clearspring - the widget network.

It’s that time of year again. One of the biggest conferences in the Web industry, South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, has published their list of proposals for next year’s (2010) conference in their Panel Picker Web application and is asking the world to vote on who they think should be included.

Can you spare 5 minutes, check out our panels, and give them a vote? We’d really appreciate it.

Here’s the list…

• The Arms Race: Delivering Perfect Ad
• Building Your Community Across a World of Communities
• Growing Social: Using Social Platforms to Grow-Fast
• Government, Meet the People (Online)

Thanks so much for your vote.

Are you going to SXSW? If so, drop us a comment. We’d love to meetup with as many folks as possible.

Note: This post was also published on the AddThis blog.

Hooman and I are hitting the road this week. There will be a couple of great opportunities that you can hear us speak.

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.

“All my bags are packed… Im ready to go… Im standin here outside your door… I hate to wake you up to say goodbye” (Leaving on a Jet Plane, John Denver)

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.

No no, despite what it looks like in the photo, my boss and our VP of Products, Joel Pulliam is not racing cars in Mexico. He and our CTO, Stewart Allen are actually in the sunny state of California this week. They’re meeting with various Web industry leaders and Clearspring users.

Their goals are to gather as much feedback as possible about our products and to start discussions around the future of the Social Web. So far, I’ve heard nothing but good things from their trip. Here in the muggy Washington, DC area at Clearspring Central Command, we can’t wait to have them back and get a full debriefing about how things went.

So… if you’re in California and see a greenish looking Ford Mustang flying down the 101 (apparently Stewart has a lead foot), wave hi to them for us.

Friday, I won’t be standing in line to get the new iPhone 3G. I’m going to be on the road again.

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.

Next week, a few of us are going to be on the road going to some really cool conferences.

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.

Well, we’re all pretty excited for the conference Widget Web Expo. The leading experts from the widget industry will come together on June 16th to the 17th in New York City to discuss all issues within the industry, everything from a creative to technical.

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.

Back in March, our CEO Hooman Radfar was on a panel “Widgets as a Platform: Content, Commerce, Communications” at the Digital Hollywood Media Summit. In the panel they discuss questions like:

• What widgets are most popular?
• What are the different types of business models?
• How do you make widget advertising effective?
• Is there enough revenue to share amongst all the constituencies?
• Will widgets be the next generation of ad networks?
• What is the role of the social network?
• What is the state of widget measurement today?

Well, the video of the panel is now on YouTube. Enjoy!

(Found on Widget Beat)

When I walked into the office yesterday morning, it dawned on me that I hadn’t been in the office for a week. I’ve been traveling and attending conferences so that I can meet and talk with as many of you as possible.

Last week I was in New York City for AJAXWorld. I filled in for our CEO Hooman Radfar at a talk he was going to give on “The Social Aggregator – Widgets Reshape the Social Web.” It went really well. We had the room filled with about 40 people. There was a lot of great discussion about how the Web is getting broken into pieces via widgets and about the current state of consumer-facing and enterprise tools that are bringing the pieces of the Web back together. For a good overview of the talk, check out Sean Michael Kerner’s post at InternetNews.

Unfortunately, I was only at AJAXWorld for the last day of the conference on Thursday. I had a fantastic time meeting people within the AJAX community and listening to some of the sessions. I would have loved to do more.

On Tuesday, I attended the SNAP Summit in San Francisco. It was also a fantastic conference. It focused on “the business and design of social applications.” This is such a fast growing space. It was a blast meeting a lot of the people who are behind the top social applications.

Some of the other highlights from the SNAP Summit was getting to hear from Dave Morin the Senior Platform Manager at Facebook and Jim Benedetto the Vice President of Technology at MySpace. I also had the pleasure of seeing two of my favorite bloggers speak: interface designer Joshua Porter from “Bokardo” and Forrester Analyst Jeremiah Owyang from “Web Strategy by Jeremiah”. Later that night, Jeremiah hosted and helped organize a blogger dinner, which I attended and thoroughly enjoyed.

So… what’s next? Next weekend I’m headed to Rochester, NY for BarCampRochester3, which we’re a sponsor of. As I’ve mentioned in the past, we’re big fans of BarCamps. They’re a great venue for getting folks together to discuss ideas around the Web, technology, and everything.

If you’re in Rochester, please drop me a line. I’d love to meetup. My e-mail address is justin@clearspring.com

Also… if there are any developer events happening in your area in the upcoming months, let me know about them. We’re always looking for new opportunities to get out there and meet with the community.