Conference – Social Tools for Business Use: Web 2.0 and the new participatory culture

And I’m speaking, along with all sorts of interesting people. Here’s the rough overview.

I just confirmed the location and pimped it on Upcoming (which I wish more event organizers would do for themselves rather than allowing their Web 2.0 savvy speakers to do for them).

According to the schedule My slot is the end of day 1. This is just about perfect, as I get to alter my message based on whatever comes before (especially since Darren Waters from the BBC is going to be covering virtual worlds too) and then relax, watch the talks and network on day 2.

Day 1:

• Opening keynote: What will “businesslike” mean when business isn’t like business anymore? (Euan Semple)
• Enterprise 2.0 – towards a social infrastructure for collaboration and collective intelligence (Lee Bryant, Headshift)
• Practical Uses of Web 2.0 Technologies in a business environment (Phil Bradley, Internet Consultant)
• We’re All Virtual Now – news, culture, politics and community in the networked world (Darren Waters, Technology Editor, BBC News Interactive)
• Case study: An Inside View On How IBM Uses Social Networking to manage its own precious knowledge (Ian McNairn, Web Innovation & Technology Program Director for Global e-business Transformation in IBM SWG)
• Web 2.0 and Virtual Worlds (Roo Reynolds, Metaverse Evangelist, IBM)

Day 2:

• Fostering Adoption: A strategy for encouraging use of social software in business (Suw Charman, Independent Social Software Consultant)
• Social software in a Hard World: the reality of using blogs and wikis in a global professional services business (Ruth Ward, Head of Knowledge Systems and Development, Allen & Overy LLP)
• How the Guardian is Moving Community from the Edge to the Centre of its Strategy (Kevin Anderson, Blogs Editor, Guardian Unlimited)
• Blogging & Other Social Media – How the Technology is changing business & law (Justin Patten, Principal, Human Law)
• Combining Wikis and the Semantic Web: moving towards Web3.0 (John Davies, Manager, Next Generation Web Research, BT)

Nice to see a couple of familiar names there. Most were easy to link to, though for John Davies I ended up pointing to the most relevant podcast (does he really not maintain a blog?). Even more shockingly Kevin Anderson, blog editor at Guardian Unlimited has an empty blog there).

How’s this for serendipity… I get to meet one of the directors of Headshift, who, at http://www.headshift.com/about/who.cfm, use the rather lovely (CC attribution licensed) Lego vignette from Legozilla, which he submitted to a group I formed in Flickr. The world is a small, small place.