Earthling

Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.

I'm back from a restful vacation, and will be spending most of the day replying to emails and catching up. If you haven't heard back from me on something, thanks for your patience this past week. Also a huge Earthling thanks to Tom Harris for his content contributions. Reading about the follow-up Scrum training made me wish I was there for it. I caught Jeff W. from the project management team in the elevators this morning, and he started to fill me in on progress. It sounds like we're in the thick of adapting Scrum to EarthLink's culture, and I look forward to catching up more on that effort.

A couple of quick notes and pointers:

• On the way back from BlogHer, I had a really nice chat with Rashmi Sinha, CEO of SlideShare, a site that hosts and makes it really easy to share slide presentations. At face value, it's a helpful utility for information sharing, and I also think there's the potential for some new forms of online storytelling to emerge around it. I may have some more thoughts on this later. Rashmi is incredibly sharp, and in hindsight I wish I had a record of our conversation -- we ended up covering everything from the challenges and advantages of non-colocated teams to the history of Web culture, with brief stops on Amar Chitra Katha comics and the role of the Zombie in American culture.
  
• Some more new web applications to take a look at:
  • Taskpaper helps you make really really simple to-do lists.
  • Fichey, which lets you peruse Web sites from a catalog of screenshots, took some heat from GigaOm for not having much of a purpose but I like the fact that they're experimenting with a different metaphor for browsing.
  • Sk*rt seems like a much friendlier Digg-like collector of user-voted new and interesting things on the Web [via a jspepper twitter update].
  • I also still have some Pownce invitations; drop a comment if you'd like one.
  
  
• For the more hands-on/technically minded Atlantans out there, Jeff Haynie just announced a BarCamp Atlanta. This is an unconference where developers get together and demonstrate what they may be working on, learn from each other, and compare notes(more on the format here.) I've never been to an actual BarCamp and look forward to being a part of this one. Thanks to Jeff Haynie, EarthLink alum Lance Weatherby, Stephen Fleming, and Michael Mealling for kickstarting this.