Social Networking

My background is in literary analysis and philosophy of language --I actually read Lakoff for the first time 20 years ago. Still find it funny people in the lefty blogosphere think he is the second coming of Christ

Anyhoo ... let's get a bit more granular here.

Let's start with the title of our panel :
Is Cyberspace Colorblind? Addressing Race and Class Online

Right there we have an interesting juxtaposition. Why are COLORBLIND and RACE lumped in with the word CLASS? From a semiological point of view this is particularly significant.

Without trying to develop assumptions of intent, from a semantics point of view it at least shows that grammatically, the organizers look at race not as a BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE but as something associated with CAPITAL. Or, in the world of web 2.0 should we call it CAPITALS - social capital, political capital, technological capital, financial capital.

The issue here then is what do we mean by :
1. Race
2. Class

And to tie it in with the technology aspect of the conference, we need to further define :
3. Cyberspace
4. Online

That would then pose the interesting dynamic of the word
5. Colorblind

Most Web 2.0 technologies have been developed from a cultural dominance standpoint. It is all in English and not just any English but the US English keyboard format.

To those of us who have international switches on our keyboards, it is obvious the US keyboard format is the dominant grammatical expression of the web --a dominance that was not obvious when publishing online meant using a WYSIWYG application like DreamWeaver.

John Edwards by Liza Sabater

I have to say that John Edwards may be the hardest working candidate from the whole crop of presidential hopefuls on both ends of the political spectrum. It's not just the fact that he is the only one who continues to put out the most policy proposals on a regular basis. It's the fact that he started earlier and with a clearly long-term strategy represented by the community platform his developed under for JohnEdwards.com.

Whereas Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton have created sites to support their candidacies money making strategies, Edwards site was founded as a platform for communications, strategy deployment and community building before it became a source for his presidential fundraising.

You can tell by perusing John Edwards's site that he has a well developed and strategized use of blogs, forums, chatrooms and other new media tools. The feel and tone of his site is head and shoulders above the Obama and Clinton sites as far as full civic engagement that goes beyond his candidacy.

Which is why I am completely impressed by his use of Memorial Day to call for action. This is the kind of strategy that would not only spring from an online community but that would be called by someone who knows they can pull it off with the community of communicators, influencers and citizen leaders they have cultivated.

Selfbubble by Heather Clisby of ClizBiz

This is what you end up doing during the first hour at SXSW --you sort through all the schwag and crap. What's funny about this photograph is that it is one of at least 4 pics taken within an hour by passersby. People were whipping out cameras and cell phones to click me in my bubble of schwaggarific mess.

SXSW is all about the generalist influencers. There's a lot of tech, media and political conferences that litter event calendars but SXSW is the place to go for the people who are experts cross disciplines. So you'll have people with strong practices as technologists, desgins, mediaologists, enterpreneurs, activists. I honestly do not know of any other conference in the United States that has the quantity of influencers that SXSW has.

Deanna Zandt, Lynn D. Johnson, Robert Scoble, Elisa Camahort, Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardin, Christopher Carfi, Thomas Van der Wal, George Kelly, Baratunde Thurston, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Chris Norton, Nancy Scola, Rachel Krammer Bussel, Erica Mauter, Jason Tooney, Christian Crumlish, Noel Hidalgo, Mary Hodder, Min Jung Kim, Tony Pierce, Steve Garfield, Chris Pirillo ... and I know I am missing a lot of other people I personally know, but the coffee and the new daylight savings time are screwing up my short term memory.

Which brings me to the toy of choice for SXSW : TWITTER.

OMFG!

Talk about early adopters. It's hard for me to explain how addictive it is, but, just so you get a taste for it, keep this window open for about an hour. Make sure you refresh every 10-20 minutes.

Then you'll understand :