Today we added the Seesmic plug-in for Wordpress here. We’ve been fans and users of Seesmic for a while now. it’s a great video community tool and provides a glimpse of how we’ll be using video more and more in the future. This plug-in allows easier posting of a Seesmic video in a blog post (like this one) and also builds in an engine for readers to leave video comments as well. We have it configured to not allow anonymous video for now, so you’ll need a Seesmic account, but it’s free and easy. Try it out. {seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/WtFurXU1ps_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”Seesmic blogging video Seesmic live here ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/OkCJgSl8dT”}}}

How on earth do you say thank you to a friend who gives of himself, his talents and his compassion? Where on earth do you begin? Maybe not on earth. Maybe all we can do is thank God for the wondrous friends, like Scott, that he’s brought into our life.

When we announced our engagement, Scott said he wanted to write a song. At that point, we hadn’t set a date. We knew it wouldn’t be real soon. Scott talked to us both on Skype – interviewed us. He asked about our love, our life and how we grew together. He invested his time in learning our story so he could compose. And today, he shared the song he wrote for us. To say we were awed is a complete understatement. We were completely blown away.

Since we set the date for our wedding, we’ve been listening to a lot of music. The wedding is over a year away, but we knew we wanted to allow plenty of time for special friends to make travel plans. There are some amazing, special people we really want to share our day. Scott talked with us, learned what he wanted to know, and somehow told our story in this one beautiful song.

Our greatest hope is that Scott will be able to bring his wife and baby (they’re expecting) to come to our wedding. They’re among those friends we’d more than welcome to come stay in our home any time.

In the meantime, we want to share with you just how incredible friendship is.

When You Shine

Shine on me is what I’d pray
As I kneeled beside my bed most everyday
I cursed the darkness for blinding me
Never realizing there is where you’d be

You sent your light down to me
You are the love that I see

Higher than the birds that fly
Up above the Mountains high
Leading me with light so brite
You Shine
When the skies are filled with stars
I will know just where you are
‘Cause light from You is the only thing I see
When you shine

Grace so tender, love so deep
It is everything I dreamed it’s meant to be
I remember, I learned to breathe
When I realized you’re always here for me

And the light that’s in your heart
Is a love that no star can hold
And my heart is in your hands
The only way that I can stand
Is to be where you are
Where you shine in the stars

We’re heading out the door to this seminar on controlling wireless expense in the enterprise in Bellevue.

It’s a great chance to hear some news from Strata8 Networks, make some new connections in the area, and to meet Leigh Fatzinger from On Message Ventures. We’ve become friends with Leigh on Facebook, but not yet had the chance to meet.

We’re looking forward to being there, and if you’re at the event, please say hi. And if you’re near Bellevue but not there, drop aus a message.

The results are in and our first guest for our “Day in the Life” series is Jeff Pulver. We’ve already confirmed with Jeff and we’ll be doing this around his visit to Seattle and Vancouver in June. He’s doing Breakfast with Jeff in Seattle on June 11th and in Vancouver on June 12th. Confirm your attendance on Facebook.

We have lots of time to prepare, and Jeff knows we want some one-on-one interview time with him during his visit. And for those of you who haven’t been to one of Jeff’s breakfasts, if you’re in either area, plan on attending. You haven’t lived until you’ve done at least one.

We got early word of another special guest who will be joining the Seattle event, but we aren’t going to spill the beans just yet. Suffice it to say, we’ll be there doing video, and we’re trying to see what other interview and video we can get during that week.

Here’s our latest episode of GeekSpeakTV. As a reminder, they aren’t just posted here on our web site. They’re also available on pulver.tv here. This episode was filmed with our new camera, and we’re hoping both the video and audio quality is better now. Neither of us is a videographer, but we’re learning and improving.

Click To Play

Technorati Tags: GeekSpeakTV, Sheryl Breuker, Ken Camp

Download Now

I’ve never met Hugh MacLeod from gapingvoid. He and I have disagreed on many a point, but one of the things I really enjoy is that Hugh never sees disagreeing as a problem and never takes it as a personal affront. And, we agree on far more than the few things we don’t quite see eye to eye on. Hugh’s one of those people I really look forward to meeting one of these days (although I don’t plan on visiting Alpine, TX).

