Social Network

Facebook is a social networking platform for connecting with friends and family and seeing what people are up to. To allow attendees to interact before, during and after the conference, join the Facebook group by clicking here.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business social networking platform to connect with colleagues and people that you know on a professional level. For the W4A, we have created a LinkedIn group which you can join following this link.

Here you can discuss, submit news articles, receive updates and find out other conference attendees to connect to.

Twitter

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter web site, via the Twitter web site, short message service (SMS), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook.

After you sign up go to the Conference Twitter page

Also, if this is the first time you have ever heard of Twitter, here is the amusing and helpful tutorial, "Twitter in plain English".

Twemes

Twemes (it stands for Twitter plus memes) is a site that aims to solve that problem by grouping Twitter tweets according to topic. Twemes searches Twitter for hashtags, key words marked with the # sign that let you know what each tweet is all about.

For example, when you tell everyone on Twitter about how much you enjoyed this post, you can mention our twitter tag and Twemes will find your tweet, categorize it, and add it to an RSS feed of related tweets. You can find topics on Twemes either by searching or by clicking on words in the tag cloud, which works as an interesting visual display of what Twitter is talking about.

Many conferences like SXSW, WWDC and TechEd use this to update followers, both attending and non-attending. Here are two articles related to Twemes that you may find useful and helpful: Mashable, Downloadsquad.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed is an aggregator of social networking services together for viewing the latest updates from people from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Reader and other services. It allows you a one stop site for viewing your friends' updates rather than having to go to each social networking site.

Slideshare

SlideShare is a free service for sharing presentations and slideshows over the web. Slideshare supports importing presentations from PowerPoint, OpenOffice.org Impress, and PDF files. The site implements most common Web 2.0 design and interaction patterns. Like many other social sharing services, users are able to add tagging, rate, comment, and embed content. Once a file is uploaded, it is visible to the public. Terms from slides can be searched via search engines. The user who uploads a presentation can choose to make the slide show available to be downloaded.

Slideshare is linked with Creative Commons so various attribution licenses are supported. In addition, these presentations can be retrieved at any computer without need for USB drives or other storage devices. In other words, presentations in Slideshare can be held before a conference for the presenters use and then reviewed afterwards by guests. Like YouTube , a presentation can be ] viewed in the small screen or take the full screen of a monitor.

Here is the W4A11 page. If you would like to share your presentation either publicly or with certain individuals and would like this uploaded under the W4A11 account, please let us know. Thanks!

If you want to upload to your own SlideShare account, then please use the tag "w4a11", you can then find all slides using these tags as http://www.slideshare.net/tag/w4a11

Flickr

To share photos on Flickr, please use the tag w4a11. You can then subscribe and view the photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/w4a11

Delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking service for sharing bookmarks of web sites with others. You can see and subscribe to the W4A Delicious bookmarks here.

If you have your own Delicious account, please tag your bookmarks with w4a11 and you can subscribe or view at http://delicious.com/tag/w4a11.