Mining Social Media For Awesome Drupal Gigs

I have posted up the text of my talk, and will be posting the slides at the same site as well.

Intro

Social media is not always socializing on the web. It can also be about the viral spread of information between people. For well over a decade the internet has been providing a new means for communicating. For well over a decade I have been slowly learning how to grok that flow of information. Come to the sessions, and I will show you my methods for filtering the stream to get the information you want. Specifically I will talk about how to get information about Drupal, and how to pickup on interesting discussions happening in the community.

Topics of Discussion

• Wrangling of RSS
• Proficient use of a Blog Aggregator
• Dealing with blogs, and information overload.
• How to go from a consumer, to a producer

A Specific Scenario Will Be Analyzed

In the last few months, I have been lucky enough to find some really awesome Drupal gigs. One has given me a chance to work with Jay Rosen, from NYU, on an idea of his to help news orgs find the best questions. I was also able to turn this into a grant proposal that I entered into the Knight News Challenge. We made it through the first round. Finally, it resulted in me becoming a co-maintainer of the installation profile that ExplainThis.org is based on. All of these were opportunities that I found through social media, or pursued through social media.

Supporting Materials

I have posted up the text of my talk, and will be posting the slides at the same site as well. I am planning on using twitter as a backchannel. If you want to ask me a question anytime before, during, or after the conference on twitter just use the hashtag, #DCSF10AK.

About the Presentor

Besides playing around with Drupal, I also dabble with Django, and other open source projects. I currently work at Yahoo! as Front-end engineer. At yahoo I do a lot of work with PHP, CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. And, as you may have guessed, I am an avid consumer of the social web, as well as curator/producer. I do my curate/production thing at my website http://alexkessinger.net.