BlogTalk 2008: Preliminary Schedule

The reviewing process for the BlogTalk 2008 conference in Cork, Ireland (which I’m co-organizing with John Breslin, Thomas N. Burg and Tom Raftery) is finally done and a preliminary programme has been put up on the website. A special „Thank You“ goes to all the people from the programme committee who helped us in reviewing the applications – we had about 45 proposals, but only 14 slots, so it was really tough to make a cut…

Like the earlier BlogTalk events, the Cork conference will bring together a very diverse group of speakers and topics – the conference aims at academics, developers and practitioniers from the Social Software field alike, which reflects on the topics, e.g.

• The DIY future: what happens when everyone designs social media? Practical suggestions for handling new ethical dilemmas
• Everyday body regimes: the construction of self in weblogs about dieting
• The impact of Politics 2.0 in Spanish social media: tracking conversations around audiovisual political wars
• What is happening behind the firewall? The emerging role of social software in IBM

BlogTalk 2008 will also be a truly international conference again – we have speakers from the US (2), UK (3), Spain (2), Argentina, Germany, Poland, Norway, Netherlands (2) and Ireland. Great! In addition, there are various panels, software demoes and last but not least promising keynote speakers: We have Salim Ismail, who is currently the head of Brickhouse, Yahoo’s internal ideas factory „where game-changing ideas are brought in, built and launched“, Rashmi Sinha from SlideShare and MindCanvas, Nova Spivack from Radar Networks and a fourth keynote who is yet to be confirmed. Oh, and did I mention that there will be a WebCamp on Social Network portability on the 2nd of March as well? So there are plenty of reasons to travel to Cork in March… :)