Tech Village Switch On Event With Communicopia

(cross-posted from Bryght.com)

After NTC and Penguin Day in Seattle, I drove East accross Washington to Spokane and then north back into Canada to keynote at a cool new tech conference called Switch On put on by a non-profit called TechVillage. TechVillage is funded by Western Economic Diversification Canada and the Kooteney Association for Science and Technology with a mission to "flourish as an enterprising non-profit that strives to be nimble and responsive to the needs of digital media, software and IT members in this region by providing professional development, consulting, networking, and project opportunities to members."

My presentation was titled "The Evolution of The Internet: Web 2.0" and was a primer on new and emerging tools and trends online. I talked about markets as conversations, RSS, social software, free and open source tools, and building communities and connecting with your customers and constituents online. There were tons of questions and in the end they had to cut me off (after giving me a small time extension already). There were about 75 local business owners here consisting primarily of software developers and web designers and there is a ton of interest in these topics. I saw a couple people shooting video so hopefully the footage of the session should be up eventually… I'll link to it from here when it comes out.

We also held a great OS CMS tools discussion and gave an overview of the best solutions out there including Drupal and WordPress as well as several other. There were lots of local shops in the audience who had rolled their own CMS and were looking to figure out how to make the jump to open source. It was a great discussion and lots of people spoke up and got involved.

Thanks so much to co-organizers Jill Boland of TechVillage and Jason Mogus of Communicopia for inviting me to speak. I value every opportunity I get to share my passion for the internet, technology and open source tools and am very thankful for this chance to come out to the Koots and talk about Bryght and Web 2.0.