I posted the pilot of a new video project that Nolan and I have been working on called Southern Fried Tech. The purpose of the video series is to illuminate all the great technologies, technology culture and innovation happening in the Southeastern U.S. While our community is by far akin to Silicon Valley, it’s not that bad either. It’s all in the way you view it and how you can leverage what exists here in terms of resources and capital.

We have a lot of work to do on the format and the content. We’re amateurs in every respect. However, thanks for the Grayson Daughters for her help, prodding and expertise. Grayson is helping us as the producer and has been wonderful to work with on this project. Also, thanks to Fat Milk for the post-production work.

If you’re interested in getting involved in some way in the project or if you have something you think would be cool for the show – please let me know. However, we’re only interested in people, places and businesses in the Southeast so keep that in mind. If you have a cool startup outside of this area, we’re still interested … but the show priority will be about our region.

technorati tags: atlanta, technology, innovation, video, socon07

Today was a great event.

It was fun getting to connect with a lot of different people at SoCon07. Some of the most rewarding times for me is when you can translate on-line relationships into off-line conversations face-to-face. If you missed the event, check out the live blogging wrap up.

Sherry posted a brief update about how things came together. What Sherry doesn’t know is that I was planning a very similar conference to SoCon07, called BarCamp Atlanta. The timing was almost around the same date as SoCon. I met Sherry via Amber Rhea through an email introduction and Sherry invited me to attend a face-to-face meeting at James Harris‘ offices. It was apparent that it would be better for the community to join forces rather than try and have very similar conferences. That was my main goal go into the meeting that night (although others had no idea about other plans at the time).

At the meeting, it was apparent to me that there was a lot of work to do – especially since I’m a little anal about these types of events and trying to be as organized and planned as can be. After the meeting (which was the week just before Christmas week), I jumped in and designed the logo, the website and programmed the entire registration site and setup the blog. I also jumped in to start helping with organization, budgeting, pulling in sponsorships and generally helping make some of the hard decisions that needed to be made. Len and Sherry were great co-organizers and I enjoyed working with them.

While we did do a small press release and got a listing on Mike’s TechLinks, I don’t really believe they made significant impact on pulling people into the conference. This is based on where registrations were coming from and the general research I did following up with people about how they heard about the conference. (This is no slight on Techlinks, they’re a great resource for Atlanta). What I believe made the difference, and based on the composition of the attendees was the power of word of mouth marketing, blogging and the general trend that happens when people start connecting and you generate a buzz.

In our case, I sent out a short email to a small set of people in my personal network who I thought would benefit from the conference – I asked one simple question: “Would you like to attend and if you don’t or can’t, would you pass this along to someone you think would benefit?”. This was sent to about 75 people – all here in the metro Atlanta area.

I know Sherry and others did the same – although I have no idea what their message was but I would suspect it was very similar.

Of course, we had a good bit of blogging leading to the event and I think that helped as well.

What didn’t work in the planning?

Well, I think Sherry probably learned that you can’t have more than 3-4 people actively planning an event – more than that (I think Sherry had like 10-15 people listed on every organizing email she sent out) is just not worth the emotional effort of hoping more people help. Also, more than a handful of people becomes unmanageable – and people start to lose what needs to be done, since you always need a leader driving the bus. When you have a committee of people trying to make group decisions, largely you get very little done. Group think is good. Collective wisdom is good. The power of connecting with people and embracing different views is good. Ten people trying to make a decision – bad.

All in all, however, we had a core group and we made decisions, made progress and we created a success. Sherry has a lot of passion and it emanates.

What was the tipping point?

Personally, I think the tipping point was Tony Stubblebine’s CrowdVine. I tracked the numbers during registration and like most events, there is an inflection point. In our case, that tipping point was when the CrowdVine social network came online. I believe this supports my theory that micro social networks are more powerful than horizontal, generalistics networks.

We blogged about it and encouraged people to use it — and they did. What I started doing was regularly checking back to see who had joined, what they were interested in, what their personal blogs looked like and what they were blogging about – if they blogged. This was powerful, it was addictive, and I felt like I was getting to know people – even before meeting a single new person at the event.

Like any event, the more people that started to hear about it and tell others, the faster registrations came in. We went from 0 to 250 registrations in 25 calendar days; 3 calendar weeks. Our final pre-registration count was 280.

