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I’m spending this lovely, frosty Saturday inside of doors at the first Southern Social Media Conference, or SoCon07. I’m not really sure why yet, though — probably to lend some credibility to my extracurricular (and all too often intra-curricular) online activities. (This is a career skill, damnit!) This afternoon I’ll be attending breakout sessions on new media/journalism, led by KSU’s Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication, and something called “the power of social networks” or something like that. The latter caught my attention with a subtitle, “How 7 million people can be wrong,” and you just know how I love to pooh-pooh new things.

Debriefing late, though I’ll probably add some bullet points here along the way; in the meantime, some mobile photos, updated throughout the day (though the vast majority of pics will end up on Flickr tagged with socon07):

• I might have to switch my second breakout session to the one dealing with anonymity in web/social media — on the one hand, the web wipes out anonymity in your public life because anyone can sneak up and shine the light on you and the nasty crap you’re up to, “call you on your shit” as has been said a few times already; on the other hand, there are the trolls, which has been discussed in terms of the “death of civility” in new online communication. Does this make politics better or worse? Hmm.
• The IT director for the Loaf pointed out that crowds like this come with a good deal of “browser snobbery,” and the like it or not 70% of the audience still uses Internet Explorer on Windows, the assiest browser on earth, so we should deal with it. Someone else countered his point by saying, well yeah but a few generations ago the majority of people didn’t think women should be allowed to vote. SMACK!
• I just threw out the “what about the disconnected” caveat that Anna raised at Beltway Collection, but not sure how many people here aren’t more interested in “serial entrepreneurship.”
• 10:53 - Amber is doing a better job live-blogging this than I am (and using timestamps more effectively), if you really want more details. We’re currently sitting in the “keynote” session by the founder of Kaneva, some virtual world thing I haven’t played with yet. Amber seems just as underwhelmed as I do right now, but for different reasons I think: “This presentation is more like a regular conference. He’s showing Powerpoint slides and talking at us. I don’t remember who said it (maybe Dave Winer?) but it really is true… once you’ve been to an unconference, it’s damn near impossible to go back [to a regular conference].” Eh, perhaps, but I’m a regular-conference aficionado and a professional PowerPoint Engineer, as my cubemate used to call me; it’s the message (3D virtual world video games and their spinoffs) not the medium that’s got me nose-down in the laptop. Maybe these virtual worlds will have a big impact on politics someday, but right now I think the presentation is of more interest to people who want to make money by designing virtual empty pizza boxes (I shitteth thee not) for kids to put in their virtual rooms for virtual decoration. I virtually care.
• 10:57 [aside] - I met at least one other person who ain’t here for biznass purposes (well, half so, he said), Ken Dubberly of FreeLori.org; also finally met Grayson of the Spacey Gracey Review (and soon, Southern Fried Tech).
• 11:09 - It’s official, the speaker has said “paradigm shift!” Huzzah!
• 11:17 - Hahaha! Someone is pointing out, “I’m looking at the avatars, these Kaneva avatars, and none of them are smiling, none of them look like they’re having any fun!” Chris Klauss’s tongue-in-cheek response: “Well we’re still in beta, that’s why they aren’t having fun.”
• 11:25 - Rather than listen to this talk of avatars (”What if I’m old and fat, all your avatars are young buff hipsters?”), I went to Kaneva to see what this crap is about, only to find that I already signed up around Christmas (must’ve been escaping the family fun). It already annoys the crap out of me: going to my Profile page I see that I got three comments or something within the first couple days: “HI,WELCOME,MY KANEVA FRIEND .I GAVE YOU YOUR 1ST RAVE .PLZ COME 2 MY PAGE N RAVE ME BACK (click the thumbs up icon control panel)…THX” “Hi, Welcome to Kaneva! Gave you a Rave, stop by and Rave me too, pls. ;o) (click the thumbs up in the Control Panel.)” “Left you a rave! Stop by my page and let me know what you think.” I’ll tell you what I think: I don’t want another damn MySpace where random strangers want to link up just to jerk each other off with “Comment love” or “raves” or whatever the hell else. teh lame!!!1!
• 1:05 - “Creating your own media” breakout session with Prof. Pitts. See sites pjnet.org and newassignment.net, watch the video by Jay Rosen. Does citizen media make editors think they don’t need editing?
• Barbara Eherenreich of Nickel and Dimed fame has a project at UnitedProfessionals.org that the Professor thinks I should check out.
• I’d be curious to get Amber’s seasoned unconference take on this observation: hour-long breakout sessions are somewhat crippled by doing a “let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves” bit - it’s 1:30 and we just finished introductions, of varying degrees of relevance. The upside of doing this, though, is (theoretically) that people can make connections with each other in mutually beneficial ways once they find out what they’re working on.
• 1:56 - Well, this media workshop is almost over and I’m not really sure what we’ve been talking about for the last 15 minutes. Part of me thinks maybe I’ll find what I was hoping to get in Part 2 of the media workshop, but I don’t know if I’m willing to skip the Social Communities session to find out. Hooray for the GAPN podcast!
• 2:22 - I just quit chatting with Kate and started paying attention now that the session leader stopped talking about World of Warcraft. Let’s see what we discover about the Power of Online Social Communities.
• So far my favorite thing in this session: the discussion leader’s geek t-shirt, fsck it!
• Hoo boy: according to our fearless leader, “CivicSpace died.” They had a good idea but missed the boat somehow. (Sooo…glad I never succeeded in implementing it?)
• How do we use online resources to motivate and reinforce real world action? See: Loaf puts random people in their top N friends on MySpace - a little reward; or pics of the fancy people at WNDC, make them feel glamorous. People like some ego-stroking. Loafing guy suggests: see Google Base, allow people to search all calendars for events, will find your event by what, keyword? location? Jonas points to imeem.com - create a network around an interest? Problem is there are SO many groups on each site and so many sites — where should be the main place to go?

  Be specific: if there are umpteen million groups that meet on a general topic, explain to the world specifically what your group is about and why people want to go to your meeting.

  Give them a playground. Media mix-ups are big. TechLinks guy is working on the Social Media Press Release - give people a bunch of media to take and remix the way they want to, cf. Colbert’s light saber video, ZeFrank’s sports racer contributions. Now, GM tried to allow people to go on their website to make their own ads, ended up with all these ads about how much SUVs suck ass. Well maybe that’s “backfiring” for a company selling a product, but might actually work anyway around issue groups; controversy can drive traffic either way. After the Howard Dean scream, the Dean forums started filling up with remixes of the Dean scream — the failure was that they didn’t embrace it properly?

  Smart Mobs: someone is advocating it in terms of corporate communications. Problem with Reingold’s case: he had an anecdotal case of technology and microinformation to organize large movements. Dodgeball.com: sign up your cellphone on it, can get short-term announcements of local events/info by text.

  And the killjoys? You don’t deal with them; you let them scream themselves out. And you need a community manager who listens to community needs so they don’t fizzle.