Monday, February 11, 2008

SoCon08

This post is way too late I know, but it's been a rough week.

SoCon08 was great this weekend. I met a bunch of great folks in various industries, doubled my Twitter followers, and got some research ideas. It is always interesting to talk to people who are just as excited about technology, especially social media as I am. Sometimes when I'm talking to someone who's not as interested, I find myself feeling a little crazy.

Friday night was a great dinner at Maggiano's (wonderful eggplant parm), where I sat with the political people and were told we were the most engaged in our conversation compared other tables. We made a couple of predictions, analyzed the Super Tuesday results, and pondered the influence of technology on the Presidential election. We also discussed the voting procedures in Georgia, using DieBold machines, and not having a paper trail when voting. I'm generally a proponent of a paperless systems because it's better for the environment and more convenient. However, we agreed that it would be nice to have some sort of receipt would make us feel more comfortable about the process. Mainly, the receipt would be for auditing purposes.

On Saturday, we had a full day of activities starting with breakfast in the morning. With my bagel, I got a sales pitch from a entrepreneur talking about his new website with small education modules for people to learn at their own pace. After that we headed into the auditorium for a discussion of the trends over the past year, important factors to consider in social media's evolution, as well as comments from the participants about their success using technology. The whole time, they were switching between the conference's Twitter page, the websites of participants, blogs, and Power Point up on the big screen. It was great because I picked up a laundry list of new links to explore...in all of my free time :)

When we took a break, we signed up for our afternoon breakout sessions. At lunch, I found myself again discussing politics, but also about Utterz and some other sites I had not heard of before. After lunch we went into our breakout sessions. I choose to go to an effective writing session and one about incorporating social media in the classroom. The most interesting parts about the sessions was just talking with other people about their perspectives and experiences with social media.

After we finished with the conference, Connie and I decided to stay another night. So we secured a room and then went over to the after conference drinks and pizza. Ok, first of all, Mellow Mushroom pizza is awesome & so are their soft pretzels. With that out of the way, we started to talk about non-business items and the beer flowed freely. It was a lot of relaxed.

Once we had our fill of pizza and beer, Connie and I headed over to our hotel. We got an awesome room (after being upgraded for free) with plenty of room, a big bed, and amazing TV. After saying we were going to work before going to bed, I think we pretty much vegged out before passing out.

All in all, the conference took a lot more energy than I had anticipated, but it also yielded more than I thought it would.

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