Social entrepreneurship is an opportunity for Philadelphia to create a regional distinction for attracting and retaining startup talent, was the central theme of my Pecha Kucha presentation Saturday night.

It was an extension of my writing on social entrepreneurship here.

The lightning talk event, in which a dozen speakers use 20 seconds for each of 20 images to give a five-minute perspective, was having its ninth iteration locally, after having been launched by graphic designers in Tokyo in 2004. See the slides from the presentation below.

Philadelphia’s Pecha Kucha [pronounced peCHA kuCHA] is held in part-time yoga studio, part-time neighborhood anchor Studio 34 and organized by a pair of Wharton students, though the 50-person crowd was largely made up of 30 and 40-somethings who lived near the Baltimore Avenue corridor of Cedar Park neighborhood in West Philadelphia.

My opinion is that Philadelphia’s considerable quality of life problems — violence, poor education, dirt, blight and more — are an opportunity for mission-driven business solutions to be based where they are most needed among large markets that have investment, marketing opportunities and access to more of both.

Soon, I’ll post the audio and the video of the presentation.

“In the U.S., political power flows from economic power, not the other way around” Tom Wicker in 1996 on shortcomings of Civil Rights movement speaking on the Charlie Rose Show.

The whole night was a treat, as I preceded Pecha Kucha by visiting the high-end modern Southern fusion-based Marigold Kitchen, in a renovated 1907 West Philadelphia rowhome, which has received great reviews by Craig Laban and Philadelphia magazine. Also, though cold and snowy, I got my first more thorough Baltimore Avenue experience, having landed there by the 34 trolley.

My good friend Eric Smith, whose successes in publishing and audience have kept me motivated, wrote some very flattering things in celebration of his own birthday, mostly about how we love to faux battle by way of our respective geek blogs Geekadelphia and Technically Philly. An excerpt:

… Without realizing it, Chris had finally given me the greatest gift of all… playful competition. I love being able to throw a jab at him now and again via Twitter or on the blog. Mocking him when I see the buzzwords flying… I should list that as an interest on my Facebook profile. I’m thrilled when I hear about a local PR firm thinking Chris and I (aka Technically Philly and Geekadelphia) hate each other. When he gave his keynote speech during the first Philly Tech Week, I ruined his moment with a tweet (this was an accident though!). When he received an award at the Geek Awards, he slammed the hell out of Geekadelphia, and I loved it.

But despite the joking around… Chris makes me want to be better at what I do.

Below watch video of my Geek Awards presentation when I had a little fun at Geekadelphia’s expense, though their fans let me hear it.

Moderating a panel on web security, as being aired yesterday on CSPAN 2 Book TV.

The Founding Fathers would have loved and leveraged social media but been fearful of its future implications on privacy and speech issues, said a host of experts at an event on the impact of new communications patterns.

Earlier this month, I moderated a panel on the subject at the National Constitution Center featuring Jennifer Preston, a social media reporter from the New York Times, Kashmir Hill, a web law reporter from Forbes and Lori Andrews, the author of a related book which served as regular fodder for the discussion, which appeared on CSPAN 2, Book TV.

Find background and audio of the entire program on the NCC blog here. Watch the entire hour-long panel discussion on CSPAN here.

Thanks to Stefan Frank for organizing the event and including me. Below, I have a three-minute clip of the final question of the night, in which, after spending the evening speaking about the perils of social media, each panelist reminds us of the power and benefit.

Some takeaways:

• A herculean battle is being balanced between the speech and communication power of the social web against privacy and security concerns.
• There is a gray area between private company and utility — when does presence on a social network become so part of social life that there should be greater scrutiny over privacy than any other service?
• I created this document and circulated it with my fellow panelists before the event.

I’m moderating a panel on privacy, security and democracy concerns surrounding the social web at the National Constitution Center in Old City, Philadelphia next Thursday.

You should come. More details here. It costs $10 for non-members.

A year ago, I felt scattered. I wanted to focus in 2011, and I think, as a full-time employee of my own business with clearer goals and objectives, I have accomplished that.

As detailed below, I feel very proud of the success I had in meeting my professional resolutions for the year. So, it’s important to me that I do so again, which I also did below.

In them, I’d say the theme for my 2012 is RISK.

It’s time to risk fast or succeed for me professionally. I want to be more aggressive in business and outreach, now with a more stable company and clearer focus.

