I’ve never used the Slick Edit product but I’ve got lot’s of experience using Atlassian products (Jira and confluence) and would love to get my grubby mitts on a copy of bamboo since I am a huge fan of the other Atlassian products I’ve used.

So head on over and find out how you can win some of this software (hint, writing a blog post about it get’s you 25 tickets in this raffle style give away)

For the past 2 years the amazing sales team that I work with at Q4 Web Systems have ventured out to San Diego for the annual NIRI conference. It’s a really important event for us and it’s always great to hear about it when the team get’s back.

This morning while I was going through google reader, I noticed this post from IR Web Report talking about some of the newer social networks (twitter and friendfeed specifically) and NIRI’s presence on both of those social networking sites. There is a friendfeed room dedicated to this years conference and you can follow niri08 on twitter.

I was really excited to see this, as part of my job going to these events doesn’t really make sense for me personally but I’m always really excited to hear about the event afterwards. This year it looks like I’ll be able to follow the event a little more closely and share in the experience even though I won’t physically be there.

It’s great to see these newer technologies playing a role in business sector that’s just starting to realize some of the potential of these new networks, it goes a long way to prove how valuable some of these services can be.

I’ve been asked by several people what twitter is and what is the value? I admit, we do live in a world that is riddled with information in all different forms. Twitter is just another one of those streams. But back to the value, it’s not an easy question to answer and it’s not a one answer fits all type of deal either. Twitter is effectively what you make of it. It’s not for everyone for sure but those who use it, do love it. The key thing though is that like myself everyone uses twitter in there own particular way. Twitter not a form of communication it’s a venue for communication and with that comes a vast amount of noise that you are responsible for cutting through.

Twitter is the perfect example of a network of trust. You don’t immediately start following hundreds or thousands of people, you begin with a few people that you trust. In my case some of the earliest people that I started following were tech blogger’s who’s blogs I’d followed. A couple of examples would be Robert Scoble and Scott Hanselman. Now these aren’t people I would necessarily trust in real life but in the digital world I tend to value and agree with a lot. What started happening is that I would see them replying to things people had asked them then I would go and look at that other persons twitter stream and I might follow that person or I might not, but that’s how your network builds out and it’s an interesting real world example of a natural built in human condition.

But again, back to value. It’s going to be up to you here to make it valuable for yourself. It’s easy to get sucked into the negativity of twitter but it can be something that is a positive experience. If it’s important to you, you can make the twitter experience work but you just have to give it a fair chance and at least a bit of your attention.

So far everything seems to work ok, and the upgrade was really easy. Just overwrite the core wordpress files and make sure not to overwrite any of your themes or personal customizations. All in all a pleasurable experience, which makes me happy!

It seems to be the ultimate web2.0 news aggregation site, it certainly won’t be replacing netvibes anytime soon but it does a fantastic job of consolidating a lot of the sites i frequent on one page.

Exploding Now

I have been reading the site for a bunch of years and did spend a period of time in touch with the guy that runs the site (which is pretty hard when you are in canada and they are in australia).

It’s a really cool idea to give back to the community and I wonder what kind of stuff will crop up that uses this code as a base.

Though honestly it makes me feel a bit inadequate not being able to do something like this myself.

they’ve buitl a really slick looking site to present the content in and the video’s have a very personal and friendly feel to them… seeing people working on the line making the cars is really interesting.

Ford Bold Moves