This cartoon from Hugh caught my eye the other day and it’s been bouncing around inside my head because it’s one of the greatest truisms ever written.

Why is this so true? This broader subject has been part of the core of the Idea Incubators conference calls Sheryl and I have been hosting on Facebook lately. That group began as an effort to better understand how to raise our visibility, grow our network, and expand into new ventures using social media and its tools.

Our networks include countless talented and creative people who can brainstorm and incubate ideas together for the benefit of all of us. We thought a small collective meeting regularly to brainstorm on this would be interesting, and so far it has been.

As we talk about our online profiles and promoting ourselves, our businesses, our ventures, last week I remember talking about my experience in sales. I recited that old adage people buy from people. Hugh’s cartoon echoes that at a deeper level.

Aside – Forgive me for Americanizing the word and spelling it properly…

Business is socializing with purpose!

Business is no longer about farming in the field during daylight hours. It isn’t about working an 8-hour shift at the local factory and heading home for dinner and family time. Business is about relationships, and the strongest, most successful relationships are social – family and friends.

That’s why social media is becoming so popular and successful today. It’s why we’re all engaged and talking online. Our business world and social world are becoming one. We don’t work an 8-hour day. We live a 24-hour day. Those 24 hours are a blend of family time, work time, fun time and socialization. Many of us work an hour or two early in the morning, then break for family time. Some of us break for lunch with kids when they get home. And some of us work on business at odd hours because the global economy requires that we’re always-on and always-available.

We take our breaks when and where they come. Sometimes that’s coffee. Sometimes that’s a movie with family. And sometimes, it’s a business conversation over a glass of wine with a close friend. Our worlds of work and personal life are weaving together more tightly as technology pervades our life and gives us easy access to resources in new ways that didn’t exist previously.

The blending of our personal and business life is a sociological evolution that could not have taken place at any other point in the history of humanity. We’re at a convergence point of technology and society – networks and people. We’re learning as we go because there isn’t a manual. We’re writing the manual on the fly as we find new ways to use the tools to strengthen all of our relationships with others.

Beyond all, humans are social creatures. We band together in caves, villages, cities and business offices. We talk, sing, paint, and laugh together because we are social. We yearn for companionship and interaction with others.

Of course business is socializing with purpose. How could it possibly succeed otherwise?
Technorati Tags: Hugh MacLeod, gapinvoid, business, social media business is socializing with purpose

This isn’t directly related to any specific technology. It isn’t about VoIP or WiFi. It isn’t about unified communications or social media. It’s really about the evolution of technology and how it’s impacting our world and our daily lives.

There’s a great series of articles over on The Economist. The best place to start is with Nomads at last. To get the full impact, you really have to follow to the next article, then the next and the next. It’s a series. Here’s a taste:

AT THE Nomad Café in Oakland, California, Tia Katrina Canlas, a law student at the nearby university in Berkeley, places her double Americano next to her mobile phone and iPod, opens her MacBook laptop computer and logs on to the café’s wireless internet connection to study for her class on the legal treatment of sexual orientation. She is a regular here but doesn’t usually bring cash, so her credit-card statement reads “Nomad, Nomad, Nomad, Nomad”. That says it all, she thinks. Permanently connected, she communicates by text, photo, video or voice throughout the day with her friends and family, and does her “work stuff” at the same time. She roams around town, but often alights at oases that cater to nomads.
[Read the Economist article]

The precept is that many of us are becoming technology nomads, carrying less and less with us in our daily travels because we know where the oasis (of WiFI rather than water) is. While that base concept quickly led me to thinking about WiFi in the early days when we went warchalking to makr where the hotspots were, most of the series is very much on target.

The second article is about the joys and drawbacks of being able to work from anywhere. Speaking as someone who started telecommuting in about 1986 and has spent 40 weeks a year on the road, I really appreciated the balance this piece presented.

