Quiddities Dev, Inc.

A Creative Web Solutions Agency Weblog

So This is What BarCamp Looks Like!

FreelanceCamp2008 turned out to be a museum full of free food, fun workshops, and enlightening conversations. I only know that because somebody told me after the fact. I was there, I just spent most of my time napping on the wooden benches or running to and from Longs.

With PublicMediaCamp2008 approaching, I was determined to avoid this. Bound and determined to enjoy the BarCamp I did a couple of things differently. (Like avoiding alcohol the night before. And taking a shower after getting out of bed.)

Squeaky clean and sober, I showed up, effortlessly arranging the muffins and setting up the coffee from Lulu Carpenter’s. The signs were hung. The registration table arranged. People began to file in, butter their bagels and blink sleepily over paper cups of coffee.

In the immortal words of Everlast, I was diggin’ the mix and feelin’ the vibe. There is a vast sprawl of people who live in the place where social and public media cross paths, and we had gotten a good diverse chunk of them to come to our little coworking space. (All one hundred or so fit inside comfortably, albeit cozily.) People looked up from their conversations, closed their laptops, pocketed their iPhones and tucked away their notebooks as soon as we started doing introductions.

Some people were more tech-savvy than others. This was clear from the outset and turned out to be a boon instead of a burden. Many of the guests were able to help their less-wired comerades sign up for Twitter, or show them how to subscribe to RSS feeds. The learning curve didn’t slow us down a bit, and I believe it went a long way toward helping the campers get to know each other better.

My favorite guest was an older gentleman who was at the BarCamp as well as the dinner at Johnny’s the night before. He was a local and zealously interested in the internet, public media, and local politics, but seems to have been left behind at the same time that Instant Messaging got really popular. This didn’t intimidate him one bit. Not only did he get a crash course in new web technology–he was among the most vocal and joyful participants we had.

Now, I’m not singling the fellow out for his lack of information. That would be hypocritical, since I spend most of my time being educated about the internet by women who have kids my age. I’m singling him out because he had an exemplary desire to learn, because he didn’t care what the other campers thought about him, because he wasn’t scared to be himself and because he was persistently happy. Getting one outstandingly stoked person like that at a BarCamp is a gift.

RadioEngage had a workshop, too. I sat cross-legged in a plush purple cafe chair updating the wiki on Amie’s laptop while Margaret headed up the central meeting area, armed with a colorful selection of expo pens and a whiteboard on wheels. Some people had taken up in chairs. Many spread out comfortably on the floor. Others leaned casually against walls or shelves. Margaret managed to probe the crowd for suggestions: if we built this platform for you, what would it have? (Everyone seemed to be waiting for Margaret to answer that question herself.)

I was reminded of that scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in which Brian escapes from the Peoples’ Front of Judea Headquarters through the back window and ends up standing before a crowd next to a bunch of prophets. Except it was different, because Margaret knew what she was talking about, and nobody was heckling her, and she wasn’t running from the Romans (to my knowledge). On an unrelated note, if you haven’t seen Monty Python’s Life of Brian, you should rent it.

This time I even got to have my own workshop. I didn’t really expect anyone to join the conversation called Blogging: For Fun and Profit. (What can I say? I can’t run your radio station and I don’t know PHP. But I can blog.) I was not as successful in terms of educating the people who weren’t so tech-savvy.

“If you make a mistake, it’s fodder for your blog,” I explained confidently. “I do a lot of stuff wrong. I’m clumsy. I send out piles of letters and forget to stamp them. I mix up emails. When I make mistakes, I just blog about it on our company website. And people really enjoy reading it, because it makes them laugh, so they’re more likely to visit Quiddities.com.”

A white-haired man who had taken up the only desk in the room raised his hand. “So, if you looked up the word ‘failure’ in the dictionary, is there a picture of you next to it?”

(I can’t be too mad about this comment, because it falls under the category of mistakes/embarassing moments, and therefore is fodder for my blog.)

Not everybody is eager to jump on the internet bandwagon. Especially if they didn’t grow up with a keyboard under their hands 20% of the time, like kids my age. But if you can’t remember a time before the internet (because you hadn’t been born yet), you’re not very likely to go places that aren’t online. And if you belong to the even larger group of people who not only want to see your online presence, but want to participate in it, you’re not very likely to spend very much time at a static, non-interactive website with little information.

Getting online can be intimidating, especially if you’ve never done it before. And it’s scary trying something new. I remember the cold sweat that broke out on my skin when I signed up for Twitter. That’s why PublicMediaCamp2008 was important: whatever lessons people took home, now they’re networked–they’re not alone, and they know it.

