Li Evans will be presenting on the 18th at 11:10 am, taking the slot previously held by Leslie Poston.

This session has been changed to:

The Intersection of Social Media and Search Marketing

Does Social Media have an effect on Search Optimization?  How much does Optimization affect Social Media?  Understanding how social media marketing affects search marketing and vice versa can be a lot to get your hands around. What exactly does it mean to optimize your digital assets, your social media profiles and how do I get optimized content socialized? There’s a lot of new ins & outs when it comes to making sure that your search marketing and your social media marketing are in synch with one another.

We have information about the Open and our goals, information about the speakers and discussion leaders, and a grid of the complete schedule, available to download for you.

Please let us know if you have any questions, and we’ll try to answer them here on the blog.

Make sure to check out the fantastic sessions on Augmented Reality, Social Media, The Future of Journalism, How the FTC regulations May Change the Blogosphere, The Makerbot and the possibility of being able to manufacture things in your own home, and more- We can’t wait to see you there!

You can take a look at the schedule online by clicking here, and a full PDF -Guide to the Web 2.0 Expo Open- will be available here in the next day or so, including information about all the pre-planned sessions and speakers, how you can present at the Open, and more.

We are really excited about all the great speakers that have gotten involved and behind the event, and it’s a testament to how Podcamp has evolved and grown since it started back in September, 2006.  While the Open is a bit different than a traditional Podcamp, we know it will have he same community feel, where your input and participation are vital to its success.

The Open will take place on Wednesday, November 18th and Thursday, November 19th at the Jacob Javits Center.  We do ask that you register in advance.  There is no fee for attending the Open and Expo- (we’ll provide you a code to register that will zero out the cost) and we hope you’ll be able to join us as we all explore doing more with less.

Whether the economy is still in a slump or clawing its way back to life by the time this book hits the shelves, one thing will still be for certain: all of us are going to be doing a lot more with a lot less.  The digital channels were meant to do just that.  Your business has been forced to change over the past couple of years.  As a result, there has never been a more important time to understand the myriad digital channels and free publishing tools that are right here in front of you- at your fingertips.

This is the essence of what we hope you’ll take away from the Web 2.0 Expo Open- a better understanding of how to do more with less, of how mastering the digital tools available will enable you to grow and succeed without necessarily costing you an arm and a leg, but instead, matching the tools to your goals and being prepared for the rapidly changing and evolving marketplaces we all find ourselves in.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUsTPGutYJw[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joA89bb3T0k[/youtube]

Augmented Reality is being touted as everything from “gimmicky” to “bigger than the web” and has been utilized by companies like GE, IBM, Walmart, and Best Buy. Whatever your take on the subject, AR is getting a massive amount of buzz and the technology that has been written about in cyberpunk novels for over two decades is coming to fruition via the mobile tools available in the latest Android models and iPhone. “Emerge” , as we are calling these sessions, will feature a number of leaders in the AR community who will dispel inaccuracies while also demonstrating how the ideas of collaborative intuition combined with the semantic web and social networks make AR the “touchstone technology” that makes it a paradigm shift that may drastically alter culture and commerce alike.

Here’s just a few quick YouTube videos about AR so you can see it in action:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb0pMeg1UN0[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKw_Mp5YkaE[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00FGtH5nkxM[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNu4CluFOcw[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j67xUCULGdE[/youtube]

For Christopher  Penn, Chris Brogan and myself, taking on this challenge is an opportunity to introduce the magic of the Podcamp experience to a different and larger crowd.  Podcamp, unlike some of the other unconferences, mixes pre-planned sessions with the spontaneous, sign-up on site sessions  most unconferences are known for.  We find this helps people to understand what they’re getting if they attend from the announced speakers and topics, while keeping the surprise of the unplanned as part of the mix.  Our sessions are also geared to be discussions and conversations rather than just “Death by Powerpoint” and we actively encourage everyone to help make their own experience.

If you can attend 95% of the conference virtually and not pay, or attend 100% of the conference in person and pay, which will most people rationally choose? Which would you choose?

Right now, social media, for all its glamour and buzz, is still a relatively small space compared to the world of business as a whole. As it grows, how long will it be before conference organizers have to clamp down on usage to avoid completely devaluing their conferences?

Will social media, in other words, burn conferences to the ground? Yes – and it should.

My answer as co-founder of PodCamp and co-organizer of PodCamp Boston 4 is one we’ve been researching and looking at for years. Whether live or recorded, the talking head portion of the conference is something that is part of the old conference model.

While I love speaking publicly, I also recognize that it’s not terribly valuable in and of itself. I could convey the exact same information with a video camera and a YouTube account, and in fact I’ve done this to a degree. 60+ people saw my PAB 2009 presentation live. Over 300 have seen it virtually. Did the attendees of PAB 2009 get more out of the public speaking experience than the people at their desks? No, not really.

What we’ve been exploring with PodCamp year after year is how to take the other parts of conferences and amplify them, the parts you cannot get out of a talking head presentation. Side conversations in hallways. One to one interactions. Spontaneous group discussions. These are all things that you can’t bottle, and honestly, you can’t tweet, stream, or liveblog either. There’s simply no way for you, as a new media journalist, to be at 300 mini-sessions, or 3,000 micro-presentations, and if the conversations are valuable, you’ll be too busy participating to be archiving and broadcasting – and that’s as it should be.

What I think the conference model will evolve to, and where PodCamp is leading along with the other *Camp events, is the truly interactive community brainshare. Would I pay $500 to see Seth Godin speak? Sure. Would I pay more to sit down over beer with Seth and a few other folks at a roundtable and have him look at my marketing campaign, maybe sketch out some ideas on a napkin? Heck yeah. Multiply that times many tables over many hours and I’d walk away with a literal goldmine of useful information that’s tailored to me and my business. That’s what we want to bring more of to PodCamp – fewer talking heads and more sharing brainspaces.

When you walk away from a PodCamp, I don’t want you to say “that was a great conference!”. I want you to say, “I met and learned from some awesome people at PodCamp!” because in the end, your community is your strength. The conference is just a convenient place for the community to meet.

What do you think the future of conferences will be? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

The Open’s theme is “Doing More with Less”, and we’re lucky enough to have a collection of some of the brightest minds in social media and marketing to talk about how they are using the web to expand their businesses, making both time and money stretch to maximum efficiency. We’d love to have you come and participate in the Open and invite you to present your view on how to do more with less by signing up to present in one of the Open slots on the day of the Expo. In the Community Lounge area, we’ll have a white board where you’ll be able to join the conversation and bring your own spin on how you are making social and digital media tools extend your reach and audience.

We’re hoping that over the course of the presentations and conversations at the Web 2.0 Open, you’ll get a better understanding of social media’s strengths and weaknesses, so you’ll have a better understanding of how to use each tool to formulate and execute a strategy that will help you achieve your end goals. Whether it’s looking at the possibilities of augmented reality, considering how community development might give you an edge over your competitors, or how journalism is changing in an increasingly competitive marketplace, the discussions in the Open sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo will both challenge your assumptions and expand your horizons.