We’ve both attended the last two SXSWi conferences, most notably launching Geekistry at the 2010 event with blog and podcast perspectives and fresh interviews with attendees Tom Merritt, Veronica Belmont, and Eileen Rivera. Now that we’re season “veterans” of the ultimate interactive geek conference we’d love to present a panel to other attendees and share some of the things we’ve learned while working on the many creative projects we have.

How are panels chosen? After the submission of a panel presentation application, the SXSW Advisory Board, a group of industry professionals from across the US and around the world, and the SXSW staff choose which panels to add to the “Panel Picker,” and then that’s where YOU come in. Because SXSW is a community-driven event YOUR VOTE COUNTS for 30% of the decision-making because SXSW wants you to see what you’re most interested in.

Of course you’re interested in us, right? Want to know more about what we’re going to discuss?

Our presentation is simple and straight-forward and we think you’ll enjoy it because it’s a part of the bigger story of how Geekistry (and our other sites) came to be.

Creative Project Collaboration from > 1,000 miles (and < $200)

Great ideas don’t always choose the most convenient places to be hatched, nor do they often find inspired, like-minded individuals eager to create them as close as the next cube. Ideas worthy of passionate creativeness can become overwhelming when two people (or two hundred) have the hurdle of thousands of miles between them. With the right tools and the right attitude, working together from any distance is not only possible, but easier now than ever. The internet allows us to communicate across great distances while working on successful projects without the need to ever meet in person or spend a lot of money connecting. Technology like web cams, desktop-sharing programs, virtual meeting spots, and even camera-phone pics of ideas scrawled on napkins helped co-founders of “Geekistry – What geeks do.” Michael Gaines and Krissi Bates-Billings create several websites and podcasts from more than 1,000 miles away. With with real-life responsibilities of families, jobs, bills, and other obligations, this two-person team found a successful way to reach their creative goals without spending very much time together in person and without breaking their bank accounts.

Questions Answered:

1. How do you find the person/people to work with?
2. What kind of commitment is expected when working with someone online?
3. Should working online be treated differently than working in the same room?
4. How much equipment will be needed and how much will it cost?
5. Can people be successful and never meet at all?

Level: Intermediate
Category: Community / Online Community
Tags: collaboration, coworking, long distance
Type: Dual
Event: Interactive 2011

Here’s what a few of you have already said about Geekistry (thank you!)

Carl Coddington: “I have been listening to podcasts from Michael Gaines for many years. He is a great speaker, really cares about people, and is a master of his craft.“

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Post tags: 2011, collaboration, community, coworking, creativity, geekistry, interactive, long distance, online community, panel, panel picker, presentation, starman, SXSW, sxsw 2011, sxswi, sxswi 2011, vote, vote for us

Up for grabs are some essentials that Krissi and Michael feel every geek should keep close at hand for good geekistry

$25 iTunes Gift Card autographed by us

$10 Starbucks Card

1 Year Subscription to WIRED Magazine

Here’s how to win!

1. Write a blog post, send a Tweet, or post a Facebook note about something you enjoy that you consider to be ‘geeky’. Please include the link-back to this post using the shortened URL “http://bit.ly/geekistryftw” – invite your readers to visit us, too!
2. After you’ve shown some geek love, leave a comment here on this post (be sure to use your real email* so we can contact you) with the link you’ve added to your blog, Twitter, or Facebook (hey, we like to re-Tweet/post you, too) and you’ll be entered into the to Epic Name Change Giveaway. You’ll also be added to our newsletter list that you’ll be seeing in your in-box, soon.
3. Want more than one chance to win? Every time you write a new blog post, send a Tweet or update on Facebook that links to this post (leave a comment or ping-back each time) you’ll get an extra entry.
4. We will announce the winner on the second podcast using our new name (effectively podcast episode #23).

Winners will be chosen by random drawing using the Random.org tool.

Good luck and let the best luckiest geek grab the goods!

———-

*You can trust us! Like you, we don’t like spam and we promise not to give your email to anyone else. By the way, if for some reason you decide you’d rather not receive any correspondence from us, request the removal of your email from our list and a real, actual human being will delete it ASAP.

———-

2010/06/08 @ 8:00pm EDT – Comments and entries are officially closed. Thanks for all who participated; the winner will be announced tonight on the live recording of podcast episode 23 http://bit.ly/geekistry-live

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, contest, delomni, Facebook, iTunes, starbucks, starman, wired

• Send us topic ideas
• Suggest other ways we can encourage audience participation
• Answer our current poll (we’ll be talking about the topic on an upcoming show)
• Chat with us on USTREAM while we’re recording
• Follow @Geekistry on Twitter
• Leave us feedback on iTunes

See you soon!

