My Social computing workshop at CASCON 2006 conference

I chaired a workshop at the CASCON 2006 conference yesterday called Social Computing: Best Practices. The workshop featured 4 speakers, Joey de Villa, Sadek Ali, Bryn Harris and Barry Wellman. I first gave an introduction to the workshop mentioning the rise in social computing, social networking, Web 2.0, blogs, and RSS and how they fit on the Gartner hype cycle. Next, I proceeded to give a brief summary of the CASCON 2005 workshop last year on the Business of Blogging, mentioning how there were not many people that knew about tagging, but certainly that has changed this year. Then we proceeded to the talks.

The first talk was from Joey de Villa of Tucows. Joey is a great speaker, I wish I could learn to be a speaker just like him. Anyways, Joey did his talk democamp style, meaning no slides just pure voice, which actually worked really well I think. His talk was about Failure 2.0, how your company cannot succeed using Web 2.0. I think that is a very important topic that many people ignore, people always talk about the successes of companies using Web 2.0, but you also need to consider the mistakes and how not to make those mistakes.

The second talk was from Sadek Ali of the University of Toronto. Sadek talked about the use of blogs within companies and how one can do data mining of blogs to extract relevant information. The third talk was Bryn Harris from IBM who talked about how to write on the web. One thing that striked me from her talk was her recommendation of using a table of contents for blog posts to put some kind of structure so it would be easier to read. One of the attendees mentioned that usually blog posts are not linear, many people will start on a particular topic and then it will lead into another topic. However, she responded that the table of contents would probably help in long posts to help navigate around in the blog, which I kind of have to agree.

The last talk was from Barry Wellman from the University of Toronto. Barry talked about the Internet in Everyday life, and he talked about his Connected Lives project and his studies with net usage from a community in Toronto called Netville. Barry always gives inspiring and entertaining talks, he's giving a more detailed talk of yesterday's talk at U of T next week.

After the talks, we had a panel discussion which discussed the following questions:

1) How can companies begin to see social computing as a viable business tool and not just a teenage or youth fad?

2) Is YouTube worth $1.67 billion and why?

3) Is advertising the best way to make money from Web 2.0 technologies? Are there better ways?

I recorded the discussion which I will upload later, so stay tuned!

Then we had a break, followed by a breakout session. We broke into 3 groups with each group discussing 3 questions which were circulated among 3 facilitators of which I was one of the facilitators. The 3 breakout questions were the following:

1) What can businesses learn from successes of social networking sites and tools such as Ryze, LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook? How can businesses leverage these successes in their own companies?

2) With big companies paying big money for small Web 2.0 startups (eg. Google that paid 1.67 billion dollars for YouTube), are we seeing a breakout of Web 2.0 into business or is this a bubble or fad?

3) Are there any Web 2.0 tools that are ready for business applications? Which ones are good ones? Why are they good for business?

There was great discussion and talk especially on Google's acquisition of YouTube and what this means for the industry in general. Each group designated one person to give a summary of their discussion to the rest of the audience.

So, I think the workshop went extremely well and I enjoyed listening and engaging with the attendees on the breakout questions. I think the discussion is by far the most interesting of the workshop, how to engage your participants, the workshop is not just listening but also interacting.

On Technorati: cascon2006, social computing