I’ll set goals to do so, but it’s also worth reviewing what has been a wonderful year. Here are some professional milestones not included in my planned resolutions below:

• January 2011: Launching Technically Media, a consultancy that publishes Technically Philly and launched that month a new blog strategy for the National Constitution Center.
• February 2011: Philadelphia magazine covered a multimillion dollar journalism effort at Temple Unuiversity and referenced that we at Technically Philly helped conceive of its structure. (I offered other strategy around the effort and wrote about a similar effort.)
• March 2011: I helped develop the strategy around OpenDataPhilly.org, an open data catalog built by Azavea and unveiled in April during Philly Tech Week.
• April 2011: I was invited to attend the Hardly.Strictly.Young conference on news innovation at the University of Missouri.
• April 2011: Addressing Philadelphia City Council, regarding Philly Tech Week.
• May 2011: NBC 10 listed me as among 20 locals who are worth following on Twitter.
• June 2011: I was invited to attend an intimate Aspen Institute roundtable on news innovation.
• July 2011: I spoke about technology issues on local NPR affiliate WHYY several times, like here, here, here and here.
• August 2011: Alumni magazine or not, I had my first glossy print feature published in the Temple Review.
• September 2011: With the generous support of the Center for Public Interest Journalism, I attended the national Online News Association conference in Boston.
• October 2011: I released a particularly large piece of journalism around a bottlenecked city data set.
• November 2011: Yes, I finally got a smart phone.

Below, see my 2012 resolutions and a review of how I did with my 2011 goals too.

MY 2012 PROFESSIONAL RESOLUTIONS

1. JANUARY: Hire a full-time employee  — We have continued to grow Technically Philly, and I am looking forward to announcing our first reporter hire.
2. FEBRUARY: Post here at least weekly — I want to continue developing thought and sharing my work here, ideally finding other like-minded individuals to grow something of an audience.
3. MARCH: Speak more precisely —  I’ve worked at this for years, but particularly having listened to dozens of recorded interviews this year, I want to strive to speak more precisely, ask and answer questions more succinctly and, as always, talk more slowly, particularly during source interviews.
4. APRIL: Inquirer op-ed — I’d like to get out some ideas I’ve been simmering here and try to create a broader impact. A good next step would be to share something with the region’s largest newspaper.
5. MAY: ONA national — Move forward the conversation to bring a national Online News Association conference to Philadelphia by 2014.
6. JUNE: Idea — Begin coding — Very crudely, I’m among the many who are going to dive in a bit on programming basics with Code Year.
7. JULY: Regularly volunteer – I want to get involved in more service.
8. AUGUST: Idea — Still thinking
9. SEPTEMBER: eBook — I plan to be involved in the release of an eBook of some kind. I have a few ideas scattered and moving slowly, so I’d like to make something happen by next fall.
10. OCTOBER: Expand to a new market – It’s time to try risking in another place.
11. NOVEMBER: Idea — Still thinking
12. DECEMBER: Idea — Still thinking

REVIEW OF 2011 RESOLUTIONS

1. JANUARY: Work full-time for myself — I am very proud to say I started 2011 as a full-time, salaried employee of my own business.
2. FEBRUARY: Post here at least weekly — I posted nearly 200 times here this year, and I have increasingly focused on developing strong ideas and sharing work I’m proud of, including some particularly strong ones here.
3. MARCH: Organize contacts — In preparation for my smartphone, I have continued to keep detailed contacts, which helps tremendously for sources and business outreach.
4. APRIL: Complete big journalism project — First introduced in October 2010, I led a small grant project for hyperlocal news site NEast Philly on embattled former state Rep. John Perzel.
5. MAY: Host major regional event — I helped lead the plans, strategy and implementation of the first ever Philly Tech Week and began plans for its second iteration next April.
6. JUNE: Lead major grant project – I introduced last year Transparencity, a large-scale grant project focusing on growing the conversation and coverage of the city’s open data movement, including some journalism in which I took great pride.
7. JULY: Regularly volunteer – I had a few starts and stops in the volunteering space, but I  did take an interest in mentoring a couple younger students with whom I had previously built relationships.
8. AUGUST: Have physical office space — I had expected that we at Technically Philly would need to get our own office space, but our relationship with Temple University has persisted, giving us great Center City office space.
9. SEPTEMBER: Monthly multimedia skill use — In addition to experimenting a bit more with Story Shuffle, I have continued to take a lot of video for my work with NEast Philly and play otherwise with multimedia, particularly with my new smartphone.
10. OCTOBER: Focus online presence — After a couple years of old WordPress.com sites, I deleted many and self-hosted though that mattered: including My Life to Do List, my senior thesis on the Philadelphia Republican Party and the writing I did while in Tokyo. I dumped some lame social media accounts and put greater focus on building audience @Twitter.
11. NOVEMBER: Business reorganization — For taxes and organization, I dedicated a filing cabinet drawer to my Technically Media business and focused our documentation.
12. DECEMBER: Update my print portfolio — I added a few online clips to a binder I keep around of my journalism work.

