Third week of the month, the two events we host come around, and I blog/email/post the hell out of it! First of all is likemind.orl at Lake Eola Panera Bread, that happened already this morning, but it happens every month. Alex Rudloff and Ryan Price (that's me) host this event for... well... anyone in Orlando! The likemind.us fellas in New York got a very nice company named Anomaly to send us some coffee/bagel money, so come for free coffee and good conversation.

Now, for the big news - Florida Creatives Happy Hour is turning 7 months old! Officially our baby is 27 weeks along in its development (but been drinking since day 1? ouch!). I'm really hoping we will be able to get some presence in the local schools once the next year gets started, so I'd like to have a short directed discussion about that, maybe record it, when we feel like we've got "quorum" (enough people to make decisions). John Rife is supposed to be returning from his trip this week, so I'm sure he'll have stories to share. I've also spent the last 2 months on a big recruiting push, and just sent a couple of fresh emails today to local illustrators/podcasters. Not to mention the social networking groups and doing lots of outreach there too. If you're on Upcoming (meaning you have a Yahoo ID), Facebook, VIRB or MySpace, join the groups. Don't forget the mailing list.

Event Page & RSVP
Monday, June 18, 2007

6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

crooked bayou
50 E Central Blvd # D
Orlando, Florida 32801
28.542, -81.3782

If you've never been to a happy hour, all you need to know is BE YOURSELF. We have a very casual atmosphere at Florida Creatives, and we are mostly made up of people who want to make some friends who are passionate about the same things they are. In addition to likeminded friends, we are most of us interested in learning about other disciplines, so we are here to learn as well. Last but not least, there are some of us who want to see this community thrive, and what we can accomplish by getting organized. Admission is free, business cards are plentiful, discussion is honest and friendly. Check us out.

Michael Black, a blogger/webmaster with over a decade of history writing about Montreal Fringe online has decided to lay a verbal smackdown on us at BloggingFringe.com - and I respond in a big way.

Please go read and comment yourself, but for bulletin's sake, here's part I of the transcript:

Read and reply on the original post

SlideFlickr.com is, well, they give you embed-friendly Flickr slideshows that work on MySpace - all the Flickr stuff requires JavaScript, so you never see the official Flickr stuff on flash only sites. If Yahoo is smart, they'll get 'em summa this!

I am a fan of the "blog this" button, but again, no MySpace support, but that's not their fault. Honestly, I hate MySpace, but it is too useful right now.

The real origin of Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, originally uploaded by Ape Lad.

The artist, apelad, lives in Florida - I saw him on BoingBoing. Watch a slideshow of all the vintage lolcats comics

OK, now that the Fringe Festival is long over, and the spike in traffic for Blogging Fringe has come and gone, what do we have to show for it? Not as much as I'd like, really. The fact that lots of our content is spread across other sites (MySpace, YouTube) doesn't really require anyone to use our site to get the content. With this audience, we don't really need to worry about feeds taking away from our traffic.

Note: As of today the daily average is 45 visitors.

The festival started on Friday, with a small event Thursday where I got to hand out some cards and meet some of the cast members and producers from shows. That's where the traffic starts.When we reach the half-way point of the festival (Tuesday), the increase of traffic we were seeing just drops off, despite the fact that we had new and compelling content hitting the site, with myself and the street team pushing the site to everyone we met.

Here's where I was stupid: Headline Animator. Feedburner tracks the stats for this dynamically-generated image, since they know you're normally hosting it somewhere other than your site. You can even generate multiple headline animators and track them individually. A few months ago, I took the HA off of MySpace in favor of the more interactive SpringWidgets option. However, I'm now thinking that this kept people on MySpace more often.

What I should really do with headline animator (done now) is post one in the header of the MySpace Blog - the header appears at the top of every blog post and the blog home as well. A really great example of what to do with your blog header can be seen at the Six Characters MySpace Blog. They use an html image map with deep links to their site - so smart.

Last, here's a breakdown of my visitors. It's sad that Internet Explorer outnumbers Firefox 36 to 106 - maybe that's a good cause to sprinkle some FireFox (or Flock, Songbird) banners around the site.

What's the short list of things I've taken away from this experience? What am I going to aspire to for our next event (Orlando Puppet Festival)?

