thomas n. burg – on social media, software tools and its benefits for us, and sometimes wine
After some time and lots of efforts by the authors and – I dare to claim that – the editors the third BlogTalks book will hit the (virtual) shelves in a month or even faster.
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.
Back then in the summer of 2002, I remember, I had a certain feeling or better a certainty that emerged out of a very simple but effective daily practice and experience. After only 3 months of using a piece of software that was built to create a weblog I knew that the network I tapped into is going to change my view of the world that I live in. At that time I was heading the Center for New Media at the Danube University of Krems and somehow peripherally, partly due to my job description, I was drawn into that enormous learning network. It started off as a simple practice of collecting links to sources on the web thus becoming an information-filter for others. Within a couple of weeks I became part of a network of like-minded people on a global scale. Via reading their blogs – via RSS – I started participating in an ongoing chat that dealt with all the topics I was interested in from my professional point of view. This conversational style increased or even sparked off my daily dose of learning. I never learned that much before. And I still do that. Not only do I learn on a factual level but I also get to know the people that are closely linked to this pieces of microcontent that are published all across the world and – at least for me – interwoven via RSS.
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.
You and Jan (he designed and compiled the data) did a great job evaluating the conference, grab the results below.
Room to move!