Junior was on display on the expo floor and we snagged some pictures:

There are numerous videos as well avaiable on YouTube chronicling the project, the DARPA Grand Challenge:

• CafeMom - The largest social network just for moms.
• Famiva - A free secure and password-protected social network for local and extended families to connect and collaborate with features such as a family tree, extended family network, photo and story sharing, family events and reminders, family maps, and more.
• Famster - A private social network for families with a blog for each member, photo and video sharing, recipes, scrapbooking, calendars, addressbooks and more. Famster costs $9.95 per month. 
• Maya’s Mom - Social collaboration and community site for parents. 
• Minti - Advice, friendship and community for parents. Join for free, get your own family page, keep a blog and make friends with other members. Forum like user ranking where advancement can be accomplished by contributing parenting advice, blogging and writing comments.
• MothersClick - Connects mothers in the same area or neighborhood and helps them find groups and organize their groups. MothersClick is designed to be a unique parenting resource, helping moms to promote group-building, knowledge-sharing, and community.
• Parentography - Parentography is an online community for parents who want advice, tools, tips and ideas for family local or distant excursions. Parents can share stories, photos, excursion ideas, ratings and reviews on all sorts of family-friendly places and activities. They can search for things to do by location, season, children’s age and other important factors or find new places with an interactive map. All parents are given profiles to share and use to find new friends.

Sites just for kids (There are tons more sites for kids but this is a sampling of my families favorites as well as ones we have used and are familiar with):

• Club Penguin - Now owned by Disney, this social network allows kids to build their own penguin character and earn money (in their little penguin world) that can be used to purchase things for their homes, their pets, and more. Different levels of activities available depending on how active the use is on the site. Several levels of parental controls allow for no chat, safe chat, or full chat amongst the kids. Premium memberships are available for a monthly fee.
• imbee - a social network for kids and teachers. imbee is a teacher endorsed social networking site appropriate for kids and ‘tweens that allows them to create blogs, upload pictures, make trading cardsm and create and join groups. Imbee’s new Teacher Feature enables teachers to extend their classroom onto the Internet and establish class blogs and online interaction. Teacher Feature enables teachers and parents to work together closely to guide children’s foray into social networking while bolstering classroom learning.
• Nicktropolis - For kids from Nick.com. The site enables kids to build their own avatars and style their clothes and hair, decorate their rooms, play games, and more. Parental controls enable parents to restrict certain activities.

Plugins from PodCamp session:

PodPress: Plugin to help you run a podcast with WordPress

Akismet: Defensive measures against spammers

All-in-one SEO: Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines

WP-Cache – WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive

WordPress Database Backup – creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

WordPress 2.3 Related Posts – will generate a related posts via WordPress 2.3 tags, and add the related posts to feed.

Ultimate Google Analytics – Install necessary code to you WordPress theme for Google Analytics

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator – This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

Twitter Poster – Pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.

Sociable – Sociable is a plugin which adds social media buttons to your posts, and does so easily, and beautifully. (see an example of it in action on this post!)

WordPress.com Stats – Automattic’s own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface. You can install this on any WordPress install but must have a WordPress.com account to use it.

Additional must have plugins:

Duplicate Content Cure – Duplicate content cure is a very simple, yet effective SEO plugin that prevents search engines from indexing wordpress pages that contain duplicate content, like archives and category pages.

WordPress Mobile Edition – A PDA friendly interface for your blog. You can see it in action by visiting this site in a mobile browser.

Simple Trackback Validation - performs simple but very effective tests on all incoming trackbacks in order to stop trackback spam.

OpenID for WordPress – plugin for Wordpress that enables visitors to use their OpenID if they want to post a comment instead of a registering yet another local Wordpress account or typing their credentials over and again.

iWPhone Plugin and Theme – The iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. (view this site on an iPhone or iPod Touch to see it in action)

Extended Comment Options – Extended Comment Options allows you to close comments or pings (or both) on all your posts, a batch of posts, single specific post, or posts in general after a certain time period.