My genuinely grateful and super-enthusiastic Thank You goes out to the following vendors, who are completely awesome.

Andrea C. Waters of Lifestyle Culinary Arts, for aiding me in the schlepping of boxes, crafting mouth-watering culinary creations, being generally cool, and most of all, her sponsorship! She has a great new location in Scotts Valley, and offers classes in addition to catering.

Manthri Srinath and Joe Carlson of Lulu Carpenters, for providing some super killer brew, plus accoutrements. People are rarely so busy and so polite at the same time.

Sunkist Naturals and Denis Hiller, for finding me, being an awesome start-up, having a great contemporary approach to publicity and being supportive throughout the planning and execution of the BarCamp.

NextSpace and Jeremy Neuner, for executing a business plan that revolves around being awesome, and for making us comfortable in the space.

Also to the rest of our sponsors with whom I did not work directly–and most of all, the <love>Q Mamas.</love>

Posted on November 24, 2008 – 8:19 pm by Desiree in Quiddities & tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

You Need a Blog. Yes, You.

You heard me.

I’ve been doing this “internet” thing for awhile now. And I’ve arrived at one ultimate conclusion.

If you have a commerical website and you don’t have a blog, you need a time machine.

Here’s why. Part of my job–and personal pasttimes–is to link relevant content on the web. We make pages. We make sites. We make forums and communities. We share photos, stories, information and programs. And we want to link all this stuff to you. That’s right. We think your enterprise (whatever it may be) is so interesting, the people who land on our site need to see it.

But if you don’t have a blog to tell us why it’s interesting, it ends up not seeming very interesting.

Sure, you could have a whole page to tell me why I need to use your site. But if its not dynamic, I don’t care. You probably just hired a contractor to write it, somebody who doesn’t even know your company. I assure you, it won’t be fuzzy and heart-wrenching and intimate and compelling. Plus, I have a hunch that page is never going to chage, so when I visit it next week, I’m going to read the same thing again.

I want to know that your company is changing. And growing. And following the times, and cutting-edge, and hip with the kids.

I want to hear about how you spilled coffee on your crotch on your way to work, how you barely made the bus, how you came up with the idea for a brilliant new t-shirt design by spacing out on a popsicle stick.

I want to know that I’m investing in real people who are like me, because sometimes they get mixed up between saying “how’s it going” and “how are you” and end up saying “how you going,” or sometimes they get called by collection agencies at inappropriate times, or sometimes they spend a whole day trying to get their computer to work and finally fix it and have to stay up until 1:00AM the next day to finish their job and end up getting bad diner coffee in the middle of the night which gives them indigestion but they do it all anyway.

I want you to blog.

But if you don’t have time to blog, don’t worry; I’ll just visit and link to people who do.

Posted on October 28, 2008 – 5:01 pm by Desiree in Quiddities & tagged , , | Comments (0)

Coworking Conundrums

We boxed up our things, vaccumed the floors, and awkwardly rolled the filing cabinets down the stairs. It’s been a week since we moved out of the Sash Mill and into NextSpace, the cutting-edge coworking space on Cooper Street in Downtown Santa Cruz.

If I said things weren’t stressful, I’d be lying. There are no more boxes to schlep or kitchen appliances to unpack. We’re still hunting the mess of one-way downtown streets every morning for a spot we can parallel-park into and fishing quarters out of our pockets. And if we cannot take advantage of the cheaper blue meters, we are forced to park at the orange ones, availing ourselves of the twent-five-cents-buys-you-thirty-minutes premium rate. Or dodge the meter maids.

While our suites in the Sash Mill were our domain, this is not so at NextSpace. We have our own office (which is pretty lush) in a fishbowl-format: open ceiling, walls of windows. Everybody can see and hear what everybody else is doing. This is true especially in the cafe area: an assimilation of sink-into chairs and sofas, attractive coffee tables replete with magazines, plenty of places to plug in your laptop…and it’s all right next to the kitchen, where us Nexters are constantly filing in and out to replenish our coffee mugs.

Since everything is shared, we end up running into each other a lot. Our friends at Santa Cruz Design and Innovation Center are right next door. 12seconds is down the hall. You can meet up with your buddies in your room, then go to the common area to kick it, or head further down for snacks.

It’s like a geeky frat house.

(On that note, there’s even a stash of grown-up drinks hidden away in the kitchen. Naturally, this is just in case the Nexters need to cut loose and party. After work, of course.)

Lulu’s at the Octagon is right across the street. This makes for a pleasant diversion–which is excellent, especially if you find yourself stuck doing work at NextSpace until the wee hours. Whatever you’re in the mood to eat at lunch, it’s probably not more than three blocks away. And though sometimes you can hear the residentially challenged Santa Cruzians hollering at each other from the street, usually, its the tunes of the musicians that float up through the windows.

