Luke Simonds of Booz Allen Hamilton talks at lunchtime about what he's seen so far

JP reflects on his experience of the day.

Overall I've had positive feedback on the Open Space that we held earlier.  People spotted some of the ways that it could have been improved, if we'd had more time.  Johnnie shared an insight with me which is that it's often good to resist the impulse to help people out based on our own perception of their problem.   We very quickly had a wide range of  conversations hosted and ready to go including: learning and education with wikis; moderation; using a combination of tools to support communities of practice; guerrilla marketing; engaging with large groups of consumers;  making money with blogs and many others that sprang up in the gaps between.  Most gratifying for me was seeing people in suits sitting cross legged on a conference room floor...

Here's Euan Semple, today's chair, being interviewed in the least noisy cafe we could find in Blackfriars.  This is one of the joys I find in blogging and social media, show up and do what you need to do, and never mind the "quality" feel the width!

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This is stretching 'pre-conference' a bit - it's posted from "speakers corner" at in the registration room at the London Hilton Metropole....

Picture by Peter Kaminski

I spoke with Adriana Cronin-Lukas this morning to hear how she first got involved in helping to create the conference and what sorts of issues she's dealing with when working with social media in a corporate context. 

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Adriana offers some fascinating insights into the differences between how social media affects organisations both at a macro, strategic level as well as at an operational level.

I met up with Lee Bryant at Headshift HQ to chat about what he's bringing to the forum on Wednesday and also to find out what he's expecting to take away.

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Lee mentions a couple of the public sites that Headshift has been involved in:

1001 Inventions
Patient Opinion
Culture Online (DCMS)

Look out for Lee on the day (the picture here is of Lee at Our Social World last year)

This is bad news indeed for those who maintain their position through manipulation, hoarding information or playing politics.

In which case, you have bigger, more fundamental issues to worry about than social media.

Mike and I talked a bit about podcasting, and I admitted that there is no podcast I listen to regularly. (There are a few reasons for this, but primary amongst them is that I rarely hook my mp3 player up to my PC to change the line-up. I'm waiting for wireless transfer, I guess.) I do try to listen to the election podcast that my partner, Antoine Clarke, does with Brian Micklethwait every Tuesday night, but the truth is that I have access to Antoine's election insight whenever I want it, and hear a lot of that stuff on a day-to-day basis anyway. Plus, I'm not an election enthusiast.

One of the dilemmas that Brian and Antoine seem to have is how long or short the podcast should be. (Here's Brian blogging about that very topic today.) When Brian was round for dinner the other week, he said something about how, when he opens up a podcast and sees that the whole file runs at something like 32 minutes or whatever, his heart sinks. I can relate. But the point is that a podcast is just a recording of a conversation, and you shouldn't rush the conversation if it's interesting to you. Better to provide detailed show notes so that people can choose to zip right to the parts that interest them. Michael Vanderdonk summed this up quite well in a comment on the blog for Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz's For Immediate Release podcast:

The real anoying part for me is that ‘time’ is the measuring stick. If you are baking a double chocolate mud cake, the cake is ready when the cake it ready. Speeding up the cooking time to have it ready ruins the cake. Taking the cake out half baked (pun intended) ruins the cake. Skipping ingredients or preparation steps, ruins the cake. Accept the fact, Neville and Shel, that FIR takes over an hour to ‘bake’. Let the listeners decide how they want to slice it…

Second verse, same as the first: Control what you can, not what you wish you could. Let people have a choice. Do your thing and then get out of the damn way.

For the initiative, AOL and Weblogs, Inc. collected a staff of journalists, industry experts, and independent investors to author single-stock-focused blogs. “Individual investors are the most passionate about individual stocks, and the further you get away from individual companies, the more the passion gets diluted,” Moe said. “What we want to do is become the place for any holder of these stocks--the place where they go there every day and know they’re going to get something they’re not going to get anywhere else."

AOL has identified a community - and it’s quite a broad one - that they’d like to influence. Whether the value they provide to readers is enough to bring great benefits has yet to be decided - and it will be decided, not by AOL, but by that community.

Link via Adriana Cronin-Lukas

[T]hose numbers have caught the attention of the mainstream, and we're about to see clone after clone being created. Why? It's the numbers. It's like mass media scouts are scanning the horizon and shouting back to the tribe, "There! There's the audience we've been losing." Meanwhile, there are reports that youTube is raising as much as $25 million in venture money. Why? It's the numbers. Is youTube the new Amazon, the new eBay, or the new mySpace? This is a VERY tricky question, because with money comes old school rules, and if there ever was an anti-establishment site, it's youTube. Remember that this site was built for user-contributed videos. The deep pockets that are drooling over it could give a rat's ass about such. They want those numbers to present their OWN videos, and that's a problem. The same users who made youTube "successful" could just as easily turn their allegiance elsewhere.

Terry laments the fact that so many companies are desperate to purchase communities developed by other entities, yet want nothing to do with exploration and experimentation of their own. Our quotation here earlier of Jeff Jarvis's contention that you can't own the community; the community owns the community is one that such companies would do well to heed. In a time where individuals online have not only asserted control but wield it with a growing certainty that it is their right (and it is), it is easier than ever to be faced with millions of turned backs. And no receipt can get you your money back on that kind of loss.

Cross-posted from What MySpace Means