Our friend iStrategyLabs CEO Peter Corbett has recently launched with the District of Columbia Apps for Democracy. It’s a challenge to developers and agencies from around the country to take the public data produced by the District of Columbia (DC) government and create interesting applications and visualizations that will help make lives easier.

This is a great opportunity to innovate and find new interesting uses for this otherwise not that exciting data. Plus, At the end of the contest, 60 prizes will be handed out ranging from $100 to $2000 for a total of $20,000. Oh and it’s not limited to people in the DC area.

So if you have sometime this weekend, bang out a quick app or widget. You could potentially make some cash and help make people’s lives easier.

I’d love to see someone make some Clearspring widgets for the contest. If you make something, send it my way and I’ll try and highlight it on the blog. My e-mail address is – justin@clearspring.com

On September 8th, Hooman will be at the PMA Digital Marketing Summit on a panel entitled “Social Networking, Social Media, Widgets, Podcasting, User-Generated Content… Where do they fit and how do you use them?” The panel is from 11:15 – 12 p.m. The panel will be moderated by Brian Morrissey of Adweek and will include Marshall Sponder, Sr. Social Networks Analyst at Monster.com and Web Analytics Associon as well as Kwasi Asare, Head of New Media at Bad Boy Entertainment.

Stay connected with Hooman while he’s at the PMA Digital Marketing Summit and in NYC by following him on Twitter.

On September 10th, I’ll be at StartUp SF demoing Clearspring’s widget platform Launchpad. Its from 6-9pm at 8th Floor Cafe of Orrick, Herrinton & Sutcliffe (@ 405 Howard St in San Francisco). It costs $10 online in advance / $20 at the door.

I’ll be in San Francisco from Tuesday to Friday of next week. If you want to meetup, grab lunch, coffee, or a beer, drop me a line. E-mail me at justin@clearspring.com or follow me on Twitter.

Here at Clearspring we’ve submitted three panels proposals for next year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival. SXSW is one of the premier conferences in the Web 2.0 industry. It’s held in March every year in Austin, TX and brings together all of the enthusiasts and thought leaders in this space.

Panels are a great opportunity for us to help lead the discussion around the issues that we care about… widgets and the social web.

I need your guys’ help. They have a panel picker application where people get to vote on what panels they want to see. This plays a significant role in what panels get chosen.

So… all I ask of you is that you take 5 minutes today, create an account with the panel picker application, and vote for Clearspring’s panels.

Here are the steps.

1. Go here and create an account – http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/
2. Then vote for these panels:
   • How Sharing is Reshaping the Web (Hooman Radfar)
   • True Life: I’m a Successful Widget (Peggy Fry)
   • How I Got Paid For Getting Grabbed (Hooman Radfar)

Voting closes April 29th so please vote soon. Thanks for your help!

The beginning of August is quickly approaching so I’m packing my bags and getting ready to head out on a few more trips.

As Joel and Stewart get back from their tour of the West coast Web companies (in a Mustang), I’ll be headed out to NYC. I’m attending SocialMediaCamp NYC and Mashable’s party SummerMash in the city. Both events are on August 7th, 2008.

These events are part of Mashable’s Summer Tour. I really had a blast at the Seattle leg. I look forward to spending time and getting to know more folks from the New York social media and Web communities.

For my next trip in August, I’ll be at the Wordpress conference WordCamp in San Francisco on the 16th. Blogs always have and will continue to be a major destination for widgets to be shared. I look forward to spending time and better getting to know the needs of the Wordpress user community.

For each of these trips, I’m giving myself a day or two around each of the events. If you wanna meet up and grab a beer, lunch, or dinner, don’t hesitate to drop me a line – justin@clearspring.com

Also… make sure that you follow myself and Clearspring on Twitter. When I travel, I tweet a lot about what I’m up to and where I’m at.

Last Thursday was the Washington DC Twin Tech Party at the U Street club Local 16. Hundreds of local executives, designers, developers, sales people, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts from local companies came to celebrate their common interest in continuing to make the Washington DC metro area a hub of activity for the Web and technology industries.

We had a nice posse of Clearpsring folks there. We all met a ton of great people. Due to the nature of the event, there was a bigger cross section of folks at this then the usual DC tech event. We also handed out A LOT of stickers, which people proudly wore. If you’d like some stickers, see my previous note.

The whole event, was inspired from a blog post written by Zach Goldfarb for the Washington Post. He noticed from two simultaneous events happening on the same day that there were two tech communities in the Washington DC area. My good friend and CEO of iStrategyLabs Peter Corbett took the initiative and decided to throw a joint party that would unite the two communities.

The event got even more exciting when Business Week and best selling author of “Once Your Lucky. Twice Your Good” Sarah Lacy decided to come to Washington DC as part of her user-generated book tour. She came to the event and got the opportunity meet the local tech scene, as well as sell and sign books.

Sarah is someone that’s seen the inside and outside of Silicon Valley. She was able to impart a lot of valuable advice to us about how we can grow the local community for it to become even more of an exciting place to work and grow a business.

