By Andres | In Toolbox

Some of you have heard me discussing this before…but I am a big fan of webinars. I wish there were more geo* webinars out there, and I hope to see the use of webinars increase in our community over the coming years.

Anyway, as I mentioned, I am a big fan of webinars…and here are some of the things I think make webinars so great:

1. Webinars are Green
   No driving, no flying, no excess consumption of crappy food in some stuffy room, and no need to hand out any hard copy collateral (of which 90% gets tossed most of the time).
2. Webinars are Low Cost
   Both for the presenter and the attendees. Yes you may have to pay for a webinar hosting service, or you may have to pay a registration fee, but overall the cost is quite low compared to having an in-person seminar or workshop. Check out Zoho’s free Presentation app if you haven’t already…it’s just as good as gotomeeting.com.
3. Webinars Are Short and Sweet
   Subtract the travel time to/from a venue and the setup/take-down time of conventional seminars/workshops, and you begin to see that webinars are really time-efficient. Plus, you can duck out without disturbing anyone else in the ‘audience.’
4. Webinars Are Very Accessible
   Aside from those pesky time zones, webinars enable just about anyone to participate, no matter their geographic location, professional affiliation, or industry background (or favorite ice cream flavor).
5. Webinars Are Repeatable
   Given the fact that a webinar is presented on a desktop 99.99% of the time, it’s easy to record and archive the webinar for others to view at a later time. So, even though you might be asleep if someone is giving a webinar on GIS tips and tricks at 9:00 a.m. GMT, you can likely still see the ‘replay’ once you wake up.

Yeah yeah yeah, I know. There’s still something to be said for in-person meetings…and I am certainly not arguing against the value of those (especially for the value of networking/camraderie)…but I hope we see more folks in the future using webinars to spread knowledge.

With that said, I would like to introduce one more reason for why webinars are so great: showdango. Why showdango? After attending a few webinars last month (including a great one by Seth Godin), I was inspired to look for more webinars that could prove to be valuable. Alas, I found no one-stop shop for searching for webinars (also referred to as webcasts I found out). Searching on Google yielded all kinds of mixed results. So…

showdango was born. It is the world’s first webinar index. Anyone is free to submit their webinars, which are accessible via categories and keyword (tag) search (sortable by timeframe…e.g., next 7 days, etc). Following suit with what just about everyone else seems to be doing, it bears the ‘beta’ qualifier, which I hope will go away in a few months.

Consider this a soft (preview) release for now…more to come in the following weeks. Email me if you want a comp’ed ‘premium subscription’ in the next week or so…

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By Andres | In Say Wut?

Nursing a cold and cranking on project work.  Here are a few items that caught my attention during the ole coffee break…only one geo type thing…

Should have a post soon on a new project as well…been doing some deep thinking about webinars…

ABI research says that user-generated content will play an increasing role in LBS, POI, and real-time content.  Oh yeah, that whole source-crowding, I mean er crowdsourcing, thing…

Regardless of whether you are using open source software or not, you should check out a new ‘stream of collective consciousness” from the open source community.  Put up by a good Portlander!

So Microsoft says it is opening up.  Then Steve Ballmer says ‘well kind of.’  And then Robert Scoble is emotional about Microsoft’s new telescope.

If you do any web design, check out this nifty article on demistifying ‘above the fold’. [via blog.guykawasaki.com]

Lastly, Google Blogoscoped provides some insight on Why Google Buys Companies.

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By Andres | In Uncategorized

Found it at my local Trader Joe’s. Awesome coffee. Great cause–supports an all-women’s coffee co-op in northern Peru. Drinking a cup right now.

Get more details here.

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By Andres | In Say Wut?

A few days ago a former colleague and I happened to be catching up and in the course of the conversation he managed to remind me of a little application called Package Manager. Just seeing the two words together brings back some painful memories…the horror…the horror.

I am going to introduce a new word for the parlance of our times: strategitactically™. That’s right…I now own the common-law trademark for that word. And it doesn’t look like anyone else has used it. I wonder why?

Strategitactically: describing the ability to think strategically while focused on tactical objectives. In lay terms: seeing the big picture while your nose is in the weeds. It’s also what didn’t happen when a startup pushed aside a core business process (i.e. strategy) in lieu of meeting tactical objectives. Read on if this sounds interesting to you… [Read more…]

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By Andres | In Uncategorized

Here’s a little dose of some of them there links.

Ran into a post on the Progressive States Network on mapping and deploying high-speed broadband.  Nice piece with some good references, and a grounding reminder of how fortunate some of us are to have broadband Internet access…I know I take it for granted.

An Israeli town is suing Google over a claim that the town was built on an Arab village.  At the core of the matter is a user-contributed point on Google Earth.

John Musser at ProgrammableWeb has  put together a  comparison of Yahoo! and Microsoft APIs.   I didn’t realize that Yahoo! has 28 open web APIs, while the big M has 22. [Read more…]

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