Three things really stand out about the current Iranian conflict.

1. User generated content is easily able to slip through any blocks that the government puts in place over traditional media.  Journalists were locked in hotels in the dark, while a protester sitting on a balcony can snap pictures and post on Flickr/YouTube/Twitter/Blogs.

2. Instead of new media sources being used to highlight traditional media articles, the traditional media was highlighting and analyzing new media posts. Maybe thats where it’ll go in the future?

3. Anything posted to UGC sites was referred to as “unconfirmed” – which is an important aspect of print media. How does one verify things posted online? Will we rely on technical checks (EXIF data in photos, GPS location of twitter posts) or rely on the wisdom of the crowd to decide what is real?

Background: The DC government is exposing an API for their 311 call center, to allow application developers to build open source tools to make it easier for citizens to submit issues. As part of it, they and iStrategyLabs have launched a second Apps for Democracy contest. The creative juices are flowing, and I have a few ideas I plan on implementing.

But first things first… in order to make it even easier for myself and for other developers, I built out a ruby gem that interacts with the Open311 and Geolocation API. I know I’m helping out my competition, but it’s all for the better good, right? Here you go:

http://projects.skeevisarts.com/code/DCGOV-0.0.1.gem

You can also grab it from github: http://github.com/skeevis/dcgov/tree/master

Download and install it, and you should be set. It’s fully tested using rspec, so just open up the spec folder and you’ll be able to exavtly how it works. I’ll eventually add this to rubyforge, but for now you can take the extra step

DC OCTO has a ways to go. The API is supposed to launch on July 1st, but they certainly have a lot more to do with the API, both in terms of development and documentation. The Geolocation API seems to be pretty solid. The 311 API has unimplemented (stubbed) functions, spelling mistakes in variable names, no error handling, and no documentation (the “submit” function, the most important, is a total mystery). It’s too bad that people will find this when they head to the CodeJam over the weekend, but oh well.

Good luck to everyone else!

Last weekend, a few dozen developers gathered together at Viget’s beautiful offices in Reston to… talk nerdy. Out of all the conferences I’ve been to, it was one of the best. It was directly honed on developers, and all talks were targeted as such. That meant no talks about marketing, gov 2.0, branding, public relations,  blogging, twitter, or anything else social media/PR, etc. as *camps and other conferences I’ve attended recently have moved towards (I’m not counting language-specific conferences).

I had taken notes, but Peter did a better job, so read his.

A few key takeways:

• Jay Virdy, CEO of Summize, kept repeating Build something simple, let the market pull you in – Brad Burnham . As soon as he accepted that, Summize turned itself into a simple Twitter search engine, and took off.
• HTML5 will likely have standards for push notifications (a la Google Wave). Comet is a current implementation. No more of this polling shit.
• Ruby 1.9 is a huge step ahead, but will pose problems for legacy apps.
• Impromptu, Lily, PureData are pretty cool tools for manipulating sound/visuals, even by reading a website. Much cooler if you want to spring for a Monome

Some link love:

• Aaron Bedra
• Peter Harkins (+ excellent notes)
• Ben Scofield
• @developer_day
• Official Site

Wait — what?

Every PHP Web Developer, or any other kind of web developer, has, at one point, butted heads with ImageMagick, or its inferior nemesis, GD. We’ve tussled with setup and installation, debugged scripts, and stolen code, but rarely do we look to it for anything beyond generating a thumbnail or resizing an image.

Armed with nothing more than the native manual, I started experimenting with its abilities. What could I make with it? I thought it would be cool to start out with making a script to generate your own version of the iconic RUN DMC logo, as I’ve seen many variations.

And so it was born.

Above is what my script generates… nearly identical to the original.

Of course..

It will also resize appropriately, given how much text you pump in.

I’ve made the source code available. Steal away.

Entrepreneurship -  at least for tech-minded folk – is more often than not omitted from curriculum in college. As I was finishing up my degree at the University of Maryland, it was assumed that everyone there would go to work for one or another government contractor or large enterprise, who would dominate job fairs with huge flashy booths and t-shirts. That’s all the teachers talked about. That’s all the career center offered. That’s all your friends knew. The cream of the crop would go to Microsoft or Google.

But what about startups? What about starting your own company, or joining someone else’s nascent startup? Right out of college is the best time to be doing it – low cost of living, no strings, etc. It wasn’t until I graduated and went to work as a consultant did I realize that there was more out there than a 9-5 and a paycheck. Most of the people I graduated with still are in shock that I left that world, and since then, have been CTO of two companies, as well as building my own business. I’ve been doing my best since then to try and find college students.

That’s why I’m especially thrilled that friend and fellow alum Jared Goralnick is organizing Bootstrap Maryland, a one day event targeted towards budding entrepeneurs. It’s great to see such a powerful lineup of locals making it happen, and, best of all… right on campus. Thanks Jared. I can’t wait to see how this turns out.

Even though 2008 was such a momentous year for me, I never had much of a chance to sit back and review it… 2009 has been just as important. Rather than write some deep insight on how it’s changed me and such, I’m just going to list it out. Here’s what’s happened in 2008 and the first quarter of ‘09:

• Started 2008 continuing to work for the government consulting firm I had been since graduation. Had a few side projects, as well as my own startup idea, Localnik.
• Left consulting firm, to become Chief Technology Officer of a startup creative agency. Did some amazing projects. Challenged myself and pushed myself harder than I ever had before.
• Left creative agency to focus full-time on web development, finally under skeevisArts – a label I had been using for ten years. Finally could do it full time! But…
• …soon after was offered to become CTO of a venture-backed startup whose founders I had come to know and trust. skeevisArts was (and still is) going well, but this was an opportunity I could not pass up, so I took it on in addition to my freelance work. Was sole developer of the product initially, but am now growing the team rapidly.
• Celebrated three years with Alex, my girlfriend.
• Sadly, my father, after going through 2 surgeries in ‘08 and 3 more in ‘09 – passed away.

Last Monday (March 16th, 2009) my father passed away, after battling cancer for nearly 8 years. Thanks to everyone for their love, support, and understanding in the past few weeks, months, and years.

I uploaded my eulogy, as well as for the rest of my family.

Like last year, I woke up at 5 AM to work at a soup kitchen in DC. It’s always fun to drive around DC afterwards, as the streets are empty.

I’ve realized that I’ve been running a Tumblr miniblog for months, and haven’t actually publicized it.

While I prefer to use this blog to “write stuff” I do find a good amount of cool stuff as I’m online, and collect it all on Tumblr.

Check it out!

21stcenturydigitalboy.com

The name is after a song by Bad Religion:

Tom Friedman has a great op-ed in the NY Times regarding  the auto bailout. He raises a good point which I believe can apply to entrepreneurship…

As I think about our bailing out Detroit, I can’t help but reflect on what, in my view, is the most important rule of business in today’s integrated and digitized global market, where knowledge and innovation tools are so widely distributed. It’s this: Whatever can be done, will be done. The only question is will it be done by you or to you. Just don’t think it won’t be done. If you have an idea in Detroit or Tennessee, promise me that you’ll pursue it, because someone in Denmark or Tel Aviv will do so a second later.

As the current auto industry, and it’s failure to adapt to a changing consumer, represents “Car 1.0″ – why should we sink our taxpayer dollars into saving it? When we instead could be investing in the next generation of clean tech?