March 26, 2007

ICWSM-2007

International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (March 26-28, 2007 - Boulder, Colorado USA)
Recent years have seen a flourishing of social media, the promise of the WWW as envisioned by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, coming to fruition. Across the world, individuals can share opinions, expertise, snapshots in time and space with little technological barrier. This is the fundamental shift: significant advances in the ease of publishing content. Creating web content was for years the domain of tech-savvy people; now the barrier has been torn down. Perhaps the most visible among the successes of social media in recent years is the blogosphere. Tens of thousands of new blogs are created every day; content from blogs appears all over: news portals, search results, corporate public relations. Even those who are unaware of the blogosphere are still influenced by its content. Blogs are highly visible today, but other forms of conversational spaces continue to flourish, especially message boards, mailing lists, review sites and Usenet. Social media covers all forms of sharing: from photos, to videos, to recommendations. In the past few years, many examples of social media have become hugely successful. Flickr is a premier photo sharing site; del.icio.us has become a touchstone for sharing recommendations of websites; Web 2.0 applications in general abound with newcomers in the social media space. One of the fascinating aspects of social media has been the drive from within to study the ecology as it evolves. People act at once as creators, observers and influencers of the space in which they participate. At the same time, businesses are quickly grasping the potential benefit to attending to the new space of social media. Monitoring the aggregate trends and opinions revealed by social media provides valuable insight to a number of business applications: marketing intelligence, competitive intelligence.

Start date: March 26, 2007 07:41 PM

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