Emily Chang – Designer

It’s not every day that we can teleport ourselves to the world of high fashion and style. But tonight, Friday, March 24, 2006, you can! Join us at the Stylehive virtual headquarters in Second Life for a fashion show to celebrate the launch of Stylehive.com.

Don’t miss the Stylehive virtual event featuring Second Life models and designers, as well as celebrity judges (Gina Pell, CEO of Splendora.com). See the Stylehive blog post, Hot Event: Fashion Show at our Virtual World Headquarters for more details.

The show begins with introductions at 7:05 PM PST in-world in Second Life:
Stylehive virtual headquarters

For those of you who can’t make it, we’re going to record some movies and will post those afterwards so check back at the Stylehive blog or here.

Social bookmarking meets virtual reality
If you miss this event, never fear. The virtual world is always available. You can visit Stylehive virtual headquarters at any time in Second Life. The modern structure and interior was designed by Aimee Weber, SL fashion maven, and includes many interactive elements pulled directly from the Stylehive.com bookmark community. See the biomorphic red couch? Click on it and launch your browser to the Stylehive bookmark about this object to learn more. It’s Baudrillard’s theories of simulacra and simulation in action. Go now, and experience it for yourself.

Stylehive.com is a new collaborative shopping community.  Ideacodes has been working with Michael and his team of experts for the last five months on all facets of design (branding, UI, user experience, AJAX interaction, and social strategy). 

CommunityWalk, the web 2.0 mapping community, has launched the new Explore feature. The Explore page lets you zoom into the map, select a category, or use a live search to find different public maps on CommunityWalk. You can even enter a search for a specific area of the map, or right click to zoom out. As you click through locations, photos are pulled up below the map dynamically.
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While there have been many seminal posts on Web 2.0 in the last several months, I strongly recommend reading “Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?” by Bryan Alexander, Director for Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE). Thanks to Bryan for the mention of eHub at the end of the article, and thanks to Max Kiesler for sending the article my way tonight.

In his article at Educause Review, Bryan Alexander presents a thorough and comprehensive perspective on the Web 2.0 movement. His point of view is well researched, academic, and an accurate and in depth overview for those seeking to understand or articulate the current web environment. On a personal level, his post was a breath of fresh air in that it came from outside the Web 2.0 world and from my consulting past in higher education technology. Concepts in social software, open source, and online communities have a natural match in academia and education, and I look forward to seeing and taking part in making this convergence happen.

The term is audacious: Web 2.0. It assumes a certain interpretation of Web history, including enough progress in certain directions to trigger a succession. The label casts the reader back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s unleashing of the World Wide Web concept a little more than a decade ago, then asks: What forms of the Web have developed and become accepted enough that we can conceive of a transition to new ones?

He continues with a well articulated and researched summary of develops and trends split into three sections: Concepts, Projects and Practices, and Rising Services or Churning Wave?

Rather than paraphrase his thoughts, please read it for yourself:
Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? by Bryan Alexander
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It’s cool to know that as we’re listening to a compilation of Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel and the Furious Five here at home, DJ Grandmaster Flash is at SupperClub tonight, literally just down the street a half a block away on Harrison!  He’ll be on the turntables starting in one hour – at 12:30 AM.  Go check it, yo.

Stylehive.com launched on Wednesday night, March 8, 2006. Read Michael Carrier’s thoughts in eHub Interviews Stylehive.

It’s with a great deal of personal satisfaction that I write this post. About the time I started this blog, my company started designing the Stylehive, a collaborative shopping community. It’s a place where contributors share and discover the hottest stores, styles, designers, trends, and must have products.

The Stylehive is the unique product and vision of entrepreneur and CEO Michael Carrier. Michael has been an internet entrepreneur for the last 12 years and has founded 2 other successful internet companies. Based in San Francisco, the web application brings together the distinct worlds of technology and trendsetting fashion, shopping and online retail.

