Blog Conferences Galore!

There are social media, blog, and Web 2.0 conferences galore. It's like the California Gold Rush and like that event, the blogging infrastructure providers, including conference organizers, will be among the winners. A few miners got rich but the vast majority did not.

At the Blog World Expo in Vegas (Nov. 8-9) you can take your chances on getting good workshops after you put your money down. With limited space at the good sessions, it is indeed a gamble.

A better bet seems to be the Executing Social Media Conference in Atlanta Nov. 14-15. Pricey for students even after the big discount but you know what you will get to hear and that you will be able to interact with substantial industry people.

My excursion to Atlanta last week to learn about Iridium satcom left me with lots of information but many new questions about the data service.

Catching Up on Iridium Satcom

I need to catch up on the physical technology that enables the social side. So I'm off to Atlanta and SITA for only two days to find out more about the Iridium communication satellite services. The voice quality is like a mobile phone. The data rate is low. But can it do text messaging? That may be enough.
The networking side of the trip is key. But do they blog?

Informative seller of social media consulting

This is not a commercial endorsement but www.vocecommunications.com certainly shows its competence and benevolence by all the interesting social media info, blogs and contacts on its web site.

Blogs are a subset of . . .

We may recognize a blog when we read it. But what about in the future? My research may be dated if it is just about blogs. We are certainly well beyond the basic blogs of 5 -10 years ago. Perhaps "blogs and other social media" would be adequate.
In a related concern, I'm working on some scales to rate the social and informational dimensions of blogging in organizations. There may be other dimensions such as mobilizing social resources. Following Lin (2000), we may find instrumental and expressive returns to blogging.
The scales can be used to construct a "blogging index" or a "social media usage" index.

Dissertation Proposal Approved

Got some good advice and approval 9/28/07. The main needs are to further narrow the focus and define the type of internal organizational blog that I ask about.
Grudin & Efimova make the point in their HICSS 2007 paper about blogs at Microsoft that corporate blogs and employee blogs are different. Team blogs are were said not to be common.
Juech & Stobbe have a 2005 paper on the Deutsche Bank Research site with a classification scheme from a German-language paper by Zerfass. It's suggestive but I don't think that it illustrates the full overlap of information and social purposes of blogs.
My proposal did suggest some dimensions of blogging experience for individual respondents. I'll be refining my definition and in the process I may define a blogging index.
I'm grateful to be "launched"