intertwingly

It's been fun participating vicariously in the recent Microsoft Social Software Symposium via weblogs, IM, and IRC.

Scoble links to the various ways you can get up to date information.  It seems to me that DayPop, Feedster, Technorati, et. al., are rapidly replacing the high traffic link blogs (like Scoble!) as connectors in our little blog ecosystem here.

David Weinberger provides an excellent overview of the various sessions.  Elizabeth Lane Lawley describes the role the backchannel that spontaneously materialized played.  It is interesting to read this in light on her observations of backchannels in general.

Picking out two things that I found particularly interesting.  First Liz:

After lunch, however, an interesting thing happened. I posted some critical comments about a speaker’s presentation, and a Microsoft Research employee who I knew only by name called me out on it. He expressed concerns about whether it was “fair” to criticize someone who wasn’t there to defend his or herself, and pointed out that we were a scary audience, and should be more generous.

On the topic of fairness, it seems to me that the days of the host deciding who gets to talk when (or more precisely, who people should chose to listen to) are numbered.  Or even, for that matter, who gets to attend (<grin>).  Furthermore, the trend will be towards panelists that actively participate in the backchannel.  At SXSW, I did exactly that (as captured by this parody).

Secondly, it seems to me that the ingredients that made this audience “scary” were exactly the same ones that caused the backchannel to emerge in the first place.  The audience consisted of intelligent people who not only were knowledgeable on the subject area, but were ones that are prone to making their own choices on where they want to invest their attention.  I'm reminded of Doc and David's World of Ends.  Perhaps "audience" should join "consumer" and "content" in Doc's frequent on target rants on this subject.

The other thing that caught my eye was from JOHO:

In another study, they looked at 400 early adopters of a new IM client at Microsoft. Managers and older users use it differently. Technophobia and switching costs are dropping. Socially, you can IM down but not up, which is maybe why the managers like it.

I guess social norms must vary considerably from place to place, as IM is one of the primary ways in which I keep in contact with my management.