Technology Report will be live blogging the Twitter 140 Conference in Mountain View California and WordCamp San Francisco on Saturday May 30th.

*The two day Twitter event starts Tuesday May 26th*

This is only the second WordCamp San Francisco and promises excellent insider insights from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Google’s top blogger Matt Cutts who has been using the WordPress blogging format for several years.

This is the first major Twitter conference *ever* and is sure to bring a lot of interesting people and companies to the Computer Science Museum in Mountain View.

Hope to see you there in person or here at Technology Report’s live coverage of these events.

Twitter 140, WordCamp, blogs, twitter mountain view, Twitter 140, WordCamp San Francisco

By John Ghysels, Special to Technology-Report.com

I’ve attended, worked, booked and even produced some good sized industry events in my day. However, I was unprepared for the sheer scale and scope of the CES Las Vegas experience.  Without a doubt the largest vendor exhibition on the planet, the size of CES simply boggles the expectations. This massive five day party stretches out over multiple floors of four large Vegas hotels, easily filling aircraft hanger style spaces with mazes of massive displays, lounges, rooms, hallways, conference rooms, listening rooms, interview spaces, tele-video rooms, demo areas and every other imaginable bit of space needed to demonstrate, communicate and sell ideas.  Each area creates experiences of massive city like regions of booths organized by technology and, in the case of the wholesaler booths, by nation, creating a far more entertaining, gadget soaked version of Epcot. 

Against the over-the-top technology and entertainment focused environment of Las Vegas, the CES Show blends well.  The first class entertainment, industry leadering speakers, innovative breakouts and engaging vendors at CES were far beyond my high expectations. 

Above all, CES is not really about gadgets, but about the development of ideas and the excitement of communicating them. It isn’t just about products which solve problems, but mostly new concepts which seek to improve and enhance life.  Seeing them all, in one gigantic marketplace explosion of innovation and competition, the experience is awe inspiring. 

At CES, each company and entrepreneur, inspired by their vision, seek to inspire each of us. CES is a testament to the strength and power of the imagination to create ideas you can touch, feel and see. 

John Ghysels, 1/14/2009

CES, CES09, blogs, companies, conferences, gadgets bloggers at CES, CES, CES 2009, CES First-timers, CES ideas, CES is it worth it?

Blogging CES 2009:

I’m reposting Lyn’s excellent blogroll from the official CES blog at blog.ce.org. For a complete pictures you’ll need to check a lot of blogs because even the companies like Engadget and Gizmodo, each I think with 10+ people reporting here, will feature only a small fraction of all the conference action here at CES, which is really almost too massive to imagine in terms of the number of exhibits across the two convention centers.

• CNET CES 2009
• Command Information IPv6 Experts
• CONNECTIONS
• Consumer Electronics Daily News
• Dealerscope
• Dot.life
• E-gear
• Engadget
• Gadgets Blog
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Gibson Guitar Blog
• GigaOm
• Green Inc.
• Growingupgadget
• HAI Blog
• Hi Tech Gadget
• Ideal Gadget
• Intel’s Consumer Electronics Insider
• Michael Gartenberg
• Natali Del Conte
• Neat Receipts Blog
• Parks Associates Blog
• Rob Pegoraro, Faster Forward, Washington Post
• Scobleizer
• Slashdot
• Sony Electronics Blog
• Talk Back from Radio Magazine
• Techeblog
• Technology-Report.com
• The Gadget Blog
• The Jeff Pulver Blog
• Thiel Weblog
• Ubergizmo
• Veronica Belmont

CES, CES09, blogs, conferences blogging ces, blogs, CES, CES 2009, CES09

Techmeme is a favorite of many in technology for pulling together technology stories and the conversations that often swirl around them.  Unlike a simple “ranking” system, TechMeme surfaces the top stories and then links out to blogs and sites that are discussing those “hot topics”.     Thus a quick review of TechMeme can give you a very fast orientation to the stories that are making their rounds in the blogs.    That does not always correspond to stories that actually *matter* to real folks, but it’s a great start.

TechMeme’s new story editor Megan has a list here of the top 10 for 2008.   Number one was the Microsoft – Yahoo aquisition saga, number two was Apple quitting MacWorld, and number three was Google Chrome.

