Vegas Geek

Ignite Vegas 2.0, finally

John — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:45:15 +0000

Back in August I helped organize the first Ignite event here in Las Vegas. I’ve been a fan of the Ignite format (5 minute presentations, 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds) and have watched dozens of videos from other Ignite events online. I was thrilled that we would finally be having an Ignite right here where I could go and be part of the excitement as it was happening. It did not disappoint.

After that first event, I was certain I wanted to come up with a topic and submit a session for the next event. I had kicked around a few ideas related to WordPress. But really, all of my public speaking over the past 2.5 years has been about WordPress and I wanted to talk about something else. I threw some ideas around with my wife, but there had been one in the back of my mind for a while that for some reason I was reluctant to mention. So finally I threw it out there.

I said, “I think I want to do a session titled ‘Everything I know about business, I learned from Fight Club.’”

Fight Club had been on my mind quite a bit recently. It is my favorite movie of all time and I had just recently built a site called durdenipsum.com (and a WordPress plugin) where I use quotes from the movie to generate placeholder text to be used for site design. So the movie was already on my mind. Once the title was out in the open, no other idea had much appeal. I submitted the session and as luck would have it, I was selected as one of the presenters for Ignite Vegas 2.0. (it’s perfectly fine to point out that I’m one of the organizers and I may have played favoritism on letting myself in.)

The event was last week and it was an absolute blast! The week leading up to the event, well, that’s a different story all together. That week I made a very enlightening discovery; it is exponentially more difficult to prepare for a 5 minute presentation than a 45 minute presentation.

Long Form Presentations
Almost all of my public speaking to this point has been in the form of 30-45 minute presentations. With that much time to be on stage, there’s plenty of time to take questions from the crowd which can alter the course of a presentation, or there’s time to back up and revisit a slide to dive further in to a specific topic. With Ignite, you’ve got none of that to fall back on. When I’m making slides, I will go over them for several days. Each slide is typically used to convey either a specific point, or as a visual cue to me for what I want to say next. So it’s important that each slide is serving it’s purpose and each topic in the set is in the right order to keep the session on track. As a result, once my slide deck is done, there is very little for me to practice. I already know the key points I want to make, and I want the presentation to be more of a conversation with the crowd instead of me droning on for 45 minutes.

None of that prepared me for speaking at Ignite.

Prepping for Ignite
Of course, the first thing I did was watch the movie. I sat with a note pad and jotted down some key elements. I already had a handful of ideas in mind for things I wanted to mention related to business. Now I just needed to tie them, in some cases the ties are pretty loose, back to the movie. When the movie was over I had 3 pages of notes.

I took the notes and started pairing them up to quotes from the movie. The plan was to use 1 quote and 1 image per slide to summarize each point I was going to make. Easier said than done. I spent the next 2 days going over the list, matching up quotes and writing out everything I wanted to say for each slide. If this were a normal presentation, I would be done. No dice. I was just getting started.

Next I watched the movie again. This time I was looking for visuals to go along with quotes and topics I had written out. In most cases I simply waited until each quote was used and found a semi-relevant image from the scene to use for the slide. This was great when the scene and quote worked together. When it didn’t, it meant watching the movie from end-to-end to find a single frame. The result; to get 20 screen shots, I watched the movie for 6+ hours.

Still not done.

I made my slides and sent them in with less than 90 minutes to spare before the deadline. I now had no way of changing my slides and 4 days to prepare for my presentation. I added all my slides to PowerPoint and set it up to auto-advance just like the real thing. I then proceeded to start practicing. After running through the slides a couple times, the first thought I had was, “Holy shit, this is tough!”

I probably ended up doing 50 or so test runs. No two had the same content. I would change wording. I’d forget a point I wanted to make. I’d add extra wording that would make me run long on a given slide. I also found it very difficult to give the presentation in front of just one or two people. I’ve spoken in front of 500 people before and wasn’t half as nervous as I was in my loft presenting to my wife and kid.

The day of the event, THANKFULLY, was a work day. I kept pretty busy until it was time to start getting ready. I decided to drink a beer and do one more walk through. It was the worst one yet. So I did it again. The second one was half decent. Fuck it. I was as ready as I was going to be.

