Events

Ruairí McKiernan speaking at BlogTalk 2010.

The second day of the conference proved just as valuable as the first, starting with Stowe Boyd talking us through his "web of flow" theory and how it is all about the streams.

He was followed by Ruairí McKiernan inspiring the crowd with the story of SpunOut.ie. Fergus Hurley talked about his experiences doing business in Silicon Valley and Laurent Walter Goix spoke of bringing it back to "context" from a telecoms perspective. Ronan Skehill outlined how "Apps Are Bad", and after a healthy debate around this idea we went to lunch.

Perhaps one of my favourite sessions from the conference was Deanna Lee‘s talk about engagement and The New York Public Library.

Various other presentations filled the afternoon; but again the highlight of the day was the panel discussion on location-based social networks.

Location-Based Social Networking Panel Discussion

Emer Lawn attended BlogTalk 2010 in Galway, Ireland last week, and she has very kindly agreed to share her original post with us here. This account is from day one. Day two will be posted shortly.

Arriving in Galway yesterday with little expectation for what Thursday and Friday would bring at BlogTalk 2010. I was delighted with day one… compelled me to write a blog at least, despite the conference having little or nothing to do with “blogging.” The day started for me with considerations for our identity online and whether we should have one ID for all properties across the Web. Facebook were bravely represented and I’d comfortably stand by them for a while. They are not going anywhere just yet! Credibility is the third thing that stuck out, which, of course, stems from being relevant and interesting.

socialmedia.net is one of the sponsors of BlogTalk, a conference taking place at the National Univeristy of Ireland, Galway on the 26th and 27th of August. We will have speakers not only from Ireland and Europe, but we also have some who are flying in from America especially to present.

These conferences are important because even though the wonders of the Internet and its associated social media services allow us to be more accessible to each other than ever before, there is stil no substitute for getting a bunch of people into a room and having them meet and talk to each other. Despite all our wonderful technology, there are some things that can only be communicated in person and in not in any other way.

As is becoming more apparent in the conference world and in the ideas underlying the notion of unconferences, the audience is equally important if not actually more important than the speakers. To quote Dan Gillmor, one of our scheduled speakers and whose interview with socialmedia.net we will be publishing on Tuesday, August 17th, “The Q&A portion of a talk is always better than the talk. I’ve been to and done several conferences where it was assumed that the main panelists were the people in the audience.”

Last May, I spent a few hours in Dublin's Googleplex to hear Matt Cutts' take on "How Google Works", and took away four thoughts that I will add to the Web Analytics, Social Media and Media Writing modules at Tipperary Institute where I work as a lecturer.

The Dublin Chamber of Commerce arranged the well-attended event and Matt Cutts did the assembled group a big favour by bringing the warmest day of the year to Dublin during his visit. That personal feat also earned Matt a Dublin sunburn, something many Irish yearn to obtain.

First Takeaway: Reset page/post titles in the URL. With some blogging programmes, it is important to note that what appears in the URL can be quite different to your headline. But you may have the opportunity to write your own headline separate from the URL of the written page and it is something you should pay attention to. It's relatively easy to do with Wordpress and I've occasionally edited a Typepad post to get a more powerful URL for a blog post. If you write for a newspaper or broadcaster, you should ensure your software can produce URLs with hyphenated post syntax.



Along with Alex Passant, I'm co-chair for this year's 7th International Conference on Social Software, AKA BlogTalk 2010, which will be held in Galway, Ireland at the end of August.

BlogTalk is a unique event, bringing together those interested in social software and social media from different backgrounds, including industry, academia, research, development, and practitioners.

We're currently looking for people to submit papers on topics related to social software and social media. The submission date has been extended to 21 June 2010. You can submit the paper through the BlogTalk 2010 EasyChair site. More details are available on the BlogTalk 2010 Call for Papers page. There is also the later date of 7 July for those who want to submit demonstration or poster proposals.