Randy Stewart, a big wheel down at the Ignite! Seattle cracker factory, sent out this call for submissions for the next Ignite! Seattle event, scheduled for June 14th:

The next Ignite Seattle is coming up on June 14th and if you’d like to speak at the event, submissions are due by this Friday, May 14th.  We usually get around 700 of Seattle’s finest geeks of all stripes at the event and we’d love to have folks from STS submit talks.

If you haven’t been to an Ignite Seattle before, we usually have ~16 speakers give talks in a broad range of geek topics.  The talks are 5 minutes long and the 20 slides auto-advance every 15 seconds.

You can submit your talk here – http://www.igniteseattle.com/submit-talk/

Ignite! is one of the best geek events in Seattle.  I’ll be there – hope to see you there too!

Renowned photographer Chase Jarvis is featured in an interview on SilberStudios.tv, Marc Silber’s photography site.  In it, Chase talks photo tips, and also gets a chance to show his new book, “The Best Camera”, his new iPhone app, which he developed with the assistance of some of my friends in the industry; and, about a third of the way in, there’s a glimpse of the website http://thebestcamera.com.  I played a very small part in bringing that website live with some creative client-side Javascript/Ajax/CSS work.

If you’re a photography buff you might want to check it out, and bookmark Marc’s site for future reference as well.

http://www.silberstudios.tv/msps/chase-jarvis-best-camera-tips/

(h/t @scobleizer)

Believe it or not, I’m now a member of the Seattle 2.0 blog staff.  I’m flattered and honored and hope to be able to contribute timely, engaging, and thought-provoking content on a weekly basis.  At the very least I’ll shoot for “timely” and hope that I’ll luck out on the other two criteria.

On The Pursuit of a Life, I’ve been writing a lot of personal posts in the last few months.  On Seattle 2.0 I’ll shift back to an industry focus, writing about startups, tech, entrepreneurship, and ponies.  Well, maybe not ponies, but I’ll be searching for ways to throw in pony references from time to time.  I want to continue writing in the same “voice” – analytical and witty, allusive and blunt.  In other words, I don’t want to go all soft and corporate on you.

One thing that will be very important for me is to inspire/provoke readers to follow on to my posts with their own comments .  I’ll be active in monitoring and responding to follow-on comments.  There are a lot of smart people out there who will have something to add, and I want to encourage your participation.

I believe my first post is scheduled for Monday, so I had better get writing!  See you there (and here), and please let me know how I’m doing from time to time.

Is hysteria an inevitabale social phenomenon? Right now we’re riding the downside of a wave of swine flu hysteria, in which schools are closing, travel is restricted between some countries, and the WHO just declared a pandemic (even if the declaration is a technicality).

A few years ago, we went through a similar episode with Mad Cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and tens of thousands of cows were put down, beef imports were curtailed or eliminated, and the world’s agricultural industry held its breath.

I’m not too interested in animal-related pandemics (avian flu would be another), but more interested in the societal phenomenon of hysteria. Not necessarily mass hysteria of the OMG-the-world-is-going-to-end variety, but hysteria brought on by a lack of perspective. In all the recent pandemics, fewer people died than those who slipped on a bar of soap in the shower and hit their head. The level of reaction – or overreaction if you will – was grossly out of proportion to the evidence.

A couple thoughts. First, does modern mass media and/or distributed real-time media fuel or temper societal hysteria? I think you could argue pretty convincingly that mass media fuels it, due to the echo chamber effect, whereas internet-driven realtime media tempers the impulse, due to the sheer number of outlets, interests, and mini-communities of interest. Second, is societal hysteria a byproduct of the individual tendency to hysteria, or is it a phenomenon that is unique to groups? We all have a tendency to overdramatize and lose perspective from time to time, as I wrote yesterday – does this reverberate into our shared societal rhythms?

During the Mad Cow episode, England was the hardest hit of all countries, with some estimates claiming 50% infection rates in cattle herds and financial losses of up to $50 billion. That’s a lot of tangible evidence to support the hysteria, even if the infection vector was not adequately known. This is interesting to me because the English have historically been known as reserved, anti-hysterical types – stiff upper lip, and all that – and so the tension between national norms and actual hysteria-inducing circumstances was interesting to watch.

Individually, we are all Englishmen or otherwise – with a lesser or greater tendency toward hysteria and lack of perspective – and I’m really curious how individual circumstances and upbringing lead one toward one or the other pole. I’m pretty convinced, based on recent personal events, that one could design a study that proved conclusively that certain types of circumstances lead one inexorably toward a dramatic lack of perspective, regardless of individual upbringing. Or perhaps not – that’s the beauty of philosophical arguments; one can never quite be sure that one has the opposing argument in checkmate.

The past year was momentous in a lot of ways.  Extraordinary political, economic, technological, and cultural changes came at every turn.  Looking back, here are the ten items that were the most wonderful things for me in 2008:

10. Michael Phelps. The best part of the Olympics – by far – was watching American swimmer Michael Phelps win eight gold medals, with eight Olympic and seven World records.  As I get older I get much less jingoistic about the U.S. Olympic team, but this guy is such an amazing athlete, it’s almost impossible not to get excited about him.

