iamelgringo

I've been impressed by what a hard job it must be to be an immigration official. If you're right and you process a visa application right... Who cares. I you're wrong... You face anger and rage.

We're now in panel discussions, so there's no live streaming.

Thoughts...

I had the pleasure of recommending one of the EIR's, and in looking at the other 4 EIR's... Kick ass people. All from a broad range of the Tech industry.. Two from the Silicon Valley scene.

The people from USCIS they they've chosen to staff the program are really impressive. I've taken to walking up to a number of them and thanked them for their service. It truly is a thankless job. After this program we should all send them a thank you card. :)

The USCIS person that's heading up the program reports to the head of USCIS, so there's a good chance that changes can be instituted.

The mission is to change and revamp everything that can be changed and revamped without going to congress to change the law.

I've had a couple of talks with the White House staffers on point for this issue, and they are extremely impressive.

We want to obey city ordinance and not block any sidewalks or streets and there aren't any decent sized parks close to Feinstein's offices.

There's a link to that event slowly drifting down the new page....

Television is not about debate, it's about sound bites.

Television is not about facts, it's about communicating feelings and emotions. It's about painting an image of your opposition.

Memes we need to spread:

The moguls and their political puppets that support these bills are dinosaurs.

These bills were written by lawyers who don't understand that this will break the internet.

These bills are created by "media moguls" or "media elite" afraid of innovating.

SOPA / PIPA needs to be painted as radical and extremist.

Computers and the internet have been the backbone of innovation and economic growth the past 20 years.

The censorship meme (sadly) doesn't matter to Middle America. We need to drop it.

I'd suggest the following talking points and sound bites for the next debate:

-"Kauffman Foundation says that 2/3 of new jobs are created by high growth technology startups. This bill breaks the internet, and kills startups that could be the next Facebook, YouTube, Google or Ebay."

-When faced with the lying... "Are Google, Twitter, Facebook, Ebay, Yahoo all lying then?"

-"Media companies and their lobbyists tried to kill VHS, the cassette recorder, the phonograph, the MP3 player and now... now, they are trying to kill the internet. They were wrong then. They're wrong now."

-"The people who created this bill are lawyers not engineers. They don't understand how the internet works."

-"SOPA and PIPA are radical copyright protectionism"

-"SOPA and PIPA are corporate welfare of the worst kind, protecting industries that are afraid of innovation"

-"We are in the worst economic conditions in a century. This the the worst possible time to ram through radical legislation created to protect media moguls sitting on mountains of cash".

-"In this terrible economy, we need to do everything we can to support technology companies who are one of the few bright spots in this economy"

And... for what it's worth... after we beat SOPA / PIPA, we need a Startup PAC to take a proactive long view on educating legislators and their staffers on these issues, rather than constantly reacting to awful legislation like SOPA/PIPA.

We need a StartupPAC

That wasn't my intent. I was trying to be funny rather than "pay" for the vote.

And, in the spirit of full disclosure, the actual email I sent out to the members of our meetup:

Video of Rand Fishkin's presentation, Gaining Traction: Inbound Marketing for Startups is live. One of the best presentations I've been at in a long time. I'll be watching it a couple of times.

Slides of the presentation are here.

I'd love for the video to make it to the top of Hacker News.... I'm not active on that site any more. Could ya'll hook a brother up?

I'd love to give Rand and SEOMoz.org some press, to boost their sales. He's an amazing guy, and SEOMoz is killer.

Help H&F help you...

The more views we get on those videos, the BizSpark team prove to their bosses that's it's worth buying all of you pizza and beer and wine, and renting out the "Fancy Pants" auditorium for us. It costs them about $20k every time we host an event there. ( Laura and I don't get anything out of it. )

So, if you'd like us to host more of those presentations...

Facebookify, Tweetify, Quorify, social newsif-y, etc...

Thanks

And, for helping out with that, you get:

Two free months of SEOMoz.

Seriously, it kicks ass. Try it out on your site.

Cheers,

Jonathan

Poorly worded, and I apologize for the confusion. See my other reply...