Remember in high school when being mean to people made you more popular? Fortunately the internet was built by people who weren’t at all popular in high school so the same rules don’t apply. To build up your social media reputation you’ll need to be accountable, genuine and nice to people.

Why? Well, because the Internet isn’t a zero sum game. Collective intelligence, collaborative projects, sharing tools – the more people cooperate the more everyone benefits. Also, have you seen how much there is on the internet? You aren’t the only show in town. If you’re a jerk people won’t waste their valuable time on you.

Google is the new resume. That stuff on the internet? Yeah, it stays around forever. You want to start an online brawl with someone? Sure, maybe it’ll get you a spike in traffic, but people will be able to search it for years to come. Do you really want to be known for throwing a tantrum? Leave that to celebrities who can’t spell.

Pack some serious Whuffie. Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's science fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. The currency of choice on the Internet isn’t money it’s social capital. To earn it you need to put in some serious interaction time with people. Throwing more money at social media doesn’t usually work; you have to walk the talk. Want to know more about this? Tara Hunt wrote a book, and you can pre-order it RIGHT HERE.

Give more than you take. This is different than giving away your product for free. This is being a part of a community, bringing something to the table and sharing it without expecting anything in return. Amber Naslund gets it and shares ten ways to give it away on her blog.

Be authentic (or what’s with the “almost everyone” part). Being nice is cool. Being fake-PR-ish is not. A part of being awesome is being honest. If you don’t like something, you can say so, just don’t be rude about it. Authenticity is one of the things that helps people really connect with you. While you are aspiring to be the nicest person ever make sure your personality is still shining through.

Why is this so momentous? Well, aside from being the first publicly recognized economic strategy for Portland in 15 years, it’s the first time that Portland has formally recognized the open source, mobile, coworking, and startup community. And that’s a big step forward. As Eva Schweber says, we should be proud.

Even though we offered no testimony, we had the largest representation from any industry. City Council and their staff knew most of the folks in that room today (myself included) because we are the ones who show up at every one of these meetings. We are all pretty clear on what perspective each of us represents and know what is going to be said before any of us open our mouths. Actions speak louder than words. The open source, mobile and startup (seriously, we need a better moniker) representatives who came to today’s meeting sent a very clear message. We are here and we are ready to take our seat at the table.

I’d recommend reading the whole Portland Economic Development Strategy document (PDF). It’s not long. And the Mayor’s Office and Portland Development Commission (PDC) did a great job of keeping approachable and intelligible.

Not interested in reading the whole thing? At least read pages 12-13 which focus on the Software Cluster for the Portland area. It looks a little something like this:

Now granted, the open source, mobile, coworking, and startup section of the document is relatively small, covering about a page-and-a-half. But the size of the section isn’t really the issue. This is still important. Again, I say “momentous.”

Why? It’s momentous because this is the first time—to my knowledge—that the City of Portland has formally recognized the open source development community, the mobile app development community, and the Web application development community. They’ve even recognized the importance of coworking environments to our community—putting them on the same footing as traditionally recognized organizations like the PDC, the Software Association of Oregon (SAO), and Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN). And in that recognition, they have made a formal commitment to support that tech community.

That means, that with the ratification of the document, the City has put a stake in the ground. It has recognized what you are doing. And it has deemed it important enough to be committed to public record. Long story short, the City of Portland—in theory—is now behind you and explicitly interested in your success.

That is huge. And for that, you should be incredibly proud of what you’ve accomplished.

Now, the real work begins

Now we need to help move the City from strategy to implementation. And just as Mayor Sam Adams asked the open source community to better engage with the City of Portland so must the mobile development community, the coworking community, and the startup community find ways to engage and interact with the City. We have to find ways to organize and present a united front. Because if we don’t, we risk losing a huge opportunity.

I know we can do it. And I’m looking forward to helping. However I can.

But that will come together. For now please, take a few seconds to bask in this moment. This is a very big deal. It’s a big deal for the Portland open source community. It’s a big deal for the burgeoning mobile development market. And it’s a big deal for each and every startup that calls Portland home today—and in the future.

Thank you, again, to Mayor Sam Adams and his office for reaching out to the Portland tech community. Thank you to Eva Schweber for spending countless hours as the resident wonk for the open source, mobile, coworking, and startup community. And congratulations to each and every one of you.

Now, it’s up to us. Let’s make something happen.

That's about to change - well, kind of. We're opening up the content gates and looking for the best How-to content out there with a couple of rules.

• Contributors must reside in one of our 13 network cities.
• Article content must be original and should include links and images.
• Posts must be non-promotional however we will attach your Techvibes directory business card to your post.
• Only one How-to blog post will be published per day.

