The revolution will not be authorized

In the past few days, STC has been sending out acceptance notices for presentations at next May’s STC Summit. There’s been a small flurry of announcements, mostly on Twitter. (I live in North Carolina where two flakes are a flurry. 10 flakes are a school-closing, bread-and-milk-buying emergency.)

For instance, we have this on Friday, November 20:

Tweets related to STC acceptances

Side note: I’ll be presenting on managing in an XML environment.

In the pre-Twitter Era, acceptances were sent by mail, and then conference organizers could post the full program more or less at their convenience. But now, the leaks start almost immediately.

This may not be a bad thing. The happy tweets raise awareness of the event. For an organizer, however, it means that notifications need to be carefully synchronized or perhaps staggered on a formal schedule (SxSW does this quite well; they announce program decisions in batches).

It seems like another case where unofficial community content is eroding the ability of the content owner to control the messaging. Coincidentally (!), that’s the topic of a webcast I’m doing on December 8.

Strategies for coping with user-generated content
Tuesday, December 8, 11 a.m. Eastern time

We are offering this webcast for free; you just need to register.

This is a new presentation that I first delivered at LavaCon in New Orleans this year.