Likemind tomorrow at B&S Daily Market. Folks start getting there 7:45-8ish am (its a morning thing), and usually hang out until 10 or so (or whenever they have to be at work). A few of us stick around to do a little informal coworking session afterwards, all are welcome.

B&S has a kickass coffee menu, some morning type food, and a few lunch things. They're amping up on the lunch offerings but not sure if they'll be in place yet.

This likemind, there is a global question all cities will be discussing around the same time: If you could rebuild your city from scratch, what would you do differently? What would you keep the same?

Looking forward to seeing everyone tomorrow :) If you've never been, consider this your invite! Here's a map to B&S Daily Market.

Wow. Jason Hawkins is super duper talented, and this video totally captures the complete awesomeness of the event. Well done again to everyone involved in organizing this thing (esp. gregg / larry ). Fired up already for the next one!

Today at 6pm, Crooked Bayou, Downtown Orlando.

I recommend the tater tots.

So.. At our lunch get together last week, we tried to come up with a name for the "event". Something we could refer to it as and repeat in the future.. Afterwards, Dan came up with "lunch_fu". Immediately, it made me think of an ass kicking sandwich.

A quick e-mail to Alex Hillman in philly, who has a friend with an art class, and a student named Alfonso Callejas. Next thing you know, we have a sketch of a sandwich that kicks some serious ass. Judson comes to the rescue and provides the colorization, and well..

We now have an official lunch_fu superhero. Created by members of the internet, for the internet, to save the internet from hunger pains. After all, low blood sugar is our biggest threat. Man.. This just brings a tear to my eye..


Now, the next step. This new crime fighting lunch superhero needs a name.

Suggestions?

Great lunch today with a bunch of us Orlando tech types. Massive props to fellow UCF season ticket holder Dan Benjamin for rounding everyone up.

Rob Dempsey shared some details of their upcoming acts_as_conference, which if your into that whole RoR thing, you should check out. It'll be in early February of this year, which is right around the time most of the country is pretty crappy. We have two seasons here in Orlando. Hot-as-hell, and Completely-friggin-awesome. We'll be right in the midst of Completely-friggin-awesome.

Gregg and Jason shared some of their new ideas for videos over at RailsEnvy, and I got to wax a little with Jason on frameworks in general. I was also about to get their opinion of the CD baby switch back to PHP. Lots of neat stuff going on in the software world, and these guys usually have their fingers on the pulse of it.

Chris Scott can't grow a beard, I got to meet Michael Blake, and I got to take a few cheap shots on Michigan's season with one of their alumni, Mr. William Couch.

If you get the chance to check out 310 for lunch, I had their smoked chicken ravioli. It was just as "delicate" as described. Fragile, even. I'm not sure what that means.

If your a software badass, preferably with Rails experience, create an Emurse resume and send the link to Dan. He's hiring.

UPDATE: Today's lunch, and our future lunches, will officially be known as lunch_fu. Here's the team picture of the people who were still left when, well, we took the picture. ;) Can't wait for the next one.

While the social scene of an event allows for friendships to easily develop, the true value of the event was during the unconference itself. I had the pleasure of helping Josh out with the Life/Local track of the event (and with the attendee badges, though, as Jeremy knows, that's tough to call a 'pleasure' ;).

Jim Johnson kicked off our track in the morning with a session on politics. There's so much happening online that campaigns can now take advantage of, and it was really interesting to hear people's impressions of things like transparency and authenticity within the political "industry." It's also cool to contrast national campaigns vs. local leaders and their use of blogs. The readership is of course a bit different, and from the examples given, it'd seem that the more local the political leader, the more authentic the blog felt. I'll be curious to see how politics learns and adapts to this exploding new medium.

Connie Reece was kind enough to join us from Austin, Texas to lead a discussion on meeting people and networking online. Twitter, facebook, linkedin -- all sorts of new tools to allow us to meet new people and manage the contacts we already have. Discussion centered around how to use these tools effectively and maximize their benefits. One of the things that jumped out to me was Connie's comments on how she adds twitter friends -- same way as me, and I'm sure a lot of other folks. If you do not use your "about" space appropriately, and I can't remember the relationship, I'm not likely to add you back. Just food for thought for all you twitterholic's out there ;)

Alicia Dorset led what was probably the strongest conversation of our track on 'Separating your work life from your personal life'. While I had to step out to handle some Emurse business, what I was able to take in was the stuff that unconference's are made of. Quality discussion on sad but true issues like stalking, privacy, work/life issues, employer/employee issues revolving around things like facebook and blogs, and the dangerous, catty world of offline scrapbooking. Who knew Scrapblog isn't just creating a fun product, they are also saving lives. Crazy.

My session on the Local Orlando scene was also something I would consider to be a success. The amount of contribution and participation to the orlando new media/technology community has exploded this year. Florida Creatives has been a growing success, barcamp was huge, blogOrlando was incredibly impressive and coworking as a value based approach to shared workspaces is becoming more and more accepted/encouraged/evangelized. We have a tremendous pool of talent here, and a truckload of creativity that's being expressed in more and more impressive ways. It's falls on us to start bringing people together and creating the relationships that will be required to serve as the base for what has the potential to be an amazing, vibrant community. We're already here, we just need to get to know each other!

