Category: NET2

All about the NetSquared conference and ongoing activities.

Lessons learned

1 Comment

Tim Bishop (aka Geodog) took some great Notes from the Activism session at NetSquared on Tuesday. I think our session “Activism: when emailing your congressperson doesn’t quite feel like enough…” went well, but after attending “Gender and the social web: new tools, same…stuff?” I think it could have been organized much better to have more audience particiption better conversation.

Susan Mernit, who led the gender session, had each speaker give a brief intro to the topic and then threw some focused questions out to the entire room. It was a really interesting and insightful conversation, but it seems Lisa Stone is still measuring the success of BlogHer by it’s acceptance by the male-dominated blogerati!

Here are my notes and conversation (typos and all) from the gender session in the hallway. I have edited out the comments that were simultaneous form other sessions…

Continue reading “Lessons learned” →

Business panel

3 Comments

This morning’s NetSquared panel is three white guys in suits talking about their corporate Business Model Revolution. They even said “monetize” – the death knell of any panel as far I’m concerned. Finally I’ll get a chance to catch up on my e-mail. (I also want post some notes from yesterday, but some of them have to get extracted from the ‘hallway’ archive.)

Testing Technorati

2 Comments

Last night at the NetSquared reception I met Tantek Celik, who is the Chief Technologist at Technorati – in other words, a leading global thinker in the field of how blogs can talk to each other and to the world. We had a spirited discussion about gender online and whether there are still “barriers to entry” for women in the blogosphere. Happily we both came to the conclusion that there is sexism IRL which repeats itself online, but that new techologies are making it easier for women and minority groups (of which women are not one, of course) to gain more power, credibility, platforms for speaking out, etc.

Tantek mentioned that he has worked a lot on microformats, which he thinks are gaining popularity without support by the typical “a-list” bloggers. I haven’t followed the spread, although I have been interested in microformats since I learned about them last year. I mentioned to Tantek that I was sporting my microformats t-shirt when I was splashed across a full page in the Independent’s recent article about political blogging. I showed him the picture on the Indy’s website which he enjoyed very much.

Tantek also introduced me to Technorati Principal Engineer Kevin Marks who I promptly bothered about a persistent tagging problem I’ve been having here. Within an hour, Kevin wrote me to say he had fixed it! So the true purpose of this entire blog entry is to see whether my tagged blog entries are showing up correctly over at Technorati. And the answer is…

Meet me in the hallway

Leave a comment

Some conferences will allow participants to get online by providing a wireless network. Sometimes you can get that wifi to work, sometimes you can get power for your laptop. Another way that NetSquared is different from most conferences is that as we checked in we were given a personalized access key for the secure wifi, which works very well. Every table in the main hall has a powerstrip on it! The message is clear: this event doesn’t just allow us to blog it, they want us to blog it (and flickr it, chat about it, tag about it, etc.)!

They also are hosting a chat room (or “hallway”) for people who are participating in person and/or online. Another great way to follow what’s going on here is to read the blogs of everyone posting on the NetSquared website.