So Many Conferences, So Little Time

Lots of great conferences going on right now – wish I could be at all of them.

This weekend is WordCamp, in San Francisco. Chz and Tofu from ICanHasCheezburger, one of my favorite blogs, will be there. (Yes, I have a doctoral degree in English and ICanHasCheezburger is one of my favorite blogs. Deal with it.)

The full schedule is online, and it many folks will use trackback to add their blogging about sessions they attended to the session’s page in the schedule.

Some sessions which look to me like highlights I will be sorry to miss:

• Getting Involved with WordPress, by Lloyd Budd and Mark Jaquith
• Kicking Ass Content Connections, with Lorelle VanFossen
• Blogs vs. Journalism, with John Dvorak and Om Malik
• Blogs at the New York Times, with Jeremy Zilar
• Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing, with Dave Winer
• State of the Word, with Matt Mullenweg

Definitely a high powered set of speakers and in a relatively intimate forum. I’ll definitely add WordCamp 2008 to my “hopefully attend list.”

Starting this morning is Ubuntu Live, which runs this morning through Tuesday in Portland. Their schedule is also online and also impressive.

(A Sunday morning keynote trifecta with Mark Shuttleworth, Stephen O’Grady, and Jeff Waugh, as the first session of teh conference? Impressive. In fact, O’Grady’s already posted his slides and script.)

Finally, the rest of the week will be OSCON 2007, which I will be attending.

As usual, OSCON is enormous (check out the schedule – there are literally 15 parallel tracks much of Wed and Thurs), and that’s just the official sessions, not to mention the parties and events.

Drop me a line if you’ll be in Portland next week too.

Corporate Blogging, Comment Seeding, and Controversy

Jerry Bowles at Enterprise Web 2.0 posted a fairly scathing indictment of Deb Weil and the GlaxoSmithKline corporate blog (clog?) for Alli: Deborah Weil and the Art of the Fake
. Bowles argues:

Deborah Weil has been around the block a couple of times and she must have known when GlaxoSmithKline’s agency approached her to consult on a new flog for its Alli weight-loss product that it was a dishonest, insincere attempt to cash in on the social media craze and that the parameters set for it doomed it to failure.

He’s referring to Weil’s post where she requested of her readers:

head on over to GlaxoSmithKline’s official corporate blog for alli, the first FDA approved, OTC (over the counter) weight loss product. Take a peek and, if you’re inspired, leave a Comment.

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Evolve or Die: The PR Firm in the Era of Conversations

At hubbub, Giovanni Rodriguez posted “Relating to the Public,” a whitepaper he and Paul Rand have written on behalf of the Council of Public Relations Firms.

It’s well worth a read, even if you’re not in the PR world.

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To Liveblog or Not to Liveblog: That is the Question

Now that I’ve had some time since the Enterprise 2.0 conference, I want to reflect a bit on the experience of liveblogging directly from the conference. I have a feeling this is going to be a lengthy post, so if you’ve no interest in liveblogging pros and cons, you’ve been warned.

(Quick Summary: there’s more value in more commentary and analysis, less in transcription).

My own liveblogging from Enterprise 2.0 was inspired by many useful liveblogs I’ve read from events – especially David Wienberger (who is able to liveblog while participating as a panelist and chatting on backchannel IRC). Noting the presence of power strips in the seating areas and a working, stable wifi network (as opposed to SXSW), it just made sense to me to share the notes I was taking.

But then a comment by Andrew McAfee made me think more critically after the fact than I had at the time.

McAfee notes:

Finally, I used to think that short talks at conferences were low-pressure events, since they’d be heard by relatively few people and remembered by even fewer. A quick Google blog search, however, brings up about 30 blog posts commenting on my keynote. These will persist unless their posters take them down, and will add to the Internet’s record of my work. This is more than a bit scary for me as a speaker, but for me as a conference attendee this is great news; it means that the overall quality of talks will go up. No one wants to be examined from that many angles and found lacking.

(Just FYI – McAfee’s keynote is also freely available online in video from Altus – to me that would be even scarrier than the blogger’s reaction).

This got me to thinking, about liveblogging in particular, and asking a number of questions I probably should have thought more about a few weeks back:

• What’s the proper etiquette for liveblogging, other than sitting in the back and typing as quietly as possible?
• Does one need permission to liveblog a conference keynote? What about a conference panel session?
• Would that be permission from the speaker(s)? the conference organizer(s)? both?
• What’s the difference between blogging about an event – summaries, excerpts, and commentary – and liveblogging an event? Is it just the time difference, or the percentage of the event covered?
• Does liveblogging get in the way of more substantive commentary?

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Liveblogging Enterprise 2.0 – Suite Two panel

(Have to run now – was a great panel, will come back and add details and links later – John)

* Moderator – Rob Rueckert, Investment Manager, Intel Capital
* Speaker – Chris Alden, EVP, Professional Products, Six Apart
* Speaker – David Cassady, EVP of Operations, SpikeSource
* Speaker – Greg Reinacker, Founder / CTO, NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
* Speaker – Ross Mayfield, CEO and Co-Founder, Socialtext

Panel introductions:
Greg Reinacker from Newsgator – founder, CTO – now, people come to us saying “I need these technologies” as opposed to us trying to expain to them what they need. What we need to overcome now is the “what about sharepoint” or “what about IE 7 and Vista” challenges as an RSS vendor

Ross Mayfield – founder, CEO of SocialText – the first wiki company. Perhaps the first company to call themselves enterprise 2.0. Four years ago we had to explain what wikis were, and what the could be used for – the four ps. Projects (this is the classical example), Practices (short of best practices – just write stuff down), People, Portals? (lost the last p there). Now there is a widespread understanding of the tools. Also generational -people who grew up doing their homework on myspace when it was called cheating, they get to work and it is called collaboration.

Chris Alden – heads the business unit at SixApart for movable type and typepad. Moving from punditry to productivity. As people find that these new ways of having conversations can be very useful – there is a whole new set of needs which emerge as you talk about taking blogs to the enterprise – ldap integration, getting everything working together. Ultimately I want ease of use, best of breed, but also I want them to work together.

David Cassidy, Spike Source. Could be open source, could be next generation / web 2.0 offerings, could be proprietary offerings. What we’re surprised about with suite two is that though it was targetted toward small and medium size businesses, large enterprises have taken notice – Shell, etc. Most of the companies have these technologies in place in one form or another, and the question they face now is what to do about how to control those pieces.

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