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Attention:

Raincity Studios is seeking an experienced Web Designer to perform work on a contractual basis. Applicant should have a sizable portfolio of their professional design work available for immediate review.

Details:

Two Positions available:

* Web Designer

* Web Designer/Developer

Web Designer Qualifications include:

* a flawless understanding of branding and design for dynamic, interaction-driven websites and web applications

* Familiarity with current and upcoming web design trends

* Creativity and problem-solving abilities a must

Web Designer/Developer Qualifications include:

* All of the above qualifications plus...

* Web Standards development techniques including CSS and XHTML

Additionally, PHP fluency will give the applicant a large leg up. Familiarity with the Drupal CMS a large plus.

If you are interested in working with Raincity, please forward your cv, portfolio URL and any other additional files or information to: inquire@raincitystudios.com

Raincity Seeking Flash Animator

Raincity Studios is currently looking for a kickin' flash animator. Perhaps you? Know of such a person? Please, pass the word along.

Ideally, this candidate loves animating in flash, hence the whole flash animator slant. And we're not talking about a bouncing ball across a screen - an honest to goodness animator. Actionscript 2 guru would be the ideal as well, but not as essential.

Please get in touch with us if you are interested, with "Flash Animation Position" in the subject line, or pass this along to anyone who you think may be.

Check out our site and get a sense of who we are and what we're all about.

Microsoft Releasing Standards-Based Web Design Tool

While it seems the feedback and criticism of IE7 has been predominantly on the negative side, Microsoft is getting set to launch Microsoft Office 2007 at the end of this week, and with it will come several other new web tools.

Apparently, Web Expression will be a tool that will actually be useful for designers, and not just for your average Joe, designed to be a professional-level product. It will eventually replace Frontpage, but will of course be going up against the big guns of Dreamweaver and GoLive.

Robert Scoble of Podtech recently shot a demo with product manager Wayne Smith - check it out.

Check out our good friends Lee and Sachi LeFever's blog site as they have just posted a blog entry on their travel blog, The World Is Not Flat, that shares with the internet their ways of blogging while journeying around the world over the last year.

Raincity designed the site, while Bryght provides hosting and support. It's tough checking in on these guys cause we're all green with envy, but following their journeys and living vicariously through them over the last year has been a treat. Thanks for the video sharing show guys!

The Web 2.0 Summit kicked off this week in San Francisco. One of the more popular workshops is a rapid fire launch and demonstration of new technologies, products and business models.

From social networking sites like "the blogophere of bulletin boards", to tools like, "yellow post-it notes", which allows you to share smart data, to a 3D social network that operates inside your browser called 3B.

The Read/Write guys summed up the projects revealed quite nicely in this article here.

Registering Your Legal Name To Blog In China

The powers that be over the blogosphere in China, China's Net regulator Ministry of Information Industries (MII), has just put forth an initiative that may be issued in the near future, where upon all bloggers in China will be required to register their real names if they wish to continue to blog. This has been instigated in an attempt to put a stop to or get control over the insults, curses, libels and fraud typically found on blogs - a tactic that is both illogical and absurd. And what the hell are they going to do to these "real name" bloggers when they find them?!

There is an estimated number of 17.5 million people in China that have started a blog. San Lian Life Week editor, Wang Xiaofeng, is one such man, and he has written a post on the topic that is both amusing and insightful.

His blog post can be read here in his mother tongue (interesting to have a peek at even if you can't understand it).

Jeremy Goldkorn posted his translation on Danwei and that English article can be found here.

There has been a lot of reviews and talk on all sides of the browser coin in the last week with the anticipation of Mozilla's version 2 and Microsoft's IE7. Microsoft finally got it together and unleashed their long-awaited improvement after 5 years of living in a cave, while Firefox's version 2 officially launched this week as well. Some interesting articles written on the topic of these browsers can be found at the links below, just to give you a taste of what's being said out there: reviews, recaps, words from the powers that be. Best thing to do, download and tinker away.

• An interview with Chris Beard, Mozilla VP of Products
• MozzillaZine Recap and Comments
• IE7 Review
• Chris Messina's thoughts on IE7 and Firefox as a movement of ideology

Some of Raincity's Erik Hermans' favourite new features on Firefox2 are the more compact header, the design, and for those atrocious spellers out there, the spell check! (He is still in tinkering mode.)

"I like the spell check a LOT!"

- Erik Hermans, Raincity Studios

And now, back to Flockin' it for myself...

I Found The Perfect Place To Talk Hockey, Beer & e-Commerce

Last week I spent a bit of my Friday afternoon with Dave Olson and Jason Billingsley at Elastic Path, an e-commerce software company based here in Vancouver.

Raincity is currently building Elastic Path's new Drupal site, set to launch in a few weeks, so I thought it'd be a good idea to check out their digs, say hello to the team and have a little software chat in their schwanky-ish entertainment room.... and of course we spoke a little hockey-talk a tad as well, and why the hell not? 'Tis the season.

