Kidzworld Launch: A Social Networking Website For Kids

Kidzworld: a fully moderated, safe and secure social networking site for kids. Kidzworld the company is a 7-year old Vancouver company and has over 700,000 users to date worldwide. In their world online, internet savvy grade-schoolers can play games, enter contests, win prizes, test their knowledge in trivia quizzes, keep up to date on the latest sports and entertainment news, and meet other Kidzworld members from all over the world!

Marketing Your Film Online

How does one effectively utilize the internet to promote and market a film project?

That was the question raised by filmmakers and members of the National Film Board and Telefilm Canada that spawned the workshop "Marketing Your Film Online", an event sponsored by Telefilm Canada at this year's St. John's International Women's Film Festival that wrapped up this week in Newfoundland.

Sharing Web 2.0 In Eastern Canada

I have been invited to speak in Halifax and St. John's next week on everything and anything web 2.0, social marketing and social softwares to help filmmakers, producers and directors in showing them how they can better utilize the internet to promote their work.

First I will be heading to Halifax to sit on a panel along side Annette Clarke of the NFB and Pattie LaCroix from Catapult Media. Then it's off to my hometown, St. John's, Newfoundland, where I will be conducting a workshop at the St. John's International Women's Film Festival.

Government Bodies Are Taking The 2.0 Plunge

Today, Steve and I spent the day at GovCamp, a one-day conference in the same vein as BarCamp. This un-conference was set up for government bodies and public institutions to learn how to come to the dark side of all things we promote and love in Web 2.0 and social networking.

On Friday I spent a couple hours in the office  of one of Bryght's resellers, Raincity Studios, chatting about social software and Web 2.0 tools with their design and development teams. We talked about how everyone in the company can use RSS and tools like Del.icio.us, Upcoming, Flickr, and PubSub to be more effective in their jobs... from monitoring CVS updates to Drupal.org via RSS for the developers in the room to using social software to promote client sites and new studio projects for the designers and marketers.

Will and Dave swung by to help out and the pizza was awesome. Thanks for the chance to come hang out and lead this workshop and other local companies should drop me a line if this is something you'd be interested in having me arrange a time to come by some lunch hour and do it again for your team. Here's the RCS blog post about the session...

It's been a busy day as per the usual here at Raincity Studios. We're working our magic on the oodles of projects that have been rolling our way as of late, but, in the spirit of the good ol' times, we've attempted to bring back the Lunch n' Learn sessions that proved to be a grand success of years gone by, and took a little time out to have a team lunch meeting to geek out and discuss social softwares, web 2.0, and how these tools can be better utilized to promote our studio, our clients, and the work we do.

Kris Krug from bryght paid us a visit and conducted the session. He's one of those web 2.0 gurus and brought us all up to speed on the various on-line communities and how to make them work to our advantage. Using the personal news aggregator bloglines is a helpful tool to organize and monitor your company and clients, or any other fun stuff you'd like to keep an eye on. Such tools as del.icio.us, technorati, and upcoming.org are useful as a watchdog as well, but also enables you to link your work, findings, new and interesting information, whatever you feel worth talking about and sharing, back to you, your business, and your whole network of folks you've met through these social softwares. Get your fingers on the pulse of all that is out there to grab on to!