Having Central Command here in the Washington DC area is definitely a source of pride for us here at Clearspring. We want to do our best to contribute and support this community. We hope there will be many more parties like this in the future.

Kudos to Peter for putting on such a great event and thanks to Sarah for coming out.

(Photos taken by and used with permission of Kenneth Yeung)

I’ll be headed to the great Northwest… Seattle, Washington. Saturday is SocialMediaCamp. It’s a BarCamp-style event focused on the use and development of social media as well as “community-based” marketing. One of the organizers is my friend and master community marketer Erica O’Grady. I’d love to get a discussion going about how widgets are a necessary part of any social media strategy.

Come Saturday evening it will be time to party. The Web 2.0 and social networking blog Mashable is hosting a US Summer Tour and Saturday night is their stop in Seattle. I’m confident I’ll be there late into the evening. Just look for the guy in the Clearspring t-shirt or covered in Clearspring stickers.

On July 21st, I’ll be heading out early to San Francisco for a couple days of meeting with folks and then the Facebook’s developer conference F8 ‘08 on July 23rd.

I’ve been out there so much that San Fran is quickly becoming one of my homes away from home and with the F8 conference I’m extra excited about this trip. Rumors are already starting to spread about what’ll be announced.

If you’ll be in Seattle or San Francisco during either of these times that I’ll be there, please please please let me know. My e-mail address is justin@clearspring.com. I’d love to meetup and grab a coffee or a pint.

Also… follow both Clearspring and me on Twitter. This is a good way to get in touch and keep track of my/the company’s adventures, especially as I travel to different developer events and conferences around the country.

On June 9 to 11th, O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns conference will be in the Washington, DC area. Organized by our friend Dave McClure, the conference is one of the premier events that addresses and discusses the issues surrounding the Social Web. A West coast version of the event was held in San Diego back in March of 2008.

Clearspring will be at Graphing Social Patterns East in a BIG way. In addition to being a Gold Level sponsor, our CEO Hooman Radfar will be giving a talk on “Widget Strategies & Social Platforms” and our Director of Product Management for Analytics Jodi McDermott will be on a panel entitled “The Joy of Widgets: Everything You Want to Know But Were Afraid to Ask” with folks from CenterNetworks, Goowy Media, RockYou, and Sprout.

On June 11th in San Francisco, our friend and CEO of RateItAll Lawrence Coburn is moderating a panel with SF New Tech entitled “Widgets up the Wazoo!” Our Director of Business Development Mike Harkey will be sitting on the panel and demoing Launchpad.  There will also be representatives from Seeqpod, Gydget, Triggit, Add to Any, Disqus, and Sprout. This will be a great opportunity to hear about the issues around widgets from the leaders in the space.

If you’re going to be at either of these events, come find us and say hi.

I’ll be attending the Tech Cocktail Conference in Chicago, IL on May 29th. It’s being hosted and organized by our friend Frank Gruber and his comrade Eric Olson. They’re the duo that has held the Tech Cocktail mixer events all over the country.

The conference has a packed lineup. Speakers include Web luminaries such as Dick Costolo of FeedBurner, Jason Fried of 37signals, Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV and many others.

I’d love to meetup with as many folks as possible. If you’re coming to the event, drop me a line – justin@clearspring.com.

Secondly, two of our engineers Roger Studner and Austin Fath (also company co-founder) will be attending the Google I/O conference in San Francisco on May 28-29th.

The conference is a great opportunity for developers to talk about how they can push the boundaries of Web applications and use Google’s different Web technologies. There will be sessions on things like “AJAX & JavaScript, APIs & Tools, Social, Maps & Geo, and Mobile.”

If you’ll be at the event and wanna meet up with Roger or Austin, just leave a comment in this blog post and i’ll make sure it gets to them.

Our very own CEO Hooman Radfar will be giving the opening keynote on the 16th. He’ll be covering how widgets can be utilized to have your content and marketing campaigns reach entirely new users or better engage your existing ones.

Secondly, our Director of Product Management for Analytics Jodi McDermott (aka WidgetGirl) will be speaking on widget analytics on the 17th.

If you’re going to be at the conference and see Hooman or Jodi, make sure you grab them and say hello. We’re all fun friendly people and love to meet new folks.

Also… if you wanna follow Jodi as she goes and presents at conferences, friend her on Twitter.

I’m excited because this weekend, April 18-20th, is PodCamp DC. It’s a “a free UnConference that helps connect you to other people interested in blogging, podcasting, video on the web, social networks and new media to learn, share and grow your new media skills.”

I’ll be speaking to podcasters on Saturday about the importance of “Making Your Video Shareable.” Should be a fun talk and discussion. Clearspring also has the pleasure of being a sponsor of the event. We’re psyched to be associated with it.

Unconferences are so much fun. They’re a great way to meet and collaborate with some of the smartest people in the industry. I’ve never been disappointed.

So… if you’ll be attending the event, drop me a note or find me and say hi. I’d love to meet-up.