I'm hunkering down for a massive April Fools Day.

OK, make that a Massive April Fools Day.

April 1st will bring the Massive Technology Conference to Vancouver: a day where business types and high-tech folks will mingle and swap tips ("Oh... so it has to make money to provide me with an income?" "Now, which end of the mouse plugs into the modem?"). There'll be a trade show, keynote speakers, a swishy reception...

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We wish we'd been able to make it to DrupalCamp Toronto, but client business kept us planted firmly on this side of the continent.

Still, we were able to attend in spirit: by reading Khalid's (and others') terrific blog coverage of the event, and by oohing and aahing over his photo of the T-shirt. The DrupalCamp logo is brilliant.

(What's that, you say? You see the Social Signal logo on the back of the T-shirt? Why, yes – we are proud sponsors of DrupalCamp Toronto!)

Now, if there are any of those T-shirts left over, I suppose receiving a few of them might take the sting out of having had to miss the camp itself...

Three things:

1. You can now listen to a podcast of the panel I was on at the "From Mass To Grass" Word of Mouth Marketing Conference in mid-April. You get to hear me mix it up with three very smart people: David Jones, Steve Osgoode and the panel's moderator, Michael Seaton. We talk about marketing, Web 2.0 and virtual worlds; between my co-panelists' expertise, Michael's moderating and the audience's questions, it was a great session.
2. It's the featured item in an episode of Michael's excellent The Client Side marketing podcast. If you're active in marketing and the social web, you're going to want to subscribe – Michael's brilliant.
3. Any chance I get to attend or take part in a panel moderated by Michael, I'm going to jump at. I've rarely been part of such a deftly animated conversation; he provided exactly the right amount of provocative questioning and insightful observation to make it (definitely) lively, (I hope) informative and (judging by the audience reaction) fun and engaging.

I just wrapped up a panel with David Jones of Fleishman-Hillard and HarperCollins' Steve Osgoode, ably animated by Scotiabank's Michael Seaton. Very smart people, these folks.

The subject was whether it's possible to market in social media and virtual worlds. But one theme kept coming up again and again: risk.

What if users say bad things about us on our blog? What if nobody shows up to participate? What if this flops?

Here's where I come down on those questions:

There's a chance of failure with any project, but the relative newness of social media adds an extra dimension of uncertainty. And while there are answers to all of those questions, there's no avoiding the fact that innovation and risk go hand in hand.

Can you mitigate that risk? Absolutely. Good participation design goes a long way toward avoiding a flop; a smart moderator can encourage productive conversations; a savvy organization can engage its critics.

But here's the thing: when you're charting new territory, then no matter how successful or unsuccessful each venture may be, it always leaves you with something valuable: knowledge.

Engaging audiences in participation and one-to-one / many-to-one / many-to-many conversations is, for most organizations, a completely new skill. The more of it you do, the more you learn; the more you exercise that muscle, the stronger it becomes.

The real risk doesn't lie in having a project that doesn't succeed, or doesn't succeed in quite the way you'd hoped. The real risk is being taken by organizations that aren't investing in learning those conversational skills – because increasingly, the public is coming to expect them. And if a company, organization or agency isn't listening, they'll turn to one that does.

Other bloggers' takes on the conference:

• Joseph Thornley: "Do you know your citizen marketers?"
• Arieh Singer: Liveblogging from the CMA's WOM Conference
• DaniGirl: Dani's day out in Toronto
  
• Scott K. Mac Donald: From Mass to Grass, Reflections on Mass to Grass I and Part II
• Provokat: Our creative director in T.O. for a day (et en français)
• Sean at CrapHammer: CMA my WOM
• Michael Seaton: Gut Marketing
  
• Cybrarian: Mass to Grass: Canada's Word of Mouth Marketing Conference
• ...and impresario Sean Moffitt's look-ahead post
  

If you're like Alex, you're already in Las Vegas at the Community 2.0 conference, and good on you. The rest of us aren't bitter about your hot, sunny days and your swimming pools and your rubbing elbows with fellow leaders in the social web. Not in the least.

Why? Because if we can't go to Community 2.0, Community 2.0 will go to us. Here's how they're expanding participation beyond the conference rooms, hallways and luxurious spa treatments rigorous breakout sessions:

• The Future of Communities, a companion blog to the conference.
• A discussion forum.
• A Gabbly chat page, for live chats.
• A dedicated IRC chat channel.
• The tag community2.0, for aggregating content on Technorati, photos on Flickr and (thanks, Lou!) bookmarks on del.icio.us.

I'm writing this from the Community 2.0 conference, which promises to be two great days of inspiration on online community building and management. It got off to a great start with a presentation by John Hagel on "What's Possible? Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities".

