Joey Primiani | Pioneering the New Internet Revolution

This past month I attended both BarCampOrlando and blogOrlando – I had the best time meeting, socializing and sharing ideas with other web elites.

Thanks to friend and film geek Jason for making the video posted of the event.

“On Sunday the 23rd, code-crunchers, web developers, hackers and designers came together to put on the first biannual BarCamp Orlando. Later in the week, on Friday the 28th, social-media-gurus, PR analysts, business consultants, Twitterers, WordPress fiends, videobloggers and everyone in between came together for the second annual blogOrlando.

BarCamp is an unconference where the talks are determined the day of, and the event is held at a local venue, as opposed to a large, structured facility. There are several contingents around the globe, and this was Orlando’s first. The man behind the event, Florida-local Gregg Pollack, explains the idea in a great instructional video shot and edited by another local, Jason Hawkins, who, by the way, is an awesome, fellow film fanatic. Jason and Gregg are also the team behind the famous Rails Envy Ads. Attendees include Alex Rudloff, cofounder of Emurse.com, creator of Twitterholic, and a software engineer of AOL.com. Also sat next to Mark Jaquith, one of the lead developers of WordPress, the blogging platform this site’s run on.

blogOrlando, on the other hand was a semi-unconference (how else would you get national participants if the scheduled sessions were unknown?) spearheaded by Josh Hallett, of hyku. The event was geared to strike up discussions about social media, journalism, personal and professional online identities, blogging practices, videoblogging, podcasting, marketing, design, web standards and search engine optimization and, boy, did it. The event was attended by some very smart people (the keynote speaker was Shel Israel, coauthor to Robert Scoble, of Naked Conversations) and subsequently initiated some very intriguing conversations about all of the aforementioned topics related to social media.”

Thanks to William Couch, read more.

“[At blogOrlando], one of the last conferences I participated in was a lively one. Led by Lish Dorset, a blogger who runs HandMadeDetroit, the discussion was over the separation of our internet lives from our real lives. And if you do so. And should you do so. And if so, how?

The discussion ended up being a bit of free-for-all with opinions ranging from “be real online all the time, even if it hurts you sometimes in the real world” (kind of my position too), to “have two totally distinct personas and never the two shall meet”. It’s a huge topic these days. Some great folks contributed to the conversation. William Couch and Etan Horowitz, both from the Orlando Sentinel, obviously have to deal with this in their jobs working for a public entity like a newspaper, but at the same time, being a real people with thoughts and ideas that may or may not complement those of the Sentinel or its readers. Very challenging.

JoeyPrimiani, a web designer and blogger, had some very keen insights as well. One lady, Nichole, worked for a PR firm by day, but runs an interesting blog that may not be to the tastes of some her firm’s clients. How do you wrestle with that? Do you give up blogging and have no online presence? Well, obviously, no one at this conference was suggesting that, but many people in the world do make that choice. Is it the right choice? Are they just being paranoid? Or are they stifling their own inner-writer/creative persona in favor of an employer’s legalistic policies? Good questions all, and a great discussion.”

Read more from Lawrence Salberg.

I also met and talked to “one of the most evil people in Silicon Valley” by Michael Arrington, Ted Murphy – CEO of PayPerPost and star of RockStartup. Whether or not if you agree with the business model, they are successful raising millions from venture capital.

Overall, amazing events. Check out more pictures from BarCamp Orlando and blogOrlando. I look forward to more in the near future! Stay posted!

BarCampOrlando is a bi-yearly event to bring together people from different technical backgrounds to share and learn from each other. There will be people who know Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, and other technologies coming together for a free all day event.

When? September 23

Where? Taste 717 W Smith St., Orlando

Very excited to meet all the web kid locals! If your in the area, register today and come join in on the fun.

Logo design done by fellow Web Designer/Friend IHeartThe.com

I recently licensed out my viral video as a kid [story] to FirstTV Production in LA. So tonight, the Country Music Channel (CMTV) will be playing it on the tv show Country Fried Home Videos hosted by comedian Bill Engvall at 8:30pm EST. I’ll be tivoing it. Watch it if you can!

[UPDATE] – Watch my video on tv here.

I’ll be at the Orlando Web Developer & Designer meetup group tonight. If your in the area, stop by and say hi!

The purpose of this group will be primarily focused around web development, though should be open to technology and design discussions outside of our specific area as well.

