Hear about the hits (and misses) from SXSW at Third Tuesday Toronto

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Did you miss South by Southwest this year? Are you wondering what all the sound and fury actually amounted to?

Now you can hear about what really mattered at SXSW from three social media leaders who were there. Keith McArthur, Dave Fleet, and Karen Geier have just returned from SXSW. And they’ve come back with stories to tell. What were the most promising and intriguing ideas they heard? What were the biggest fails? Where is social media going? What are the top trends we we should be looking for over the next year? What’s hot? What’s not?

Keith, Dave and Karen will share what they heard and learned at SXSW at the next Third Tuesday Toronto on March 29.

Register online to attend

If you’re interested in participating, click over to the Third Tuesday Toronto meetup site and register online to attend.

Acknowledging Third Tuesday’s sponsors

As always, I want to thank the sponsors of Third Tuesday: CNW Group, Rogers Communications, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, Radian6 and Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. Thanks to these sponsors, we are able to program great speakers in cities across Canada, including Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Ottawa.

 

 

Inside PR: The Web doesn't have a Forget button

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Inside PR 2.45 [ 14:45 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I are all here for this week’s Inside PR. We talk about a couple things this week – community-driven events and online sharing.

Are unconferences and community-driven events dying?

We look back one more time at our great experience at this year’s highly successful Podcamp Toronto. It takes a huge amount of effort to organize this type of event. And as professionally organized events have moved into the social media space, have they lessened our appetite and the pool of volunteers willing to organize unconferences? Do the professionally organized conferences cause us to have expectations of a conference that a community-based, volunteer driven conference can’t meet?

What’s happening in your community. Are there still vibrant unconferences or other community-driven events where you live? Are they becoming more frequent and more successful? Or rarer? Less well attended? We’d love to hear from you about this.

Sharing is Forever

We also talk about online sharing – or over-sharing. Martin starts the conversation by pointing to two sites that let you share your clickstream. Wow!

Would you want to share with others all the sites that you visit? Do you use the Web for work-related research? Is this an idea for a business that simply won’t work – at least if people appreciate the value of making conscious decisions about what we share.

Often, a choice to share is forgotten or poorly understood. We’ve already seen how Facebook’s frequent changes of their terms of service leads to people sharing information they hadn’t consciously realized they were sharing. Or think of Tumblr. How many people shared information on Tumblr, became bored with the platform and forgot that it is still spewing information about them. As Gini says, The Web doesn’t have a “Forget” button. Sharing is forever.

 

What Keeps Jacob Glick Awake at Night?

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We live in a Google world. Google Search. Google Reader. Google Maps. GMail, Google Translate, Google Docs, Blogger. Android. Chrome. Google News. Google seems to reach into every aspect of our online lives.

But will it stay that way? If there is one constant on the Internet, it is the inevitability of change. And that’s not just change in technology. That’s change in how we use it, how we relate to one another, how we see institutions and our expectations of them. What we find useful today we might not find useful tomorrow.

Our next speaker at Third Tuesday Ottawa will be Jacob Glick, Senior Policy Counsel at Google. This role at Google gives him a unique perspective on many of the most important issues that will shape the continuing evolution of the Internet and how Google itself is evolving to maintain its relevance and to live up to its slogan, “Don’t be evil.”

I’m very much looking forward to the discussion that I know Jacob will prompt. It should be a good one.

Register online to attend

If you’re interested in participating, click over to the Third Tuesday Ottawa meetup site and register online to attend.

Acknowledging Third Tuesday’s sponsors

As always, I want to thank the sponsors of Third Tuesday: CNW Group, Rogers Communications, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, Radian6 and Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. Thanks to these sponsors, we are able to program great speakers in cities across Canada, including Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Ottawa.

Are you a .ca? Show your pride

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Third Tuesday has a new sponsor – the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA). CIRA is responsible for Canada’s top level web domain – .ca. CIRA’s sponsorship will enable third Tuesday to expand and do more programming. (I’ll write more about this in a future post).

I use a.ca domain for my blog, ProPR.ca. I want to speak with my community of interest wherever they are in the world. But I’m also proud of where I come from. Signalling that I’m Canadian provides people with a reference point. It anchors me in my home community.

We have a lot to be proud of in Canada. Now CIRA is giving us a chance to recognize and celebrate some of the best initiatives that use a .ca domain.

CIRA has launched the .ca Impact Awards. The awards will recognize people who are using their .ca websites to make a positive difference for their communities. Awards will be given out for each of four categories: e-learning, small business, not for profit, and web technology. The winners will receive a prize of $5000 and be recognized at an awards ceremony at this year’s Mesh Conference in Toronto on May 24, 2011.

The deadline for award submissions is March 25. So if you think that your .ca website has had a positive impact on your community, why not submit an entry to the first.ca Impact Awards? You’ve done something remarkable. Now be recognized for it.

Interested in more information? Take a look at this video.

(Disclosure: not only is CIRA a sponsor of Third Tuesday, but they also a client of Thornley Fallis and 76design. To paraphrase the old commercial, I liked using the domain so much, I went to work for the people who run it.)