Here are some of the highlights of John's talk:

How do we create effective online community?

1. What do we mean by community?
2. What skill sets are needed?
3. What mind shifts are needed?
4. What organizational structure is needed?

1. What is community?

There's a tendency to regard anything that's interaction as community.
The emphasis of real community establish connections among people so they can participate in shared discussions over time, leading to a complex web of relationships, and to an increased identification with the overall community.

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Great news... Northern Voice is on again. Now in its third year, this Vancouver-based conference draws an international audience that ranges from novices to leaders in blogging and the web.

This year, Northern Voice - organized last year by Boris Mann, Brian Lamb, Cyprien Lomas, Darren Barefoot, Kris Krug, Lauren Wood and Roland Tanglao – has moved to bigger digs at UBC. It's running from Feb. 23 to 24, and if it's anything like the last two, it's going to be fantastic.

If you're going to be in or near Vancouver next February, check back on their site regularly for updates – so you can register as soon as it opens (the conference fills up awfully quickly). And if you aren't going to be in Vancouver in February, well, compare the winter climate here to yours and adjust your travel plans accordingly.

A friend recently called up to say an organization he works for is planning on having a few lucky volunteers liveblog the event. (Liveblogging is when bloggers offer real-time reporting or commentary on an event as it occurs, often updating a single post multiple times with new information as the event unfolds. See some of the latest examples here.) He asked if I had any suggestions.

I did – and I thought I'd share them with you.

Before you read my throughts, check out this post on liveblogging by Beth Kanter, one of the smartest people I know. She has plenty of great tips for actually conducting the blogging session — including one brilliant, simple idea: copying and pasting the session description in at the top of the post.

Now here's what I suggested.

1. The biggest thing: know what you want, and work it out with your livebloggers beforehand. Is it direct quotes? Just the gist of what's being discussed? Comprehensive notes or the occasional remarkable point? Set priorities in consultation with them, and check in during convention so you can do any necessary course correction — or, if something unexpected seems to be turning out well, change their mandate.
2. If you have two people who work really well together, consider having them open a document in a real-time collaborative editor and have one live-blog rough notes while the other follows behind them, tidying up and adding commas. On the Mac, Alex and I have had great luck with SubEthaEdit from Coding Monkeys; there's a list of options at Wikipedia.
3. Photos give a great sense of the colour of an event, but if I ever see another endless procession of head-and-shoulder shots of people at microphones, it'll be too damned soon. Brainstorm ideas with a photoblogger ahead of time: close-up shots of buttons and decorated attendee credentials, audience reaction to keynote speakers, corridor conversations, behind-the-scenes preparations, people who've brought their kids... And consider getting the word out in advance about a Flickr tag, so you can turn anyone taking pictures at your event into an instant photoblogger.
4. Consider developing themes for individual livebloggers to follow, especially if you have the official proceedings covered off. What if one person was getting interviews with the oldest members, or inviting them to key in a few lines of a post? How about tracking down people who've never been to convention before and doing a quick videophone interview with them? Or asking delegates and guests about the best books they've read so far this year?
5. Give your livebloggers all the access they need. Make sure they can get digital recordings of the keynotes, panels and discussions ASAP so they can confirm quotes or create podcasts. If you've got a great, enthusiastic blogger who's also a good writer, see if you can give her or him some time with a few of the dignitaries for blogging fodder.

Those are some of my suggestions. Feel free to suggest some of your own in the comments!

BarCamp Vancouver last weekend was inspiring and inspired.

I caught John Ounpuu's introduction to Sutori, a site that gives consumers a place to share stories of customer satisfaction and, probably more often, dissatisfaction. James Sherrett previewed the intriguing AdHack, which will allow people to upload and publish their own ads for products they love... and reap the benefits if the companies behind the products like what they see.

Kate Milberry walked us through the history of tech activism, the wonderful Dethe Elza explained how you can wield Python to warp OS X to your will, Alex explained how you can use tagging to do the same thing to the entire world, and I offered seven tips for better tech presentations. For us the day ended early, but I gather from the blog posts I've read out that there was plenty more where that came from.

With so many conferences geared to monetizing this and finding venture capital for that, it was great to see something organized out of the sheer love of what emerging digital technology can do for people. Congrats to everyone who made this happen.

At last week's 2006 Nonprofit Technology Conference in Seattle, I sat on a terrific panel led by Matt Blair, with Marnie Webb and Marshall Kirkpatrick, on the security implications of the new web. It was one of those amazing sessions where the audience was so engaged from the start that we had no need for the usual opening-presentations-plus-Q&A structure; we got right into a very cool 90-minute conversation.

I don't think anyone was recording the session, but I thought I'd share the notes I'd prepared for my presentation.

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