Got a great new product?  Want to get a lot of people to see it?  Get a power user on Flickr to take a picture of it.  Scott Beale, also known as Laughing Squid, is a well know photographer.  In fact, he may be the second most 'internet famous' photographer (Thomas Hawk is perhaps the most famous).  So if you are going to create a product for photographers call up Scott and get him to take a picture of it.  

That is exactly what the Yuval Koren, the guy behind Eye-Fi, did.  What is Eye-Fi?  An SD memory card that will turn your camera into a wi-fi camera – no more USB cable.  This is going to be huge!  And  Yuval, by simply showing it to one of the best know 'internet famous' photographer is getting his product in front of thousands of people who WILL buy the Eye-Fi.  Very smart.  More on Gizmodo here.  Check out Scott's eyefi flickr pics here: 

.. 

Alex has a great post following up on his Barcamp Bangalore experience, replete with shots of many of the attendees.  So cool.  This is something they started at Barcamp Austin, and I hope it continues.  Love seeing the faces of everyone who participates.

Last night I did podcasts with Alex & Jay Fichialos.  They had just finished up Barcamp Bangalore.  I've put the casts into the Weblogs Worknotes stream, and you can also listen in to the Barcamp Bangalore podcast.

(Two sharp Mikes:  Manuel & Arrington) 

A great start last night for Third Thursday, the monthly meetup on social media jumpstarted by Mike Manuel, Phil Gomes, Jeremy Pepper & Giovanni Rodriguez.  Hated not to make it, but we can live vicariously through Pepper's write up, Valleywag's commentary, Mike A's blog, Mike M's blog, and this mp3.  Mike Arrington, of TechCrunch, talks about his goals for the growing network of sites he runs, and how he thinks the new PR should work.

We talked a bit about these same topics in our podcast on Weblogs Worknotes.  

Ben Brown (of Consumating & other Webby adventures) is your guide to SXSW Interactive in IFC's 'Behind the Badge.' 

(Photo by the ever present Scott Beale)

The latest addition to the Weblogs Worknotes podcast is a chat with Lane Becker, one of the founding members of Adaptive Path. Lane is heading up a new line of business at AP, where the user experience gurus will offer their services to start-ups in exchange for equity. Other topics include how AP helped Princess Cruise Lines rethink their entire consumer booking process, how technology companies can improve their product development processes and why South Park, SF is, once again, the hip hop happening spot for all things Web.

Dig it.

Play the podcast at the Weblogs Worknotes page using the Flash player. Download it here (~65 MB mp3). Or subscribe to the feed for Weblogs Worknotes.

Technorati Tags: adaptive path, lane becker, podcast, south park, user experience, web development, Weblogs Work, Weblogs+Worknotes

Our Big in Japan tools, specifically PodServe, have seen a huge spike in usage recently.  It is becoming clear much of the current traffic is due to a single podcast.  Leo Laporte covered PodServe on "Inside the Net" a couple of weeks ago and we thought it might help tell the Big in Japan story to 15,000 people (the number of listeners Amber Mac reported to us).  

Evidently Leo's podcasts (according to AOL Radio who distributes them) are more popular than we thought.  In March alone Leo had more than 2.6 million downloads.  That is a big audience by any measure.  As a result traffic to PodServe has spiked, with registered users increasing by more than 50% since the interview.  

Leo, like PodServe, targets a very specific niche firmly planted in the long tail.  Alex blogged about how it is very inexpensive to reach these long tail markets in a post titled, "Biggest Market = Highest Cost to Reach" earlier this week.   

Seth is catching on to the powers of microchunking in this post today:

Wishing is not much of a business strategy, and the realists among us will probably focus on three things:

• turn your website inside out as fast as you can. That means RSS everywhere–in and out. And it means encouraging your readers to flip the funnel.
• continue integrating your pages into your site, but prepared to do a better job of integrating your pages into the web.
• remember that every single page is now a landing page. "First time here?" is going to be answered yes more often than not in an atomic world.

We talk about this all the time with folks. Instead of focusing all the energy we used to on the 'look and feel' of the 'landing' page (ie. the home page), you need to think about how your Web stuff is just a blip in a much larger experience. (pace Mr. Veen) Each blog post is a new little doorway into your area of expertise, and none of us know when we put things out there exactly how people will find us or exactly where our words, images & ideas will end up. And that's a great thing. Let's start working with those assumptions.

Technorati Tags: feeds, jeff+veen, microchunking, rss, sethgodin

If you blog for fun it is okay to throw your blog up on a server and enjoy.  If you do it for a living you might want to give your infrastucture a little thought.  99% of our blogs are WordPress (we have one Movable Type blog).  We are in the process of reviewing our setup, but our current setup can be seen below:

I’ll be leading a roundtable discussion on social media tonight at Refresh Dallas with wicked smart boys John Keehler, Jake Mckee & Blake Burris. Starts at 7:00 up in Plano. Come hang out with us.

Here’s the Upcoming page for Refresh, which happens each month.

Presentation: Get Small Fast: Microbranding & Next Gen Social Media

We’re way beyond the blog. Not that blogging’s done. Far from it. We’re just at the beginning, but already social media means much more. Look at the growth in MySpace, YouTube, podcasting. Flickr’s on the cover of Newsweek; danah boyd is on with Bill O’Reilly (what? what?). We’re not in Kansas anymore.

This installment of Refresh Dallas is a roundtable chat with a few local social media mavens (Brian Oberkirch, John Keehler, Jake McKee, Blake Burris). There may be a t-shirt given away to someone who says something inspiring. (T-shirts & stickers are Web 2.0 costs of entry, eh? “Our software is free. Our schwag rocks.”) Let’s talk.

Technorati Tags: blake+burris, jake+mckee, john+keehler, refreshdallas, social+media