TL;DR: Hi. I'm Bryan. This is my Steem witness update. Thanks for checking out this post. As you read this, consider voting for 
Click here to check out my witness application.
Posting Quality Content
I continue to actively participate in steemit by posting quality content. For example, while in Vegas last week for Pubcon, I took several photos of the amazing buildings there so I could post about them on steemit.
Blockchain Meetups
I was a founder and for over a year have been co-organizer of the awesome Blockchain Meetup in Scottsdale/Phoenix Arizona, USA.
Just last week we had another meetup and around ten new members came. I gave a presentation on blockchains including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Steem/steemit.
After the presentation, we had an impromptu steemit meetup where 
Promoting steemit to People Outside of the Blockchain Space
I also convinced a friend to sign up for steemit who is involved in an existing independent author community. This is exciting to me because these are self published authors who are already earning money by publsihing their works online, attend conferences, etc. Hopefully there will be more news on this front soon.
Pubcon
I first attended this famous "Webmaster" conference in 2004 and made good on my promise to return to Pubcon this month (October 2016) to give a talk on blockchains including Bitcoin, Ethereum and Steem/steemit. I felt really good about this because I was going outside of my comfort zone and beyond the blockchain echo chamber into a world where people are NOT talking about blockchains 24/7. The reception to my presentation was very positive! People had a lot of questions, and several people came up to talk to me after the presentation. There was a party at Hofbrau Haus in Vegas that night, and we talked about it there as well. Someone even told me that they bought Bitcoin during my talk! I know that might not seem like a big deal to steemit fans, but Steem is a part of a large crypto ecosystem, and Bitcoin is the "us dollar" of the cryptocurrency world - so to have even one person onboard during my talk was awesome. Not sure how many people signed up for steemit but given that everyone there is a social media expert I think we'll see some signups :^)
I think this is a prime opportunity to bring people who are both early adopters, and social media experts, to the steemit platform (and by extension into the Bitcoin and blockchain space in general). These influencers can help "bridge the gap" between the masses of social media users and the early adopters who are already on steemit.
I've been tweeting selected posts to 400+ followers - many of whom are from the Pubcon crowd. This has alreay drawn a little more attention to steemit.
Wordpress
I've been cross-posting selected posts to a blog on Wordpress.com, and sometimes Medium.com. These always include links to steemit.com to help hook people in.
Decentralized Curation Pool Applications
Due to all the work related to meetups, conferences, etc. this has been put on the back burner a bit but I have not forgotten about it. Two weekends ago I met with a local developer friend of mine and 1) convinced him steemit rocks and 2) explained to him the idea behind decentralized curation pool apps. We did some brainstorming and have some new ideas about how to approach these apps. He was very interested and we plan to do more work on this soon. I also downloaded the source code from 
Update: @nonlinearone Witness Node
My witness node is located in North America in a high quality data center with redundant backups, quality support, and insane internet connections.
Update: Things have been going very well with my witness. After some issues with the initial setup wherein it missed three blocks, it has faithfully witnessed every block it has been responsible for.
I believe that this is, at least in part, due to the fact that the server is a dedicated server that is beefier than it "needs" to be. The cost of this setup is almost $300 per month. It's currently severe overkill for a witness that witnesses a maximum of five blocks per day, but hey - steemit deserves it. If you want to support kickass hardware for witness nodes, please consider supporting my witness with your upvotes. Thanks! :^)
Recap: Quality Sever Host
I've learned a lot of things when it comes to server hosting. Uptime matters. Support matters. Network matters. Quality matters.
And for these reasons I'm hosting this node with high quality, high reputation host I've been using for over six years. Their support and uptime have been amazing. We'll see how things go with this new server - I'm hopeful that my experience will be as good as my past experiences have been.
This is more expensive than many alternatives (it costs three times as much as a similar configuration at a discount host), but I think it will be worth it. Steem deserves nothing less.
Recap: Traditional dedicated server configuration
- Processor: Intel Xeon E5-1650 v3 Hexa-Core
- RAM: 32GB DDR4 SDRAM
- HD1: 2 x SSD Software RAID 1 (+250GB Crucial SSD (MLC))
- HD2: SATA Backup Drive (+1 TB SATA (7,200 rpm))
- DDOSProtection: Standard DDoS Attack Protection (up to 2gbps)
- Network
- Bandwidth: 5 TB Outbound Bandwidth
- N+1 Network Equipment, Tier-1 Bandwidth Providers, Diverse Fiber Paths ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network ).
- Peering connections with Amazon, Equinix, Google, Motorola Mobility, Microsoft, Netflix, and Yahoo ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering )
Please Vote for @nonlinearone as Witness
Ready to cast your vote for me? Thanks!
Just head to https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Once I'm in the top 50, you'll be able to click the upvote icon next to my name to show your support. Until then, you'll simply need to scroll down until you see a box like this. Simply cut and paste nonlinearone into that box and hit the vote button.
Thank You!
If you really want to help support my campaign, please also upvote and resteem this post :) Thank You!