Just a little promo for a workshop I am organizing here in beautiful summery Toronto... Coming up July 24-25, 2007.

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Have you heard the buzz about Facebook, MySpace, blogging, and other popular social web tools, and wondered whether they could be useful to your organization... but not known where to start, or how to sort the good stuff from the hype? Come and learn from two of Canada's top experts on web strategy and participation design for the not-for-profit sector!

The latest generation of Web 2.0 (or "social web") strategies and tools offer powerful opportunities for organizations to improve the way they work, communicate their messages, empower others, and serve the public. In this workshop you will learn how the latest tools for online collaboration and community building can make your organization smarter and more effective.

WHO:

Are you on the edge of your seat? Well, here it is:

When working in a text field to be submitted (blog post, Basecamp entry, Writeboard version, long blog comment, whatever)...

ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS select all text and then copy it to your clipboard, before you hit submit. On a Mac, this means hitting apple-a, and then apple-c, before you hit submit. On a PC, ctrl-a, then ctrl-c.

There are no exceptions to this rule. It must become habit. If you do not make it habit, then you will become complacent, and one day, you will have fine-tuned all your brilliant words into perfection, and you will hit submit, and you will learn the harsh lesson of the 2.0 overlords. You will lose it all. Either your wifi will crap out, or some server somewhere will be down, or something else will f#@$ you up. Do not take this lesson lightly.

For added security, I highly recommend installing a multi-clipboard program on your computer. I use iClip and I love it. That way, I have access to the last 10 things I've copied and pasted, and it has saved my ass many times.

That is all. Carry on with your day, now, and may the protection offered by this rule shine upon your work.

Wow. I just read Boris's post on Bryght.com about this new web app called Mailroom, which sounds pretty nifty. It's a solution for businesses that does all kinds of things I bet you never dreamed your email would be able to do...

Once inside Mailroom, just answer your email like normal. Mailroom automatically saves the answers and starts to suggest them as replies for future email. What’s more, Mailroom uses the same advanced technology that powers modern spam filters to read the contents of your emails and learn which responses go with each question.

If I had a company, I would suggest it to them, or look into implementing... but I don't have a company, so instead I'll blog about it. :) I keep on being astounded by what the web innovators out there are up to....

(Sidebar: I am starting to feel like I'd like to be part of a company, in the sense that I'd like a regular job with a regular paycheque. Anyone cool hiring Sarah-style social change geeks out there??)

Now that the 30 Days of Sustainability is (are?) over, it's time to step up my work on the upcoming Web of Change conference site. Whoo hoo! I can't wait to get it going.

It's been a fascinating process already. We're building a Drupal site, and so the functionality possibilities are immense. However, the brilliant Phillip Smith and I have together been drilling down to what the users of this site will actually NEED.

It's a delicate balancing act. On one hand, I feel like we should be on the front end of what is possible, as a social change technology conference and as something of a network hub in that movement, and so the temptation exists to go all gung-ho and integrate all kinds of community functionality. Let us build it, because we can! Social software fun for everyone! However, the other reality is that we are a conference site, and our main objective is to get people excited about the most lovely conference on the circuit, and to want to register. Also, realistically, many of our attendees are more about the social change side than the social software side, and aren't actually interested in too much Web 2.0 schtuff. I mean, there's a few of us that'll be trying to get them to drink the Kool-Aid and all, but still.

One question that Phillip and I were contemplating was whether to have the blog on the main page, or have it as a link to a separate page. I think I'm voting for main page, but below the fold. Thoughts?

In any event, today I gathered up a bunch of conference websites for comparison purposes. I thought it would make for some interesting linking and commentating...

Mesh (Toronto) - Not a bad site, but some poor copy writing in parts. I'd like to attend, actually - definitely overdue for a Toronto trip.

NetSquared Conference (San Jose) - Personally i find the conference page somewhat less than clear, though the main Netsquared page is certainly a piece of Drupal loveliness to behold. Anyone want to sponsor me to attend this one? I so need to be there.

NTen Technology Conference - This is so not a beautiful site. But they are so having a Yoga for Geeks session next year.

South by Southwest Interactive - cool, but pretty busy. I intend to be in attendance next year, incidentally. It's fairly torturous watching the Flickr photos of everyone else having a blast roll on in.

Webzine (shouts out to Eddie!) - Functional, urban, hip. Are you having one again this September?

O'Reilly Emerging Technology - Nothing here to make me gasp, or even really wish I had been there. Ours will be nicer. :)

Anyone else have links to other sites, interesting or otherwise? I'm especially interested in conference sites that are actually attractive AND easy to navigate.

