I just came back from the 4th Social Computing Symposium hosted by Microsoft Research. I organized the first two so it’s always a little strange to go back as “just” an attendee. There’s, well, much less to do. I guess I enjoy running around frantically herding the cats, so to speak. You also develop a much deeper understanding of who’s who and who’s doing what when you are hosting vs. attending an event. It’s becoming more bloggers and industry than research, though there’s still a research presence.
That aside, I quite enjoyed seeing a lot of familiar faces and meeting new ones. I talked to Ned Gulley at Mathworks for a while and learned all about their matlab programming contests , they are doing a very interesting experiment in fostering collaboration through competition by enabling people to copy and paste each other’s code in algorithm contests.
They had five minute blitz sessions, where the speakers were selected by the participants’ votes early in the morning. I love this format (similar to Ignite), it inspired two of my favorite talks: Clay Shirky talking about uses of technology to instigate revolution and Anil Dash of Sixpart talking about the similarities between the remix culture of rap music and the quoting/linking behaviors of bloggers—both leading to sticky copyright situations. We also heard some admonishments from Jenny Levine, a librarian blogger reminding us that there are are some very real perils to be found in relying on the collective intelligence of user generated content.
Some emerging themes: merging social tech with social play/games, data visualizations for user generated content, the meaningful impact of social tech on “real” life which is not always positive—all mixed in with a sense of bated breath waiting for the next cool thing as we currently spin around already existing web 2.0 social technologies.