Disclosure: Long on YHOO

SEO, Social Networks, Uncategorized, Websites, blogs, internet, search blog rankings, blogs, internet ranking, links, tech, Top Tech Stories

Canon Powershot SX10

Product Review: Why go SLR?  Power finally arrives for the portable digital camera. 

By John R. Ghysels, Special to Technology-Report.com

Many picture buffs like myself are torn between the weight, expense and size of many digital SLR’s, and the increasing power and convenience of the near SLR portables.  Hardcore travelers like myself know the convenience of throwing a camera in a case or backpack and the hassle that the weight, care and feeding of an SLR can pose on such trips. 

Fortunately, it looks like that a reasonable price and high quality has finally come to super-zoom portable cameras. This item, only introduced in October of 2008, is setting a brand new standard for others to follow.  Earlier “super-zoom” models; zooms in excess of 10x or 12x, suffered from image quality problems as long zooms strained the limits of their tiny processors. The long zooms need to capture light and reduce the effects of vibration and all these negative effects increase exponentially with each increase in zoom power. It used to be that only the large lenses and higher sensitivity power of expensive SLR’s solved this problem. 

It appears that processor sensitivity has finally caught up with the portable 20x optical zoom, if the enthusiastic raves on Digital Camera HQ  http://www.digitalcamera-hq.com/digital-cameras/canon-powershot-sx10is_product-reviews.html, and www.amazon.com as well as other sources are any indication. 

Even more exciting, the price seems to be falling toward the $300 level as I write this, despite the surprisingly high demand that has emerged for many gadgets during the 2008 holiday season.  Might be worth picking one of these up for your holiday or summer travels. I definitely will. 

John Ghysels, 11/30/2008.

Cameras, Websites, blogs, gadgets Cameras, portable, SLR, super zoom, superzoom, SX10

Here in Southern Oregon, Applegate is the charming valley and river that was named after early settlers. For Silicon Valley the new term “AppleGate” refers to the top tech blog Engadget’s posting of a fake email suggesting that Apple’s iPhone would be delayed. The report led to an almost immediate sell off of Apple stock and a 4 billion dollar decline in Apple’s market capitalization, though the stock rebounded quickly when it became clear the email was a fake.

This appears to be a *superb* example of how information is reflected by the stock market and how quickly. I get the idea the (bogus) iPhone delay rumor affected the price of APPL almost immediately but have not checked the timing.

Mike at TechCrunch has a nice play by play and graph of AppleGate, and the Engadget post AppleGate post is here.

blogs, companies

Interesting.   My Chico the Wonder Dog SEO experiment is yielding some unexpected results.    A tweet about this is now higher in the ranks than the original blog post page.

Chico the Wonder Dog has been trading places with another Chico the Wonder Dog.   That post is much older and may have more incoming links since that guy seems to spend more time posting about his dog than I do, though based on my quick analysis of this and a few other cases I think it indicates that Google looks carefully at the rate of link growth, and if it slows they tend to put back the “old, tried and true” page in favor of the newcomer. This makes sense from an anti-spam perspective although in Chicos particular case it probably does not yield the top dog.

However, the Twitter reference rising to high seems really surprising because Twitter posts are generally small and insignificant (as it is here).  I’m surprised Google ranks these at all, let alone makes them competitive with meaty postings.  Perhaps Google has elevated “social media” in some algorithmic fashion though my guess is this is a defect that will be corrected – ie Twitter is structured in a way that links to these posts from many Twitter people and this is messing up the Algo’s handing of this insignificant material.    If I’m searching for “Tesla Coil”, let along pretty much anything of any relevance, I hardly want a bunch of Twitter posts!

Google, SEO, Social Networks, Web 2.0, blogs

I’m back at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View at Startup Camp, another great UNconference event from David Berlind and Doug Gold and hosted by several nice sponsor companies.

The focus here is broader than the Mashup Camps which were more relevant to my travel experience and where we need to go with Online Highways, but I’ve enjoyed excellent “open” presentations by Jeff Barr from Amazon and Venture Capitalists Jeff Clavier with Rick Segal who are generously offering some really key insights into the startup funding process.

Matt Mullenweg is here and it was fun to meet the creator of the superb Wordpress environment.

Web 2.0, Websites, blogs, mashups