blogtalk.net: “We’ve had submissions from authors in 19 countries for BlogTalk 2008“

Submitters will be notified in January. It’s going to be a great conference again. John is doing fantastic work.

[tags]blogtalk[/tags] [tags]conferences[/tags] [tags]blogtalk2008[/tags]

Social Software hat sich seit dem ersten Buch BlogTalks (2003) von einer Innovation zu einer Konstante in Diskussionen über Wissensmanagement und E-Learning entwickelt – letztlich eines meiner großen Ziele für BlogTalk – siehe auch meine Einleitung zum vorliegenden Buch.

I can tell you all those self-publishing services are time bandits. First it took me two months to figure out that Booksurge (an Amazon company) is supposedly run by inverse mechanical turks. Either my sales agent didn’t reply for weeks or was not capable to answer my questions and sometimes after some time she (or it) sent me commodified marketing mails about their service. That really drove me nuts. She would have failed the Turing-test in any case.

Eventually I decided to cancel my engagement with Booksurge for the sake of making the book public before the turn of the decade. It’s a pity though because – and that was my interest in the first place – I wanted the book to be part of the Amazon.com directory and not only the Amazon.de one. I have no clue how to achieve that – I’m grateful for any help on that.

In the end I decided to go with Books On Demand (German) again: Another pain in the ass (ask Jan) to get the files the way their publishing engine can accept it. And we haven’t seen any results yet.

For your information here is the cover and the link to my (very personal) intro to the book.

After 2 months of usage that certainty made it evident for me that with blogs and the related networks we do have a very powerful personal publishing tool available that will augment our personal scope of networking as a base for learning enourmously. I was quite certain that this will not only effect the private usage but even more the organizational usage of it. Since then I am most interested in transfering the lessons learned in the open web into the professional and organizational context.

So in 2002 after a brief introspection I decided to organize a conference on that topic and together with Max Scheugl the first draft of BlogTalk – the first international conference on weblogs – was created. It turned out to be a huge success and had a successor in 2004, thanks to Markus Toyfl for helping to design it, and eventually turned for its third edition – that was conceived and organized together with Jan Schmidt – into a more general conference on social software – a practice and phenomenon that took shape already in late 2002.

The conference and the people that dropped by – from all over the world – to either present their visions, research, projects and ideas or to listen and to talk to each other represent what you could call a gathering of lead users that sought and are still looking for innovation – on several sometimes contradictional levels. We all – and I dare to claim that – are still looking for better ways to communicate and relate to each other be it for the exchange of knowledge or the exchange of experiences. And finally we are all aware that it is about connecting with like-minded people. A connectedness that primarily benefits us personally and on a second level it somehow creates what you might call a collective awareness and value that surpasses what we were used to accept as the boundaries of human intellect.

That might be entirely conventional from an anthropological perspective. Human beings are here for conversations as a prime base for anything else that can come to one’s mind. After all we humans represent and create networks of conversational animals. To imporve on that by shifting it to the virtual realm makes it a relevant aspect for me: it is where the virtual becomes indistinguisghable from the real.

During the last years I had the change to participate in a paradigm shift. On the one hand the web is clearly an effect and cause of what is termed globalization on the other hand it has a lot to do with innovation. And I am extrmely happy about that latter part. Experiencing innovation, even being part of it is exciting in itself and challenging on the the other hand. Just think of transfering your experiences into a world that does not participate in that innovation. A world that by the very virtue of not being part of the innovation is creating that notion of innovation at the same time. Just think of translating that for them and it becomes quite clear what is at stake. I realized – mediated through the conference and its aftereffects – that language and images are the relevant membranes that separate innovation from its acceptance. And if something truely new is here to stay than you first need to find the right words (metahphors) for it.

Hence, a new media evolved from being a mere instrument for doing a lot of things better and faster into a phenomenon that now constantly creates new concepts of how to make use of it. Concepts that by far transcend the simulation of existing media. The last 5 years were the most exciting ones and I have to thank the the people that build the web that connected me to that pieces and people.

Thus please go ahead and consult this volume as a representation of what the conference BlogTalk and its related conversations were about.

Thomas N. Burg, March 2007