Recap: Day 1 Graphing Social Patterns East 2008

Day 1 of O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns is in the books and it was a great day with a lot of great content.

I live blogged the event HERE, so check it out.

A lot of the talk today revolved around widgets, it seems to be thehot topic of the day as we have seen a couple of funding rounds recently for the local Clearspring and also RockYou from out west.

Hooman Rafdar, CEO of Clearspring, gave a great talk on widgets.  He had a couple of interesting points but the one I took away most form it was

the only constant in all of this is change …

try new things FAST and use data.

Between his talk and another panel on widgets moderated by Allen Stern of CenterNetworks a key concept was to make sure that you take the time to develop a good widget strategy before diving into the deep end.

Another one of tha talks was by Adam Nash of LinkedIn.  He talked about LinkedIn’s stratey in buidling a business social network and their tring to make it all very relevant to the professional.

There was a lot of talk about the differences between Advertising and App-vertising, and how social applications have become a new way to advertise by combining content and the ad into one unit.

Frank Gruber moderated a panel on White Label Social Networks.  There was a good discussion on building out of these kind of instant on social networks and the tools that are the best to use.  There is a video of this talk HERE, so check it out.

We had a great look into the class taught by Dave McClure at Stanford on building Facebook apps and how succesful it was,  They have had over 20 million installs of some of the apps that were built out of the class.  Several companies have been formed and many of those students have no shortage of job offers.

And finally there was a great panel on “Need for Feeds” and how networks and users are using their news feeds.  I found the talk of making those feeds even more tailored to the user and how this will play out in the future extremely interesting and engaging.  It seems this is the next direction for many.

Off to Day 2 !

Note:

Photos above courtesy of:

Shashi Bellamkonda www.shashi.name and www.solutionsarepower.com.

Frank Gruber of www.somewhatfrank.com

Day2 Live Blogging: Graphing Social Patterns East 2008

GSP: White-Label Social Networks

Got a good video of the panel moderated by Frank Gruber of SomeWhatFrank.

It was a good look at the tools and building out of “white label” social networks

Live Blogging: Graphing Social Patterns 2008

We are here at Graphing Social Patterns here in Crystal City VA and Dave McClure the conference organizer is giving the welcome speech !

Making some great points about what works and what does not.

In Case of Twitter Emergency, Break Glass

My name is Jimmy and I am an Apple-holic.  Now to start my 12 step program. …..

I will be the first to admit, Apple has me roped into thes damed events they do, especially WWDC and MacWorld.  I wonder what the loss value of work that day is around the globe ?  I sit trying to refresh my damned screen as the various live blogs go teets up and I break into a cold sweat when I cant get the “One More Thing” right away !!!

With the advent of Twitter we had another avenue to get those little nuggets of news … that is if Twitter is up, whcih as we all know has not been consistently lately.  I saw a couple of posts today about Twitters plans to stay alive during the crunch.  And BTW, it is not only WWDC this week, O’reilly has Graphing Social Patterns East 08 going on as well in DC and I am sure a few tweets will be flying from there.

But in the case that Twitter also goes colonel sanders teets up on us this week, what are we to do?  We need some sort of “In Case Twitter Is Down, Break The Glass” and go to this service … I am not sure what “this service” would be.  It could be the new kid on the block, Plurk, but they seem to be having some scaling issues as well.  Or maybe the old school Pownce … either way break glass, press button and have Twitter forward to that other “this service” …

As a side note, I am getting one of those little square “super bowl” type office pool sheest ready for everyone to take their bid on an time we see the Twitter lights go out … anyone interested.  Gentlemen’s bet of course, you all know gambling is illegal

Live Blogging: Graphing Social Patterns 2008

This week is quite the busy week for the local DC tech scene.  Tomorrow is the start of Graphing Social Patterns East in Crystal City.  It looks like it is going to be an awesome lineup and I am totally excited to be able to attend and cover the events for the local readers of the blog here.  One of the tools I really want to use to capture the events, besides a little video from the Flip Camera, is the new live blog platform I wrote about yesterday, Scribble Live.

Like I was saying, one of the cool things about Scribble Live is the ability to collaborate on that event with others.  With that said, I have created a live blog to use during the conference and would love for others to join me in making it a great capture from many angles of the events.

If anyone out there would like to add to the live blog, simply go here and add your observations:

Graphing Social Patterns East Live Blog

Also, you can email text and pictures to the live blog as well.  Simply email them to this address and they will also show up in the live blog feed.

