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Hawaii Geek Week Begins in Honolulu

Hawaii Geek Week Begins in Honolulu

Mactoberfest in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Saturday, October 18, 2008, started the first of a week long celebration called Hawaii Geek Week.

Designated by the governor of Hawaii, there is a week of tech events all over Honolulu, ending with PodCamp/WordCamp Hawaii.

The first event, Mactoberfest, was a great success with a photography and computer tech swap meet and a day of speakers covering web technologies and applications. It began with myself, Lorelle VanFossen, speaking about how WordPress changes lives, followed by Lorenz Sell of iLovePhotos, John Dalton of Studio Artist, and a great panel discussing the past and the future of web technology, blogging, and journalism. OhScrap has some pictures of Mactoberfest.

iLovePhotos with Lorenz Sell was a powerful demonstration on the future of photography online. For Mac users only, iLovePhotos uses folders and tags to categorize your images with face detection. They are working on adding facial recognition in the future, changing how you handle and store photographs. In testing now, it is available for free during the beta testing stage.

With a simple and easy to use interface, it can detect faces in your photographs. Tag the photographs with the person’s name and email address and it will sort the photographs by their name, and also allow you to share your photographs with them. It also features “Smart slide shows,” slide shows put together “automatically” by event or name or similarity with interesting slide transitions.

John Dalton’s presentation of the amazing software, Studio Artist, shook the room with its powerful creative abilities. Using photographs and video, you can create a wide variety of overlays to the images to “paint” them. Their video, Movie and Rotoscope, and Image Galleries showcase many contributions and examples of what is possible, including images from the award winning movies, Invisible Mountains written and directed by Richard Power Hoffmann and Year of the Fish by David Kaplan.

The Studio Artist software program isn’t inexpensive, but it does give the artist an ability to create a wide spectrum of visual media, from animation and cartoons to vast artistic renderings. It is also only available for Mac users.

Burt Lum and Ryan Kawailani Ozawa of Bytemarks Cafe, L.P. “Neenz” Faleafine of From the Mind of NEENZ, Bob Lew, and Lorelle were the panelists on a hot conversation in the afternoon on the past and future of the web. A very hotly debated topic was the weakening of the media and news and how blogs are replacing them as resource and sources, with attendees asking themselves and the experts on what the future holds for the media.

Hosted by the Hawaii Macintosh and Apple Users Society (HMAUS), the free day long event fired up a lot of people to learn more about blogging and social media, and inspired many bloggers to new standards.

The next day, Sunday, HMAUS members and photographers gathered at Foster Botanical Garden for a Photo Walkabout followed by a social get-together at a nearby restaurant. The group wandered through the lovely Foster gardens, photographing the beautiful tropical trees, plants, and flowers from all over the world, and talk photography.

On Wednesday, October 22, 2008, I will be hosting a day-long seminar on blogging tips and WordPress at the Web Weavers Workshop.

Wednesday afternoon is the live radio show, Bytemarks Cafe, with Burt Lum and Ryan Kawailani Ozawa featuring myself and HMAUS and Hawaii Geek Week representatives. It runs from 5-6PM every Wednesday on KIPO – 89.3 FM in Honolulu.

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Thursday, October 23, is the Social Media Club Workshop, another one day workshop, this time covering Social Media. The speakers include Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells from San Francisco, Beth Kanter from Boston, and Roxanne Darling from Honolulu.

Friday is the Windward Community Tech Fair Workshops and Exhibits at Windward Community College. It is a free day long Tech Fair covering a wide variety of web and tech topics such as Google Docs, Digital Workflow for Educators, blogging, social media, and iChat Video Conferencing. I will be speaking about blogging as a career and business strategy.

Podcamp and WordCamp Hawaii is October 24, 2008, bringing together Hawaii’s hottest podcasters, bloggers, and social media experts, as well as guests from around the world.

Speakers include:

I will be talking about , the new web analytics program. will be speaking about WordPress 2.7 and WordPress news, and Shane Robinson will cover .

Stay tuned for more news and updates.

View Comments (8)
  • WOW! I hope to someday visit Hawaii. Would have loved to have been there for this conference though! Now its off to look into this iLovePhotos. Thanks for the info, as usual Lorelle delivers.

  • Wow – and you said on Twitter you were holed up in hotel working on preso for tomorrow! Seems more like you were blog heralding our Geek Week activities!

    I am glad you did BTW and mahalo nui for the continued outstanding coverage you have been giving us, not to mention the love and support Lorelle.

  • Much Mahalo for the great coverage, Lorelle! Tremendous amount of quality events happening on our little island this week.

    I do have an update: After noticing we didn’t have a Basic WordPress session, I switched my “WordPress MU” session to “How to setup your WordPress blog.”

    We felt it was more important to show those attendees that haven’t yet worked with WordPress how easy it is, rather than jump so far forward with an exploration of WPMU.

    If there is interest, I’ll be happy to pick up a WPMU session on Saturday!

  • @ Shane Robinson:

    Oh, no. I hope you didn’t change that! I had a lot of people ask me about WordPressMU and I told them to check out your presentation. Setting up WordPress is a couple minute thing – BORING. :D Try for Saturday to do WordPressMU as it is much needed.

  • @Lorelle VanFossen:

    No worries. That’s the great thing about WordCamp, we can talk about whatever those in attendance want to talk about. If the audience is familiar with WordPress.com and WordPress.org already, we can talk about WPMU and use the PodCamp Hawaii site to demo since it’s MU.

    Also, while setting up WordPress is a couple minute thing, for those that don’t yet blog (and there are a LOT of them here on the islands) seeing how easy it is to write a Post and a Page and seeing the power of Themes and Plugins is actually a very exciting experience.

  • I’ll see, and finally get to meet you IRL there.

    I do have to bug out around Noon to pick up a friend arriving at the airport for PodCamp. It’s funny, Rox and I just realized tonight that none of our friends from the Mainland arriving at the airport have made arrangements for us to pick them up…? Then we realized it seems to be a Hawaii thing. Whenever we are leaving for a trip we have several friends that insist on taking and picking us up at the airport. Thinking back to when I lived on the Mainland, we didn’t really do that.

    Just another small example of “Live Aloha.”

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