Proposal For BlogTalk 2008

Man. The Blogtalk conference has the most convoluted application process that I have experienced in many years. And why do I need to provide an entire 'paper'? Isn't that just a bit old fashioned for a social media conference?

I favor the approach that the folks at Reboot took this past summer, where people proposed sessions -- of their own or to be presented by others -- and other Rebooters commented, attributed and fooled with them in general. A big sloppy social mess.

Anyway, the proposal solution -- something called Easy Chair? -- was set up to require a paper to be uploaded, which I am just not going to do. However, here's the abstract for the talk I would like to give at BlogTalk, which I guess was lost in the submission process:

The Missing Touch Points In Social Media: Fragments And Conjectures

There are a lot of social touch points in the social media experiences, and most of them are not served by tools, or to the extent that they are, it is a fragmentary and disjoint experience. In my presentation, I plan to examine these touch points, and consider how today's tools do -- and don't -- cover the fabric of social interaction around social media. I plan to look at blogging tools themselves, as well as point solutions like Flock, me.dium, del.icio.us, and many others.

A conference like blogtalk should be more open and loose that it feels like to me. If the reviewers are inclined toward a proposal, they could invite the author to expand on it. Writing a two page document is a lot of work to throw into the sausage machine.

Comments

[John Breslin]

Hi Stowe -

It's not just you, Stephanie also didn't like the two-page proposal idea. I remember in the last BlogTalk there was a 500 word limit, which is about a page, and I increased it this year from that to a suggested two pages minimum.

I talked on the #joiito IRC channel about how BlogTalk provides a nice mix, in that it allows practitioners to see what academics or developers are doing, and shows academics and developers what practitioners need. There aren't that many events like it I think, and I'd hope that this mix can be sustained (BTW as someone who operates on both sides of the fence at DERI and boards.ie, I know that this kind of event is very important.)

I believe Reboot, LeWeb, etc. usually just require an abstract, so maybe 10-15 sentences saying what you propose to do. On the other hand, academic conferences often require up to 10-15 pages in length. Perhaps we should have had separate submission methods for practitioners, developers, academics, etc., but I went for a happy (or not so happy as it seems!) medium of two pages.

I agree that for next year we should perhaps go for abstracts first, extended versions by invite. We also had a fairly short turnaround time for BlogTalk 2008 in order to get it going again as soon as possible... I would still like to try and make the submission process for this year "easier", so am open to all suggestions (that don't put an extra burden on our reviewers).

Thanks,

John.
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[John Breslin]

So for those who weren't party to our IRC chat, we've softened the two-page requirement somewhat by changing the CFP to say that we need "an abstract of your presentation, and you can attach a two to four page paper to support your submission". Reviewers will still be advised to review all available material.

Thanks for the feedback here and on IRC Stowe.