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.