Crowdvine for conference : social networking and matching
A little while back I posted on conferences using web 2.0 tools to bring user generated content to the homepage eg. a communal Twitter account, a Flickr tag, a Technorati tag…one conference brought all this together in a groupstream (as opposed to a one person lifestream).
Only problem with this is what if some people don’t use Flickr, how to you cater for the other 20 photo services. Technorati Tags takes care of the whole blogosphere, but then I guess it also does video, photo’s and bookmarks (last time I looked)…but I wonder how much of the photosphere, vidospehere, podosphere, bookmarkosphere it covers…sorry about all the spheres.
The other approach was using a product like Clearspace where attendees can do all their blogging and share photo’s/documents and network…I seem to think that the former aggregation model is better for a bigger conference as people like using their exisiting tools for all their content. I also mentioned matching services like Intronetworks as a way for people to meet like people.
TechCrunch points to Crowdvine (white label hosted social network) new product called Crowdvine for Conferences, this brings together all of what I’ve mentioned above. It is a space to network and share content, and it also aggregates content from 3rd party services, and you can even request to meet people, and it has teamed up with Pathable to provide a matching feature (everyone fills in a profile, the database works out who you are similar to, on event day you are given a badge labelling your tags and related people). Another matching tool is Attendr.
Check out an example.
Another tool Confabb is more like a hosted page for your conference details, each conference has a disussion forum, and there is also a space to aggregate content about that conference via tags from Technorati, YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc…there are over 50,000 conferences listed.
Stuart Henshall has an indepth post about social media and conferences…this is also picked up at the FASTForward blog.
[ADDED 21/07/08: Swift]
[ADDED 21/12/08: Conference networking at Online Information 2008: report and lessons learned]
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John, thanks for the post. Totally agree about aggregation. For a short lived social network around a conference it doesn’t make any sense to lock in the users or data. Plus, as Stuart pointed out, having the content spread out over existing sites extends the reach of the conference.
Comment by Tony Stubblebine — November 28, 2007 @ 2:16 am