Continuing in the series, the third piece is one that could provoke a lot of thought around how our nomadic ways will change buildings, cities and traffic. I think I could spend hours talking and thinking about that issue because how we use offices and physical space is certainly undergoing change.

The fourth article talks about how people, friends and family use current tools differently. As half of a truly hyper-connected couple with Sheryl, this is an area we’re both really fascinated by.

The series goes on, but you get the point. I encourage everyone who uses current technology to go start at the beginning and read what interests you.

The subject was also part of this morning’s Squawkbox podcast conference call. If you’re a Facebook user, you can listen to the recording of that here. It will also likely be part of the conversation on the Idea Incubators weekly call that Sheryl and I host through Facebook here this evening. Both are lively conference calls and open to anyone. Jump into the conversation.

Technorati Tags: mobile computing, wireless, nomadic computing, mobility

Unified communications isn’t all about voice. It isn’t even all about phones. The web, and its evolution come into play as a huge part of how we integrate all communications.

There’s a news story this morning that’s been getting a lot of buzz and discussion.

Is the Mobile Web Dead? Some Mobile Entrepreneurs Say Yes

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / April 14, 2008 5:29 PM

Former Yahoo! Mobile evangelist turned startup entrepreneur Russell Beattie announced today that he’s calling it quits for his company Mowser because the market for mobile browsing is taking a fast turn for the worse. “The mobile traffic just isn’t there,” Beattie says, “It’s not there now, and it won’t be.”

Beattie’s announcement comes just two months after mobile blogger and consultant Michael Mace wrote a much discussed post titled Mobile Applications, RIP.

“The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices,” Mace wrote.

[Read full post]

I was involved in conference call discussing this topinc this morning and found my own theory spilling out in a pretty ad hoc mode as I reacted to some of the conversation. Here are some of the thoughts that spilled out.

First, I don’t think the Mobile Web was ever a viable concept. It was a window of opportunity that allowed carriers and providers a brief opportunity to give the illusion of real innovation by packaging browser content slightly differently.

The mobile web is dead because the web is mobile. Today people uses iPhones, Blackberries, smartphones, gaming consoles, and all manner of other devices to access the web.

Some folks on the call described the the iPhone browser as disruptive and a complete change to the browsing experience. I disagree. I expressed my view that the browser itself is rapidly dying.

With the rise in what we call cloud computing, and the increasing reliance on the browser to access web applications, I actually argued that Web 2.0 has been almost entirely about cosmetics. Web 2.0 sites get a new look, round the edges on the boxes, and present a facelift. But the underlying technology and capability certainly didn’t change an evolutionary generation.

Web 2.0 has all been a cosmetic facelift illusion. And the browser is badly in need of a paradigm shift. (Yes I took a beating for using that phrase0.

I’d argue that the browser, still based on the old tired original browser interface, is old, tired, and dying. It’s as obsolete as the ten-digit dial pad on a telephone. These are two interfaces, the two primary interfaces, into the unified communications world. We’re using old user interfaces to do new things.

I think the next generation web (WebNG for the sake of argument), will bring new tools, new interfaces, new ways of itneracting with cloud computing resources. Yes, a paradigm shift in user behavior and interaction.

What form will that take? Voice recognition? Eye movement? A new way of using gestures to interact with devices? Perhaps some combination.

What do you think? Leave your thoughts in comments.

Here’s our latest episode of GeekSpeakTV. In addition to posting them here, they’re now available on pulver.tv here. We also stared doing some live broadcasting today on BlogTV.com as part of our pulver.tv show work.

Click To Play

Technorati Tags: GeekSpeakTV, Sheryl BNreuker, Ken Camp

Download Now

Around all the other work we’ve had going on today, we did a live session on BlogTV earlier too. This is all in preparation for making GeekSpeakTV a live part of the PulverTV network. Here’s our session from earlier today.

