Emerging Technologies Consulting

No podcast today. I promise to return to them next week. If you have an interest in being interviewed for next week’s podcast, leave me a comment with your email address and I’ll be in touch. The world doesn’t need to just hear from me. It needs to hear from everyone!

Anyway, this past week, I was at Northern Voice, a blogging and social media conference. I’ve already written a couple of posts about it at my personal blog.  Friday was kind of blur for me.  It was an unconference format, meaning that many of the sessions were proposed and presented right there on the spot.  One of my favorite sessions was Scott Leslie’s “Pimp My Browser” session.  Even though I already use a lot of Firefox plugins already, I learned about a few new ones and how to use a couple of the ones I have even more effectively.  I also presented on Friday with my colleague and friend Leslie Madsen-Brooks on gender issues in the blog world.  Thirty minutes was definitely not enough time to really work through this issue, but it was still fun and somewhat fruitful.

Nora Young and Rob Cottingham got us started on Saturday with two great keynotes.  My sense of Nora’s talk was that she tried to address the cultural shifts that are taking place in the media world as a result of social media.  She uses the advent of the telephone as a metaphor when people weren’t even sure how to answer the phone–some use “Ahoy” and some used “Hello”.  She argues we’re in this same uncertain moment with social media.  (Part of her talk is here.)

Rob Cottingham let us laugh at ourselves, joking about memes and even heckling himself via Twitter.  His main point, however, was serious, that social media allows us to connect with each other, to be more human.

Aside from the keynotes and my own presentation with Nancy White and Barbara Ganley, I thoroughly enjoyed Alan Levine’s presentation, where he talked about the significance of the 365 photo group on Flickr, a group started by D’Arcy Norman and that has grown to over 200 members.  Part of what made the presentation so fun was that he used CoolIris, a nifty Firefox plugin that really does wonders for images.  He also talked about using Flickr and other platforms as ways of blogging, experimenting with writing longer description in Flickr or in del.icio.us.

Probably the conference is best for those who know a little about social media and software and want to learn a lot more.  For folks like me, who already know a lot, it was still great to share ideas with people, catch up with old friends, and meet new people.  I’m looking forward to future conferences where I can learn and socialize.