As I’ve done in passed years, as this year comes to a close, I like to dive a bit into the work I’ve done here in the last 12 months to gauge what was popular and what I was most proud of.

Below, find my 10 best read posts of the year and a few others I thought were worth reading.

10. Rejection takes you further than success: why getting rejected a lot brought me here

9. Homelessness in Philadelphia: what I learned working for a social services startup for a year
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8. How to be a freelance journalist: real advice from another young, unknown journalist on freelancing

7. Five criteria for the flourishing of news entities of the future

6. Broetry Poetry Slam: ‘Portrait of a Bro’ in Spoken Word [VIDEO]

5. What Philly.com should be: a comprehensive, collaborative and open source for all news in Philadelphia

4. Selling Out: why some acquisitions are good and others are bad for Philadelphia business

3. Social entrepreneurship: how Philadelphia could have a regional distinction for startups

2. Why did you become a journalist?

1. Universities should host the newsrooms of their neighborhoods

And because popular rarely means best, Here are my favorite posts that didn’t happen to among the mos read:

1. January: Why Journalism should be like the catering business
2. February: Eleven lessons that shaped how I live my life
3. March: Why print will last so much longer than you think it will (hint: we can feel it)
4. March: 9 YouTube videos that changed my perspective on the world and the lessons I learned
5. April: 25 things I learned from the best newspapermen (and women) around
6. May: Gentrification: thoughts from seven years as student and young professional in Philadelphia
7. June: News needs to make more money on the popcorn
8. July: Technically Media meeting style: effective, productive and professional from home
   
9. August: Glengarry Glen Ross: 10 sales lessons from the 1992 cult classic movie
   
10. September: How 9/11 helped shape New York City for the better
    
11. October: Will jobs ever come back?: maybe there is an answer to the employment bomb
    
12. November: When you buy something, you are voting for its existence

Story Shuffle 10 happened this month and the theme of Parents offered a handful of interesting stories.

See them all here or listen to mine below.

Listen here.

The structure of my story:

• As children, we have an opportunity to experience so many different friends households that its an under appreciated opportunity to evaluate what type of home life we want to live.
• I loved my childhood and my family and my parents but I still sought to find out how others did it.
• Particularly in high school, I remember how distinct the homes of my friends that I visited.
• I loved getting to know people’s parents at an early age. I was the guy in the car to the bowling alley talking to your mom.
• And I fell in love with the idea of personality types. There are lots of theories about how temperament define us. One of the oldest is the four temperaments which anthropologists say has been on display for thousands of years in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
• It was Hippocrates 400 years before Christ who tried to make it a medical theory. That’s all debunked but it’s still a novel way to see the world.
• It says there are four: the sanguine or impulsive pleasure seeking; the choleric or ambitious leader type; the melancholic or introverted and thoughtful and the phlegmatic or relaxed and content.
• The homes and parents I would visit as a kid fit into those groups.
• Reinhardt: ping pong and pool and firework and what gate. His father would play and yell. It was the sanguine house.
• Avondoglio household was neat and across a beautiful pond from the family restaurant. U remember first talking politics and business with Bryant and his father. It was the choleric house.
• Medvidick was behind overgrown bushes, dark and you never went in the front door. Dark and books were everywhere. Father tinkering, mother  referencing literature. It was the melancholic house.
• The Sheehan household was. Always unlocked, simple and cared for. Unnecessary apologetic and nothing ever changed. Time warp, hours passed. It was the phlegmatic house.
• Years later, I have such a broad understanding of how a home cn be run and how parenting can be done. I was give the chance or success because f my parents but had so many other lessons elsewhere.
• And that sharing of learning from one generation to another is parenting.

Creede, Colo. in 1880

Metropolitan boosters — men employed in the late 19th century to encourage Americans to move west to burgeoning cities — have been of interest to me lately.