9. F#. Microsoft has had the part-functional part-object-oriented language F# in the cooker for a few years now, but it wasn’t until 2008 that I discovered it and took to it right away.  An offshoot of OCaml and the ML family, with inputs from Haskell, F# is a .NET platform language that looks and feels right.  I’ve been studying it on and off for several months, and have plans to do production work in F# in 2009.

8. Crowdify. My startup, my baby, Crowdify is a crowd-driven brand opinion network.  It’s still in early alpha, as I work to find the time to run a side startup while working full time, but I feel good about making a self-imposed milestone earlier in the year to publish the alpha site, and have long-term plans to improve it and market the technology.

7. The Seattle Startup Community. Early in the year I started to get involved in local tech and startup events in a way that I never had before, even though I’ve been working as a developer/CTO/CIO in Seattle for nearly 15 years.  I quickly learned that I should have gotten involved a lot sooner, as the local startup community is a nonstop parade of bright, motivated, fun people.  I’ve been so lucky to make some good friends, and LOTS of acquaintances, among this crowd.

6. FiveThirtyEight.com. Has there ever been a better use for the F5 key than in October 2008?  During the leadup to the U.S. elections, FiveThirtyEight.com was a daily – nay, hourly – addiction.  The little pie chart in the upper-left corner dominated my dreams.  Nate Silver became a minor celebrity due to the (justly deserved) success of the site.

5. iPhone. Apple’s iPhone was released last year, but I didn’t get mine until one of my kids broke the screen on my AT&T Tilt, and I was forced to get a new phone.  I was instantly smitten.  I have developed the weird habit of carrying my iPhone in my hand almost everywhere I go – if I’m not touching it, it almost feels like I’m missing a limb.

4. Tina Fey. Sarah Palin should get partial credit for Tina Fey’s wonderfulness, since it was Fey-as-Palin that gave us one of the most memorable political caricatures in American history.  From the first “You Betcha!” to the last “Palin 2012″ T-shirt, our weeks were filled with winks, poses, and that perfect Wasilla accent.

3. Startup Weekend. In January, I attended the Seattle Startup Weekend event at Adobe, and this in many ways was THE seminal event of my year.  I met tons of interesting startup folks. I was so inspired that I came up with the idea for Crowdify just two days after the end of the event.  I started Twittering.  I owe Andrew Hyde a big debt for his energy and enthusiasm in bringing the Startup Weekend concept to life, and working tirelessly for a year, facilitating Startup Weekend events around the country.

2. Barack Obama. I have waited a long, long time for this day.  I was an early and avid Howard Dean supporter, and following The Scream sat through the soul-crushing Kerry defeat in 2004.  I watched in disgust as the recent administration tore up the constitution, continued an unwinnable war, lied to the public, responded late and poorly to the biggest natural disaster in recent American history, hired dumb cronies to positions of importance, and much much more.   In 2008 we did the right thing and changed course; and in so doing, happened to make a huge dent in America’s assumptions about race and gender.  Good work all around.

1. Twitter. How do I begin to describe how I feel about Twitter?  In January 2008, Twitter – and lifestreaming in general – was completely off my radar.  At the end of 2008, I can’t really imagine ever *not* lifestreaming, and right now that means my Twitter feed.  Why is it so important?  Well, to start with, it provides what Leisa Reichelt described as ambient intimacy – a sense of constant connection with your friends and acquaintances.  Another equally important function of Twitter is to allow me to express myself in frequent, short, stream-of-conciousness snippets, some of which are conversational; but a good portion of them are also personal, or indeed, even confessional in nature.  I have met many interesting people via Twitter; some of which have gone on to become so-called Real Life friends; but that distinction – Real Life vs. Online – continues to crumble, and the dividing line will, in due time, become a spectrum of connection rather than a binary distinction.

What are your most wonderful things of 2008?

This show should be called “Leo Laporte and Five Guys Whose Voices Are Not Fit For Radio”.  Aside from LL, you have never a more squeaky, gravelly collection of voices since the Munchkin scene in The Wizard of Oz.  Having said that, the content was actually pretty good.  I may make it a background track while I’m programming something particularly boring.

Catch it at http://twit.tv/twit.

From Science Daily:

On March 26, 2008, surgeons at UC San Diego Medical Center removed an inflamed appendix through a patient’s vagina, a first in the United States. Following the 50-minute procedure, the patient, Diana Schlamadinger, reported only minor discomfort. Removal of diseased organs through the body’s natural openings offers patients a rapid recovery, minimal pain, and no scarring. Key to these surgical clinical trials is collaboration with medical device companies to develop new minimally-invasive tools.

Methinks that the idea of shoving surgical tools up a woman’s hoo-hoo and removing a inflamed, potentially explosive, body organ through a cut in the vaginal wall is most definitely NOT “minimally invasive”. That definition had to be made by a man.

I’d be willing to bet that 9 out of 10 women would say “go in through my belly button, please!”