Quick Updates – Politic20, Seth Godin, TagJungle, Utah Bloggers Conference

Those who know me know that I’m really passionate about helping make Utah a better place for business and especially for leading edge (web 2.0) technology. My goals and drive are to help create a stronger community for Utah technologists and I’m pretty willing to throw myself into almost any project that has the potential to bring notoriety to Utah or help strenthen community relations. Sometimes through juggling priorities to get things done and push projects forward, things get left until later. That happened this week. I literally left the Politic20 event and went to the first organizational meeting for the Seth Godin in Utah project and then threw myself into that.

Since that meeting, the Seth Godin Street Team (of which I’m a member) has put in probably 100 man-hours in about 2 1/2 day span. We’ve built a web-site, put together a ton of documentation, contacted hundreds of people directly, initiated a blog storm, and raised around $10,000.00 in soft commitments. Next week should see a lot of those efforts bear fruit. As soon as that has stabilized, there are a bunch of things I’ve got to finalize for the Utah Bloggers Conference – Seth is in May, the Conference is in June.

The Utah Bloggers Conference currently has 4 high profile guest speakers (I’ll be putting out a lot more on this very soon) inlcuding Robert Scoble of PodTech, Jeff Barr of Amazon, Ryan Block of Engadget and Veronica Belmont of C-Net. There are a few more than I’m working on getting out here, hopefully I’ll be able to get committments in the next week.

We’re also working on about 4 very exciting events for Politic20 in the next month, we’ll be announcing as soon as we get calendars coordinated with several politicians. For those who have been asking – YES! we’re doing one with SLC Mayor Rocky Anderson! Very Very Soon. I spent part of the afternoon with Congressman Cannon yesterday recruiting him to help us with some of the events we want to do next – he has been VERY helpful and is very excited about our format.

In addition to that, we got our new servers in for TagJungle and have just finished getting them all configured. TagJungle searches SCREAM now (our database servers got really bogged down as we got close to the billion record level) go try it out! We’ve got a whole bunch of new code that we’re debugging and we’ll hopefully be launching that very soon as well. Things are still a bit up and down with the site, but we’ll be finally launching our beta product (we’ve intentionally never ‘officially’ launched it)!

Next week (in two days) I’ll be in San Francisco at the Web2.0 Expo with my partners at WikiReview as they do their official launch and with my good friend Judd Bagley. It will be fun to hook up with a lot of my old acquaintances and friends in Silicon Valley.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately, things have been very exciting and fast-paced. It’s been a wild and super-fun ride! Yesterday was one of the best days I’ve had in a while as we got Seth Goding progress, politician commitments, TagJungle servers up, and movement on the Bloggers Conference all in the same day! I’m having a great time and absolutely loving being an entrepreneur – sure we’re still not flush with cash, but I don’t have to go to a job everyday – I have time to do all of these things that I love and move forward on my goals. Life is Good!