The 3rd Annual Seattle Power Tool Race & Derby 2008 took place on Saturday (6-28). The event was part of Artopia in Georgetown. HazardFactory hosted the event. Their claim of faster tools, bigger air, more chaos, and more stupid (huh) turned out to be true. Check out the smashing and crashing that went down.

YouTube | Metacafe
Culturemob was proud to be a co-sponsor of the event!

Go to culturemob to discover more events.

So you wanted to know all about Culturemob.com right? ITV (Independent Television) interviews Culturemob CEO and Founder Steve McCracken outside Seattle’s popular night spot Neumos…hey, wait a minute. That’s me!

Check out this video and find out what I have to say about Culturemob.com

Thanks to Amy and the crew at ITV.

I found out that the Twitterrific application is coming to the iPhone. This is gonna change the way you or your friends or your kids communicate forever. Twitter is the product of Iconfactory, which won an Apple Design Award by the way. The Twitter concept is fairly new to me, but I ain’t that savvy. Twitter is the creation of the people from the offices of Obvious. Twitter is a way to transfer information in real time. Like I tend to twitter about the stuff I’m doing. People who “follow” me can receive a news feed about that. Endless usage really. Twitterrific is an app that connects you to twitter. You can post “tweets” and connect to others via phone internet…whatever. I’m not aware of a PC app for this but I know it’s available for Mac users.

Now it has an interface on iPhone too? Triumph or Tragedy right? America and perhaps other parts of the globe, loves to tell people what they’re doing. It’s a fundamental shift I tell ya! Have you noticed that when the smoking ban was initiated a few years back; smart phones and texting skyrocketed? Hey, I’m just sayin’!

This morning I read an article about Twitterrific on Macworld written by Dan Moren. Dan breaks down his thoughts about the pros and cons of this application.
http://www.macworld.com/article/133968/2008/06/iphone_twitterrifc.html

It was an informative article and it seems to me that we are about to witness a major shift in behavior.

Culturemob now has a Twitter, AIM and MSN account for you to send us your feedback. My colleague Brummel wrote a blog about it.

In the last three weeks, we’ve rolled out a bunch of new features and a major redesign, all of which I’d like to draw attention to.

PORTLAND & DENVER!

We’re finally branching out and covering more cities, starting with Portland and Denver. Seattleites, tell your Portlander and Denverite friends to go nuts! We’re looking to improve our coverage in those areas, so let us know what you’d like to see on our site for Denver and Portland.

ADD AN EVENT

This is a big one and we think that we’ve got a damn good first iteration. Plug your event into our system and not only will your fans be able to track your event with our RSS and iCal feeds, but we’ll make sure that your event is also covered by the following:

• KEXP
• NadaMucho
• Seattle PI
• Seattle Times
• Seattle Weekly
• The Stranger
• Three Imaginary Girls

If you got an event you’d like to promote, give it a try and let us know what you think. We want to be your one-stop-shop to promote your event.

EDIT AN EVENT/VENUE/ARTIST

The nature of events is very fluid. Lineups might change, the start-time will be pushed back, the location might move. Because of this, we’ve added the ability for any user to be able to edit an event, artist, or venue. If something is wrong, make it right.

TELL A FRIEND

We wanted a quick way for folks to be able to tell their friends the details of an event that they’re interested in. We’ve added the ability to use your address book from AOL, Outlook, Yahoo, GMail, Plaxo, and more.

WIDGET

We’ve added the ability to build and place a widget of your events on pretty much any type of page: MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, TypePad, Wordpress, just using straight up html, and many more. Speaking of which…

FACEBOOK APP

Now you can grab your My Events RSS feed and plug it into your Facebook page. You can tell your friends what events you’re interested in attending. Bands, grab your artist RSS feed and your Facebook page will be populated with a list of your events.

USER COMMENTS PAGE

We’ve got a vibrant base of users posting comments on artists, events, and venues. Now if you click on their user name, you can see all their comments. If you see a comment with some good taste, you can see what else that user recommends (or tells you to stay away from). Also, you now can post your beautiful mug for your avatar in your account page.

SITE REFINEMENT

I can’t quite call it a redesign, but we’ve made some major refinements to the design. For those interested in the reasoning behind the changes, Designer Chris Brummel has written more about that here.

So there you go. And we’ve got lots more coming down the pipe. Make sure to let us know what you think of these features and what you’d like to see added.

While I spend my days writing cute comments about Seattle venues, going out to art shows, and blogging about local music, all the techies here at CultureMob.com have been working diligently to improve our website and add useful new features for our users- YOU! Check them out:

• ADD AN EVENT- Now promoters and performers can upload new events into CultureMob.com so all of our readers can discover them. Once your event is on CultureMob.com, we redistribute the information to other local publications like The Stranger and The Seattle Weekly- how easy is that?. Is your event listed on CultureMob.com?
• TELL A FRIEND- Once you’ve found that awesome event like this week’s Meat Beat Manifesto or the opening of Miss Saigon, you can share the information with your friends (and look cool because you knew about it first!)
• FACEBOOK and MYSPACE APPLICATIONS - You’ve got a great lineup of events to attend that you’ve found at CultureMob.com; add the CultureMob.com application to your Facebook and Myspace page and share your events listing with your friends!

WOW! Have fun with these new features and use CultureMob.com to promote, discover, and share information about exciting events in Seattle!

CultureMob.com would like to thank Ryan and Lisa from the Pioneer Square Community Association for showing both Shilo and I a great time yesterday at the First Thursday’s Art Walk. There was so much to see. Remember, if you would like to participate in the First Thursdays Art in the Park, go to http://www.pioneersquare.org/artparkinfo.html

We took a bunch of random short videos and posted them on the CultureMob.com page at Youtube.com. Feel free to subscribe to it too. Here’s one of my favorites.

Shilo’s First Ever First Thursday


You can see the rest (bloopers, dance group, Amber Tide and so much more at our youtube.com page)

For more events, go to CultureMob.com

Wired takes Facebook and other social networks to task for locking in users, advocating open standards for constructing relationships among users.

Wired attempted to recreate all of the functionality of Facebook by pulling resources from Flickr, Last.fm, LibraryThing, etc. into a Wordpress blog, ultimately failing because of the lack of an open standard. (They make no mention the Friend-of-a-Friend project, which is odd since it seems to aim to be this missing standard.)

Most interesting I suppose is that it underscores the core value of existing social networks — social networking, not the service addons. If the networking component can be commoditized then the existing social networks would compete on the merits of their feature bundles with sites specializing in those kinds of functionality.

An article suggesting that social networking sites that do not interoperate, and do not serve as a natural extension of what people already do, will fizzle out as a result of the commoditization of networking tools. In other words, social networking as an end in itself is unsustainable.

“[T]he value of MySpace and the other 2.0 sites is built on their ability to monetize—through ad sales and marketing, among other streams—the traffic generated by their users. The tacit trade-off is free Web hosting, tools, and distribution. This trade-off is not in itself unfair. But, as with IM, the value proposition does not remain constant. The walled-garden attributes of MySpace and Facebook, like those of the subscriber-era AOL, can quickly become liabilities. And as the value of social-media tools becomes inevitably unsexy and commoditized, it may be only a matter of time before the Tila Tequilas of the world, inspiration for millions of page views, decide they might as well go elsewhere. And, just as in high school, where the cool kids go, the rest of us will follow.”