As a free member of Stylehive, you can:

- Discover new brands, products, designers, stores, and experts

- Use the Stylehive’s special tags to build a personalized list. For example, use the wish list tag to build a customized birthday gift shopping list.

- Easily share your shopping finds with other like-minded shoppers, family, and friends

- Discover stylish experts in the Hive and follow favorite designers, brands and shopping topics

- Collaborate easily with groups of people on topics such as home design or designer handbags

- Promote yourself, your blog, your products or your retail store to the Stylehive community

The Stylehive blog will also feature the best finds from the Stylehive community with the editorial expertise of Stephanie Wong, a fashion industry veteran, style scout, and founder of her own online guide to shopping.

My partner at Ideacodes, Max Kiesler, and I have had the pleasure of working with Michael and his expert team for the last several months to design and develop the Stylehive, and we’re pleased to announce that Stylehive alpha will launch this week. Today, we sent out some invites to a private group of bloggers, friends, colleagues, and style gurus to get their feedback.

Stylehive alpha is now live:
www.stylehive.com – register for free

I’ll be doing a much longer post to share some of the thoughts that went into designing and developing this new social shopping and style community.

See us in the Hive:
http://www.stylehive.com/kingbee (Michael Carrier’s page)
http://www.stylehive.com/emilychang
http://www.stylehive.com/max

Blogs talking about Stylehive:

UPDATE: stay up to date with what people are saying about Stylehive at the Stylehive blog.

Stylehive is Looking Good by Mike Arrington at Techcrunch

Stylehive bookmarklet DesignDemo by Max Kiesler

Stylehive: Social Web for the Shopping Obsessed by Frank Gruber.

Stylehive Deserves Some Buzz… by Scott Lake of JadedPixel and Shopify.

Social bookmarking goes shopping with Stylehive by Ben Rowe.

Stylehive launches on Thursday by Auren Hoffman.
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I’m always interested in new blog networks. I’ve been fortunate to enjoy a healthy increasing readership and acceptance in several online networks. Most of these, however, push content out to other niche sites in the blogosphere.

BlogBurst is a new product by Pluck, a company based in Austin co-founded in 2003 by Dave Panos and Andrew Busey. BlogBurst is an opt-in wire service for bloggers and publishers with a different approach.

The syndication network will bring together blogs and highly visible and trafficked mainstream publisher and media web sites. At the moment, this includes the WashingtonPost.com, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News, although many new partnerships will be announced shortly.

The obvious benefit for bloggers? BlogBurst will drive exposure and grow readership. On the other hand, traditional media publishers will benefit from insights and timely discussion from blogs and bloggers in the network. BlogBurst editors select content from blogs for republication. Current topics that are in trials include science and technology, travel, food and entertainment, local metros, and women’s issues.

My blogs, eHub and emilychang.com are included in the category “science and technology” within BlogBurst’s network. While the system is live, they haven’t launched to the public quite yet. Stay tuned.

If you’re going to be at SXSW this week, you can check out BlogBurst’s events and blogger lounge. You can also catch Mike Arrington’s review of BlogBurst, which they demoed at the TechCrunch party last month.

Disclosure: I’m on the BlogBurst board as an unpaid advisor.
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I’m definitely part of the Lego generation – played with them as a kid, went to Lego world in Holland, and was a fan of Lego Mindstorms.

This Lego Volvo is crazy:

More amazing Lego creations at TechEBlog’s Top 10 Strangest Lego Creations.

These days, like many of you, my life is filled with electronic communications, whether that’s email, chat, collaborative project management, mobile messages, or other data sources. I’ve written about this in the past.

On any given day, I spend hours on communications and between my work as Ideacodes, eHub, and personal communications, I pretty much live between a web browser, email client, and IM. Navigating these various spaces takes time, effort, and manual labor. Even with wikis, Basecamp’s efficiency in project management, iMail’s smart folders or Gmail’s labeling, I still find myself sorting and searching through multiple applications, browser windows, saving documents to project folders on my hard drive and then backed up to external drives.

Foldera plans to change that.
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