| Read more ...

I'm taking off tomorrow morning for London, England, where I'll be speaking along with techPresident blogger Michael Turk at "Politics Web 2.0," a two-day international conference hosted by the University of London, Royal Halloway. The conference features 120 papers organised into 41 panels, with more than 180 participants drawn from over 30 countries, and is probably a bit more academic than most of the events I tend to go to these days. My talk is titled, "The Revolution Will Be Networked: How Open Source Politics is Emerging in America." What do you think I should cover?

For all of our talk about social networking and how it is changing politics, today we were treated to an up close and personal example of how social networking is changing our most basic social interactions.

Within hours of the tragedy that occurred today at Virginia Tech, ABC News had published a story entitled “If You're OK, Please Update Your Profile” which quoted someone named Carlos 'Mohawk Monday' Fernandez asking, “Many of us are all worried about our friends, so lets do this. If you are okay! Please update your status in facebook to say something like ‘I'm okay’.”

With cell phones spotty because of the massive volume of calls, and concrete information even more scarce, Facebook became a vital way of letting family, friends, and even strangers know that you were OK.

I didn't go to South by Southwest (SXSW), the annual interactive festival in Austin, Texas, but I lot of my friends and colleagues did. However, I know what time many of them landed, where they were flying from, where they've been staying and eating, and even what sessions they've been attending. How do I know all this? They've been Twittering it, of course.