Results tagged “appearances”

As ever, the best thing about blogging is the conversations it kicks off. Some nice responses to recent posts here and around the web:

• In a follow-up to Gourmet Live and Rewarding Experiences, Mathew Ingram of GigaOm ruminated a bit about magazine apps as walled gardens. Overall, Mathew's got a strong skepticism about a lot of efforts in this area, but I was pleased to see him say "About the only magazine that has taken any kind of creative steps in this direction with its iPad app is Gourmet magazine". Ron Mwangaguhunga of eMedia Vitals continued the conversation as well.

• A few weeks ago I was quoted in the New Yorker talking about Facebook and its impact on culture. In this week's issue of the New Yorker, I pop up again, but this time quoted in Ben McGrath's lengthy profile of Nick Denton. Spoilers: The piece closes with me asking, "Who has more freedom in the media world than Nick Denton?" People seem to like lines like that, as the quote popped up in The NY Times Dealbook blog and elsewhere.

• I argued with Malcolm Gladwell's assertion that social media can't be tools for real change. Eric Harvey offered a thoughtful, well-reasoned counterpoint to my piece, which is well worth a read.

• Last week, Twitter changed CEOs with Ev Williams focusing on product and COO Dick Costolo becoming the new CEO. ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick examined the transition, with a nod towards my piece on ten years of history behind Twitter's senior execs.

• At Web 2.0 Expo here in New York last week, I did an interview with Mac Slocum of O'Reilly. While I included the video here in an earlier post, Mac revisited the interview on the O'Reilly Radar blog under the title "Why blogging still matters", focusing on one of the points that came up later in the conversation. It had been a long day with lots of different ideas flowing, so I'd nearly forgotten that we even talked about that, but now I'm pretty glad that part of the conversation was captured.

• I was a judge in the Apps 4 Africa contest which ended last week with some amazing winners, including my favorite iCow, which came in first place. You can listen to an interview I did with Future Tense about the competition, or check out this video of Secretary of State Clinton congratulating the winners:

• This past weekend, I attended the Open Web Foo Camp hosted by O'Reilly. While the camp itself is off the record, Scott Rosenberg did an admirable job of documenting one of the key themes of the event — whether the present "open" phase of the web is merely an aberration. I tried to use my access to influential open web advocates at Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other big web companies to push them to make their employers more open and to resist the urge to compromise on their principles despite the understandable pressure they must be under. Hopefully a little friendly urging can give them the support they need to make the right choices.

• Finally, with ThinkUp well into beta-testing and Expert Labs supporting its first deployment by Code for America, Gina Trapani and I joined John Moore on The Lab for a brief interview about Expert Labs and where ThinkUp is headed.

Okay, that's enough roundup of Other People's Content. We'll return to original content here again shortly.

Been busy running around doing a bunch of fun stuff lately; Here's some videos with highlights!

The Personal Democracy Forum invited me to talk about what we've been learning at Expert labs, which I summarized in a talk called "Startup.gov" which talks about bringing startup-style principles to government.

Ignite NYC asked me to take five minutes to show twenty slides on any topic as part of Internet Week here in New York. I decided to try to defend the indefensible:

Finally, yesterday we finally announced our first public project at Activate, the work we've been doing to help Condé Nast launch Gourmet Live. Though we've just started to explain the concept to everyone, the fundamentals of an awesome new business and some truly impressive new technology are all laid out in the introductory video:

Phew! More on all of these projects as soon as I get a little bit of time to blog about them, but thanks also to everyone who came out to the internet Week interview and all the great folks I met at Blogging While Brown last weekend. Nothing's more inspiring than the talented people I'm lucky enough to meet at all of the various events I get to attend.

(And yes, as the videos make clear, I really do have a whole closet full of dark suits and pinkish-purple shirts.)

Just a few weeks ago I made a list of some places that I'm speaking or appearing in the coming weeks and months, and here's an update on a few of those. I hope folks will come up and say hi, or find time for a conversation, if you plan on being at any of these events. (And a special thanks to Clay Shirky; having a chance to speak with his ITP class on Friday night was inspiring and invigorating, making all these other presentations something I'm really looking forward to.)

• Tonight! The NY Tech Meetup. After six years, I'm finally doing my first-ever presentation of an app at the Tech Meetup, unveiling ThinkTank as an introduction to the mission of Expert Labs. If you can't make it, this TechPresident interview I did with Nancy Scola should give you an idea of why I'm so excited.
• Twitter's "Chirp" developer conference on April 14 in San Francisco. We'll be talking about how to use platforms like Twitter as a power for social good, and I couldn't be more delighted to be a voice for that concept. (Psst... I might be doing some improvisational presentationizing at Chirp as well.)
• Fast Company's Innovation Uncensored conference, April 21 in NYC. Finally, you get to see me and Ashton at the same event. Magical and revolutionary!
• I'll be speaking at the USA India Business Summit in Atlanta on May 10-11. This one's really a change of pace for me, but I'm really optimistic about this new event providing a much-needed forum for a truly fascinating new era of business between my parents' home country and my own.
• A keynote at Gov 2.0 Expo, on May 26 in Washington, D.C. I'm thrilled to be talking about how we can bring startup-style innovation to the service of public good, and there's no better place to have that conversation than the Gov 2.0 event.

There are a few other events that I know will pop up on the calendar; I'm looking forward to Blogging While Brown and to catching up with a bunch of folks at Foo East, though I guess it's bad form to mention that? I dunno. I also don't think I'm going to the 140 Conference, Google I/O or Facebook F8, unless somebody lets me know that I should be there. Regardless, I'm looking forward to meeting a lot of you in person! As always, email me at anil@dashes.com, send me an @anildash message or DM on Twitter, or leave me a message at +1 646 833-8659 if you'd like to get hold of me when at an event.

