For those of you planning to volunteer in person for Geeksgiving at Home of the Innocents tomorrow, here are details via HOI’s Linda Medley:

Attached is a campus map for dissemination.  “Geeksgiving Central” will be in the Kay & Jim Morrissey Advanced Therapy Center (North end of campus) in the therapy gym.  We will have signs posted for those volunteers who come and go from Noon until 9:00 p.m.  We have a series of user names and passwords for your convenience and will be testing connectivity and speed well before you guys are due to arrive.  And of course we will be available throughout that entire period to provide information and help with trouble shooting should the need arise.

Volunteers can park on Mellwood, which runs parallel to the Advanced Therapy Center.  There is also parking in front, and across from the ATC.  If that seems tight then feel free to park in Lot A wherever there is availability.

For those with particular aspirations of (or aversions to) appearing on television, Mayor Greg Fischer is expected to visit the Geeksgiving command center at Home of the Innocents between 6 and 7pm tomorrow, likely with the local media in tow. Plan your presence accordingly.

As always, you can help Geeksgiving from anywhere, but if you’d like to sit shoulder to shoulder with some fellow geek-givers, we’re certainly glad to have you.

BONUS: Louisville’s own Gyroskope will be hosting a Geeksgiving Afterparty at 9pm at Butchertown Pub & Studios, 1335 Story Avenue. Any and all Geeksgiving participants are welcome.

Leia the Riveter courtesy RedBubble

As part of Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer’s Give A Day week of service, the Louisville Digital Association is spearheading Geeksgiving, a pledge drive to generate donations and support for the Home of the Innocents. From noon to 9pm, a group of LDA volunteers — which can and should include you — will be using online tools to urge our citizens to donate goods and cash to one of the Derby City’s most deserving charities.

In other words, for nine hours on Oct. 19 we’ll be tweeting, blogging, Facebook-ing and G+-ing our fingers off until our various and sundry online followers have stocked Home of the Innocents with all the supplies it needs to keep Louisville’s most vulnerable citizens safe, warm, and able to face the holiday season with some measure of dignity and comfort. (We’ll even resort ot LinkedIn, AOL and MySpace if we have to.)

If you’d like to be part of the Geeksgiving team, register here. All it takes is a commitment to spread the word during the nine hours of Geeksgiving (and hyping the Geeksgiving event in advance). Work from home, the office, pretty much anywhere you’ve got Internet connectivity. If you’d like to be part of the in-person team working from Home of the Innocents during Geeksgiving, contact us. We’d love to have you there, sharing the strength of Louisville geeks united in service to a good cause.

It’s time to show Louisville what the power of Geekdom harnessed for good can accomplish. Register for Geeksgiving today.

A lot of so-called experts claim to have “written the book” on social media, but only the LDA’s own Jason Falls could have written this book. And to prove it, Mr, Falls is throwing a party in honor of his own blessed tome, and you’re all invited. Quoth the press release:

Social Media Explorer will host a Louisville celebration for Jason Falls and Erik Deckers in honor of their recently published book No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing on Thursday, Oct. 20 from 7-9 p.m. ET at Avalon on Bardstown Road in Louisville. Everyone is invited but the first 50 people to register for the event and show up will get a FREE COPY of the book!

Enjoy appetizers and networking with the Louisville social media, technology, marketing, public relations and entrepreneur communities as we celebrate the book with food, folks and fun. Falls and Deckers will sign copies, so bring yours if you have it.

Admission and appetizers are free until they last. There will be a cash bar.

Register at http://nobslouisville.eventbrite.com

If the party is half as entertaining as the book it’s celebrating, we’re all in for a memorable experience. See you there.

Image by Gustavo Pimenta via Flickr

It’s easy to talk a good game about using the power of the Internet to change the world. On Oct. 18, you can have lunch with someone who has actually done it. Quoth the press release:

Mayor Greg Fischer invites you to come learn how a simple concept from a young high school teacher turned into one of America’s greatest new ideas.

Charles Best, then a social studies teacher fresh out of college, sensed that many people would like to help distressed public schools, but were frustrated by a lack of influence over their donations. He created DonorsChoose.org in 2000 so that individuals could connect directly with classrooms in need. It has led to $86 million in direct donations to classrooms and teachers—and donorschoose.org is now coming to Louisville.

This is a brown-bag lunch-and-learn session. Bring your own lunch. Soft drinks, coffee provided.

The lunch goes down at the Green Building, 732 East Market, from noon to 1pm on Oct. 18. No word on reserved seating, which usually means first come, first served. Be there or be a right orthogonal quadrilateral.

The long awaited slide deck from the LDA’s gangbusters Oct. 4 lecture Finding Your Edge in Mobile Marketing are now available.

Image via Wikipedia

As per October tradition, the Louisville Digital Association elected its new Board of Directors and Board Officers for the 2011-2012 operating year. In other words, these are the new folks in charge. While Jay Garmon (me) was retained as President, the remaining three Officer positions saw new faces, and there was healthy turnover in the remaining Directorships. Check the leadership roster below for details.

President: Jay Garmon
After proposing the transformation of the former Social Media Club of Louisville into the LDA, Jay was tasked with actually making the transition happen. In other words, this is all his fault, so they won’t let him stop. In his mild-mannered alter-ego, Jay is the Marketing Director for one-time Louisville (now Boston) startup Backupify. Jay refused to move to Beantown with his job, and his inspiration for the LDA was in part a desire to ensure no other Louisville tech company has to make that choice again.