Show Time
The place filled up nicely by the time things started. We were at a bar so it made it really convenient to grab a little extra liquid courage before it was my turn to go on stage. When they called the speaker right before me, I made my way to the side of the stage. I went over in my head the couple of slides that kept tripping me up. Before I knew it she was announcing my name. My first slide showed up on screen and the next 5 minutes flew by in the blink of an eye. When I got off stage I couldn’t remember a thing I had said. I couldn’t remember screwing anything up too terribly, so that was good. But, I also couldn’t remember if I made the points I was trying to make.

I am both looking forward and terrified to see the video of my presentation once they get posted.

Regardless, I had an great time and the crowd seemed to enjoy it. I couldn’t ask for much more than that.

New plugin: Ipsum Maker

John — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:08:31 +0000

Caution: Silly project ahead.

It’s no secret I build a lot of websites. During the build process, I’m constantly using lorem ipsum filler text to see how elements are going to lay out on the page. Normally that means heading over to lipsum.com to generate a few paragraphs. But seriously, that is some boring text! Which lead several people to create their own entertaining themed lorum ipsum generators. Some of my favorites being Bacon, Gangsta, Samuel L Jackson and one all about seafood. There’s also a couple for veggies and vegans.

Well, inspiration struck and I decided it was time to create my own lorum ipsum generator using quotes from my favorite movie of all time, Fight Club. You can check it out at DurdenIpsum.com.

But why keep all that fun to myself? I’ve released a generic version of the plugin so you can download it and make your own ipsum generator. If you do, please drop back by and leave a comment with a link to your new site.

Have fun!

Taking back Twitter

John — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 05:13:46 +0000

Back in February or 2009 I wrote a post called “I’m done with auto-follow on Twitter“. But, apparently I didn’t learn my lesson.

Once I started running 9seeds and was actively using social media to help ‘build our brand’, I started doing 2 things on Twitter that I ended up regretting. First, I turned auto-follow back on so that I could receive DMs from anybody was following. The second thing I did was for every conference I went to, I would follow the hash tag and then follow as many of the people I saw tweeting from the event. These both seemed like great ways of connecting with more people. Amazingly, it had almost the exact opposite effect.

The tipping point came about 3 months ago. I checked my Twitter account and noticed that I was following more than 6,000 people. But, that doesn’t mean I was reading all their tweets. There were so many tweets coming in that it was basically white noise. I had created a list of friends, family and community members I wanted to follow. Those were the tweets I was reading and interacting with. So, I decided to clean it up. I used Manage Flitter to unfollow about 3000 accounts. Most of those were people who had followed me, got me to auto-follow them back and then stopped following me. I was surprised at how many brands do that. It didn’t really help the white noise, unfortunately. The stream was still too much to deal with and I was stuck reading only my list.

In September I read this post by Chris Brogan where he talks about unfollowing the 131,000 people he was following in order to stop the crazy amount of DM spam he was getting on a daily basis. He took a fair amount of grief from people who were hurt by the fact that he unfollowed them. It’s funny how people can take something as meaningless as a twitter follow so personally.

But, the final straw for me was this post by Aaron Hockley where he writes about what he’d do differently if we here to start over on Twitter. While none of the past was Earth shattering or necessarily groundbreaking, two things he mentioned gave me that AHA moment I needed.

I would start a list for each of my top three areas of interest.

When I attend an event, I’d start a list for people I met at that event or those who were actively tweeting about the event. During the event, I’d monitor said list closely. After the event, I’d move relevant folks to another list and delete the event list.

Sometimes you need somebody else to point out what is right in front of you.

Over the past 3 days I’ve unfollowed roughly 3000 more accounts and am now down to roughly 350 that I still follow. And since I’m using a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel to do the unfollowing, there have been a few (a few dozen?) accounts that got unfollowed that I will end up following back. I’m still monitoring my list and plan to create a handful of other lists that will let me dive in to specific groups of people more easily. I will also be following Aaron’s lead and creating lists before heading off to my next conference so that I can easily add attendees to the list to see which I want to follow long term or possibly move them to a separate list.

If I unfollowed you, I promise it was nothing personal. We likely didn’t connect much on Twitter to begin with and unless you use some tool to let you know who unfollows you (insecure much?), you probably won’t even notice.