1. Figure out how to get people coming before the event.
2. Track MySpace views - Headline Animator will do nicely.
3. Track MySpace Blog views with a second Headline Animator.
4. Outfit the MySpace page and blog header with deep links to the site.
5. Include links (and deep links) back to the main site in every MySpace blog.
6. Try making a MySpace bulletin for every blog post on the main site.
7. Consider including a "MySpace code" textbox in every post, a la YouTube.
8. Invest in a Related Posts widget for the sidebar - who knows how much this could keep people on the site?
9. Continue to seek out methods of Viral content like the Fringe Crush - people were hooked on new ones and were very eager to record one with us, though we didn't see any user-generated videos this year.
10. Push VoiceMail Reviews like nobody's business - I waited too long to start pushing that idea, it could have worked out better.
11. Consider posting Twitter inside the main blog chronology - after 24 hours, the posts don't appear on the flash widget, but there was useful stuff going in there several times a day.
12. Include more personality stuff (that's normally my mantra), i.e. facetime. one of the most commented on video clips was a small part of the opening night video where I couldn't get in to the VIP party.
13. Form more artist relationships before the festival (coming back every year helps with this). Standing next to TJ Dawe and having him point out the podcast on my behalf was better (in context) than any marketing plan. Word of mouth was our #1 best campaign.
14. Don't forget to mention the day job and hand people cards when they ask about it. Blogging Fringe is also a portfolio piece, don't forget to let it drive some business back to myself!

Hello Vocus, On-Demand Software for Public Relations and Government Relations, who are you? You guys have me on some sort of an internal news reader or some such, because I keep getting hits from your site! I don't want to be removed, I'd just like to know who my admirer is so I can shake their hand (physically or virtually). It always seems to be something to do with Fringe, so a Fringe fan, perhaps?

Hello? Anybody home?

Love ya, mean it!

First let me remind you that we have an event coming up on Monday the 18th at the Crooked Bayou, our home now for 4 of 7 months of Florida Creatives Happy Hours. As usual, meet and greet will be from 6-9PM officially. I have often stayed far past 10 o'clock myself, but you're welcome to come and go when you like.

Also, If you haven't seen already, a Florida Creatives group now exists on several major social networking sites. If you have friends living elsewhere in the state, get them to join these groups and meet some other creatives in another commmunity.
Mailing List - 51 members - http://groups.google.com/group/florida-creatives
MySpace - 151 members - http://groups.myspace.com/floridacreatives
Facebook - 21 members - http://ucf.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2731760310
Upcoming - 9 members - http://upcoming.yahoo.com/group/2967/
Virb - 5 members - http://virb.com/groups/15363582

I've also just spent a bit of time writing an About Page at FloridaCreatives.com - check it out, let me know if it needs clarification or updating.

Hope to see you all on the 18th! Thanks for supporting Florida Creatives.

For a while in college, I studied 3D graphics, motion graphics, animation, etc. I'm also a big music guy, and a huge fan of Japanese sample artist Cornelius. So when I see stuff like this, it really gets me going.

So many things happened while I was "away", or rather, while I was at Fringe. Here are some highlights:

1. Apple, Inc: Watch YouTube videos on AppleTV, oh, and we really meant it when we said we want to sell music without DRM. Really.
2. Microsoft: Hey! We've had multi-touch stuff in our labs for a while, but we don't care about home users - we're going after retail and enterprise with Surface! Whatever.
3. Last.fm: Remember us? We're one of those sites that lets you share your iTunes playlist on the web. Well, CBS thinks our 15M users are worth $280 million! Whoopie!
4. MySpace: We got really pissed that everyone's using Photobucket instead of our photo hosting, so we bought them for about $250Million!
5. Google: You can now see a panorama of the place you're trying to find in Google Maps (in 5 major cities). Aren't we the best company ever?

More important than how cool Google is: the blog that brought me all of this news: Lost Remote. Technically, it's a TV blog, but I find all the best stuff there. Seriously, check it out.

For about the last week, Liberatr.net has been down due to the fact that I had to move it to another server ASAP - my email wasn't working, and it was on the list of things to do for about 2 months anyway. The site used 80GB in the month of April (or thereabout). 80GB is nothing to scoff at.

I think I might start hosting my files on Amazon S3 or Cachefly or something as long as it's cheaper than hosting. We shall see.

The important news is: your Liberatr.net feed should be back. It was broken for a while, which must not have been fun.

Since SO MANY posts came out during Fringe, it has made me re-think my quota for the feeds. I've now got the most recent 100 posts in the feed. I hope this doesn't take too long to download...?

If you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, please check out Liberatr.net right away. It's not currently even 10% of what I've got planned for it, but it helps a few people check all my blogs by visiting 2 sites instead of 10.