Leaving the Sash Mill meant sacrificing a lot. Parking, privacy, total control over our domain, for instance. Now that the nerve-wracking move is over and we’re starting to get grooves in our chairs again, I think we can all agree that we sacrificed something to get something better. It’s scary at first to be so exposed, and we’re definitely not accustomed to being interrupted in our office because we have to chat with the people we haven’t met yet. That sort of stuff we reserved for the Geek Dinners or the BarCamps or the other various networking events. We waited ’till then to bounce our ideas off each other and went back to our offices at the end of the day to mull things over.

The more comfortable we get here, the more pervasive that fuzzy networking feeling gets. It will get easier as we learn to mix socializing with working–a skill that most of the Nexters already posess. Listen in on a few conversations and you’ll get an idea of how dynamic the activity is. (You don’t really have a choice; you eavesdrop whether you like it or not.) Perhaps it’s best that we all got packed into a second-story coworking space Downtown. Personally, I like it better already.

Posted on October 17, 2008 – 5:16 pm by Desiree in Quiddities & tagged , , , , | Comments (2)

Here’s One For The Ladies

The final half-hour of my day begins with a pleasantly thoughtless dream-state triggered by the sound of the air purifier. I’m watching Margaret shuffle through papers and click through emails. She finishes and looks at me. When I notice her, I snap back into reality. For a minute, we just look at each other. She’s assembling her thoughts into coherent order. I’m thwacking my pen against my legal pad waiting to write. She blinks from behind her pink-framed glasses and under the piles of wild curls.

“So–” she blinks. “There’s this Women In Business Conference on Wednesday.”

“Are you going?”

“Yes. I think you should come. Do you want to go?”

Conferences will always be precious to me. I love them. Not sure why. Maybe it’s the bad drip coffee. The pre-printed nametags that always fall apart. Perhaps the wads of business cards warming my pockets and purse. Or the notoriously recurring microphone problems. Who knows? Nevertheless, they are special. I think of them as adventurous paths only the brave can tread to total fulfillment.

(My very first conference experience was sponsored by the Hartwick College Student Senate. They paid for me to represent our school at “Get Fired Up!” a student leadership conference held at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in early 2007. For two nights, we stayed in a hotel down the street, where drunken college debauchery ensued: this including not-so-secret trysts, poorly executed practical jokes, and a verbal-turned-violent argument over whether Jesus supported the death penalty when he wrote the Bible. I found it to be groundbreaking.)

I consented to come along. My hope was to make relevant observations in the background while Margaret did the networking. We met at Fins Coffee at 8:00 in the foggy morning, keen on avoiding the conference coffee.

We arrived. The Cocoanut Grove was curiously devoid of dudes. Our nametags were printed on stickers and we stood in line with high-heeled, suited women, who were all talking and laughing loudly in spite of the fact that the sun was barely up. I awkwardly affixed my sticker to my blazer. We took seats in the main room. Somebody got up to present the first speaker. Margaret opened her laptop and began to simultaneously respond to multiple emails, chat with developers in the office, and twitter the conference events. Guess I had better take some notes.

Laura Lowell spoke on marketing. She impressed us immediately with her ability to identify the more obvious truths about marketing which we sometimes miss. For instance, “Recognize that you have two types of people in your office. You have planners, and you have doers. If you are both, you may feel schizophrenic.” She also urged conference-goers to take an ethical approach with mistakes — don’t sweep them under the rug, because correcting them can improve the quality of your service and become a preventative measure against similar embarrassments in the future.

“Say No to Jargon” was a piece that made Margaret erupt in giggles among the otherwise silent guests. We knew exactly what she was talking about. When you work with websites, you read a lot about “industry-leading solutions” that take your “whatever” to “the next level”. Nobody knows what the solutions are, why they’re industry leading, where the next level is or who the heck lives there. However, based on how often jargon appears in marketing literature, you’d think it was all pretty special stuff. Too bad it means absolutely nothing.

I had exhausted my coffee so I went to see what the Cocoanut Grove had to offer. Drip coffee, regular and decaf, with corresponding black and orange handles, was available in four pots. This impressed me, but I was stunned by a woman who exclaimed with alarm that the hot coffee was melting the wax on the outside of her paper cup. I doubled them up, got my joe and helped myself to half-and-half, though I took issue with the cream being stored in un-chilled, un-covered carafes. Whatever. My standards aren’t that high. I hurried back to the conference room to catch the next speaker.

