BarCamp Boston 2.0

Posted on by John

At the risk of turning this blog into a list of upcoming conferences, I wanted to make sure to mention BarCamp Boston 2.0

Ok, this time the 2.0 isn’t just another reference to the next generation of something which now feels old fashioned – it really is the second annual BarCamp in Boston.

Boston BarCamp

This year it will be held at the Stata Center, Saturday and Sunday March 17th and 18th. (That’s the weekend after SXSW, unless you’re staying through the end of the music festival) .

Check out the Wiki for sessions, registrants, and other necessary info.

Will they call it APNP?

Posted on by John

News from late last week that NowPublic, a Vancouver BC based participatory news network, has partnered with the Associated Press, which calls itself “the essential global news network.”

APNP

You can read the press release from the AP, or track reactions to the story at NowPublic.

While the releases so far have been rather light on specifics, this seems like a great partnership, assuming it brings some the APs resources in contact with some of NowPublic’s participants.

Want Buzz? Be Interesting (and don’t put up barriers to conversation)

Posted on by John

A few weeks ago, at the AlwaysOn Media conference in New York, there was a panel titled “Can Brands Get Away with ‘Buzz Marketing’ in the Blogosphere” – it was moderated by Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine), and included Rick Murray (Womma, me2revolution, Edelman), Gordon Gould (ThisNext), Barry Reicherter (Porter Novelli), and David Weinberger (Joho the Blog).

I was intrigued by an article in Information Week (“Blogger Smackdown at AlwaysOn“) which concluded:

The debate quickly escalated from a discussion of whether buzz marketing was feasible to whether marketing through blogs even made sense. Online blog marketing firm PayPerPost was savaged by both Jarvis and Weinberger, with PayPerPost’s CEO present in the room trying unsuccessfully to defend himself.

The video from the session is online at the AlwaysOn Media site, though they don’t provide any simple way to link to or bookmark a specific session. Instead, go to this webcast archive page, scroll down to where the session title is, and click on the icon in the video archive column. (Actually, there are lots of good sessions available – including the keynote on “Surviving the Media Disruption” – but beware, the volume varies wildly).

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Social Bookmarking on the Corporate Intranet

Posted on by John

I’ve been looking recently at a number of different approaches to social bookmarking in an intranet context.

There are a number of open source projects in the space, most notably scuttle (PHP), Connotea (Perl), and MarkaBoo (Ruby-on-Rails) (see a much more complete list at 3Spots).

In addition, there’s an interesting project underway at MITRE called Onomi. Originally based on Scuttle, it has been evolving over the last year and there are some good papers exploring the work they’ve published available online:

(Tips of the virtual blog hat to Seth and Bill Ives for pointers to Onomi and other relevant projects).

In addition, for Drupal users, there’s the userlink module for 4.7 from FunnyMonkey as well as the TagMark module (sponsored by Lullabot.com) for 5.0.