I have two conferences in the next few weeks, the RSA Security conference, in San Francisco, and CCCC, in Louisville, KY.  I’m not actually going in person to CCCC, because again, can’t afford to travel…no travel funding from my school for anyone this year…  Ideally I’ll video-skype in and talk over my slides that I’ll have sent ahead, but if that won’t work, then the panel organizer, Pam Chisum, will give my talk.  She’s a former MA student of mine and now is just starting her dissertation work up at Washington State University.

That talk will be about Twitter, and is a slightly more developed version of the talk I ended up not giving at MiT06 last spring (lousy economy!), about Ethereal Archives.  I’ll be adding a bit about the impact of some recent changes to Twitter, and of the more sophisticated Twitter clients.

The RSA panel is a little different (and apparently it’s “hot!”).  We are putting on two skits about the foolishness of trying to bar employees from social networking sites in order to preclude time-wasting.  It’s foolish for two reasons: first, many people who are even a little tech savvy can figure out how to get around whatever firewall or other barriers, which can create security risks. Second, as has been demonstrated by any number of PEW internet studies, and more formally argued by Clay Shirky, tapping our social networks and/or “the crowd” actually increases productivity and efficiency.  Hopefully there will be time to introduce some of that evidence because it’s not clear to me how much industry folk are aware of this research that might be highly relevant for them.