Not bad for the first social media mashup in the South.

See you at SoCon08.

technorati tags: socon07, atlanta, georgia, unconference, socon08

We kicked off SoCon07 last night with over 90 people attending our dinner and networking event. It was fun and we had lots of lively conversation about starting companies, differences between Oracle and MySQL and whether you need to raise venture capital to build a business.

Thanks to Josh Hallet for this wonderful picture and many more he’s taking of the event. Other pictures can be found at our shared Flickr Group.

technorati tags: socon07, atlanta, georgia

Or is that URIs? I can never seem to keep them straight – even after more than four years on the W3C and IETF. But, don’t worry, Mike Schinkel will be coming to SoCon07 and I’m sure he can help explain it.

You see, Mike’s really into pretty URLs – if there really is such a thing. If you’re RESTful or just doing a simple web page for your pet dog, Mike can help you name your URL as if it was your first born.

One of the cool things about the upcoming SoCon07 not-so-conference is the fact that I’ve heard a number of people planning on announcing their hot new idea. It started out with Tony Stubblebine pre-announcing CrowdVine – and we already have over forty people networking together. You see, maybe stuff is happening around here.

And now, Mike Schinkel and Ben Coffey plan to announce T.oolico.us – the toolbar cousin to del.icio.us or something like that. The idea is that Toolicious will provide users with a row of hyperlinks to useful page-specific functionality – all embedded nice and neatly (and I’m sure, named properly) into the top of each web page.

Wow, now that sounds pretty interesting. And, that’s a Good Thing.

P.S. if you’re a Mac lover like me, go and tell Mike not to listen to marfc and buy a Mac.

technorati tags: socon07, toolicous, crowdvine

I had a brief podcast interview Friday with Brent Leary and Michael Thomas on their podcast show, Technology for Business Sake. Their episode was titled “How you can blog your way to more business” and featured Anil Dash of Six Apart. I had just a brief clip to talk about SoCon07 before Anil came on to talk about blogging. I particularly like the format of their show – they’re fun, very knowledgeable and have some great guests regularly appearing. Chris Anderson of The Long Tail fame is their next guest for this Sunday’s show.

powered by ODEO

technorati tags: socon07, podcast, atlanta, georgia, businesstechnologyradio, sixapart

I’m jealous that I couldn’t go to Blog Savannah this weekend. It looks like Josh Hallet has some good pictures of the event – which looks like a lot of fun.

Today, I closed registration for SoCon07 – which is still 2 weeks away – because we’re completely full. If you’re a procrastinator and decided to wait and see, well, there’s always next year for you.

We have over 250 people pre-registered for the event – which means we’re going to have a fairly large crowd. It’s fun to see all the registrations coming in and the different organizations and locations that people are from. We’ve had a good mix of people from all walks of life show up – I’m excited to see what kind of collaborations will come out of the conference. I’ve already made a few connections with some interesting people doing some fun stuff.

I’ve setup a Flickr group for SoCon07 photos. I’m hoping we can take some pre-conference photos very soon and publish them. Also, we’ll use this group to coordinate photos from the event.

technorati tags: socon07, unconference, atlanta, georgia, blogsavannah

I worked hard over the past few days on getting the SoCon07 website functional and the registration system created. I leveraged our new web 2.0 framework, Seam(less), which we’re getting ready to launch this week. This made the development (which was minor) very fast.

Registration for the unconference is now open. The meetup is going to be free, but sign-up will be required so we can get an accurate headcount for t-shirts, food, seating, etc.

If you’re interested in the new social web and you’re within traveling distance to Atlanta, you should come and join us. Unlike traditional conferences, we’re going make this a very interactive, participatory meeting — where we get together and talk about what’s going on, where we believe the future is going and how we are part of the next generation web and how that impacts our personal and professional lives.

I will be hosting a dinner table Friday night and some sessions on Saturday. I’m also hoping to do a shoot for our upcoming new weekly video podcast (to be announced very soon), called Southern Fried Tech. Stay tuned for more information on that.

If you’d like to promote the conference on your blog or website, please feel welcome to use the following logo:

I look forward to meeting you at the conference!

technorati tags: socon07, socialmedia, atlanta, unconference, web2.0