education building

Update: Sept: 27.  This workshop has been cancelled due to lack of registrants.  aw shucks.  next time.

So I have been keeping this under wraps, what with so much going on this summer, and honestly, I didnt even really believe it was going to happen, but yes it is official. No getting out of it now. I received my conference material in the mail today for the upcoming Management Skills in Advanced Technology (MSAT) 20th Anniversary event.

I have been asked to present on the subject of blogs and social networking etc. The title of the talk I am giving is called; This is not your Daddy’s Internet! Blogs—Podcasts—Relationship Networking and will be filled with intersting case studies, useful examples, and some hands on activities to get people into it. This is the blurb.

Terms like “cyberspace”, and “information superhighway” were effective metaphors in the early days of the web, and were needed to convey the paradigm shift occurring because of this new form of communication. The ideas of asynchronous communication (email), massive media accessibility (p2p), and linking to create networks of content were foreign to most people and these terms provided a logical “bricks and mortar” basis upon which to build an understanding of the internet. They have also held back its progress ever since.

The web is less and less a place you go to – increasingly it comes to you. It is “live”, “immediate”, and “present”, using technologies such as cell phones and other mobile devices. At the same time, the activities people do on the internet are changing as tge implications of social software begin to seep into the mainstream. In the early days of the internet there was an implicit understanding that the internet was going to be the ultimate source of information (Wikipedia, check.), where you could find the answers to every question (Google, check.), and people would be hiding under the auspices of false identities – pseudonyms – to protect their identity and privacy. Barely a decade old, and it is all that and much more. Sites such as MySpace are becoming the corner store parking lots of our youth where you hang out with friends, gossip, flirt, and try to stand out from the crowd.

So my lengthly email last month, bemoaning the sad state of bookmark migration was proven to be little a bit premature. Scott tried to console me with his comments, but I was not convinced I would ever succeed. That was until I received this kind letter from the folks at del.icio.us.

Hi! This is a note to people affected by a recent bug on del.icio.us. We had a glitch in our import function for the past two weeks or so that caused some bookmark imports to fail (partially or completely). We’re very sorry for this inconvenience. It’s now fixed, so the bookmarks you imported should have appeared in your account. If those bookmarks haven’t shown up, please try importing them again. Let us know if a new import still doesn’t work, and we’ll look into that more deeply.

Not sure how they knew i was affected, or why they decided to respond to me but needless to say I was impressed as heck. And this from a service that is 100% free! No sooner did I receive this, I loaded up my entire furl archive and dumped it, popular tags and all, into my del.icio.us account. yay! It was actually quite brilliant, not only importing my notes, tags, and popular tags, but also the date that I originally bookmarked, so it doesnt mess up my chronology. Now for something completely different. This spam visualization from the Thrind, freakshow that he is thinks its a good idea to shed light on the spam world. bah! i hate spam!