I’m interested in how that concept can be brought to modern concepts or urban renewal. I came across a portion of an essay in ‘A companion to the American West,’ collected by William Francis Deverell [p. 513]:

Integral to the hinterland and ‘instant city’ models of nineteenth-century western urban history has been the figure of the urban booster. Cities in the west have been promoted, hawked and downright lied about on a scale rarely matched elsewhere in the nation. Boosters in cities on the make — Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century, San Francisco in the 1860s, Denver in the 1880s, Seattle in the 1900s, Los Angeles and Oakland in the 1920s — spared little effort in luring the investment capital, industry and residents necessary to ensure sustained economic development. Western boosters and their allies engaged in what one historian calls ‘urban imperialism,’ an endless quest for control of the markets and economic bonanzas that guaranteed real estate profits. Booster scholarship has tended to focus on the art of promotion and to see cities as products less of social construction than of capitalist fantasies. But behind boosters is the most interesting feature of western cities: urban growth as an end in itself, an economic logic fundamental to capitalism, was elevated by western boosters to the level of civic religion. In some cities, for instance, space was rarely scare but capital was. In places like Los Angeles and later Dallas and Phoenix, this led boosters to cultivate real estate markets and encourage an urban morphology that spread development horizontally across vast distances. In other cities, an opposite geography was at work, and a great deal of scare capital went into creating very expensive space. In Seattle, Portland and San Francisco, immense amounts of capital were devoted to filling tidelands and wetlands that allowed the cities to grow…

My first smartphone arrived at my door yesterday.

Considering it’s late 2011 and I report for a technology news site, you can be sure that I got a lot of crap for it being only my first. Of course, as I explained, in 2009 I was a struggling freelance writer so I had trouble enough affording my prepaid burner phone. Late that year, I joined a family plan with my sister to cut costs even more and took the basic level phone: a sturdy Samsung texting phone.

Only now, two years later, was my contract ready for an update. Considering I had already made my jump into the Apple world, I bought into the hype, and spent more than $300 on the iPhone 4s. Of course, because I cover technology, I already had a clear idea of what I would be doing with the device and had played with them for years — though that made my awe no less substantial as I played with mine.

Still, I quickly added a slew of free apps that seem to me to be the staples. Below, a list of the free apps I first added to my phone, and expectations for getting more crap:

1. Twitter — Ask my colleagues about me texting them, to ask them to tweet something. I will never live that down.
   
2. Facebook — Uh huh.
   
3. Mint.com — I just joined the years-old financial planning and evaluation web applications and was curious to see if its app would offer any value.
4. Philly.com — (Mostly) local news, a great way to check in on the day.
   
5. NPR News — Love. It’s how I’ll check in on national news that I want to know.
6. CNN — Though I’m not sure if I’ll use the app, I certainly appreciate the push alerts.
7. Pandora — I’m scared of the data hogging music streaming app, but I know I’ll value it, especially because the Grooveshark app can only had be had with a hacked iPhone.
8. Yelp — Yes, location-based decisions of bars and restaurants
9. American Express — I’m not sure if I’ll use this, but for quick access to what my credit card is up to, I’ll give it a try.
10. Instagram — Yes, I’m a sucker for those filters and sleek shots posted to social media.
11. PNC Virtual Wallet — I have also been playing with a financial planning tool from my primary bank that could be seen as an eventual competitor to Mint. For now, I’ll use both, and try depositing checks simply through the iPhone app.
12. AAA TripTik — Among other things, it pinpoints the cheapest gas in close proximity.
13. QR Reader for iPhone — Ok, so I find these amusing.
14. Onavo — The compression tool is meant to reduce your data usage, though despite the Wired coverage, the app is telling me it doesn’t support ‘my operator.’ I’ll keep it around for now.
15. Verizon — To track data usage.
16. Wikipedia — I end up there from time to time and like the chance to save the extra steps getting there.
17. Netflix — There’s probably no need to stream movies or TV shows on my mobile device, but why not?
18. *Google Contacts — It’s not an app, but I did use this and this post to sync my Google contacts with my Mac Address Book to then have all my contacts on my iPhone. Yay!

Near the close of the OpenDataRace, a popularity contest for data sets that affect nonprofit missions, I was asked onto NewsWorks Tonight, the daily, local drive-time news radio show from NPR affiliate WHYY. We recorded the segment last week and it aired Monday.

Read more about the contest here, see the data sets and register to vote here and listen to the NewsWorks segment below.

LISTEN HERE.

I was on the program back in June to talk about the open data movement and other initiatives here. I got some fun comments from friends, like this one.