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Post tags: delomni, Entertainment, live stream, Podcast, record, starman, ustream

Star Trek’s communicators were pretty badass to me in the early 70′s. Oh sure, we had walkie-talkies, but they were extremely limited in range and bulky. Today, the iPhone is about as close to a communicator as we can get, and we don’t even need the flip antenna. I’d bet there were discussions about whether or not the antenna was even required in the 23rd century. I had the Star Trek Technical Manual and one of the things that got me into electronics was this schematic of a communicator. I knew communicators themselves were fake, but I always wondered if that schematic worked on some level, or if there was one component that was completely fictional. I’ll bet that mystery component had an Apple or Nokia logo on it.

Star Trek’s phasers were neat weapons, but we can’t harness a mini fusion reactor just yet. There are places to order lasers online which won’t disintegrate a raging Mugatu, but you can burn holes through balloons at 20 yards on AA batteries. I little side note: green lasers do more damage than red, but red lasers look cooler on TV. II shudder at the thought of what the world would be like with real phasers, anyway. Could you imagine what some kid that didn’t take his Ritalin could do to his classmates at school with a Starfleet issued Phaser Type II?

The two remaining technologies I’m waiting to see are transporter technology and warp drive. I still believe that there’s something that can allow us to move faster than light without turning us into a puddle of goo, but I could be completely wrong. The idea of transporters is intriguing since it brings up so many philosophical issues. For one thing, when you’re transporting at the speed of light, do you compensate for the Earth orbiting the Sun? If you don’t, parts of your body materialize on the other side of the planet in pieces as the stationary beam tries to put you back together while we move at several thousand miles per hour. Betcha didn’t think about that. Even if you try to compensate, tiny variations like earthquakes could make for a rather bad day. “Bob, what happened to your arm?” “Oh, there was a tremor when the beam started”. It’s the same issue I have with time travel movies. Then there’s the issue of whether or not a transporter can move your soul with you. I don’t want to get into that whole debate, but it’s an interesting topic to bring up at a pub.

Star Trek: The Next Generation had a lot of the tech that the original Star Trek did, but there was one piece of technology called the PADD which will be realized tomorrow, and that’s Apple’s iPad. Like the PADD on Star Trek: TNG, the iPad will have a touch screen interface, the ability to respond via voice, connect to a network, and play videos. Douglas Adams had a similar device in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, but it was the PADD that truly realized a personal data device. The nice thing about the iPad is that you don’t have to listen to Vogon poetry to own one. However, I can’t see streaming episodes of “The View” being any better.

I remember watching “The Martian Chronicles” when it was on TV, listening to the narrator say that the Martian was “listening to his book”. I thought about that for a minute and realized how cool it would be to passively close your eyes and listen to a book instead of reading it. Today, most major books are out in some audio format. Do we start colonizing Mars next? There’s talk about it. Ray Bradbury would be proud.

The problem with living in the future you always wanted is predicting where things are going next because you’re so enthralled by what’s current. Oh sure, things can get smaller, data networks can get faster, but in the end, we still have to drive to work, and we’re not eating preformed cubes as food (not very romantic). I don’t think 3D technology will catch on as the TV manufacturers will make you believe it will and be the next big thing, I think there’s going to be some new technological breakthrough, like the transistor itself, which will change everything all over again. It will probably be found accidentally.

I still think anti-grav would be fun at parties.

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Post tags: audio books, careful with that phaser eugene, communicators, delomni, phasers, ritalin, sci-fi, Star Trek, star trek the next generation, star trek tng, starman, the martian chronicles

What I did was create a phony Twitter account. We all know that there are quite a few of them out there, right? The character was female, lived nowhere near I did, and had a picture of a friend of mine as her avatar which she let me use. From there I created a fake blog, a fake town, a fake bio. I did everything I could to make the Twitter ID look legitimate. The goal was to make people think they were being followed by a hot college grad with a degree in marketing and see if they’d follow back with nothing more than a bio and a picture.

I won’t be naming names, and I’ll say that I didn’t follow anyone in this experiment that I know personally, but I started following three heavy hitters. Amazingly, within an hour I had about 15 followers, all from people looking at their follow lists. So from those 15, I started following them back. After that it gets a little uncertain as to where new followers came from, but I started getting more and more as time went on. I’d get followed, follow back, get followed, follow back, etc. After about 50 followers, I started following more well known people. Sure enough, I started getting even more followers. It’s unbelievable that these people, some with thousands of followers themselves, would either take the time to look for people to follow, or have a botscript written to do the work for them. Almost everyone was some social media “guru”, there wasn’t a single person that followed me back that I knew personally.

It took only a few days, but I managed to hit 100 followers, and not a single tweet written. What does that tell us about follow habits? The conclusions I came up with are as follows:

1. My alter ego was female and attractive. Right off the bat, that pretty much shows how the male population relates to women on Twitter. I got some mentions like “hey where are you from?” (read the bio, numbnut) or “what are you on Twitter for? Look for advice?”. I’d stay silent and still keep every follower I had.
2. Marketing people are always looking for connections. Looking at my list, I have almost nobody on the list that isn’t into marketing of some kind. People are always looking for the next best thing, and I firmly believe that some of the marketing people scan for keywords in their twitter feeds for that very purpose.
3. Following is free. It doesn’t cost anything to follow a stranger. There’s no social connection and there’s no fallout if someone unfollows.