So if you've been sitting on a great How-to blog post idea and want to get it out to the Techvibes audience, be sure to submit it now. Here's an example of the type of topics that we're looking for:

• How to find the right VC for your business
• How to build an iPhone App
• How to choose a Web Development company

Blog posts can be emailed to me directly. First come, first served.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system targeted at Netbooks. The system is extremely simple consisting of just a web browser, essentially. In the age of web apps a lot of our time is spent in the browser and our reliance on desktop-based applications has almost vanished for some. This is who the Chrome OS is made for.

Application developers will be able to develop for the operating system quite easily using available web technologies, similar to the Palm Pre's WebOS, such as html, css and javascript. All Chrome OS applications will also be able to run in any modern web browser across any operating system.

One thing many people are worried about is the ability to do work while not connected. A lot of the day people are connected, but what about when you're in the country, or on a plane? With technologies such as Google Gears and upcoming advancements in HTML5, almost all aspects of desktop computing will be covered. You will be able to work while offline and sync up later once you are connected.

Google Chrome OS is currently in development and the source code should be released later this year for all you developers to tinker with. The full version of the OS should be shipped sometime in the second half of next year.

Luckily, Rohit Bhargava summed up the report consisely with his 10 standout conclusions for those of you that don't have the time to dig deeper into Sysomos' report:

1. 21% (One Fifth) of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders. These are the percentage of Twitter accounts that have never posted a single tweet. They may either be registered simply to hold a username for later use, or be experimental accounts started up but never used.
2. Nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers. In a finding perhaps consistent with the newness of the tool as well as the fact that many people may currently have an account simply to start experimenting with the tool, Sysomos found the vast majority of Twitter users have an extremely low followership.
3. March and April of 2009 were the tipping point for Twitter. During these months, Ashton Kutcher launched his quest to get to 1 million followers faster than CNN, Oprah started using Twitter, and the steady flow of new users to the site continued. For many, it offered a safer and easier way to get their feet wet with social media, 140 characters at a time.
4. 150 followers is the magic number. In a particularly interesting data point from the survey, Sysomos found that Twitter users tended to "follow back" all their followers up until about 150 connections. Then the reciprocation rate fell off dramatically, which seems to indicate that this number may be the crossover point where people shift from using Twitter for more personal use to using it more for "lifecasting" their thoughts and actions to a community of people who they feel varying levels of connection to.
5. A small minority creates most of the activity. A steep curve of a small minority of actively engaged content creators generating most of the activity on a site is common among social networks, but it is steeper and more pronounced on Twitter. 5% of users account for 75% of all activity, and 10% of users account for 86%. This seems to suggest that the site has managed to engage a mass audience beyond those who typically engage with social media.
6. Half of all Twitter users are not "active." If you take a general description of being "active" on Twitter to mean that you have posted a tweet at some point in the last 7 days (1 week), then the survey learned that 50.4% of all Twitter users fit this category. If you remove the 21% from point #1, this leaves about 30% of users who have an account and have tweeted before, but happen to be inactive now.
7. Tuesday is the most active Twitter day. One of the most useful data points from the report is that it clears up the common question of which day of the week is the best day to tweet something. Sysomos found that Tuesday stood out as the most popular day for tweets and retweets, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.
8. APIs have been the key to Twitter's growth & utility. In terms of tools that people are using for Twitter, Sysomos found that more than half (55%) of all Twitter users use something other than Twitter.com to tweet, search and connect with others. This may, in part, be due to Twitter's notorious reputation of failing/crashing, but also is a credit to all the third party applications that have been built on top of Twitter and do their fair share to bring new users to the service.
9. English still dominates Twitter. When exploring Russia as part of a class that I am teaching this summer at Georgetown, one of the barriers we learned about was the difficulty of fitting some Russian language words into just 140 characters. Twitter is, however, extremely English-friendly. As the Sysomos report found, the top four countries on Twitter are all English speaking (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Of these, US makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively. The largest non-English speaking country on Twitter? Brazil with 2%.
10. Twitter is being led by the social media geeks. This particular finding should likely come as no surprise, but 15% of Twitter users who follow more than 2000 people identify themselves as social media marketers. These individuals are more likely to post updates every day (sometimes more than once per day) and also use Twitter more actively for direct communication.

Among the guest speakers will be Michael Jones, the chief technologist or Google Earth and Google Maps, Alex Miller, the founder and President of ESRI Canada, David Boloker, the CTO for Emerging Internet Technologies for IBM Software Groups, and  Dr. John Stutz, the founder of the Tellus Institute. A full list of speakers and topics is available here. Geoweb 2009’s main focus will be on 3d cityscapes, and will address not only global challenges but the unique challenges of Vancouver and Whistler as the ramp up to the 2010 Winter Games.