Some of the take aways from the local orlando session -- the need for a common local blogroll, a list of everyone's twitter names, events that are more broad (not just technical, not just creative, just events that will allow us to all share in a great experience). I believe it was John Frost who suggested a possible photo walk. A few suggestions were made on possibilties for this -- either Disney, which would be right up John's alley, or working with the History center downtown. They do historic orlando walking tours that would be great and appeal to folks of all backgrounds, not just geeks and creatives. Bust out the nikon's and flood flickr with our "art" ;)

We talked about the effectiveness of sites like Meetup.com for getting together with other likeminded folks in our hood. Upcoming.org also lists events, but isn't nearly as used here in town. Two regular meetup's that you should consider attending are Florida Creatives (Monday, October 15th is the next at Crooked Bayou, downtown) and likemind. Likemind is a morning coffee meetup that is open to anyone of any industry, and is held at B&S Daily Market. The next Orlando likemind will probably be October 20th-ish, but we'll announce once we're sure (checkout likemind.us for more information).

One of the things I wanted to mention, but it escaped me, was Outside.In. Outside.In offers a great opportunity for us to pool together our content. It's not as used as it should be, the conceptually, it's a great site and something folks should look into joining.

We also did a crash course on coworking, similar to the presentation I gave at barcamp. The big difference, of course, is that Alex Hillman from Indy Hall in Philly was able to come be my wingman and answer our questions. From my discussions with Alex over the last year or so, the Philly scene holds a lot in common to the things going on here in Orlando. Many of our issues are the same, so it's been great to have him lend a hand with suggestions and encouragement. The Philly scene spent a solid year, if not a tad more, building community and evangelizing to anyone who would listen -- pretty much exactly what we've been doing down here. It was at the last blogOrlando that I announced our effort to bring coworking to Orlando, and its amazing how much more knowledgable and accepted the idea has become in that time. Coworking is a reflection of the community, an evolutionary step in its development, and I really do think we're on the verge of pulling off something great here in town.

So what did you think? What are the things that we can do right now to make Orlando's scene that much stronger? What events have you enjoyed? What efforts do you participate in? Are you excited by the changes you've seen here in town? Join in the comments below or blog about it on your own site. Tag with "blogorlando", "orlandoscene" and/or "floridacreatives" (which will show up on the floridacreatives.com site).

Remember, tag your blogorlando thoughts with "blogorlando", and your orlando scene thoughts with "floridacreatives" and/or "orlandoscene." We'll be on the look out, and I'll try to aggregate, repost, engage, etc. with folks.

Tons of crazy stories from the after parties, tons of thoughts to share from the event, but I'm running crazy late.. So... Later ;)

Everyone's favorite monthly Monday happy hour is tonight over at Crooked Bayou in downtown Orlando. You can expect a handful of us creative types drinking some beer and eating some tater tots.

6pm-ish until whenever people peace out.

Crooked Bayou, downtown. Good times. It usually ranges anywhere from 15 to 40 folks, all working in some sort of creative profession. Lot's of web folks, but also peeps from marketing, video production and theater.

Here are the details on Upcoming.org, hope to see you there.

Ryan Price and I will be at Panera on Lake Eola a week from today for Likemind -- a pre-work coffee drinking gathering designed to bring like minded individuals together.

It's fun, you're going to be getting coffee anyway.. soo.. let's all do it together ;)

Ryan's set up an RSVP page at Upcoming. Hit it up and spread the word!

The second meeting of the Florida Creatives was a huge success, props out to Ryan Price for keeping up the great work. Crooked Bayou was a much better venue than Dexter's for this kind of thing, and the turnout was significantly stronger.

A little link love out to Gregg Pollack from Tech CFL. Jamie Byrne and the rest of the gang at Petentials. Stefan Price from Roundtable Productions. Natasha McIntosh from North-South Marketplace. Marshall Sontag from WineQ.com. Josh Hallett from Hyku.com. Chris Scott from iamzed.com. Erik Hersman from WhiteAfrican.com. John Rife and his awesome wife from FindingJohn.com. Kyle Fiducia from VaguelyAware.com. Bill Ferrante from BillTheBroker.com, and Mark Baratelli from imakepodcasts.com.

Those are all the names I can remember off the top of my head (that I've associated websites too ;), but I'm a little tired. My apologizes if I missed anyone. Shoot me and e-mail or leave a comment here to put me in my place ;)

As far as coworking interest goes, we seem to have enough folks looking to jump on board. We're going to start meeting up once or twice a week at various coffee shops to get into a groove while we scout out potential costs and locations. I'll add info to the wiki as things develop.

This time, over at Crooked Bayou. Monday, Jan. 15th, 2007.

Here is the Upcoming.org link/rsvp.

Ryan Price just let me know of a Happy Hour at Dexters in downtown Orlando for the "Florida Creatives" group. It's on Monday, Dec 18th, 5:30-9pm. I doubt I'll stay until 9, but I'll certainly roll by for awhile. Especially now that I live like, 500 yards away ;)

More Information Here