The experiment was over a year ago and to this day, my fake toon still has over 100 followers, without a single tweet written. She’s not listed on any lists, but the number of unfollows she got was about a dozen, which could be from people pruning their lists, or bot accounts that Twitter deleted.

In the future I hope to do more social experiments like this and see how people react to different situations in social media.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: delomni, experiment, follow, followers, starman, Twitter

Taurus - Back it up.

Gemini - You’re still using IE6?

Cancer - Don’t open attachments.

Leo - Live long and prosper.

Virgo - Go ahead and use the Game Shark. Nobody’s looking.

Libra - Behind you!

Scorpio - Your lucky code is Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start

Sagittarius - When someone asks you if you’re a god, you say “YES!”.

Capricorn - Ra ra ra-ah-ah-, ra-ma, ra-ma-ma, ga-ga, ooh-la-la.

Aquarius - The owls are not what they seem.

Pisces - The Apple Store going down is not a cause for alarm.

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Post tags: delomni, geek, horoscope, starman

Part 1 in this series gives an overview of life in The Cloud.

Every few years, technology gets a buzzword that people latch onto to be the “next big thing”. Lately, it’s been “The Cloud”, which represents the non-local storage of your data. Instead of keeping your data on your hard drive where you can access it immediately, it’s stored on a server on the internet. You may still have close to instant access to it depending on your internet connection and the size of the file. This may seem like an attractive solution since your data isn’t tied to a single physical device, and you don’t have to sync all your data between multiple computers, laptops, and cell phones.

The Cloud could be where you store your email, your documents, your contacts, or any number of files that you own. It’s all in one place, so if you want to access them on a new or borrowed computer, you simply log into whatever service you need to and all your data’s there. There’s no need to copy all your emails or calendar data from one new OS install to another. IMAP and Gmail keeps all your mail on the server. Google Docs keeps its documents on their server. Dropbox and MobileMe can store any types of files you want. The Cloud is a great solution for most people, but it does have drawbacks which people may not be aware of.

The downside of storing data on The Cloud is that access to it depends on what security practices you use to keep that data safe. If someone steals your laptop, they could access your hard drive and read or copy your data if it’s not properly secured, but they’d need physical access to get at the data. With The Cloud, access to your data would generally mean at least having some kind of knowledge of your username and what service you use, and cracking a password isn’t always easy (hint: don’t use birthdays). Then there’s the issue of packet sniffing where someone can pull the data you’re using from over an unsecured connection, wired or WiFi.

When you store data in The Cloud, the speed of your access to it depends on your internet connection. If you’re in an area with a spotty connection, having your data in The Cloud might not look like an attractive idea. The Cloud is generally good for people with reliable WiFi or some kind of stable internet connection. If you need your data immediately and you may be in a location where your internet connection is poor or non-existent, The Cloud may only be good for you as a backup. Keeping crucial data on your device may be the prudent thing to do.

If you’re using a pay service to keep you data, you’d best back it up in case of a billing problem. Free services such as Google may be a good solution for you since you won’t have to worry about your account getting closed for non-payment, but not everyone is a fan of Google and its ad-targeted system. Also, even free services like Google go down once in a while due to network problems or power failures.

What we’ll do in this series is cover some of the issues people will need to be aware of when using The Cloud, how to secure your data, and what good practices you can use so that you’re not leaving your virtual laptop out for people to snoop around in.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: amazon s3, cloud, delomni, Gmail, Google, imap, MobileMe, starman, the cloud

Taurus - The artist that created the album you downloaded illegally will haunt your dreams.

Gemini - Your warranty will expire the day before something breaks.

Cancer - That video will not be available in your country.

Leo - You are passionate and loving. That won’t matter to the person that unfollows your ass.

Virgo - I’d set a second alarm.

Libra - Your career of hurtful Youtube comments will warrant a visit.

Scorpio - Your lucky numbers are 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42

Sagittarius - Somewhere in the world is an arcade machine with your quarter still in it.

Capricorn - You may want to reconsider that stalking gig.

Aquarius - The Avatar cosplay costume looks like shit. Reconsider.

Pisces - Your princess is in another castle.

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Post tags: delomni, geek, horoscope, starman

It listens to the song for several seconds and sends uniquely identifying information about it to its servers. The server then responds back with an accurate song title and artist. For me, it’s had a 100% success rate on popular songs, only failing on some indie songs.

For users that downloaded the older version, you have unlimited tagging. Currently, you’ll have to buy Shazam Encore for unlimited tagging, or just use the free Shazam which only offers five tags per month.

Not only is Shazam an excellent tool for figuring out which song is playing, it’s a great way to log what you were listening to at a certain time in your life.

Shazam is available only for the iPhone through the App Store.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: app store, delomni, iPhone, Music, shazam, starman, tagging, what's that song?, what's the frequency kenneth?

You can find them at geekalerts.

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Post tags: delomni, light switch, okuda, roddenberry, sci-fi, Star Trek, starman