The Launching of Hawkeye Tweets

There is no mistaking the fact that I am a HUGE Iowa Hawkeye Nerd. If you hadn't noticed, two of the last three sites launched by Brice Cheddarn Development have been Hawkeye related. Hawkapalooza was a pro-bono website put together to help a student organization at the University of Iowa. NILE was put together for a client to help him promote his novel.

Hawkeye Tweets is personal project to support my favorite team. It was inspired by the work of colleagues, who put together Suns Tweets and Cards Tweets as a way to use Twitter in support of their teams. I took the same concept and applied it to the Iowa Hawkeyes.

With the help of justSignal, the same technology used on Suns Tweets and Cards Tweets, I was able to put this site together in one massive all night, Monster-fueled hacking session. Hawkeye Tweets uses the justSignal Twitter Widget to pull in the streaming tweets and ColdFusion to power the backend and other ancillary components. ColdFusion will be used more heavily as the site expands.

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The Launching of Nile Kinnick

Nile Kinnick played football at the University of Iowa in the late 1930s.  He went on to break many Iowa Hawkeye football records on his way to winning the 1939 Heisman Trophy. But there was more to Nile Kinnick than just football.  And Tom Lidd did an excellent job of telling the full story in his book NILE.

Having discovered this novel one weekend while doing research, I was quick to purchase it. I also wrote a blog post about it on the Iowa Hawkeyes Blog. In that post, I made an open offer to help the author promote and sell the book. As luck should have it, Tom was a reader of the blog and sent me an email stating an interest in my offer.

Over the next several months, Tom and I exchanged several emails and ideas back and forth on how to promote his book. Th overall goal is to have the book turned into a screenplay, so having a web presence could only help acheive that goal. And believe me, this novel will make a fantastic movie.

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Iowa Tech and Social Media Interactive Conference

In just a few short weeks, Iowa will be hosting the Iowa Tech and Social Media Interactive Conference (IOWAtasmic), one of the very fist large social media conferences to be organized in the state. On September 18-20th, 2009 in Mount Pleasant, Iowa on the Welsyan College campus, IOWAtasmic will provide a chance for businesses and individuals around Iowa and the midwest to take part in and learn about the ever growing social media revolution.

While many people think social media is just a fad, IOWAtasmic sets out to demonstrate to Iowans that it's not. The goal of the event is to bring new technology and knowledge to Iowa, as well as to showcase the existing technology and services already offered in the area.

The conference also sets out to prove that Iowa is not ten years behind the rest of the World, technologically speaking, and will attempt to highlight incentives and benefits of relocating or expanding into Iowa.

Event organizer Bradley Laborman, known as Bradman in the online world, says attendees will benefit from the knowledge of top tech and social media figures from the U.S. and Canada. The conference will consist of keynote speakers, local musicians, youtube celebrities, social media gurus and entrepreneurs from across the country.

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