ConvergeSouth 2007, day 2 notes and wrap-up

2007-10-22T11:41:16+00:00

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/convergesouth-logo.gif" alt="ConvergeSouth logo" height="72" width="360" align="right" vspace="10px" hspace="10px" /> I'm back from ConvergeSouth 2007 now and caching up on email, blogs, etc. I enjoyed day two as much as day one. Here are my notes, quotes and paraphrased thoughts from two of my favorites sessions on Saturday, Social Networking and Corporate Wikis.

Social Networking panel

This panel was made up of Ruby Sinreich, Soni Pitts and Elisa Camahort. Ruby started off by explaining that she specializes in network centric advocacy, which like social networks is not a new thing. Online social network services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. are just just new parts of the existing social fabric. Online and off, aspects of an effective social network are the same. Those are: social ties, common stories, dense communication grid, shared resources and clarity of purpose. Good social software can support all of those. See also: Leonard Witt's post, Laurie Writes' post and Ruby's Network Centric Advocacy slides on Flickr.

Soni spoke next about how she helped businesses use social networking when she worked as a business coach. Then Elisa spoke and expressed some caution and skepticism of Facebook and social network services in general. Those thoughts were echoed in the audience discussion that followed which covered privacy issues, the creepies, LinkedIn vs. Facebook, owning your data and some good advice about managing your online identity from Wayne Sutton.

Near the end, Ed Cone spoke up about his recent articles in CIO Insight about Wachovia Bank's new Microsoft SharePoint-based 110,000 employee-strong social networking site. The articles Will Microsoft Become Facebook for the Enterprise? and Social Networks at Work Promise Bottom-Line Results are well worth a read if you are interested in business applications of social networking.

Corporate Wikis

This session wasn't well attended, but it was very informative and I enjoyed meeting session leader and wiki consultant Natalie Koeplinger. Natalie presented slides on wiki basics, how to select a wiki, best practices and measuring wiki success. Natalie works most with MediaWiki and Microsoft SharePoint, which now has some basic wiki functionality, just enough to make it a player even without help from Microsoft partners SocialText and Atlassian.

Wrap-up

The last session of the day was a short wrap-up and gave the attendees and opportunity to speak up about how to improve the conference. I agreed with pretty much all of the suggestions from the audience: don't end the conference so early each day, keep the how-to sessions but convert part of the conference to bar-camp format, try to get the NC A&T students more involved and establish and make use of a conference wiki. Later in the evening FilmBabble Dan and I attended the ConvergeSouth film festival, which was very good. It had to be pretty good to keep me in that horribly uncomfortable chair for three plus hours ;-)

That brings me to the end of my ConvergeSouth 2007 coverage. Thanks to Sue Polinsky, all the other organizers and host NC A&T University for a great conference. I hope to make it back next year for ConvergeSouth and BlogHer, which will be in Greensboro the very same weekend.

ConvergeSouth 2007, day 1 notes

2007-10-19T17:30:10+00:00

I'm in Greensboro today, a couple of hours away from home, attending ConvergeSouth 2007 -- "the annual tech users' conference in Greensboro, North Carolina. A combination of a blogger-con and a creativity center." Here's a summary of notes and quotes I scribbled in my notebook on day #1.

Keynote: Jason Calacanis and Ed Cone. Billed as a fire-side chat, the keynote turned out to be a pretty straight-forward interview of Jason Calacanis by Ed Cone. Ed started with some biographical questions, then moved to questions about Jason's businesses Weblogs.com and Mahalo. Along the way Jason dispensed business advice like "it takes the same time investment to build a small business as to build a big one" so "think big, but take small steps." Ed urged Jason to connect the dots between his psychology degree and his business success, which led to the observation that "most people are motivated not by money but by recognition and affiliation." I guess that's the motivation Jason harnessed with weblogs.com and the same one he hopes will lead to great human-authored search results for Mahalo.

Moving from old to new media: Dan Conover, Will Bunch and Joe Killian. In this panel-session, three newspaper writers discussed the difficulties that local papers are having making the move to the new world of blogs, wikis and social media. Some of the complaints were that newspaper hosted blog-authors do not reach out to other bloggers, don't connect to community and are rarely given enough time to run a successful blog. Newspapers are so far behind because "the culture of innovation is so alien to newspapers." That explains why "Google, the ultimate non-local entity is kicking local paper's butts."

We agree to disagree: Dan Conover, Ruby Sinreich, Chris Rabb. Despite the title, this panel was about how community and non-traditional news sites are changing the way folks relate to news. Ruby talked about Orange Politics, the site she started to help Orange County folks understand and get active in local politics. Chris talked about his site Afro-Netizen and the motivations behind it. Then the panel ranted a bit about progressive politics, the insular white-maleness of Daily Kos, the pros and cons of media "objectivity" and a variety of other topics. All good stuff; I could listen to these guys ramble on for hours.

Affiliate marketing and Web 2.0. This was an overview of affiliate marketing programs by Sam Harrelson. It seemed to cover all of the affiliate bases, but I didn't really understand the Web 2.0 tie-in. I guess I'm only marginally interested in the topic and probably should have chosen a different session.

Sociable web as a social force. This session led by Anton Zuiker and Jason Calacanis discussed how blogs and social networks can quickly bring folks together around issues, get your opinions indexed in Google right next to the evil corporation that just screwed you over and other scenarios familiar to anybody who has read the Cluetrain Manifesto. Brian Russell also talked about his efforts to use the sociable web to jump start his Carborro Coworking business. To demonstrate the power of social networks, Jason twittered his phone number, asked folks to call and we spent the rest of the session listening to his cell phone ring. Despite that, good session.

All and all, an interesting and thought provoking day -- though it did cover a lot of familiar ground for me. It's not over yet. I'm getting reading to head out to the BBQ now.

Blogging Roller

ConvergeSouth 2007, day 2 notes and wrap-up

Social Networking panel

Corporate Wikis

Wrap-up

ConvergeSouth 2007, day 1 notes