03CA5617-AE45-4DD9-A0B8-C0DDEC25EDD8@scribblelive.com

I think it will be great if some of you can collaborate so we can really create a rich and varied “living” document that others can enjoy and learn from the what is being presented that were not able to make it.

Look forward to seeing many of your updates !

UPDATE:  To simply follow the events go to this URL

http://www.scribblelive.com/Event/Graphing_Social_Patterns_East_2008

Scribble Live, Live Blogging Made Easy

Recently I came across a new product that was released at the recent Mesh08 conference called Scribble Live.  It is a drop dead easy live blogging platform that gets you live blogging an event in a matter of seconds !

I have been using it at the last couple events I have been to and plan on using it pretty extensively at the Graphing Social Patterns Conference and BlogPotomac this week in DC.  As it stands right now, they offer a pretty cool featureset and are looking to add more.

What I think is very cool is the ability to share the live blog you are working on with others to have them collaborate with you.  They may be in different panels or getting a different spin on the event and can add in their thoughts and observations into the same stream.  Not only that, but your live blog you create comes with an email address that anyone can send pics or videos to and have those inserted right into the live blog stream as well.  It is very very cool.

I have been keeping up with the Scribble Live blog and they are about to release the ability to embed the live blog into your own pages on your website or blog.  This keeps traffic on your site which is always a nice touch.  There looks to be a wordpress plugin to even incporporate this into your wordpress blog.

If anyone out there is interested in collaborating at GSP or BlogPotomac with me on the live blogging, please drop me a line and let me know !

Now is Gone: Book Signing and Chat Part II

I was fortunate the other night to be able to get down to the Barnes and Noble in Clarendon, VA to sit in on a talk and book signing with the authors of Now is Gone, Geoff Livingston and Brian Solis.

It was a really nice, quaint, and engaging evening with some great conversation between the guests and the authors over the book and other relevant social media topics.  Geoff and Brian had some great insight on how social media is being used today inside the government, small and large companies, and where they see it going as well.

They also talked about how even though the book was released a short time ago, so much has changed on the social media scene in that perdiod.  There was some chat also about a possible revision to the book to address these changes in the landscape.  Geoff also touched on ho the book was really meant to be a collaboration of the community with inclusions of others ideas, as well as a guide that can stand the test of time, not dating itself.

Below is the video I took of the event, the sound is a bit off in some of it, but I hope you can watch and enjoy.

Rohit Bhargava Talks Personlity on the Par-Tay

Last night many of us dodged the tornadoes to head down to Bus Boys and Poets for a special event.  It was a special audience included prodcution of Jonny’s ParTay with his special guest Rohit Bhargava, author of the new book “Personality not Included“.  It was put on with help and sponsorship of Shashi Bellamkonda (Network Solutions) and Jill Foster of DC Media Makers who did an incredible job of pulling together a great evening.

The talk of course revolved around Rohit’s book and his take on businesses, small and large, and their need to add a little personality to the customer experience.  He touched on how marketing is about building a relationship with your current and potential customers.  I did a live blog of it you can take a look at HERE.

Embedded here is the actual video of the show and also a little video I shot as well.

Twitter Continues to Bring Online World Offline

I can honestly say that most of the connections that I have made with my friends in the DC area here have come right from the pages of Twitter in some fashion. I am continually amazed how Twitter, for the most part, has brought so many of my online connections offline and allowed me to make some really good friendships with a lot of great people.

I wrote the other day about how Twitter helped a couple of stranded Twitter’rs at the Ft Lauderdale airport. Without Twitter, this offline experience never happens and what I am sure will become a friendship would have been missed.

Then today while reading the interwebs, I came across this post title “Twitter for Business?“. The author, Mark Dixon, who openly admits he has questioned the Twitter phenomena, tells of a great experience he had because of Twitter.

However, I had a delightful business encounter yesterday triggered by a Twitter message. On Tuesday afternoon at 2:33pm, I tweeted, “Wrapped up the last of several con calls. Getting ready to head to the airport in route to San Francisco.”

At 2:58 pm, I received an email from Dazza Greenwood, “Just noticed on Twitter you are headed to SF… I’m in the city this week and weekend and wonder if you’d happen to have a few moments to get together and say “hi” in person? …”

Mark made it to SF and that night had a great evening at the home of Dazza. In the end, Mark summed it up better than I can here:

Thanks, Twitter, for spawning a productive face-to-face meeting that gave personal substance to a previously distant, virtual business relationship.

Now if they can only stay up long enough for us to make that next great connection ….

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