Site Launch: VegasTech.com

John — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 23:09:57 +0000

I’ve been waiting several years for there to be an active tech community here in Las Vegas. I’d tried starting up meetup groups and other tech related happenings, but after some early success, they tend to fall in to the same traps; lack of interest and too many other things going on in Vegas to stand out.

Over the past year or so, we’re seeing a real shift here in Vegas. Zappos announced that they’d be moving their offices downtown and then started putting some cash in to other projects downtown in an effort to raise up the overall tech community. To say it’s working would be a understatement.

The idea came about for a website where we could list the people, companies, projects and events going on in the Vegas tech community. Since the hashtag #VegasTech had already been getting some traction, the domain name vegastech.com was purchased and a small group of us set out to build it. Today we launched the site, and I’m excited to see what happens.

Big thanks to Mark, Pat, John and Sara for your help putting the site together!

Event Review: Digital World Expo

John — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 18:56:20 +0000

This week I spent Monday and Tuesday Digital World Expo, the first of what will likely become an annual event here in Las Vegas. DWE was organized by Shawn Rorick who also founded the Las Vegas interactive Marketing Association.

When I first heard about the event, I reached out to Shawn to find out about being a presenter. As it turns out, my name had already crossed his desk and I was on his list for people to reach out to. Shortly after I was added to the list of presenters. Of course I would be doing a presentation on Monday and Tuesday talking about WordPress. But that was just the beginning of my involvement.

Shawn came to me with the idea for something he called the Digital Startup Speaker Series (DSSS), An Open Mic opportunity for startups to pitch their product or service to the attendees at DWE. Shawn asked that I, along with Jennifer Gosse from trac.ky (also a Vegas Startup) organize it. The idea and opportunity was too good to pass up, so I accepted.

The DSSS stage was at the back of the expo hall, so even the people who registered for free expo hall only passes were able to check out the presentations. Both days featured roughly a dozen startups giving 10 minute presentations. Here’s the list:

Monday: TripDibs, uStarPoker, Proximity Team, Ayloo, Rumgr, originate, Insure Monkey, Coupons for Humanity, Vote Giant, MeFundee

Tuesday: BloomWorlds, Video Receptionist, Stikki, Wedgies, 9seeds, Influential Networks, Dropbear, Blvd Media Group, Ticketometer, Tracky, Trademark Panda

While the overall crowd at the conference wasn’t very big, the area around the DSSS stayed busy both days. I watched as one after another of the startups would exit the stage and immediately end up in an in-depth conversation with groups of interested observers. The DSSS was a brilliant idea and gave some local startups a great opportunity to practice their pitch in front of a group of decision makers they may not otherwise have had access to. I’d have to say the DSSS was a great success!

Since I was busy helping to run the DSSS, I wasn’t able to attend any of the classes going on. Which is a bummer because I was really looking forward to catching a couple of them. My classes on Monday & Tuesday were both given to a pretty small group of people, but they were very interested in WordPress and learning more about it. Hopefully my overview gave them some pointers and pushed them in the right direction.

I’m definitely looking forward to DWE 2012. Now that they’ve got one under their belt, I’m sure next year’s event will be an even bigger success!

Swearing online and in person

John — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:13:57 +0000

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending my third WordCamp Portland event. As usual, it was a great event. It is consistently one of my favorite events of the year.

During one of the sessions led by Aaron Hockley, the topic of ‘personal brand’ (a term I’m not a big fan of, but for lack of a better one) came up. It’s something I wrestle with a bit and I wanted to throw my situation to the room and see what they had to say about it. I said something to the effect of:

If you hang out with me in person you’ll find that I swear. I swear a lot. I swear like a sailor. But, you will rarely, if ever, catch me swearing on my blog, Twitter or Facebook. This originally started because of my kids and just trying to keep my content clean in case they were around it. Then, I started a business and the line between my ‘personal brand’ and my business virtually disappeared. People who know me online know that I am VegasGeek and am also 9seeds. So, keeping it clean now seems like the right thing to do for the business.

After a bit of discussion, CamiKaos grabbed the mic and gave an interesting perspective. Cami had interviewed me back in 2009 at WordCamp Portland and she remarked that we had been chatting casually for a while before the interview, but as soon as the camera was on, Bam! I went in to ‘professional’ mode.