PodCamp MidWest

• Flickr Photos
• SnapFoo Pics
• Linuxchic’s Twitter
• TechMonkey’s Twitter

Session HighlightsPodcasting Like Pro with Brady GoodmanA podcast can’t be too short. If the audience wants more, they will be back for the next episode. Don’t force a certain show length, just let it happen.Consider creating a table of contents for long format shows either on your blog (show notes) or creating chapters through iTunes in the actual podcast itself so people can just skip to the topic they are interested in if they want.Show notes help your search engine results, trackback links and more. An audio podcast can’t be crawled by search engines so show notes not only give your audience links to follow and more information about the content of your episode but also gives you traffic from keywords in search engines.Get to the point, don’t spend 5 minutes doing cute unprofessional things like, “Is this thing on?”. Get the listener hooked with some content before the banter. Give your audience a reason to listen.Sell sponsorships: ie Do a cooking show? Get it sponsored by your nitche like recipes.com. Sell packages, banners, audio, links… don’t look for fortune, just sell the ads. You don’t have to go global, pound the pavement and hit up your local merchants and websites. Don’t get hooked on your subscriber numbers and stats – sell to your nitche – tell your potential sponsors their customers are the ones listening so they need their brand on your show.Listen to your own podcast.Commit to improving, commit to being on time with your episodes, commit to being a professional.Social Networking – Life in the fishbowl and beyond – Michael BaileyBreakout Session (Conversational)A great mix of people participated in this break out session facilitated by Michael Bailey of Mobasoft. With introductions came a lot of new Twitter friends. Questions raised by those new to social networking and media was how long does content last on the internet? Responses contributed to a conversation including technical information on webservers, the Way Back Machine, and censoring what you say. It was hard to stop the conversation and move on. =)I didn’t get a change to live blog the next two sessions since TechMonkey and I were giving some of our own. There were several people recording sessions for their own casts and sites and we will include the links to them when we get them. Lane Fournerat live streamed our WordPress for Beginners session as well as recorded it to upload later.Just Press Record with Michael BaileyMichael brought out several mics, headphones, and a mixer and jacked them all into his MacBook so participants could get a hands on demo of podcasting equipment. Lots of learning and sharing went on here.Most people are not aware that the equipment that they can purchase to produce professional sounding podcasts is inexpensive. For $200 or less a podcaster can outfit a home studio with a mixer and a professional microphone. While you don’t need this equipment to record a podcast it helps the quality of the recording and if you have more than one person you can control their levels independently with a mixer. The software Michael demo’ed on his MacBook was Audacity, a powerful and free audio application and runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows.The hands on session seemed to be a big hit and once someone broke the ice many people came up to check out the equipment, ask questions, and share their experiences.Video Podcasting Info with Lane FourneratLane has been live streaming from PodCamp Midwest today at Justin.TV and he shares his expertise on how to record video and where you can post it on the net. He showed how you can make money creating internet video with Associated Content and ExpoTV.com. He has posted tutorials on software and video making made with his webcam at Associated Content and created video reviews of products and movies at Expotv.com with each site paying for user contributed content. Lane tells us how easy it is to create video with your computer.Lane likes the Logitec QuickCam webcams for their ease of use. The software (runs on Windows) creates AVI formatted video with a decent compression rate for uploading straight to the web. For converting video formats Lane recommended SUPER, a free , efficient and easy to use video encoder.

Friday, February 15th, 2008: Meet-n-Greet!
Johnny’s Sports Bar

WHEN:
6PM – whenever (They close at 2AM)

ADDRESS:
6765 W 119th Street
Overland Park, KS 66209
913-451-4542

Day One, Saturday February 16th, 2008
WHERE:
KU Regents Center – Regnier Hall
127th street and Quivira
Overland Park, KS

WHEN:
9:00 AM: DOORS OPEN Light breakfast (coffee, juice and muffins / bagels) may be available if we receive sponsorship funds. MORE LATER

9:00 AM: KICKOF

See here for the sessions that are lined up or head over to the registrations page to add your name to the list.

Good times!