some social insight?

Yesterday I sat in on about four workshops at the Tools of Change conference (#toc). Before I got to the conference I tried to think about what would have most value for me and the industry. Anyway to make a long story short I decided to do the XML track of workshops. Needless to say it was a mistake. The intro workshop turned out to be for people who had never even heard of XML never mind used it in web apps. But I couldn't be rude and just get up and leave. I would hear it out a bit, meanwhile I opened tweetdeck and started following the #toc twitter feed. I was astounded that toc had started to trend fifth and sixth in popularity on twopular.com. What I especially notice was a lot of noise coming out of the Blogging and Social Media workshop. No one was tweeting in the XML workshop. I tweeted how boring the workshop was and someone replied from the Brogan workshop that there were lots of seats there and I should come over. I did.

Here was my realization when I got to that workshop. Chris Brogan was driving the rating on twopular or at least the workshop was. Everyone in this workshop was live blogging and tweeting away. The audience was responding back to Chris as the presentation went on. I had seen this phenomenon with Chris when I did an O'Reilly webinar with him a couple weeks back. At that time I was blown away by the chatter that was going on in the discussion. It was non-stop. I've done a lot of webinars but have never seen anything like it. The amazing thing was Chris was keeping his focus and interacting with those comments at the same time.

Now Chris is not saying anything revolutionary. He is talking about blogging, using twitter, engaging the audience, using the crowd for insight. But this message continues to burn through the publishing world like a bush fire. Forget XML and ebooks, Chris is pushing the envelope to integrate all content and do mashups using the simple tools of social networking. Of course you need the technical frameworks and environments for all of this stuff to work but for it to really work the technology has to become invisible. Technical experts don't really like to make their technology invisible and so I think sometimes they don't "get" what is happening in the social networking world.  What is more important to publishing? Standards, XML, ebooks, all of that. But what gets people engaged? Twitter, blogging - the platforms for the individual to broadcast their message, even if that is only retweeting someone.

Posted via email from Tim's posterous