I have recently been presenting at Royal Holloway's "Politics: Web 2.0 Conference" just outside London, extremely well organized by Professor Andy Chadwick and the New Political Communication Unit at Royal Holloway.
Yes, perhaps the focus could partly be considered a bit "simplistic" and not too academic - Does web 2.0 hinder or help democratic citizenship? - but in the end the event was fresh, enjoyable and cutting-edge, surely reaching its goals. A success.
Thanks to Andrew Chadwick for setting it up all and for the spirit and freshness he was able to transfer to the whole event.
Unsurprisingy, an academic who consistently deals with Web 2.0 is at the same time a very open, enjoyable and interactive person.
Despite not entirely matching my research interests - it is not always a disadvantage - and a clear (expected and pretty reasonable) bias towards American politics, elections, campaigns and candidates' strategies - rather than counter-politics, social movements and social activism - I had the opportunity to have my arguments heard by an excellent and surprising morning audience (including Mike Turk) and exchange my ideas with several scholars and practitioners.
Still struck by the gap in the amount of "liveblogging", "microblogging" and "twittering" done by Americans compared to Europeans, I was very pleased to discover the effects of it on me, thanks to Micah Sifry on his "Personal Democracy" and "TechPresident". :)
Very well representing such freshness and the openness to networking and sharing of those "New politics" events (compared to the theoretical barricades of some sociological venues), Micah Sifry was kind enough to invite me to the surely exciting event he is organizing in New York City, June 22-23, 2008. A good opportunity to advertise it now: it's called "Rebooting the system" and will include great speakers such as Michael Arrington, Vinton Cerf, Larry Lessig, Tom Steinberg, Patrick Ruffini among the many.
Other notes on the event, the people I met + my presentation coming soon...
This quick post has the goal of introducing one of the most complete and well-produced resources on the pre-history and History of the Internet & the World Wide Web, named here as the "Social Web" (though not properly defined, but mostly broadly associated to "Social Software"). Embedded here are the slides of Trebor Scholtz, available also in article-form, posted on his website Collectivate.net.
Carsonified, a small company based in Bath, England, created this resource while organising the "Future of Web Apps" Event in Miami.
I have been to one of the FOWAExpo events in London, at the Excel Centre. Carsonified was able to attract excellent speakers, "bringing" all of them to the Old Continent.
A large and well-mixed list of contacts across the industry is the secret for the success of such events.
By harvesting from the same list, Carsonified was able to involve 3,000 - among friends and colleagues in the industry - to vote and thus recontruct the list of the ten best Web Applications.
Surely on the best products of today's Web, as Technorati might confirm, Read/Write Web Blog is not only a source of precious and well-thought contents, but also of good practices.
Unlike the author of the present website, , the Read/Write Web posts with extreme constancy and with the same consistency adds to the more traditional posts weekly, monthly and yearly summaries of the best bits from the contents of the website.
I found this practice, well represented by this article, "Best of 2007 ReadWriteWeb Editor's Picks", an extremely good way of adding quality editorial work to the blog while making our lives way easier in finding the best ideas and spotting where the best debates lie. Conversely, a not-as-good practice is that of noticing it in January and speaking about this in March only...
Ah, at Read/Write Web they have also interesting opinions on which article would best suite January First (2008).
Something like a guide to online giving (or lending), for example. More on Philanthropy 2.0 coming soon.
After a couple of months of intense academic work I finally decided to give myself some time for adding a couple of cool - and necessary - features to this website (blog? don't like this label...)
No need to spend time on conceptually discussing why I added these "components", or on the whys for doing it just now despite embracing the spirit of the adult Web 2.0 era a couple of years ago.
Here's a list. And I'm not done. Just enjoy it.
Tags finally applicable to each article + possibility for readers to create new tags and label my posts
Content-as-cloud, linked to the tagging application
Instant Search, a very effective AJAX module for searching the content without the need to refresh or open a page
Free commenting (finally), another excellent AJAX component, commens are instantly posted (e-mail required though)
Live User Chat (dedicated to registered users and friends)
A lean "blogroll" that complements my broader section with a presence in the frontpage
admin
, the Read/Write Web posts with extreme constancy and with the same consistency adds to the more traditional posts weekly, monthly and yearly summaries of the best bits from the contents of the website. 
