He was struggling to find high quality developers in Los Angeles. Just the kind of person I like to meet. :) But I was a bit surprised when he emphasized how hard it had been for them to find a web developer in Los Angeles. My flippant comment was, “If you do a Google search for Los Angeles web developer, you’ll find a LOT of people and firms.” His response was that he had done exactly that, but that the long list is not all that useful. Yesterday, I met with someone at the early stage of a startup. He has a great concept with

Great by Cliff Allen Business Networking Online who I had blogged about previously in Marketing, Startups and Networking in Los Angeles . Then, face-to-face meetings and activities become much more valuable. see Visible Networking as a series of conversations around blog posts, and encouraging a group of people to actively participate. In this post, Cliff provides some feedback on what works when you move towards doing business networking online. I'm trying to get the concept of visible networking going, so his feedback is really valuable.

This past week has had an interesting confluence of events that's led me to conclude that I want to start doing a lot of visible networking among the tech / web crowd here in Los Angeles. I want to take you through a bit of what brought me here, because I think it will help explain what I mean by visible networking. Networking Events – Questionable Return on Your Time Last week I posted about Networking Events in Los Angeles and Southern California and received back some interesting comments, some of the best from a LinkedIn Group. Several of the comments there echoed what I've been feeling: Person 1: I have attended a plethora of networking groups and have also found it harder and harder to continue to be motivated to go. Person 2: Very discouraging (few if any happy with their networking efforts) but not unexpected.

LAWeekly announced the winners of their first annual web awards today. LA’s Best Local Activism Site GOOD Los Angeles LA’s Best Online Photo of the Year “Walkabout,” by Mathieu Young, GOOD Los Angeles We want to send out a big congratulations to those of you who were picked, and send a special thanks out to all of our readers. Thanks to your support, and your votes, we took home the award for Best Tech Blog.

LAWeekly announced the winners of their first annual web awards today. LA’s Best Local Activism Site GOOD Los Angeles LA’s Best Online Photo of the Year “Walkabout,” by Mathieu Young, GOOD Los Angeles We want to send out a big congratulations to those of you who were picked, and send a special thanks out to all of our readers. Thanks to your support, and your votes, we took home the award for Best Tech Blog.

Los Angeles-based FreedomSpeaks , which provides online tools for connecting voters with elected officials, said Wednesday that the firm has rolled out a new web based application programming interface (API). FreedomSpeaks and The Proponent were founded by Jason Kiesel and Kurt Daradics; the firm is backed by angel investor Dale Okuno, who is CEO of EZ-Data. According to the firm, the new API will allow organizations to "white label" the firm's engine, and connect their members and others with their local elected officials. The new API allows organizations to automatically

LA Weekly announced that they are having the first ever Los Angeles Web Awards . There are so many great bloggers, writers, foodies and oversharers in Los Angeles, this is a great way to highlight the best of the best and bring attention to a site that may not be on everyone’s regular RSS feed. Feel free to nominate your favorite Los Angeles tech blog lalawag in as many categories as you see fit. There are a total of 36 categories to choose from, but don’t worry you don’t have to fill in all of them in order to submit your vote. To

The state of being without a job, yet having the resources to enjoy fun activities during otherwise normal working hours. Especially here in Los Angeles, a town that was already well-known for its odd careers. Web 2.0’s funemployed    n. Example:              Francisco is funemployed,

I've helped organize the Los Angeles CTO Forum for almost 10 years. They are generally the senior most person responsible for custom software development, database design, database administration, web development, etc. In a recent conversation with a fellow CTO, we lamented about the fact that while there's very active software development and web development going on in Southern California and West Los Angeles, yet there didn't seem to be as much of a community around it. As part of doing that, I've had the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of different chief technical officers from different kinds of companies over those years.

You know, for pretty much every ethnicity, every race, every sports activity, anything you can figure that you can create a community around there was a dating site for that. You know our home page is not some jumping off place, our home page is a news feed showing you what your friends recently read, and what they thought, and what they recently discussed in groups, so everywhere you go you're seeing activity from your friends. Here's an easy way to vote for this interview on Hacker News. --Andrew Andrew