Blogging from the Connect & Collaborate Conference – Part One

First up was fellow blogger Liz Lawley. Awesome speaker — I guess being a university prof helps. Her slides are here. Highlights (check out the links below, some really neat apps):

• Continuous Partial Attention as a social phenomenon — if you don’t know what this is, just watch what a teenager does online — it’s not multitasking
• Opportunities for using tools like Del.icio.us inside the corporate firewall — not only to allow users to access their bookmarks from any computer, but to allow people to discover the content, interests and expertise of others in the organization
• The emergence of Flickr as not just a tool for sharing photos, but as a tool for sharing information and experiences (Ton Zilstra tells me my photos gave him a better context of who I am and where I live, to understand what my blog was about)
• Opportunities for using Yahoo Search MyWeb 2.0 (it searches just stuff bookmarked by friends or friends-of-friends) to refocus Intranet & Internet searches from content of all employees in the organization (Intranet) and content of the entire world (Internet) to just content of people in their networks inside and outside the organization
• Opportunities for using Dodgeball (a tool that tells friends where you are, and tells you which friends of friends, and which crushes, are nearby, and invites them to contact you if they are interested in doing so, without identifying their precise location) inside the corporate firewall to tell colleagues and clients where you are and invite colleagues and clients and others you would like to meet to contact you if they are in close physical proximity (a neat spin on ‘presence’ apps)
• The reinvention, with ever-growing bandwidth and cheap storage capacity, of the Network as Desktop, and specifically the innovations of 37Signals:
• Basecamp – Project management with a twist or two
• Backpack – Wiki with a robust sharing and permissioning interface
• Tada list – To do lists accessible from anywhere on the web
• Plazes – Discover who is where you are, and where your friends/colleagues/clients are
• The growing importance of backchanneling (allowing people at meetings to multitask without disrupting, and to quietly clarify and amplify what the speaker at the meeting is talking about)