GeekSpeakTV Live 4/15/08 - Broadcast your self LIVE

Technorati Tags: GeekSpeakTV, BlogTV, PulverTV, Sheryl Breuker, Ken Camp

Three weeks ago we began a series of FREE Conference Calls on Facebook entitled Idea Incubators. We created an associated page for this interest group on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Idea-Incubators/12333049347.

The idea behind these weekly calls is simple -

How do we raise our visibility, grow our network, and expand into new ventures using social media and it’s tools.
Our networks include talented and creative people who can brainstorm and incubate ideas together for the benefit of all of us.

The calls take place each Wednesday evening at 7:30pm PDT. Everyone is wecome, and we encourage you to come join in if this topic is of interest.

Recorded copies of each call are available on Facebook, but we’ll also be podcasting these calls.

This evening we sat down to talk about what social media is. It seems to mean many different things to different people. We took some time to think about what it means to us and try to give broader definition than we see in most conversations.

In this episode, we also unveiled our new look for the show and new them music. We want to thank our friend Dan Lynch for the great music.

Click To Play

If you haven’t already done so, please also take a minute to go vote in our poll here.

Technorati Tags: GeekSpeakTV, Sheryl Breuker, Ken Camp, Stardust Global Ventures

Download Now

We’ve just added a new feature here as part of a brainstorm we had with our GeekSpeakTV shows. On Twitter the other day we were talking with our friend Jeff Pulver and had the brilliant idea what a blast it would be to shadow him for a week to document what his life is like. A week probably isn’t practical, but a Day in the Life sounds like a lot of fun and an interesting approach to some video specials.

That settled, we started thinking about who we’d like to interview, and realized that what we really want to know is who you would like to see shadowed for a day. That question meant adding some polling mechanism, so we went searching for a poll plug-in we could use here with Wordpress. Now we’re set, and here’s our first poll.

You only get to vote once, so use your votes wisely. We’re reaching out to all the people listed to get a sense of how receptive they are to the idea. Some we already know will be game. We can auto-close polls, but this first one is open until we close it manually. We’ll see how this works and take our cue from our readers, listeners and viewers to see who our first Day in the Life candidate is.

 Loading ...

You can check back and see the results on our sidebar as time goes by. When we have a clear guest in our sights based on voting, we’ll close this poll and post the results here.

Our friend Dan Lynch is a talented musician. For those of you who don’t know, he wrote Sheryl’s GabbyGeek theme music she uses on her Incidental Interviews podcasts. Dan’s talented and always looking for new projects, Once we started seriously looking at our GeekSpeakTV project, there was never a question where we’d turn for the music theme.

Dan’s done another stellar piece of work and we’re both thrilled with the outcome. We’ll be unveiling it live on our next episode. That should air sometime this week. In the meantime, you can read about the creative process and hear the tune early from the composer himself by following the link below.

If you’re looking for theme music, for a podcast, a video show, an event or anything else, Dan comes with a five stars recommendation from us! Check him out at shedmusic.net.

GeekSpeak TV Theme

Hey folks, sorry it’s been a while. Anyway, I do have something brand new for you to listen to, it’s a theme tune I made recently for my friends Sheryl & Ken’s new show GeekSpeak TV. They’re gonna be doing the show as a video podcast I think but I’m not sure of all the details at the moment.

I met Sheryl almost a year ago now when I joined Jaiku.com, a little microblogging / social networking site. She was one of the first people I got talking to on there and I’ve made a lot of good friends through the site since, some I’ve even met in real life, yes that’s right in person, I never would have expected all the cool things that have come out of it but it’s been amazing. We have quite a cosy little community over there which is great fun to be a part of. Sheryl started doing a podcast a while back which became pretty popular and soon she was hanging out with the stars such as Leo Laporte, a popular technology broadcaster. Prompting much repetition of the phrase “I knew her before she was famous” from me. The show was called The Gabby Geek and I offered to make some theme music for it. Sheryl seemed pretty happy with the resulting tune and I was happy to make some good use of my studio, I was even a guest on the very first episode of the show which was great fun.

[Read Dan's full post]