Karen Orton boasts no secret knowledge of online communities, but she does have an uncommon passion for them. Her presentation fishtailed nicely with the marketing presentation that came before it. She managed to reveal the marketing capacity of online communities, like Facebook. The charmingly simplistic Twitter was another example: its main feature allows you to answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less.

Awkwardness ensued when Karen endeavored to describe Twitter. After you log in, “you answer the question, ‘What are you doing?’ with a brief sentence. People are always sending out updates on what they’re doing. You can find other people on Twitter, and follow them. Yes, question.” A young shorthaired woman got the mic. She asked in exasperation, “Follow you where?” Women laughed sympathetically. Maybe we won’t get the whole room Tweeting before the day’s end.

Lunch was served none too early. Chinese chicken salads were served piled high on platters and after a moment, the servers swept the tables with handfuls of saran-wrapped snicker doodles. We were entertained by a final speaker while we digested.

Kirsten Mangers was dressed in an immaculate suit that did not betray the rawness of her character. She is blunt, sarcastic, and controversial, but most of all, she’s just plain fun: her jokes had the audience rolling. “We’re women, let’s face it: we’re smarter than anybody, of any other gender, out there, anywhere”. Her talk on advertising was insightful, though not directly relevant to Quiddities. She was my favorite speaker of the day regardless, because her talk was so totally in the spirit of the WIB Conference. She spoke as a businesswoman: who, like the rest of us, persevered even though she wasn’t always taken seriously. Like us, when old tactics stopped working, she tapped her creative strength to solve enduring problems. She did so without compromising her character or abandoning her femininity. It’s easy to see why some people may not like Kirsten. She is amicable with a dash of threatening mixed in. However, she certainly showed us that you don’t have to sacrifice who you are in order to succeed — you simply need to harness it.

Networking hour arrived. Immediately I noticed something strange. Conferences oftentimes engender competition: I have sat through many a workshop, watching two participants vying for control of the group’s loyalty, each trying to say their opinion louder than the other. This was different. Without restraint, I saw people enthusiastically reach out to each other. An exchange of cards blossomed into a conversational clique. For some weird reason, everyone was being supportive. How weird. A couple people even came up to me.

“I’m very interested to know, what is your company? I can’t see your nametag!”

“Um, I just work for Margaret,” I replied. (This turned out to be sufficient explanation; everybody at the conference knew who Margaret was.)

Cash bar was announced and we gathered our things, sure to grab a pair of sponsor goodie bags on the way out. As Margaret took me back to my car I decided the most important thing I took home from WIB was this: no longer does the corporate world need be all coldness and quotas. Now, we live in a world where everyone participates. The last edifices of the old conservative white guys in suits are crumbling. Our customers can follow us on Twitter, be our friends on Facebook, moderate our online support groups and make or break us with an online review in an instant. It’s probably time to get a little more creative than a thirty-second TV spot, and a little more human than a mail-in titled “We’d Like To Hear From You!”

In an age where we can connect instantly and the consequences of our actions are just as imminent, our challenge is to develop new ways of connecting with our customers and fulfilling their needs. Among those exploring this new online landscape, you can be certain the girls will be there.

Grab-bag contents included a packet of SPF30 sunscreen, post-its, and numerous pens. See you all next year!

Posted on September 30, 2008 – 6:00 pm by Desiree in Quiddities & tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Geeks on the Beach ‘08

One of the things I like most about being a member of the Quiddities family is the sincere connection our office shares with a number of local geeks. It’s like I can tap into a warm, fuzzy network of pleasantly geeky correspondence. What can I say? We’re social creatures (yes, I proudly count myself amongst the geeks now).

Anyway, one of the most important celebrations of geekery this side of the Watsonville border is the Geek Dinner, where the geeks gather with gusto to share food and ideas. Geek Dinner No. 7 is “Geeks on the Beach.” (”We usually have them at a geeky restaurant,” Margaret explained.)

The custom may sound casual or campy to some. Au contraire. Anyone who has attended a Geek Dinner can say from experience that they are veritable breeding grounds of brilliance. Petri dishes of discovery. You get the idea. Coworking, Freelance Camp, Public Media Camp, 12seconds.tv, Jelly, NextSpace–the seeds of these great enterprises lie in the fertile ritualistic Geek Dinner.

As a budding geek I am eagerly anticipating Geeks on the Beach, my very first Geek Dinner. Camera in tow, armed with flip-flops and a pair of barbeque tongs, I hope for my own brush with brilliance at the upcoming local geek gathering. Provided I can get my night shift covered–I’ll see you all there!

Geek Dinner No. 7, “Geeks on the Beach,” will be at Black Beach on September 4 at 6:30PM. You can click here for more on the haps.

Posted on September 2, 2008 – 4:18 pm by Desiree in Quiddities & tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

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