I asked Cami if she had noticed specifically that I don’t swear online. Without hesitation she said yes.

I immediately started thinking about the people I know both online and in person. Do I notice when they swear? (sure) Does it change the way I feel about that person? (nope) Do I notice when somebody swears in person, but doesn’t swear online? (not really) And, as a business owner, the most important question, would I choose not to work with somebody because they swear? (nope)

I brought this up at dinner after WordCamp. Todd said that I didn’t swear that much, but that the swearing increases proportionally based on the number of beers that have been consumed. It’s funny because it’s true.

I’m curious what you think.
- Do you think it hurts somebody’s ‘personal brand’ if they swear (online / in public)?
- Do you think a potential client would base a decision on it?
- Do you think somebody’s ‘personal brand’ extends to their company/job?
- Do you think this is all a moot point thanks to the amount of tattoos I have?

(image from flckr user joeshlabotnik)

WordCamp Portland – Round 3

John — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 22:14:43 +0000

One of my favorite WordCamp events each year is always the one up in Portland. No, not just because they had kegs of beer just inside the front door. Although that certainly didn’t suck. Their local WordPress community is awesome and invited in us outsiders with open arms. By the end of the first weekend there, I was ready to move in.

More than just my annual pilgrimage back to Portland for beer and Voodoo Doughnuts, I’m really excited for this year’s WCPDX since they are switching things up and doing mainly an unconference style event. If you aren’t sure what that is, rather than having a predetermined list of speakers with set times, anybody and everybody is encouraged to suggest topics for sessions. Then a vote happens and the most popular topics get turned in to sessions.

I’ve been to 20+ WordCamp events, and 2 of my favorite sessions I’ve sat in on were both unconference sessions. I found that the audience was more engaged and both sessions turned in to more of a discussion than a simple presentation. I got a lot out of both of those sessions and I expect a lot more of the same next month in PDX!

If you are planning on going to the event, start thinking about discussions you’d like to take part in. Then, when you get there, write it down on the suggestion board! I have a couple ideas in mind already myself.

See you there!

WordPress meetup date change

John — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 17:53:57 +0000

A funny thing happened while planning WordPress meetup. Turns out, I managed to plan it for a time when several of the WordPress peeps in Vegas will be out of town for WordCamp San Francisco. Oopsy.

After a quick bit of rearranging, we are now scheduled for Wednesday, August 10th, 7pm – 9pm at The Beat Coffeehouse in Downtown Las Vegas.

Sorry for the confusion and looking forward to seeing you all there!

WordPress Meetup Hits Vegas!

John — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 05:04:19 +0000

Last week while attending my first Vegas Jelly event at The Beat Coffeehouse, I knew immediately that I had found what I’ve been trying to find for a long time; a place to host a regular WordPress meetup group. After exchanging a couple emails with the owner, I knew we were in business. Food, beer, central location, free WiFi and a place that’s happy to have us… Yep, this is what I’ve been searching for!

That being said, I’m very excited to announce…

WordPress Meetup – August 11th at The Beat

The when: ~~Thursday, August 11th~~ Wednesday, August 10th- 7pm to 9pm
The where: The Beat Coffeehouse – 520 Freemont St, downtown Las Vegas (inside the Emergency Arts building) – Map it
The what: An evening of WordPress, presentation and conversation

The plan is to run a monthly event on the 2nd or 3rd Thursday of each month. I’ve created a Facebook group where I’ll keep everybody up to date on when the event will be each month. If you have a WordPress site and need some help, know a bunch about WordPress and want to share some knowledge or just want to come out and talk about one heck of an awesome CMS, come on down! And, of course, if you know somebody who might be interested, send them the link or just drag them with you.

Presenters Welcome

My plan is to have a 10-15 minute presentation each month followed by some casual conversation. If you have an idea for a presentation, let me know and I’ll get you on the schedule for an upcoming event.

Like I said last week, the Vegas Tech Scene is on the rise. Jelly, Ignite, WordPress meetup and I think we’ll be hearing some news about WordCamp Las Vegas pretty darn soon. Stay tuned!