I'm doing a number of presentations and public appearances over the next several weeks, here's a quick chronological overview if you'd like to meet up.

• The AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego, this week from Feb 18-20. The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the parent organization for my new project Expert Labs, so I'm extraordinarily excited to get to attend and participate in this event for the first time. Even if you're not a scientist, you can check out Family Science Days for some very cool events that are open to the public.
• Sweets and Treats on March 10 in Washington, DC. Debbie Weil's great event for bringing together DC's tech and government communities looks really promising, and that was even before I knew there was gonna be free cupcakes.
• South by Southwest in Austin, TX on March 12-16. I'm really looking forward to this — Break Bread for Brad in memory of Brad Graham on the night of the 12th, the KICK kickball game is coming back on the morning of Saturday the 13th (more about that soon!), I'll be returning to Battledecks (this time as a judge), and of course all the usual Austin festivities.
• Fast Company's Innovation Uncensored conference, April 21. I'd be excited just to attend this one — it's even more thrilling to get to present. Take a look at the lineup of speakers and I bet you'll agree.
• Gov 2.0 Expo, May 25-27. I can already tell there's been a huge shift in the conversation about how government and technology relate, and if last fall's Gov 2.0 Summit was a watershed moment, this might be even more of a milestone.

And, if you can't make it to any of those events, I'll be doing a few things online, such as this career event about looking at your job skills in the context of Last Year's Model. I'll likely be adding in a few additional events, including Chicago in early March, which I'm hoping will let me meet even more of you. Oh, and of course I'll be blogging here as well, if you really don't feel like going anywhere.

Those of you who liked my post the other day about not missing anything while I was offline might also enjoy a conversation I had with CBC Radio's show Spark, part of which will be on the air today. Canadians can hear it on CBC Radio One at 11:30 a.m. or on Saturday at 4:00 p.m. Sirius subscribers can find showtimes on the site, and geeks can listen to Spark right now on the CBC's site. (My clip starts at about 15:20.)

(There's also a little nod to the post over on Deadspin — check out the comments, where smart boys discover that "Anil" looks like "anal"!)

Because my name and my big ole' head are sitting on top of this page, it's probably not making the self-indulgence any worse to collect a few links to some recent places I've popped up online:

• Gawker recommended my Twitter account as one to follow after Krucoff posted a list to Young Manhattanite based on Rex's suggestions. The strange thing to me is that Gawker is (still!) such a presence in media circles in NYC that 6,000 people would actually read such a thing. Of course, they're all just wannabees -- real Gawker credit comes from having been at the launch party five years ago. I'm just sayin'. (For more, similarly inane insights, add me on Twitter!)
• I helped Charlene Li (a.k.a. The Best Tech Industry Analyst) save $8.33 by offering up my testimonial about the Clear card. That's enough to pay for a subscription to dashes.com for more than a year!
• Mat Honan wrote a piece in Wired about The Big Word Project, the scam website where people pay for words. My site shows up because it's the link for the word "purple", even though I didn't do it myself. I blame Mike.
• CRN has a (really very good) look at what the technology industry wants from the Presidential candidates, with responses from the likes of Bill Gates and Paul Otellini. Inexplicably, I'm in there, too: "The No. 1 thing we want to see is elected officials use social networking tools online as a tool for governance and for leadership when in office, just as they do to get elected." Basically, I am tired of politicians treating web communities as an ATM for their campaigns, instead of seeing the web as an opportunity for fixing government.
• And last but certainly not least, "So What Do You Do, Anil Dash". It's a really long interview with me by the folks at Mediabistro, in advance of my presentation at the Mediabistro Circus event on Tuesday. If you know me, there's probably few surprises, but I was happy to get the chance to articulate a lot of points that I otherwise don't usually talk about explicitly. Most of all, I am really glad to help emphasize how vibrant the technology scene is here in New York City; My biggest goal in participating in these sorts of conferences here in New York is to show people that there's a lot more going on with tech here than people might realize if they're myopically focused on just Silicon Valley.

I've been doing a good bit of speaking lately, and have some more coming up, so let me share it with you if you're interested.

• I was flattered to have my post about Gawker quoted in passing by Jim Romenesko while talking about Vanessa Grigoriadis. However, I was mortified at the context -- Page Six of the NY Post had published a thinly-veiled threat of sexual violence against Ms. Grigoriadis. Let's repeat: The traditional, mainstream, dead-tree media institution published a threat of sexual violence on newsprint. And those who objected? The folks typing away in Movable Type at Radar Online and Media Bistro. This is why we need blogs to help fix traditional media.
• I got to spend an hour talking to John C. Havens over at Blog Talk Radio which was ostensibly about transparency, but ended up getting into a good bit of blog history and some more philosophical parts of blogging. That was a lot of fun, and I was glad to get to do it.
• On Friday, I'll be speaking at the Online News Association Conference in Toronto. I'll only be in town for a few hours, unfortunately, even though I love Toronto, but the discussion about Journalism Next is right up my alley. And I'm especially looking forward to getting to meet the other folks on the panel.
• And then on Saturday, I'll be at ConvergeSouth 2007 in Greensboro, North Carolina. It looks to be an absolutely amazing event, and I'll be joining in at 10am on Saturday for my panel. I'll also be hosting a dinner at 6:30 on Saturday, you can sign up on the wiki to join the table.

Phew! Can't wait to meet a bunch of new folks, and if you want to get in touch and will be at either event, my mobile number and email address are both right here on my blog.