Welcome to Third Tuesday at Century Restaurant in Vancouver! The wifi is spotty at best so the majority of this post may not be live.

Tonight’s speaker is Darren Barefoot who will be talking about “Getting the Attention of the Web’s Influencers”.

Update: Darren introduces his company, Capulet Communications and one of its facets which is ‘web influencer outreach’ or ‘blogger relations’, and will be presenting a case study: ThoughtFarmer, which provides intranet solutions.

Darren believes in making a marketing campaign “cool”, see: Apple. For this particular client, they wanted to market to business bloggers, those who would have a true interest in the project.

Here are some assumptions to be made when going into a project like this:

– Everyone is Busy (which leads to how do you get noticed amongst busy bloggers?)

– Email Doesn’t Work (people respond to originality) ie. the comic Darren created when pitching John and I about the Brother Printer Campaign

– Marketing equals Thing You’re Marketing (giveaways work!) same example, the Brother Printer giveaway

– Funny beats Unfunny every time (it’s risky because humor levels may vary from person to person)

– Get people to visit your site (more links from your campaign participants equals more people tracking back to your website).

Darren suggests having a database of bloggers; find your target bloggers, narrow it down to blogs with a big enough audience, and balance out content and reach.

Update: Back to ThoughtFarmer. Since it was an intranet for businesses, Capulet created a fake company (Tubetastic) and even built them a website. They also created profiles on the site as though bloggers they were targeting were employees of this fake company ie. Robert Scoble was the Tube Janitor. Essentially it was a micro site with content from all the bloggers’ sites, aggregated over at Tubetastic.

To recap: Fake company, fake employees, prominent bloggers, and an intranet. It was an entire scenario and experience for the bloggers who were in turn feeding content surrounding the product. They were engaged.

Photo credit: John Bollwitt on Flickr

Update: Remember the value of an ‘elevator pitch’, your quick, simple, not-too-much-time-to-explain pitch.

Another thing on the humour side, was the use of snail mail to send an employee welcome letter to bloggers from the fake company Tubetastic.

Seth Godin quote: “Safe is risky and risky is safe”.

Update: Note: Bloggers are very public people. Couple of things that could go wrong…

– Snail mail fail could happen.

– Wikis could go bad ie. unrelated content being posted, content altered in a bad way etc.

– Blog posts that become more about the campaign (in this case Tubetastic) and less about the actual company, being ThoughtFarmer in this case.

Results of the ThoughtFarmer campaign were all positive and traffic to the site doubled. Something that they noticed however was that there were fewer full length blog posts since folks were publishing their thoughts instantly on Twitter or microblogging systems.

Update: Formal presentation is over, now time for questions. Monique asks how traffic is tracked via Twitter – Darren says through ‘follows’ and I would assume Twemes or hashtags.

David asked how many physical packages were sent by snail mail. Out of 50 about 35 were sent (some addresses weren’t found etc.)

Photo credit: John Bollwitt on Flickr

The question is raised about distributing the likenesses of the bloggers. From personal experience with Darren, he used our Creative Commons licensed Flickr photos but still always asked permission to publish them, either on his site, in his campaign or even when our mugs showed up in the Wall Street Journal.

Darren goes through the criteria he looks for when looking for a blogger for a campaign. From things like Google Page Rank, Technorati Rank, number of posts a day (how active they are) to blogrolls, discussions, design, etc.

More words of advice are things like linking to your bloggers – bloggers love link love. A question from the room asks about negative reactions etc.

Bruce asks how do people differentiate Darren’s emails from spam? Darren quotes Tim Bray, mentioning it’s unsolicited commercial email from someone you don’t know. Darren always tries to add a personal element when reaching out and tries to get the blogger in the loop as soon as possible.

Question from the audience: How to pitch you, Darren? “If you read my blog, you’ll know.” Local, for a good cause, do you have a good story to tell? Also, “we don’t deal with press releases anymore, we just point people to blog posts.”

Update: Metblogs meetup is currently going on over at Library Square.

One of the best things about Web 2.0 in my opinion is open source development. Partnered with Creative Commons Licensing, you are often free to build, re-work and share your contributions to an original work through public collaboration.

WordPress is a shining example of an open source project, meaning folks are free to build their own plugins, make their own themes, and add to the value of the entire platform by spinning around the code in their own way and releasing it back to the community for all to share – at least that’s the expectation. I haven’t heard of it happening much just yet, but with a WordPress install being basically free (except for your separate expenses for hosting, a domain etc.) just what exactly do people get out of running WordPress?

Reading one of my favourite resource sites this morning I came across “24 Ways To Contribute To WordPress” – from wearing your WordPress t-shirt with pride, to even writing a blog post about it, all of these step help spread the word. Here are some of the ways you can contribute:

Participate In The WP Forum
The official WordPress forums which can be found here were set up for users to help other users…

Donate Money Towards The WP Project
Now, you might scoff at the idea of donating cash towards the WP.org project, but the fact of the matter is, most of the money involved with Automattic is used for WP.com…

Create And Share WordPress Themes
Not much explaining I have to do here. If you create a theme, share your work to the masses…

Report Theme Piracy
While there is a large amount of inspiration within the WordPress themeing community, some folks just can’t seem to find a way to differentiate themselves, so they copy a successful theme from the codebase all the way to the CSS…

(Side note: Most themes have a Creative Commons License. I have found that if you hack apart a theme based on an original ie. not from scratch, simply credit/link the original author and state that your theme is ‘adapted’ from their works. As for premium ‘paid’ themes, always check the licensing and to see if they are being re-sold).

