I’ve been involved in organizing Ignite Portland since our first one in October 2007. Last week, we organized our ninth Ignite Portland event with over 700 people in attendance and another 160 people tuning into at least part of our live stream.

I’ve helped organize all nine of the Ignite events in Portland, and I’ve been on the other side of the microphone as a presenter at several Ignite events, so I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks along the way for people who are interested in organizing one. Here are a few of the things that can help you organize an Ignite that shines.

Know Your Audience and Be Flexible

The Ignite format specifies the five-minute presentations with 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds, but most of the rest is up to interpretation. We’ve customized our event to make it appeal to our Portland audience:

• We get corporate sponsors to cover our expenses rather than charging a fee to attend.
• We hold Ignite Portland in a cool old theater where people can order pizza, dinner and drinks.
• Our event is almost entirely automated; we’ve eliminated the need for an MC.
• Ignite Portland is always a standalone event not held in conjunction with other conferences.

I’ve also attended Ignite events in corporate settings, bars, convention centers and even a local library, both with and without registration fees. Several of these Ignite events were scheduled to run alongside another event as a fun evening activity. Each of those locations and formats suited the needs of their unique audience.

Keep it Simple

Keeping your event as simple as possible is especially important for the first couple of times that you organize one. The more moving parts, the more help you’ll need to pull it off, and the more chances there are that something could go wrong. While we started with a simple Ignite format, we have gotten increasingly complex with our fully automated process, live streaming, simulcasting to a second location, sponsor videos and more. Unfortunately, this also means that it takes us four or five months to organize our event, and we have a high rate of volunteer organizer burnout, since our events is run entirely by unpaid volunteers. Our first Ignite Portland was organized in about a month, since it was a much simpler format. I strongly encourage you to stay focused on keeping it simple and lightweight to organize.

Have Fun

One of the best things about organizing an Ignite is that you get to help select the talks. It can be challenging to get a coherent story in only five-minutes, and I’ve found that a fun approach to a topic can really help get the point across quickly. My favorite example was a talk about how to boil water in five easy steps using a nuclear reactor where the presenter managed to get her message across while making it interesting and funny at the same time. In Portland, we’ve also noticed that while the event was started for the technology community, we’ve ended up with quite a few technologists talking about fun side projects and interests. While we still have a number of technology topics, we also try to mix in a few talks that are just for fun.

Anyone can organize an Ignite event, and your event should be shaped to reflect your environment. Pick an interesting location to hold your Ignite, customize the format to meet your needs and your audience, but most of all, have a little fun with your Ignite!

What are your experiences attending or organizing Ignite events?

Bagdad photo by Lucas DeShazer used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

The folks at Creative Edge were kind enough to offer me the chance to look over the service, so I’ve been checking it out over the past week or so. There are two main ways to find content in the vast collection: browsing through it and searching. You can browse the collection by subject (for example, CAD or photography), by product (for example, CS4 or Cubase) or brand (for example, New Riders or Missing Manuals). When browsing, you can use the drop-down menu to only display videos, books or Short Cuts (shorter content on specific topics).

You can also use the search tool, which I find particularly handy as it does a full-text search of all of the books in the collection. You can then sort search results by relevancy, popularity or when they were added to the collection (useful if you want to exclude out-of-date material). You can use the tabs at the top of the screen to limit search results for books or videos, and you can tag and “favorite” content that you’d like to come back to later.

The online book viewing experience is great. Content loads quickly, it’s easy to read and there’s a table of contents on the left-hand side of the page which makes it fast to flip between sections. You can add your own notes and bookmarks, and search within books. The video experience doesn’t feel quite as polished; opening a video just opens a player in a new window — and it’s not as easy to find specific bits of information as there’s no search or table of contents. Any required supplemental files (code samples or graphics, for example) are provided for each video and book.

Access to Creative Edge’s entire library requires a $24.99 monthly subscription (though it’s currently available for an introductory price of $19.99/month), which, given the size of its library, seems like a reasonable price if your book-buying budget is anywhere near that amount.

Have you tried Creative Edge or Safari? How do you find they compare to buying “dead tree” books?

Even as a devoted Apple user, no matter how much I want to, I can’t quite make the psychological break from Microsoft Office. I’ve nothing against the software giant’s office suite — even the 2008 Mac edition I use is a great collection of software, although it is perhaps a little over-featured,  lacking the intuitive web collaboration of Google Docs and not quite as elegantly Mac-native as I’d like.

Apple’s iWork ’09 fares no better on web collaboration than Microsoft’s offering, but it’s certainly more Mac-native and tantalizingly low-priced, though it’s not as full-featured and lacks tutorials for new users switching from Office.

As expected, the book steps through the application’s regular features but puts a surprising emphasis on design and aesthetics. The title’s broadly divided into three sections — focusing on Pages, Numbers and Keynote, respectively — with each section roughly breaking down into creating and editing, layout, themes and templates, and sharing. It’s a  well put together tour of the suite, providing an overview of basics, with some hints and tips and coverage of more advanced functionality. There are few other books around that provide an objective (i.e., non-Apple) coverage of iWork, and in that regard, it’s a good overview.

However, even after an afternoon spent with iWork ’09 and Clark’s book, I’m still drawn to Microsoft Office. As elegant and as powerful as iWork is, the near ubiquity of Microsoft’s suite means that I feel my time is better spent understanding the ins and outs of a product where my investment in skilling up is more likely to yield more portable and transferable skills.

“iWork ’09: The Missing Manual” is a great title for acclimatizing yourself with Apple’s lovely working environment, but I can’t help but think iWork will remain a niche application suite in the face of Microsoft’s de facto standard.

Let us know what you think of the iWork office suite in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Evolution of the E-book Market
• Is it Time For the “Web OS”?
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era

In the intervening period, we’ve seen companies such as Plaxo and Facebook seek to evolve themselves into the position of defacto social address books, but even such powerful companies have only offered uneven ‘hacks’ for integration with our email, cellphone and IM contact books.

Apple’s Mobile Me service has attempted to provide some of the ‘glue’ to connect these silos of contact data, but at a great price…and of course tied to the Mac universe. It’s also telling that Gmail still lacks a useful API to it’s Contacts data – perhaps data that should really be a standalone application? This has left an opening for companies such as Soocial…

Founded in Amsterdam, by Stefan Fountain, Soocial provide hooks into existing services and a modicum of interoperability between them. Currently the service enables users to draw contact data from…

• Gmail
• Highrise
• Facebook
• OSX’s Address Book
• A number of mobile handsets

It’s an impressive (though again uneven) list of contact sources, notably support for what appears to be a broad range of handsets,though, some like the Facebook application don’t offer true synchronization or access to contact data within that service.

I can’t help but thinking what’s really needed is a master web-based address book, with a standards-based API that any device or application can draw contact information and synchronise with. Perhaps this is the space that Soocial hopes to occupy – or indeed upcoming services such as CloudContacts.

Soocial’s Fountain has such faith in the utility of his service, that he has generously extended a limited number of invitations to Web Worker Daily’s readership, as part of Soocial’s (currently private) beta trial.

Head on over to http://www.soocial.com/web-worker-daily to pickup your invitation and put Soocial through its paces.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Evolution of the E-book Market
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast