DJALCHEMI

Online Social Networks Conference (feeling overloaded)

I'm currently taking part in Online Social Networks 2005, and online conference that runs until 23 February — as the web site says, "It's not to late to register". It's organised by leading evangelists for online networking, Howard Rheingold, Lisa Kimball, and Joi Ito. Most of the proceedings are available only to people who have registered, but Joi Ito has posted an openly accessible mp3 of the opening keynote session via his blog.

It's been a long time since I participated in one of these events — the last one being Collaborate 98, produced by some of the same team, which now has its proceedings openly available for browsing online. I think the price has dropped significantly in the last seven years (Online Social Networks 2005 is $35 to register, which is just under £20).

The conference is just starting up before more focused business gets under way next week. But already I'm finding it hard to keep up with the many voices. Online networks used to be smaller and less Babel-like than this.

So far the comment that best expresses my feelings is "Head space - it's all used up. Blogs, RSS/Atom, wikis, flickr, del.icio.us, 43 things, furl, pubsub, etc." (from conference participant George Siemens, who meant this to apply to other people, though I use it to apply to me).

My coping mechanism is to skim the proceedings, filtering largely on the basis of names that I recognise (the well-known figures like Rheingold and David Woolley, plus a couple of friends from Ecademy). In the process I pick up the odd little gem like this del.icio.us tutorial. Well, I haven't actually viewed this yet, but I have furled it for future reference, which is as close to absorbing information as I get these days.