Report Security Hazards To The Proper People
If you happen to be a coder and come across something that you think may pose a security risk, the best thing for you to do is to send an email to security at wordpress.org…

What if you’re not a code monkey? Well.. blog it, wear it, or organize it.

These are just a few, for the entire list check out the Weblog Tools Collection site.

Also, a great way to participate is by having a coding party like the folks did at DrupalCamp Vancouver. Through the power of a Drupal Code Sprint, they took a website from alpha to beta and gave back to the Fearless City project. I propose we figure out something cool and neat to contribute during or after the next WordCamp Vancouver.

Finally, if you have a WordPress site show it off with a “proudly powered by” link or button, found here.

It has been over a year since John and I received a preview copy of the 1907 trolley car footage of Vancouver on DVD. The film is the earliest footage of Vancouver and was shot with a hand-crank camera mounted on the front of a B.C. Electric Railway streetcar by William Harbeck of Seattle.

Included in the DVD liner was a Google map outlining the route the trolley took through Gastown and over to the West End.

Over the last few years the Vancouver Historical Society has recreated the route shown in the film and now 101 years later it will be screened for the public and available for sale on DVD.

What: City Reflections – Vancouver 1907 / 2007 movie screening
When: Thursday May 22nd 2008 @ 8:00pm
Where: Vancouver Museum, 1100 Chestnut Street
More Info: There are no tickets to the screening, it’s first come first serve. The DVD of 1907 – 2007 footage will be on sale for $20. View photos from the launch May 7th, 2008.

In the original film you can only spot one car and the city is bustling with people, bicycles, and some horse-drawn carriages trotting along the dirt-covered Cordova Street.

Here are some other events of historical significance that took place in 1907, courtesy of VancouverHistory.ca and soon available in the book, The History of Metropolitan Vancouver.

…The Montreal-based jeweler, Henry Birks & Sons, came to Vancouver in February of [1907] and bought the well-established shop of George Trorey, at the northeast corner of Granville and Hastings. They kept Trorey on as manager—and they kept his famous sidewalk clock, too. The Birks clock and the store can just be glimpsed as our movie-streetcar swings east onto Hastings from Granville.

…The most famous writer in the world at the time, Rudyard Kipling, visited Vancouver again. Kipling really liked this city; this was his third visit, and he even bought land here (at the southeast corner of East 11th Avenue and Fraser Street.)

…David Spencer, who had earlier (1873) started a store in Victoria, put his son Chris, 38, in charge of a big new Spencer’s on Hastings Street in Vancouver. Chris had started working for the Victoria store in 1882 at age 13. The new store was so successful that it eventually took up almost an entire city block. Today, the building is SFU’s downtown campus.

…A fellow named Richard Cormon Purdy opened a shop on Robson Street and began selling chocolates.

Photo credit: DaveO on Flickr

The electric trolley in Vancouver has had a sordid history, from the Interurban to the recent retirement of the old electric Flyer buses. Although this city has had a love/hate relationship with transit over the years, more than anything this film proves that it can provide valuable glimpse into Vancouver’s past.

(Hat Tip to Karen for the heads up about the event on Thursday)

In the summer of 2006 I joined the Metroblogging Vancouver team and over the last few years our network has grown to represent over 50 bloggable cities worldwide. Admittedly my participation has dwindled somewhat however I’m still pretty proud to be a part of this global community.

Tomorrow there will be a Vancouver Metblogs meetup at Library Square Public House. All readers, commenters, authors, and anyone in general is more than welcome (in fact encouraged) to stop by and have some food and drink with the Metblogs team.

I realize tomorrow is also Third Tuesday, which I am sponsoring with a live blog and prizes, but I think heading to Library Square afterwards would be pretty fun – here’s why:

Also the father of Metroblogging nation, Sean Bonner, is in town and will be at the meetup. Sean is also the co-founder of Bode Media Inc and he helped create the Los Angeles group blog, Blogging.la, the flagship site of Metblogs.

If you can make it on time at 7:30pm, awesome. If you’re going to Third Tuesday to hear Darren Barefoot speak – that’s cool too, however please consider heading over to Library Square with us afterwards if you’re not already social media’d out for the night.

The latest in the Day Tripping series takes us south of the border and to no real destination as the journey is the trip.

When most folks head across the border from Metro Vancouver they take the I-5 although I highly suggest that next time, if you have some time of your hands, you veer off the interstate and take the more scenic Chuckanut Drive.

Photo credit: clango on Flickr

Just south of Bellingham look for the signs for Chuckanut Drive, Route 11. Along the way there is the historical town of Fairhaven and 21 miles down the road you’ll eventually join up with the I-5 again in Burlington.

There is plenty to stop check out including picnic areas, various Oyster Bars, restaurants, and Larabee State Park with hiking, waking and biking trails.

Photo credit: candescence on Flickr

Meandering along cliffs above the ocean while hugging the rocky tree-lined curves the views from the Chuckanut are breathtaking. To me, the entire course resembles a lush Pacific Northwest version of the Pacific Coast Highway.

Winding down into the valley, there is a winery (Chuckanut Ridge Wine Co), cafes, antique shops, blueberry farm, apple farms, and agricultural land.

There is also amazing camping (should you decide to stay longer than a day) over at Deception Pass which is a jog off the Chuckanut at Burlington but is worth the extra miles. Deception Pass connects the mainland to Whidbey Island, Duane’s over there right now so I’m sure he’ll have a recap or some photos up after this weekend.

Photo credit: Duane Storey on Flickr

If you’re simply looking for an afternoon drive with amazing views and fresh sea air, Chuckanut is a great way to go – and you can still go to Target and Bellis Fair on your way back home.