What an exciting day today! And what an exhausting one, too! After having travelled over 17 hours I am completely shattered, yet, the excitement I just mentioned is winning over the whole thing! My body just wants to go and get some night sleep. My brain and my heart though are just buzzing from what promises to be one of those events very difficult to forget! Yes, folks, I am talking about IBM‘s Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit, which starts tomorrow and till the 17th of April, where I will be having the opportunity to present, for the first time and following the format of a BOFs session, my pitch on "Thinking out of the inbox: More Collaboration through less e-Mail". W00t! I can’t wait!!
But if I have to be honest with you folks, the main reason why I am so looking forward to this week’s Web 2.0 event is because for the first time in years I would be able to put together a face behind the text, the voice, the interactions of a whole bunch of people I will be meeting up with for the next few days. It is going to be one of those experiences where I will be taking social networking to the extreme once again. The experience through the Web on what you can get from social computing will have NOTHING to do with what is going to happen tomorrow and over the course of the next couple of days.
And today just saw a glimpse of it already. Arrived at the hotel, chilled out a bit, unpacking and getting comfy and, of course, had to get the wireless connection to see what various people were doing and right away and in less than 30 minutes I got my WHOLE week booked up with some really really cool events!! Way awesome! Not only meeting up with a great bunch of social software enthusiasts, but also exposure to lots and lots of great materials, fantastic keynote speakers, lovely dinners and meetups in the evening and after the event already packed with additional activities I will be confirming with different people involved. So if you tried to get in touch with me before, not to worry, I shall be sharing all of the details with you shortly. If you haven’t got in touch just yet, but planning to do so, by all means, I am sure we could spend some time catching up with each other! After all, one thing is the social computing interactions through the Web and another thing is just getting to experience it in real life.
Which is what I am about to do in the next few hours, so you may need to excuse the light blogging coming along, since I doubt I would have much time to blog it all initially due to the fact I will be running around like mad helping out that everything works out all right with the rest of the organisers. Plus attending some sessions, plus meeting some new people, plus getting to talk to some of those folks I know for years! and the list keeps growing larger and larger by the minute!
So much so that I think that in between enjoying the event, the multiple various conversations I will engage with, the social events and whatever else I sense there will be very little time blogging ahead of me. Thus that’s why this time around I am going to try something different…
Remember my twitterrhea over at Lotusphere 2008, where I got a chance to tweet quite a bit on all of the happenings during such a terrific event that I got exposed to? Well, this time is going to be different. To start with, I have gone ahead and created an exclusive new Twitter id: elsuacon, that I will only be twittering about the different events I will be attending from here onwards, and that getting started tomorrow. So I am planning to go wild on that one and make as much annotations as my little brain can process, with the hopes that those notes in Twitter will help with the creation of highlights through various blog posts on what the event has been. Thus the blog posts may not be that often, since the sessions are very very short and there are multiple places where I would have wanted to blog and won’t be able to, but my new Twitter ID, elsuacon, surely is going to get plenty of activity.
So you can imagine that with all that said, I am going to share with you one short, quick warning: do not subscribe to the channel unless you would want to go through some twitterrhea which may take over your own Twitter snippets. You can certainly keep commenting and engaging in the conversation over at my usual Twitter handle, but everything else, like session reviews, anecdotes, summaries, stuff learned, etc. etc. will go into this new Twitter account I have created.
Hopefully, that way, I can put together plenty of thoughts very quick for each session, which I could then summarise and put together with some nice wording after the whole thing is done as part of the Highlights. Apart from the day to day dialogue. At the same time, I am sure you have seen already how one of my fellow IBMers, Sacha Chua, one of the folks I have been wanting to meet up for a long while now!, has created a hashtag for the event under web20summit, so folks can also follow our thoughts easier and much much faster.
And talking about thoughts, there would be plenty of other stuff I could talk about for what’s left of the week, but one step at a time, my body is seriously asking for some rest, and I think I am going to give in. So, stay tuned for plenty more to come and if you see I have gone far too quiet on this blog, it is for sure due to the fact that I am taking the extreme the usage of elsuacon, over at Twitter!
Can’t wait for all the fun to get started!!
Tags: Yorktown Heights, NY, IBM, Watson Research Center, Web 2.0 Summit, Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit, Web20Summit, Web20Summit2008, Web20Summit08, Conference Events, Summit, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Personal KM, Personal Knowledge Management, Personal Knowledge Sharing, Social Software Adoption, MacBook Pro, Twitter, Blogging, Con-Blogging, Metablogging, BOFs, Birds of a Feather, Crowne Plaza, White Plains, Events, Lotusphere2008, Lotusphere, elsuacon, Sacha Chua, Hashtags
