Members of local entrepreneur organization Bootstrap Austin have made a strong showing in panel submissions for next spring's South by Southwest Interactive Conference.
Support these local entrepreneurs by clicking on the links to vote for their panels. Public support is 30% of the weight given when panels are chosen, and this year's competition is fierce, with over 3,000 panels submitted, and only room for 300 sessions. Panel voting ends September 4th.
Following are the panels that have been submitted by Bootstrap Austin members, alphabetically by Bootstrapper/presenter last name.
Maura Nevel Thomas, RegainYourTime.com: Win the War Against Information Overload - http://budurl.com/9v4l
Pat Scherer, The Detail Person: Slacker Website Triage: Addressing Purpose, Usability and Conversion (with Brian Massey & Theresa Neil) - http://budurl.com/sxswslacker
Jan Triplett, Business Success Center: Successful Networking for Introverts, Rebels and Misfits (with Julie Gomoli) - http://bit.ly/4AK8L
Maura Thomas is an early member of Bootstrap Austin and founder of two Austin bootstrapped companies: RegainYourTime.com and Avail Assistants. In Maura's 15 years in the productivity training industry, she developed a process for peak effectiveness called the Empowered Productivity System. She has been invited to speak and train all over Texas and nationally. Maura is very active in the local small business community, and sits on several non-profit boards and committees, including being selected by The Climate Project and personally trained by former Vice President Al Gore to deliver his message on climate change.
Brewster Kahle used to talk about the Internet as a huge book that everyone was collaboratively writing, and in that spirit, we adopted early on the metaphor of "bookmarking" to note online addresses we might return to for whatever reason. Bookmarking was crucial to evolving browser navigation, and soon enough we had web sites where we could store bookmarks. A site called del.icio.ous gave us a way to categorize bookmarks with simple tags. Any user of the system could create a personal set of tags - roll your own taxonomy. So why not share tags and bookmarks with others? That's the concept of social bookmarking, shared sites, navigation, and bottom-up taxonomies or "folksonomies." Social bookmarking became a popular way to share content, and to "vote" with your feet - using algorithms that rate content by the number of bookmarks and the number of links. This is all part of the evolution of a web-facilitated mediasphere where the line between content producer and content consumer is blurred, and crowds collaborate in making and extending stories and knowledge.
We can facilitate the social bookmarking of our own content by adding "blogware" that makes it easy to bookmark a site at one of the many social bookmarking and collaborative content sites that have appeared. We've done this at bootstrapaustin.org - we've added a drop-down menu to the footer of each post for bookmarking posts at del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, ma.gnolia, Yahoo, Google, Stumbleupon and Facebook.
Social bookmarking can be a powerful way for this community to share knowledge about bootstrapping with each other and the world. We strongly encourage everybody to read the Bootsap Austin blog (http://bootstrapaustin.org) and bookmark those things you find compelling at one or more of the social bookmarking sites listed.
Info about the social bookmarking sites (via Wikipedia):
Delicious (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.
Digg is a website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.
Furl (from File Uniform Resource Locators) is a free social bookmarking website that allows members to store searchable copies of webpages and share them with others.
ma.gnolia is a social bookmarking site similar to Delicious.
StumbleUpon is an internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles.
At Facebook, you can post bookmarks to you profile.
