Can you feel it? It's coming...

Even after the glory that was SocialDevCamp, we have another DC local conference coming:

The 2008 DCPHP Conference

This is a real conference which means the agenda is set, the speakers have been determined, and the sponsors are coming.

The highlights:

Aaron Brazell is talking about it in "Friends vs Fans" and Jared Goralnick talks about it in "Avoiding the online popularity contest to seek a deeper connection".

It all boils down to:  What is a friend?

There are some people on social networks that seem to add everyone and anyone they have ever, will ever, or ever want to meet.  This gives the massive networks of people whom they don't know at all or know in passing.  This seems to be the most common on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Personally, I approach it a bit differently...

Over the weekend, a fellow DCian and friend - Jimmy Gardner - asked a simple question that I've been kicking around for a while. Since he put it so eloquently, I'll use his words:

There is obviously a lot of good things happening here in the DC area with regards to our local tech community and some of the startups that are being born out of it. But I can’t help but feel that many of us here have developed a bit of a complex, whether we know it or not.

This was just a couple days after Aaron Brazell aka Technosailor said something else that sparked my interest:

Recently, while flipping through a recent issue of php|architect, I came across a familiar name: Hunter Jensen.

Hunter and I met at ZendCon 06 when we shared a hotel room for the week. At the time, he was an active user of QCodo and generally working with a number of customers along that front. Somewhere along the way, he decided to consider the dark side... a degree in law.

(cue scary music now)

Seriously though... if you've been on any forum or mailing list for more than 3 days, you've seen the IANAL (I Am Not a Lawyer) abbreviation. While we can't keep up to date on every single aspect, there are some thing that we need to be aware of and track. I think licensing issues (GPL vs Public Domain vs etc, etc) is one of the biggest issues that make our lives difficult, but there are a number of others...

Maybe it's a part of the DC culture or maybe it's the overall direction that things are going - I don't know - what I do know is that there's one question that seems to be coming up repeatedly in a variety of circles:

How can we use technology for good?

Personally, I consider that there are two different "goods" out there:

First, there are the Little Goods. Helping out a friend, meeting a customer's needs, and holding a door for someone are all little things that just about anyone can do to make things better for someone. If you do them enough, I think you can change the world one person at a time.

But on a different level, there are Big Goods. These are things that require action from larger groups of people and they affect larger groups of people. The outpouring of support for the US after 9-11, the huge amount of private contributions to accountable organizations to help other people, and just about every blood drive I've ever seen.

Unless you're in the DC Social Media scene, you might have missed the kickoff of the new podcast radio show: District of Corruption hosted by Geoff Livingston and my colleage and occasional mutual provoker Aaron Brazell.

Every Tuesday at 4pm EST, Aaron and Geoff take 30 minutes to hit some of the major social media topics for the week, poke at some of the more annoying players out there, and take feedback and comments from their callers. While they claim a focus on the DC Metro, they tend to hit the core principles and use local organizations as their examples. Whether you're a DC local or not, if you're interested in Social Media, you'll find something of interest.

While the first episode was a little rough and disorganized, the second episode started to show some of the polish and flow I've learned to expect from these two. This week (22 January) will be their third episode and I expect it to be even better as they figure things out and have fun with it.

One of the single best things and single worst things about PHP is the PHP Manual.

It's complete, is always up to date, specifies when commands became available, and has a huge amount of commentary and tips spanning the past few years. Quite often I get more from the comments than the actual entry... There are parts of the Manual that I use far more than any others... like the formatting parameters that date() takes. I remember the basics, but it seems that I almost never use the basics. I use this page so much that it's always in my browser history and I've considered adding it to my toolbar.

Unforutnately, the downside is that unless you know the keywords or related topics that you're looking for, you don't have a chance of finding it. The onsite search is sufficient for exact/partial terms but mediocre at best for anything close. A long time ago, I gave up and relied on Google for that heavy lifting.

Well, due to the brave efforts of one of the DCPHP'ers - Jason Lefkowitz - we have an alternative in MyPHPDocs.com. The site lets you click and drag the portions of the manual that are the most important to you, hit a button, and voila. You have your own manual. The best thing is that the tool isn't copying content from the site. You don't have to worry about getting out of date because it effectively acts as a page of bookmarks to the core manual.