A small list of topics could include, web standards, cross browser development, HTML/XHTML, Dynamic languages [asp, .NET, php, CFM, jsp, Ruby, etc…], rapid web application development, web applications and database interaction, code optimization, AJAX (What is it, why and where to use it and how not to abuse it), Web Toolkits (prototype, dojo, gwt [google web toolkit]), development tools [notepad, dreamweaver, etc], managing web projects, and many, many others contributed by all of you.

This group should be open for everyone from beginners to advanced developers. The aim is not to take away from the Orlando Web Design meetup group but rather to have a group specifically for web development, programming and applications. So come join, start networking, learn more than in a classroom and lets do this!

When? 7pm, August 23

Where? Stadust Video & Coffee

Thanks to Tangent – Digital Media Student – University of Central Florida

Digital Media Principles

This class seems like a lot of fun! The professor already mentioned Web 2.0 technologies and elaborated more about the way Digital Media and how social networks are evolving, covering some of the basics. Ex: Second Life, DMCA, WOW, Creative Commons, Intellectual Property, Quantum Computing, Google, etc. Projects will be a majority of the class and I plan to use some of my ideas I have been working on already to count towards this class.

Computers as a Medium

Another projected oriented class that will focus on having teams of web experts, 3D Animators, graphic artists, software developers, etc. These teams will share, communicate and critic ideas and focus on promoting brand and image. Also, the professor gave out his Second Life name on the syllabus 🙂

Theater Survey Elective

This is the quintessential college professor who pushes you to think outside the box and push the limits of normality. Something I am all about. Behind this wacky professor lies a quality that is very engaging and interesting.

He stresses to stay entertaining and innovative you must never stop questioning realty. As said by Aristotle, it is all about convention and testing expectations to plant bold images in peoples minds and get them thinking differently about the world around them. He wants us to apply this ideology to our lives. And did I mention, he breathed fire in front of the class the first day?

Calculus II

Pretty straight forward stuff. Probably one of my hardest classes, but great teacher!

Computer Science I

From the teachers definition it is a mix between “Computer and Science” 🙂 It will consist of creating and implementing algorithms, binary trees, heaps, sorting, searching, recursion and more in C. The professor, a grad student getting his PHd, is hilarious and reminds me of maddox, so he is basically 133t.

As I walked into the valley of unkempt level 70’s, I predicted correctly that someone was going to make fun of me for using a mac. I didn’t know there were any Windows fanboys left… ah, their loss!

Overall Thoughts

I would say I lucked out on profs this semester. I am looking to work in some of my web projects and ideas into the classes so I can kill two birds with one stone. I am very excited to be back in school, looks like it is going to be a great semester. Good luck to everyone!

Last week I went to visit the guys over at the PhotoshopTV Podcast thanks to my friend Paul.

The company, the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) are also charge of the popular magazines – Photoshop User, Layers Magazine, and a the publishers of a few other Adobe and Apple products. Also, they are behind the annual Photoshop World conference.

Take a look at the Flickr Set of some of the pictures I took inside the studio set and offices.

On Friday, I called my bffs at Google to get the answer straight on the robots.txt file. If you have never heard of a robots.txt file, it is a simple text file that is placed on the root directory of most websites. Through this very short code, as you can see placed in my directory, it can make a huge impact on your traffic and search engine rank:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This is telling Google to spider all and disallow nothing on my server. It tells Google’s web robots and other search engines what part of the website or all should be publicly viewable.

The Google Webmasters tool was the first time I really became aware of the file. Google provides webmasters a handy basic and beta tools to help web developers get the most out of their SEO keywords and help websites spider effectively.

By not using this file, it will show up on the webmasters tool as a “404 page”. Google obviously uses complex algorithms to find the links itself, but this is the ultimate tool to direct the search giant where to go.

But the real question when I called Google was I wanted to make sure that it was safe to do this with wordpress activated websites. Now there is a lot of controversy of the best way it should be done.

It is OK with to show all with a WordPress installation. Sensitive files and passwords are stored on the actual database and should not be stored on the server. So it is ok to display the whole root server, unless you have information you don’t want to be displayed.

For example, this is the reason why your Facebook profile doesn’t spider in Google (from Facebook Robots.txt File):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /profile.php
Disallow: /album.php
Disallow: /photo.php
Disallow: /p.php
Disallow: /feeds/

You can also check out any website robots.txt file by going to http://rootdirectory.com/robots.txt.

There are several other variables that can be optionally included, you can take a look at them here. If you are concerned about organizing your content and making sure Google doesn’t pick up irrelevant information using WordPress, here is a great video that describes what you can do.