If you promise not to tell anyone, I'll let you in on a little secret. I've never been outside North America. Despite having lived three years in Guadalajara, Mexico at a very young age, the rest of my life has been spent locked up in the United States. I've never even been to Canada. I haven't gone to Europe, to Asia, Africa, Australia... you name it. Traveling has never been my thing. But this year, at least one of those will be crossed off the list, for I'm headed to London in September to talk to a room full of professionals looking to learn more about blogging, social media, and how to take on the new world or real-time information flow. A guest of Ecademy, and its founder, Thomas Power and his wife, Penny, a full day's agenda is set to take place on September 17th, which I am really looking forward to - even more so than flying East over the Atlantic Ocean.In the last few years, I've gotten to know Thomas a bit through seeing him on the social networks, primarily including FriendFeed, Twitter and Facebook, in that order. But in parallel, Thomas has developed his own business-oriented social network, called Ecademy, which, if his own connections are any indication, is more than 50,000 strong.
Thomas Power and the "Law of Big Numbers"
Thomas, who recently put up an interesting video on YouTube showing why he chooses Quantity over Quality, has made some choices when it comes to Ecademy. There are a tremendous amount of options for connections, messaging, direct blog posting to the site, but yes, it's not the most polished and doesn't have a glitzy Web 2.0 look. But the network is full of fervor, of people who are eager to learn - as I have especially found once he introduced me, and I gained more than 8,000 contacts in the space of two weeks.
My Ecademy Profile: Connected, But Raw
A small subset of these connections are going to meet with me on September 17th to start with the basics and then race through what should be a jam-packed day. If you are in London and would like to attend, you can find the event here:
http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=meeting&mid=28677
(Disclaimer: Thomas' description of me is very positive - and I didn't write my bio)
The full agenda for September 17th (GMT) is below.
9.30am Registration and Networking
10.00am - 12.00pm Morning Program
- Harnessing the new world of real-time
- How to use RSS Feeds, Google Reader, Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and Socialmedian
2.00pm - 5.00pm Afternoon Program
- Participating and Broadcasting
- Blogging
- Microblogging
- Social Aggregation
- Best Practices
- Tips and Tricks
- Using these tools for business
- Keeping your business and personal identities separate
- What is oversharing?
- Quality over quantity