Walking the Talk: Atlanta's SoCon '08

After the overwhelming success of the first social media un-conference held last year, SoCon '08 picked up where we left off a year ago and kept running.

We've come a long way in a year. Social media has left the old vs. new media conversation behind. The big guns wowed us, but now we're translating what we learned from them into lessons useful to our own situations. And writing our own books. It's all about learning by doing.

The best news is that we are truly living social media; using the tools. And SoCon '08 provides a great example of just this point.

It all began before the event. We had our own gathering place set up ahead of time to meet and get to know one another. We had used Crowdvine last year as well, and it proved to be most effective once again in giving us a running start in networking and thus getting the most out of our 1.5 day unconference.

Once SoCon 'o8 began, the social media tools were put into use in earnest.

Robert Rhyne Armstrong live blogged the event from the opening presentation and open mic through the break out sessions. He used Cover It Live to do so. Check out his blog Tread Heavily and notice that it's all there--even comments from others as he blogged live.

Amani Channel posted video of the event on his My Urban Channel blog. Nice job, complete with interviews. (And not just because I'm on it!)

Several hundred photos were uploaded to the SoCon '08 Flickr group.

Josh Hallett made a very insightful observation of just what an unconference is on his blog Hyku.

While SoCon '08 is over, we're continuing the conversation with a new SoCon group on yet another social media networking tool, Ning, setup by Leonard Witt. Come on over and join in. Who knows what we'll cook up and be reporting next year at SoCon '09!