A few things going on today in the social networking world for security professionals.
But, to me the coolest thing was the arrival of the social networking lanyards from Laminex.
As you can see, they turned out pretty well. Please note, the printed Twitter ID is the result of an iron-on transfer. If you signed up for your lanyard early enough I've got a transfer for you. Still not sure if I'll be able to iron them all on before the conference but I'll try. Also note that the lanyard to the left is modeled by my 6yo son. so unless you are under 4" tall your badge will not hang to your waist.
TweepML List
The second cool thing was the completion of the TweepML for Physical Security Professionals. This is a dynamic list of 100 security professionals on Twitter. If you enter your user ID at the end of the list, you can choose to follow all, or select specific people to follow. It would be great if TweepML would generate a RSS feed of the members twitter streams but so far I'm not seeing any way to do that easily.
Well, the only way to do it easily is through the FriendFeed Room. Unfortunately, there wasn't much interest when it was formed but maybe there will be now.
Conference Tools
Which leads me to the third cool thing. If you've ever gone to a conference where you and others were using Twitter you probably noticed how easily information was shared between everyone by the use of hashtags. Hashtags are simply putting the # sign before a word. Doing so makes it easy to search for that word and compile a list of current tweets that contain it. For instance, if I'm at a vendor booth and they are about to start a demo of their latest technology - I can send a tweet with the #asis09 hashtag in it. Everyone following that hashtag will see the message and know. This kind of communication is new and strange to many. It falls between direct person-to-group communications and general postings of information. With person-to-group the ones receiving the message are expected to respond or digest the information. Just posting the information so it's available makes it difficult for everyone. With Twitter, the information gets to everyone who wants it - and people can choose to be as interactive as they desire.
Andres Armeda has done an impressive job making this easy. We're in the process of configuring tools for social networking users to stay on top of things during the conference. The goal is to give people the resources they need to monitor what others are saying and doing without hassle. This will take the shape of a website that's streaming all conference related posts, RSS feeds that can be turned into SMS messages and even a specific twitter account you can follow to get everyone's traffic from one source.
Meetups
Still need some help in this area. It's obvious that this year's conference will not have as many large scale events as previous years. However, I'm still trying to secure some agreements with the events that will be held to arrange for at least one meetup a day. Monday is the ASIS sponsored meetup at the President's Reception - but only conference attendees have tickets to the reception unless they are purchased specifically. Since a good number of us are exhibitors, that leaves a good number out in the cold without tickets.
I'm hoping to arrange for meetups as part of larger events. For instance, if Company X is holding their event Tuesday evening, they agree to allow social networking users into the event to meetup with each other. If your company is interested in helping, please let me know. You may even be interested in hosting a small get together for Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook users. If that's the case, you'll definitely earn a place in each of our hearts and I'm sure your investment will be returned through the solid networking value alone.
