CreateSouth Conference in Myrtle Beach

The CREATE South conference has come and gone at this point. The day felt fantastic to me and the attendees seemed to generally feel the same way. It had logistical problems at points but the problems were survivable. The real power comes from getting people in the same room, talking about what matters from them and then getting out of the way. The magic trick of organizing this sort of thing is that all the programming is bait to get people to show up, but the people that show up are the real value. People met, talked, networked, learned, taught, ate bbq and chicken bog and generally had a good time.

First, let’s welcome the new bloggers minted at the conference. Jo and Roger have officially joined the blog world. This was part of what we wanted to happen, so it makes me happy every time either of them posts.

There is a Flickr photo pool for pictures from the day and you can also search on the tag “createsouth”.

Here’s some of the reactions around the blogosphere:

• Dan Conover posts video of Ed Cone’s keynote presentation
• GeekyCyberMom (Naomi) has video of Tee Morris’ presentation on podcasting
• Vera posts her thoughts on the conference and her trip
• Presenter Ivy tells her story of the weekend (Ivy is the one who called the conference “full of awesome and win”) and also approves of the chicken bog that Andre cooked
• Presenter Heather gives her thoughts on the day
• Lowcountry Blogs has a recap post
• Musical guest Chris weighs in
• Joan has a number of photos of the event
• Keynote speaker Ed Cone writes several posts, about the food, about the conference itself, about his stay at the beach and his session
• Tee Morris mentions the conference in his podcast
• Paul notes the prevalence of Twitter at the conference
• Judy had a good time and notes most of us are too pudgy

I’ll keep updating this as I find new posts. Thanks everyone for coming, participating, presenting and making it a wonderful time!

I am proud to announce that we have confirmed as our keynote speaker Mr. Ed Cone. Ed lives in Greensboro NC with his family. He is a senior writer with Ziff Davis Enterprise for CIO Insight magazine, a columnist and a blogger. He has been a staff writer at Forbes and a contributing editor at Wired amongst his many writing gigs.

As one of the founders of the ConvergeSouth conference and a primary instigator of the Greensboro blogging community, Ed will speak about using new media to create and nurse the community in your localities. I personally have had the opportunity to spend some time having conversations with Ed at various conferences and am delighted that he will come to our inaugural conference in Myrtle Beach. He’s a great guy, highly knowledgeable about new media and easy to talk to.

Come to CREATE South on April 19th and you too can hang out with Ed. See you there.

Here is a downloadable audio promo for the Create South conference. It is Creative Commons licensed Attribution, which is more or less impossible to use without attributing it since the promo is its own attribution. For those of you friendly to our project, if you’d throw this in your own podcasts or even just your podcast feed we would be highly appreciative. Play the promo, come to our shindig. It is an infotopia!

Eric Rice rethinks the whole *-Camp thing. His suggestions are goofy and for comedic effect but you know, they aren’t miles away from the thinking behind Create South. From the very first conversation I ever had about it, I knew I wanted it to be more doing things and less talking about doing things. The whole reason it is not “Podcamp Myrtle Beach” is that we want to bring in people beyond the core group of insiders who tend to show up to such things. The idea of having no set agenda before you get there just seems antithetical to getting in the people who most need to learn. This whole conference is our attempt to thread the needle between the boringness of most tech conferences, the energy and chaos of the *-Camps, the “audience is in charge” aspect of the Bloggercons, all with a minimum of dogma and maximum hands on at all points. Do you want to help thread that needle? You can, by showing up my friends.

The CreateSouth blog is open for business. The goal will be to post here at least once every day between now and the conference. Welcome, friends. We hope to put on a good shindig for y’all.