All right, I've got some serious sore forearms and it's concerning me so I'm gonna shut her down and head to bed. Ciao...

This just in (in case you care): Writely has been acquired by Google. See here: http://writely.blogspot.com/2006/03/google-yep-google.html.

Recalling my mission to make valuable new web tools understandable to the less-webby masses, allow me to explain why *I* care. Writely is an online word processor - kind of like Word for the web. I've been using it for a couple of months, and I've grown rather fond of it. To me, it epitomizes many of the reasons why I get excited about web technology, at its best. Why? Because Writely has great potential for fostering collaboration.

The main thing that makes it different from Word is that multiple people can work on a document simultaneously (just not on the same sentence at the same time. Anything else goes.) Writely tracks all revisions as previous versions that you can refer back to, and eliminates forever the horrible experience of passing around multiple versions of the same document, clogged up with endless "tracked" changes.

So, for example, earlier this week I was asked to help some friends write copy for a software product that they're launching soon. I plugged the bare-bones I was given into Writely, and did my best to come up with clear, engaging text. Then I added the project lead to the document as a "collaborator", and together we worked, talking out loud sometimes and working independently at others. Once we were feeling pretty good about what we'd come up with, we added in another project member to look it over. He made a bunch of changes that I thought were terrific, and preserved the good in what had already been done.

Together the three of us fine-tuned our document, live on the internet, until we were satisfied. What emerged felt like a truly collaborative effort. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy, and it was very clear to me that what we had created using Writely was better than what any of us would have come up with alone. I'm also quite certain that it was better than what would have resulted had we passed around a Word document and all added our two cents at different times.

I think there's something about giving over to the flow, trusting the process, watching your words be changed by another... and letting the wisdom of the group emerge. That's what social software can facilitate, at its best. That's why I get excited about this stuff! Maybe if we build the right technology, it really will contribute to the emergence of new capacities in human consciousness. Then our challenge will be to learn wise use of our tools, and discernment about when the tech is helpful, and when it is actually distancing us from the presence and awareness required to move towards the evolution of our consciousness.

(Big words for a blogger, eh? Oh, and if I've sold you on Writely, get yourself on the new waitlist quick.)

Just checking in from the keynote addresses at Northern Voice.  Robert Scales just took a great picture of me and Kris and I thought I'd stick it up, since I generally don't link enough images in here!

Moosecamp yesterday was fun - frenetic, unstructured, but fun. There's a ridiculous amount of Flickr-ing happening. I taught a yoga class. KK led a very successful photocamp. We had a picnic in Stanley Park, with mucho sausages, condiments galore, many photos taken, and probably hundreds of freezing fingers and toes in aggregate. (Beautiful day it may have been, but damn it was chilly come 8pm last night.)

I'm looking forward to the rest of the day, particularly the How Your Blog and Change the World panel. More later, likely...
   

Ha ha ha ha ha... This made me laugh. I've been doing a lot of reading, trying to sort out the "bubble that will burst vs revolution that will change the world" debate about the evolution of the web. I found the irreverant Go Flock Yourself quite by accident and just had to pass along the following. It's commentary on an excerpt from Robert Scoble's new book about business blogging, in which he gives his list of six things that make blogging different from other forms of media.

“Social” (did the editor put his foot down against “Socialable?”) isn’t a misnomer, but the vast majority of the segments of this “one big conversation!” that I’ve witnessed play out like one big shitty office cocktail party — a bunch of people smiling and nodding and half-paying attention to one another while their brains fiendishly work out the problem of how to refocus the conversation on themselves.

I had to chuckle. I love the idea that the web is helping people to become participants rather than just consumers, and helping people to find their voice and express themselves. But some of the zealous proclamations about the massive democratic conversation that is the blogosphere can be a bit much, and it's true that talking does not necessarily equate to contributing value to the conversation.

(Yesterday I also read "The Amorality of Web 2.0" by Nick Carr, where he writes about the religious fervour some people have about the web, and his particular concerns about the growing "culture of the amateur." I'll leave it to him to make his point.)

For myself, I am left to conclude that the important factor remains the consciousness of the people using the tools. Just as individuals have to learn skills to communicate and collaborate in the "real world" (things like good listening skills, the practice of not acting or speaking from a reactionary or "triggered" state, the discernment to know when your comments are adding value, and when they are merely masturbatory, etc), so do we have to learn and apply the online equivalents of those skills. I think it's this personal and collective evolution of awareness that will determine whether or not the emerging technology will live up to all its hype.

(Sheesh, and I thought I was just going to post the quote!)