Ignites Around The World This Week

Ignite is a fun geek event that Bre Pettis and I started in Seattle in 2006. Each speaker gets 20 slides @ 15 seconds a slide for a total of five minutes. I find that it really energizes the community, whether it's aimed at a city or at conference (like Where 2.0). O'Reilly has put up a community site to help people do their own events, we call an Ignite in a Box internally. Since we launched the site Ignite has spread to Boston, Portland, Salt Lake City, and Helsinki (I've personally brought it to San Francisco, Beijing and Berlin). This week there are two Ignites happening 6,000 miles away from each other.

Ignite Portland - Out for the third time, our strongest Ignite community does not disappoint. They have a stellar line-up at the Bagdad Theater on Wednesday, June 18th. Get there early if you want to get in (ticket or no ticket). Here's a sampling of their talks:

# How to buy a car for under $1,000 - Kevin Fox
# Making Sense of Carbon Offsets - Ewan O’Leary
# The Evolution of our Social Brains - Jenny Andrews
# Make Cranes, Not War - Nedra Rezinas
# Boiling Water in Five Easy Steps - Vanessa Holfeltz
# Cup Noodle: Innovation, Inspiration and Manga - Jason Grigsby (Jason is going to be speaking about optimizing webpages for the mobile web at our Web 2.0 Expo in NYC).

Ignite Paris - Ignite is coming to Paris! It is at Café DUNE. This is amazing to me. RSVP on Upcoming or Facebook.

Congrats to the organizers, attendees and communities around Ignite Portland & Paris. If you want to do your own and would like our assistance head to http://ignite.oreilly.com.