Building on the momentum of all the (OpenSocial based) applications they added a few weeks back, LinkedIn is now rolling out events. In this video, Christine Wodtke demonstrates how the application leverages your social graph, showing who in your network is attending various events:

Its a great idea, and I’ve already found or created events for all my conferences coming up. (I’m tempted to create events in the past, as a way of adding conferences where I’ve presented to my LinkedIn profile. The “add an event” flow doesn’t seem to prohibit that, though I haven’t followed it all the way through yet).

I wish the recommendations (which events they suggest you might want to attend) were a bit more precise, but I guess that’s a result of relying on things like “industry” set in your profile (mine is set to “Internet” which must be hard to match on), or job title (“Next Generation Internet Strategist” is not on many event planners’ lists of target job titles), or even education (my educational background is pretty varied and not neatly tied to what I do now). I think it’d be great to allow me to configure the app to add some tags of interests – and maybe let me choose how recommended events get sorted (date, distance, relevancy, or some combination thereof).

It would also be good to have a simple way to get an event’s URL – for now I’ve been to the event’s “page” and clicking on the “Share” link, then pulling the short url out of that message. That results in a url looking like this: http://events.linkedin.com/pub/12514
Rather than one looking like this: http://www.linkedin.com/osview/canvas?_ch_page_id=1&_ch_panel_id=3&_ch_app_id=30&_applicationId=2000&appParams={%22from%22%3A%22my_events%22%2C%22go_to%22%3A%22events%2F12514%22}&_ownerId=2757022&completeUrlHash=gXn-

I assume the nasty url is a result of OpenSocial, in the sense that the hosting site needs to know which application to load and then pass info to the application – but since they are already creating url aliases, why not expose them more directly?

These suggestions aside, it’s a welcome addition which makes LinkedIn much more useful, especially to those not in job-seeking mode.

(If we’re not connected on LinkedIn and should be, here’s my profile).

The Boston chapter of the Interaction Design Association is hosting a night of short talks – I imagine something like Pecha Kucha or Ignite! – this Thursday (June 26th, 2008) 6pm-9pm at Bentley College. RSVP required

Planned speakers:

• Juhan Sonin: Design and Open Source Software
• Jeremy Merle: Designing in an Agile Environment
• Ian Muir: Designer-Developer collaboration
• Jesse Beach: HTML5 Heads Up
• Jared Spool: What’s the Best Way to Compare Multiple Design Alternatives?
• Christa Houlahan: Search, Beyond the Box
• Matt McKeon: Many Eyes, Visualisation in the hands of the people.
• Michael Hawley: Next Generation Interaction Paradigms
• Kris Engdahl: Using Reality Maps for Task Analysis

Looking forward to it – hopefully I’ll be able to blog a bit about some of the presentations.

Pecha Kuch is coming up on April 10th, 8pm, at Harvard Graduate School for Design.

I’m hoping to make it over there after Our World Digitized at MIT

This is a benefit not only for the steady stream of students (undergrad and graduate) and recent graduates all those colleges and universities pump into the workforce regularly, but also because of the broader institutions they support.

My two favorite examples this year are the MIT Comparative Media Studies program and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. (As an alumnus of neither Harvard nor MIT, I can recommend both impartially).

Somewhat less well-known in tech circles than the Media Lab, the Comparative Media Studies program practices “applied humanism”:

The . . . program is committed to the art of thinking across media forms, theoretical domains, cultural contexts, and historical periods. Both our graduate and undergraduate programs encourage the bridging of theory and practice, as much through course work as through participation in faculty and independent research projects.

Among the projects that the MIT CMS program currently sponsors / hosts:

• The Convergence Culture Consortium
• Learning Games to Go
• Metamedia
• Project New Media Literacies
• Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab
• MIT Center for Future Civic Media

In addition, check out their Faculty, Theses, Publications, and subscribe to their Events Calendar and News Feed, which often includes podcasts of various events.

This week (Nov. 16th and 17th, 2007), the Convergence Culture Consortium will be hosting the Futures of Entertainment II conference, which (true to their mission):

brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications. This year’s conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, metrics, measurement, and accounting for audiences, cultural labor and audience relations, and mobile platform development.

Check out the full conference schedule for more detail on speakers and subjects. I will be attending and hopefully blogging about much of the conference – though those posts may not appear until the following week due to some vacation time which will take me offline.

Just up the Charles in Harvard Square, the Berkman center focuses on “Internet & Society” in the broad context of the Harvard Law School.

To get a sense of the breadth and depth of the center, just look at:

• The projects linked from their home page, including the Center for Citizen Media, the Citizen Media Law project, the Digital Natives project, and the Internet and Democracy Project, among others)
• Their faculty and fellows, including Yochai Benkler, John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, danah boyd, Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jimmy Wales, and David Weinberger, and that’s just grabbing the names that immediately jump out to me, not to suggest all the others aren’t equally prominent or doing equally fascinating and worthwhile work.

Also be sure to check out (and subscribe to) MediaBerkman, which podcasts / vodcasts many Berkman sponsored events for those not able to make it to Cambridge in person.