More than 1 million U.S. elementary and secondary students now take all or part of their class load online, according to The Sloan Consortium. That is twenty times the amount from 2000. Forty-four U.S. states offer online education to elementary or secondary students, and experts predict that in 10 years, half of all classes will be online.

That is why author Lisa Gillis is providing insight and advice for parents who are raising children in this new, unfamiliar environment in her new book “Virtual Schooling: A Guide to Optimizing Your Child’s Education” (Palgrave Macmillan, $15.95). Gillis is the director of government affairs and school development for Insight Schools, Inc., the leading network of tuition-free online public high schools in the U.S., and she has drawn upon her twenty-five years experience teaching and parenting produce a practical guide for parents who wish to navigate the virtual educational complex surrounding them.

The new theme that technology brings to education is the same one it brings to everything else: personalization. We now have a wealth of varied educational options available to us from our homes, and as always with the internet it’s just a matter of us taking ownership over the chaos of options out there, educating ourselves (as painfully redundant as that is in this context) and making the appropriate choice.

Gillis, a mother of identical twin boys, has some experience with the challenges of childhood education. While her one son Stephen excelled in school, his brother John fell behind due to significant congenital vision challenges. After exhausting herself with traditional school programs, Gillis decided to adopt an individualized learning program for John, and she would like to share the success she had with other struggling parents out there.

This will be helpful in today’s complicated educational environment; an environment which increasingly brings to mind certain science fictional notions of children, and imagining what it was like to all gather together in a great hall of learning. I wonder if Gillis’s book will be the one that Tommy and Margie find.

Not surprisingly, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is steamed and has promised to double the prize package offered by the DEMO Conference.

Unlike last year, attendees no longer have to pick one event over the other as they no longer fall on the same date. With TechCrunch50 taking place on September 14-15th in San Francisco and DEMO the following week in San Diego on September 21-23rd, most assumed the similar startup pitch events could both survive.

Not if it's up to Arrington - he still argues that DEMO's $20K "pay-to-pitch" is bad all-around. Startups get gouged when they are most vulnerable AND attendees get shortchanged as well with the presenting company lineup full of those with the means to pay instead of the best startup ideas.

So, will any of our readers be attending either event in September?

“Yeah, let’s try this whole crowdsourcing, user-generated content thing! Sounds like people really go for it.” It’s all fun and games, until a big, ol’ SUV comes to the party. Chevy Tahoe provided video clips and soundtracks to consumers to remix, edit and add text for a commercial. Turns out, consumers think the Tahoe is a gas-guzzling, environment ruining, Republican.

Be prepared for disagreement with your brand, but start with the right purpose. “Tell us why you love us” might have been a better starting point for Chevy.

Don’t plan for the unexpected

Ok, so this ends up being kind of funny. NASA asked the public to name the next ISS module....and Stephen Colbert got his viewers to vote for his name. Are you calling out to the right crowd? Asking the general public something is a great idea, but is it really crowdsourcing if one person manipulates the way an entire group votes? No, unfortunately, it isn’t. Qualifying the people you are asking to participate is just as important as asking them to participate.

This doesn’t mean eliminating negative feedback, Dell, for example, asked customers what they wanted and got a loud, “no Windows” in reply. Dell now ships computers with Linux, much to the appreciation of consumers.

Assume work to happen for free

LinkedIn recently asked its users to translate the site for a “badge of honour,” annoying professional translators. The thing is, if you are asking someone to do something for free, you are telling them what they normally get paid to do has no value. Not a great way to get on people’s Christmas card list.

On the other hand, BT Ieas (no link - it is an internal program) asks its employees for thoughts on saving the business money or making it more revenue. If they implement an idea the employee gets a percent of the money saved/gained. Cause hey – ideas aren’t free.
 
Expect that a utopian collectivist community to emerge

Yeah, I get it, don’t throw stones...When Cambrian House originally started, we thought we could match "founding teams" to crowdsourced ideas. That’s a little too much accountability for anyone to take on after hours when it isn’t their idea to begin with.

What does work? Involving people with passion at a level they are comfortable with. Through three years of trial, error and discovery we’ve honed in on four areas that crowdsourcing plays really well with: brand collaboration, market prediction, product innovation and research discovery.
 
Assume people care

Bottom line: People are busy.  Is this going to improve their life? If you don’t provide the proper incentive, it just won’t fly. As with everything else on the internet, just getting people to notice is most of the battle. The key to all of successful crowdsourcing is feeding a need that isn’t currently being met.

Crowdsourcing done well can solve seemingly insurmountable challenges, bring you closer to your brand and get stuff done. Hope this gives you a bit more insight.