conferences | Social Signal

A few months ago, I left a conference thinking how great it would be if I could have checked up on the speakers beforehand: not just their bios, but their reputations for delivering engaging, useful and, yes, entertaining talks. From that spun out the idea for a site where anyone could rate speakers and their presentations. My back-of-the-napkin diagrams got pretty elaborate... before I filed them away in our now-bulging File Drawer O' Great Ideas.

If you love to visit that exciting, magical place where technology meets social change, you won't want to miss the 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit, taking place in Oakland November 17-19.

We wish we'd been able to make it to DrupalCamp Toronto, but client business kept us planted firmly on this side of the continent.

Still, we were able to attend in spirit: by reading Khalid's (and others') terrific blog coverage of the event, and by oohing and aahing over his photo of the T-shirt. The DrupalCamp logo is brilliant.

(What's that, you say? You see the Social Signal logo on the back of the T-shirt? Why, yes – we are proud sponsors of DrupalCamp Toronto!)

Now, if there are any of those T-shirts left over, I suppose receiving a few of them might take the sting out of having had to miss the camp itself...

I just wrapped up a panel with David Jones of Fleishman-Hillard and HarperCollins' Steve Osgoode, ably animated by Scotiabank's Michael Seaton. Very smart people, these folks.

The subject was whether it's possible to market in social media and virtual worlds. But one theme kept coming up again and again: risk.

What if users say bad things about us on our blog? What if nobody shows up to participate? What if this flops?

Here's where I come down on those questions: