Two developments last week (the first official week of Mass Mobile Month) were especially exciting. First there was the release of the official Mass Mobile Month iPhone app, a handy portable guide to all of the mobile-related events this month and their venues. Cambridge, MA-based Swift Mobile created the app; it’s a variation on the apps they’re developing for the travel and meeting industry (see our coverage of Swift Mobile on Xconomy).

Second, I had the opportunity last week to meet Kathy Kiely, president of the Ad Club, the trade association for marketing and advertising companies in New England, and record an interview about Mass Mobile Month for The Big Orange Couch, the club’s online video series. I hate watching myself on video, but I think this one actually came out pretty well! It’s embedded below.

One of the highlights of Mass Mobile Month is Xconomy’s own Mobile Madness event on March 9. If you haven’t signed up yet, do it now—last I checked, the event was nearly sold out. Unfortunately, after spending the last few months organizing Mobile Madness, I may wind up missing some or all of it, as I’ve been seated as a juror for a trial in Boston that’s expected to last several weeks.

I want to thank all of the organizations who have joined Xconomy in promoting the Mass Mobile Month events. All of these organizations recognize that by working together, we can take Boston’s amazing cluster of talent and ideas for mobile innovation and make it into something even more remarkable and world-changing.

What makes being Slashdotted a special joy, though, is that the Slashdot community is notoriously questioning, critical, and sometimes even a little biting. So when you find out you’ve been Slashdotted, you’re simultaneously praising the gods of cyberspace and bracing for an onslaught of snark.

If a visitor from Slashdot doesn’t like the look, feel, or style of your site or your article, they won’t hesitate to let you know. One Xconomy article that got Slashdotted a while back was a multi-page piece, and all of the comments from Slashdot visitors were complaints about how annoying it was to have to hit “next page” three or four times to read the whole piece. Today, the very first comment on my Apple article from a Slashdot visitor—in fact, the comment that tipped me off that we’d been Slashdotted—focused on an (admittedly gratuitous) neologism in the first paragraph (the word was “mediasphere”) and on how amateurish the column logo looks. (I know that, but in my defense, the goofiness is partly intentional. And I’m planning on finding someone to design a better logo.)

So far the Slashdot entry about my piece has generated 526 comments on Slashdot, compared to about 20 comments on Xconomy itself. Sometimes I wish readers would stick with Xconomy’s own comment section to talk about our pieces. But on the other hand, a lot of the discussion over at Slashdot boils down to vituperative name-calling—as is the case with most online discussions involving Apple or Microsoft (not just those at Slashdot)—so it’s probably best kept within Slashdot’s walls.

I laughed at David Pogue’s lines today, in a blog post about reader response to his review of the Google Nexus One phone: “Veteran tech columnists know one thing very well indeed: If you write anything positive about an Apple product or negative about a Microsoft product, you get buried by hate mail and personal attacks. The only worse result is if you say something negative about an Apple product or positive about a Microsoft product, in which case you get exposed to the true ugliness of the human spirit (and sometimes, in fact, physical threats).” All true—and I guess I feel like I escaped today relatively unscathed.

This week, Jarvis took his slogan to the next level, launching a trio of products—a book, an iPhone application, and a photo-sharing community on the Web—intended to encourage all photographers, pro and amateur alike, to get more creative with their camera phones. This cross-media campaign is a brilliant concept—both as a digital-arts-education project and as a piece of self-promotion for Jarvis and his studio—and it also happens to fit in really well with the theme I’ve been writing about in this space throughout September in “Seven Projects to Stretch your Digital Wings,” Parts 1, 2, and 3. So, if you’ve got an iPhone, go spend $2.99 on Jarvis’s app, called “Best Camera,” and consider today’s column Project #8.

There are more than 1,300 photography-related apps in the iTunes App Store, but as far as I know, Best Camera is the only one that comes with a dedicated community of other iPhone users. The app allows you to take a picture with the iPhone’s built-in camera, apply a range of cool digital filters and effects, and then upload your finished photo to a gallery that’s constantly being updated, in real time, with new photos from other Best Camera users. You can give the photos you like best a thumbs-up, and browse photos either by popularity or recentness.

This is an excerpt from my September 25, 2009 World Wide Wade column. Click here to continue reading the column at Xconomy.