Last week I went to an Alliance of Technology and Women (that's ATW for short) panel on Blogging for Business.  I really enjoyed it, and learned quite a bit about blogging (I thought *I* was a blogger!) and how some are using blogging to benefit their business. 

 Admittedly, I wasn't sure what to expect from the event, but it was being hosted at my company, and the invitation to attend had come from our super nice admin - but I lost it in my mail box during my recent head cold-ness & ear infection sickness.  A nice coworker reminded me of it, and said there was free food & drinks.  I'm there!

I'm glad I went,  the event was great.  The food was good, the people were very nice, and the panelists were entertaining and enlightening!  On the panel were:

• Robin Stavinsky – New Venture Marketing
• Paul Rosenfeld – Quickbooks Online
• John Earnhardt – Cisco
• Tara Hunt – Riya.com
• Britt Bravo – Nonprofit consultant & motivator of social good

Robin was the moderator of the panel, and gave us all the ins and outs of blogging: what it is, what it's not, what a business can do with it, etc.  She's clearly a big believer in blogging, and had a lot of convincing information about the need for businesses to blog.

Paul was pretty inspiring, and actually made me want to USE QuickBooks online.  Not because he got up and advertised his business (though he did get in a little plug) but because of his attitude and beliefs about blogging.  Paul and his team really seem to be using blogging to connect with their customers, primarily by way of strong employee participation and a very liberal set of blogging rules.  I'm still in awe at how Paul was able to pull this off, and as he was talking I kept thinking about a recent presentation at work which emphasized the don't-put-anything-in-writing-as-it-could-be-used-in-court mentality.

Speaking of legal craziness, it was really insightful to go from Paul's very open stance to blogging to John's well-organized presentation about blogging at Cisco.  oO(they might have some of the same legal woes that we do.  What do we need to do to get blogging past our legal dudesc?)

Tara's talk & web walking were the most interesting, I think.  Not only was I amused by her little jabs at Internet Explorer (esp. since we don't sanction the use of anything *but* IE at work) but I was really fascinated by her passion for blogging and how she was able to put that passion to work for her professionally.  It was also nice to be reminded that yes, sometimes it's ok to blog about random personal things.  Thank gods!  :-)  Anyway, I could have listened to & watched Tara talk all evening! 

Last, but certainly not least, was Britt Bravo, who's put her blogging to work for her by helping to show the world that you can have fun while making the world a better place.  Who knew?  I later found out that Britt lives here in Oakland, so I'll be watching her site for fun opportunities to do good in the world!

As you may know, I’ve been working for quite some time on putting together some sites using open source technologies. I started this site on Mambo, moved it Joomla, and am now using Gallery, extCal, and some others to make everything work. I’ve also got a couple of other sites going, including www.friendsofaclc.com and a site for Loren’s Ultimate Frisbee team, which is a major work in progress and isn’t quite presentable yet. (if you really want to see it – it’s currently at www.jenndiesi.com/darkmeatultimate.)

Anyway – one of the biggest missing pieces with all this is the functionality that Yahoo groups offer. You see, the ultimate kids and parents use a Yahoo group to do the bulk of their communications, and they need to keep that functionality. You’d think that with as popular as Yahoo groups are, that someone would have already been all over this technology and have something similar developed – but that hasn’t been the case. In fact, it’s just been in the past six months or so that someone has taken on the project, and it’s nearing completion!

Now, I’m not complaining. After all – all of this wonderful technology comes relatively freely to me; and I don’t have any free time to work on these tools myself. (though I’d like to get involved, as soon as my schedule frees up!) In the mean time, I’ll just have to be patient, and wait for the good graces of more time resourceful programmers to deliver the goods. http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=40848.0

Check out Pandora, a small start-up who’s been working to find a way to bring you music that you’ll like.  Pandora analyzes everything that makes up a song and uses that information to create "stations" based on what it thinks you’ll like.  After setting up some stations, and telling it which songs I liked and didn’t like, it did a pretty good job of finding music that I’d like.  It reminded me of Tivo’s thumbs up/thumbs down functionality. 

You start by entering a singer or song name.  Pandora plays a song from that artist, and goes from there.  It’s a free service for now – and it’s locally based, which makes it even cooler in my book. 

See www.pandora.com.  After you’ve got the hang of it, you can check out my stations by searching for shared stations – and punching in my email address: jdiesi -at- mail -dot- com.