails come in through the day I go ahead and respond, but most messages are replied o near lunch, and again around 4-5 pm before heading home for the day.
So there you have it! It’s not a secret any longer, I check email just like everyone else. My only gripe, the office won’t let me check my work email on my iPhone, I have to use the webmail interface for Outlook which we all know is horrible.