Vice President: Grace Simrall
The LDA”s Hacker-in-Chief, Grace is a top-flight Business Intelligence consultant by day and the the LDA’s liason to LVL1 and the the larger Louisville maker community by night.

Treasurer: Nick Huhn
Digital strategy consultant slash tech startup co-founder, the LDA is designed to create more Nick Huhns, and Nick is here to make sure we can keep paying for catering at our events.

Secretary: Deborah Boyer
Despite her years as a number-crunching business consultant and turnaround specialist, Deborah still finds time to serve on several charitable boards and activites, including the LDA where she’s our lead ambassador to other non-profits here in town.

Directors:

• Jason Falls (formerly Secretary)
  One of the country’s Top 10 Social Media consultants, we aren’t letting Falls get away no matter how busy he gets.
• David Finch (formerly Treasurer)
  Our man at Doe Anderson and one of our many Bloggers At Large, Finch brings the quiet wisdom to our proceedings.
• Jason Hiner
  Our favorite star from CBS (Interactive), Hiner is our direct link to the tech journalism circuit nationally and internationally.
• Ben Jennings
  Our resident inside man at the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation, Jennings keeps us in the loop on public tech financing and legislation.
• Michelle Jones (formerly Vice President)
  The voice behind Consuming Louisville, Let Them Tweet Cake, and, in addition to her notable tech savvy, our emissary to the larger Possibility Citizenry
• Jason Loehr
  One of the mad men behind Mad*Pow Creative, Loehr is the utility man who tackles everything from design projects to fundraising collateral, and does it with style.

Retiring Directors:

• Elle Waters
• Jim McDonnell
• Chris Hall

If anything good comes from the Louisville Digital Association in the next 12 months, this is who to thank. If it all goes down in flames, it was Garmon’s fault.

Image via Wikipedia

When pundits discuss the “post-PC era” that’s code for a world where more people surf the web on smartphones than conventional computers. And that world is now. If you’re marketing online and not focusing on the mobile space, you’re missing the biggest target out there.

LDA’s own Jim McDonnell, the guru of emerging channels at Papa John’s, has been perfecting the art of selling pizza via smartphones for years. On Oct. 4, he’ll show you the roadmap he developed at the cost of thousands of dollars, and let you in on the dirty secrets of mobile marketing. Join us at the Price Weber auditorium, 10701 Shelbyville Road, from 6:30-8:30 pm as the LDA gets the down-low on mobile marketing. (There will be hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar, so we’ve got that goin’ for us, which is nice, too.)

Seating is limited, so reserve your spot today.

Admission is free. The wisdom is priceless.

From our friends at Louisville EnterpriseCorp, we’ve learned of a free webinar conducted by Patent Commissioner Robert L Stoll on the patent law changes wrought by the recently enacted America Invents Act. It all goes down Sept. 27 from 1-2:30pm. Quoth the signup page:

The most publicized change is the move to a first-inventor-to-file system, which will impact how applications are prepared, filed, and prosecuted in the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), as well as how infringement cases are litigated.  The new legislation includes many other significant changes in prosecution, litigation and PTO operation and funding.  Practitioners will need to know these changes, understand which ones take effect immediately and what to do about them, and how to plan for changes that won’t take effect for a year or even 18 months.

This 90 minute webinar provides an in depth analysis of the impact of patent reform from the perspective of outside prosecution and litigation counsel, corporate counsel and the PTO.

Points of discussion will include:

- First-inventor-to-file and Prior Art Under New Sections 102 and 103
- Inter Partes Review and Post grant Review
- PTO Fees and Funding
- Transitional Program for Business Method Patents
- Expansion of Prior User Rights
- Virtual and False Marking
- Joinder of Parties

You can signup for the free webinar here.

Image via Wikipedia

Take a road trip down I-65 to hear some of the most intelligent thinkers in online media discuss the new world of the social web at a free lecture on Sept. 28 from 8-10pm Eastern (7-9pm Central) at WKU‘s Ransdell Hall (AKA the College of Education building).

MIT’s Sam Ford and USC’s Henry Jenkins — authors of the book “Spreadable Media” — will discuss the changing role of the audience in an environment of increasingly pervasive digital content, and understanding the effects of participatory media on society, politics, and culture.

Admission is free. Seating is first come, first served. Be there or be less awesome.

Image via Wikipedia

WordPress is the most popular blog platform on the planet for two reasons:

1. It’s free
2. It’s easily customized — even into non-blog sites

Are you looking to build the best possible website for the lowest possible cost? Head to the 2nd Annual WordCamp Louisville on Saturday, Oct. 1 at the Delphi Learning Center on UofL’s Shelby Campus. The workshop runs from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm, and session tickets are as cheap as $15. Quoth the press release:

The Beginner’s Workshop is a two-hour, hands on clinic where students will actually build their own website. Students will be given the option to build the site on their own domain, for an additional cost. If you have never built a website but have always wanted to, this is the clinic for you. Tickets for The Beginner’s Workshop are $20 each.

Intermediate/advanced WordPress users will have the opportunity to listen and ask questions to some of the region’s finest and most innovative designers and developers who use WordPress as their website platform of choice at the WordPress Louisville “Talks”. The “Talks” planned include “Facebook and WordPress a Match Made in Heaven”, “Configuring WordPress for Multiple Environments” and “Google+ and WordPress- Ideas on Building SEO and Traffic for your Web Presence”. General Admission tickets for The Talks are $15 each.

Purchase tickets now at www.2011.louisville.wordcamp.org

Blogger or not, everybody could benefit from tips on the foremost free web platform on the planet. See you there.