http://mikeschinkel.com Web Marketing Strategist — Atlanta Startup Catalyst Sun, 21 Mar 2010 01:43:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've been organzing meetups in the Atlanta area since January 2007.  Over that time I've organized over 50 meetup events, they've typically achieved average ratings of 4.5 of 5 or better, they've typically had 50 or more people attend, I've helped at least five (5) other people launch their meetup ... http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/25-best-practices-for-meetup-organizers/ Yesterday Vivek Wadhwa who has recently become one of my favorite authors on startup-related topics wrote a somewhat inflammatory post on TechCrunch entitled "Can Entrepreneurs Be Made?" In it he asserts that entrepeneurs are made, not born, and it's somewhat inflammatory because he calls out Jason Calcanis, Fred Wilson, and other ... http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/are-entrepreneurs-born-or-made-does-it-really-matter/ Lance Weatherby of ATDC and Socialytics wrote a post today entitled Nobody Told Me where he ranted about how there are too many startup activities in Atlanta and not enough people "creating products, getting customers, and building companies."  After writing a long comment which his blog wouldn't accept for some ... http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/force-of-harm/ A friend recently sent me a URL via a Forward-to-Friend.com which is a service of MailChimp. While I really love the guys at MailChimp their URLs for their Forward-to-Friend.com are simply awful. There days of social media well designed URLs are finally being recognized by many as being ... http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/forward-to-friend-urls/ Last month on the 21st we had a blowout meeting about Twitter for the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs meetup group I organize; over 100 people attended! We started out with an Intro to Twitter which I prepared and delivered. It reminded me of delivering training long ago during my DSW Group, Financial ... http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/awe-learns-twitter/ Just an announcement that we are going to be discussing Why you MUST have a Twitter Strategy at Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs on August 21, 2008. I'm going to present a short intro/overview to Twitter and then, god willing and the creek don't rise, we plan to have two (2) video conferences, one from ... http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/event-why-you-must-have-a-twitter-strategy/ It's been almost fifteen years now since the web first hit it's tipping point and transitioned from an academic's playground and a mere curiosity for the average person to the decidedly mainstream global change agent that now drives trillions of dollars in global value creation annually. During that time we've ... http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/is-com-still-required/ Wall of Spam courtesy of freezelight and enabled by Creative Commons Damon Clinkscales blogged about Twitter Spam last month where he advocated proactively cleansing one follower's list of "follow spammers" to help reduce the load on Twitter, improve Twitter's reliability, and increase the value of the Twitter community in general. I agree! Still, ... http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/twitter-anti-follow-spam/ So I've got a project where I need to have a Flash component built in Flex to call to a WordPress blog and get information about it's latest post. Should be no problem right?  The easy way to do this would be to just write a "rest.php" file and brute-force ... http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/restful-web-services-in-wordpress-plugin/ Recently on Twitter I've had several people ask where they could find another good place for free WiFi in Atlanta.  Each time I answered so I decided to maintain a page on my site with a list of the Atlanta WiFi Hot Spots I go to frequently or at least know ... http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/finding-a-wifi-hot-spot-in-atlanta/