Raincity Radio does Elastic Path

China’s first barcamp

Last month, only a few days after Barcamp Vancouver, on our way to work Kris and I were speaking about our strategy for our upcoming second trip to China. It then occurred to us that it would be a great opportunity to help organize the first Barcamp in China, during our stay in Shanghai.

We immediately recruited the help of Crystal Williams, who had been a key member of the organization team that made Barcamp Vancouver a success. With less then a month to go, we sent a shout-out to the community with hopes to find more help on the ground and set barcamp Shanghai in motion.

Not your typical barcamp planning

As always, Crystal jumped right into action setting up the wiki on barcamp.org, setting up the organizer mailing lists, creating the logo and blog badges. and laying down the foundation to help the organizers move forward with a plan of action.

Through our own blogs and blog network, the official barcamp.org website, and an Upcoming.org posting, we had local “Shanghainese�? volunteering to help within a matter of days. Luyi Chen and Jon Hancock jumped in quickly to lock down a venue, sponsors, t-shirts, and food, and Alex Cureton-Griffiths made early posts for us in his publication, Shanghai Networking News.

Roughly a week into planning, barcamp.org was blocked in China. Crystal Williams and Jon Hancock collaborated, working in shifts, to get a custom designed, Chinese hosted un-wiki live and functional in less than three days.

We had less than 4 weeks to get everything sorted out and needed to secure a venue ASAP. Luyi Chen helped us secure the Tudou.com offices for a venue and Pacific Epoch as a media sponsor. Jon Hancock made sure the website stayed live through tens of thousands of hack attempts and multiple server outages as well as securing a venue for our fantastic opening night party at T-Sens and catering for Sunday’s event. Special thanks go to Andrea Liu and Franz Patzig for their help scouting venues, negotiating contracts, and recruiting participants and sponsors.

The result was nothing short of a miracle and goes to show what people can do when they work together.

Our Sponsors

The key to run any barcamp in my opinion depends on 3 things, 1) a solid task master to organize the resources and peeps, 2) a great venue to host the event, and 3) sponsors to help cover the costs of food, internet, papers, etc.

Having the first two requirement secured, we where in dire need to raise funds to cover the cost, we wanted to keep the event free to attract as many people as possible.

Raincity and Bryght jumped right in and became the first two sponsors, Jon Hancock’s Shell Shadow followed immediately with website hosting and a cash sponsorship. Pacific Epoch became our official Media Sponsor and Tudou.com sponsored the venue, internet access, and infrastructure to host the event. ThoughtWorks, PowerE2E, and Vobile followed over the next week to put us at 10,000 RMB, fully covering t-shirts, supplies, and food for the event.

See the complete sponsor list here.

Over 60 participants and 19 presentations

The event kicked off with a party at T-Sens, a newly opened French bistro/bar on the Bund on Saturday September 23rd 2006 at 6pm. Over 25 people come meet the organizing team and socialize on the banks of the Huangpu river.

On Sunday the 24th we set up the location at 7am and by 8:30 the door open with Remco Marcelis manning the reception desk greeting all the peeps.

After a tasty breakfast, we started the sessions at 10am. We ran sessions in blocks of 30 and 60 minutes: From Open Source Business Development to Extreme programming with Legos, Philosophy, International Business Development, and kk’s Photocamp, we kept the attendees busy until 17:00. In total over 61 participants showed up splitting their time between 19 sessions. We took an hour off at lunch to feast on some great food provided by Wes’ Gulistan, The Kebab Caliphate. A great little restaurant located under the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum.

The official flickr tag was “barcampshanghai�? at last check we had over 570 images uploaded.

The bulk of the attendees stayed for the most part of the day, providing us with some great comments and review.

We agreed to organize another Barcamp Shanghai in March 2007, again kk and I will be here to help facilitate the event.

Crystal challenged people to organize other barcamps in China (Beijing, Hangzhou, and Hong Kong look likely) between now and March. The peeps from Thoughtworks met with us this week in Beijing and will be taking the lead organizing Barcamp Beijing. More info soon.

Overall, I am extremely happy with how smooth the event went, the collective effort was crucial in making this a success. Organizers and participants alike should pat themselves on the back for coming together and making this happen.

By the number of references in Google, it looks like the international and the Chinese community is eager to see more camps and I am proud to have done my bit in bringing such a cool event to China.

Government Bodies Are Taking The 2.0 Plunge

Reporting From Brussels...

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.

Here are some of my thoughts on what we all took away:

• great speakers, great people and some good fun
• governments and organizations need to recognize and harness the power of social networks, Web 2.0 tools and the internet.
• taxonomy, blogs, forums are all ways for governments and institutions to provide access to information and hear the voice of the people. This isn’t anything new, or that we haven’t heard before, but institutions need to start taking note of this and find ways for utilizing
• hurdles: multilingualism and dual language content, particularly in content management systems
• there is defiantly a need for content management systems

Tomorrow, Steve and I are heading on over to DrupalCon for 2 days, then we'll be BarCampin' it at BarCamp Brussels... and by the way, Brussels Rules, even with uppity french people yelling at each other in traffic.