Jared W. Smith

After a few months of hard work and preparation, Charleston will officially launch its chapter of Social Media Club tonight with a panel of journalists asking them how social media’s transformed how they engage with their audience. Here’s the event page for tonight’s panel on Facebook.

It’s very befitting that the kickoff event for Charleston’s Social Media Club is a panel with local media professionals. After all, the roots of our blogging community stem from local media’s efforts to reach out to local bloggers all the way back in April of 2006. The founders of that effort, Dan and Janet (Edens) Conover, will be on the panel, along with Ken Hawkins from TheDigitel.com, Andy Owens of the Charleston Regional Business Journal, and Raymond Owens, a producer at WCBD Channel 2 who was well ahead of the curve by being the first broadcast media presence in Charleston to do newsgathering via Twitter (well before WCBD’s station-wide push into social media earlier this year).

Social Media Club Charleston has been in the works for a few months now. Jeff Webster and Nick Tompkins kicked off the effort just before the 2008 holiday season. Heather Solos of Lowcountry Bloggers and Home-Ec 101, local social media/PR pro Lyn Mettler, Blackbaud’s Chad Norman, and yours truly rounded out the initial leadership group and has been laying the groundwork for this launch over the last few months. Thanks to help from The Graduate School of the College of Charleston, we’re able to put on this event for you. It’s stating the obvious to say we’re ridiculously excited to bring SMC to Charleston.

Between the rockstar panel and the wonderful opportunity to meet lots of new people, tonight should be a lot of fun. Tweet your thoughts using the #smcchs hashtag, and we hope to see you there. The event will be at Maybank Hall on the College of Charleston campus at 6:30. (Here’s a map to Maybank Hall.)

Going to try something new today — rather than destroying your streams and live-tweeting, I’ll rather post items to FriendFeed comments. That stream is embedded here for your convenience. If you have FriendFeed, feel free to add your thoughts on what I’m attending as well.

So The Great Facebook URL Rush of 2009 is over, and in the end, my Personal Brand remains intact: facebook.com/jaredwsmith. We now return to your regularly scheduled geekery, already in progress.

I’ll be right smack in the middle of the Research Triangle this weekend for WordCampRDU 2009, one of many WordCamp events dedicated to helping users of all skills levels, from beginner to expert, hone their skills and learn more about the ever-expanding world of WordPress.

I made a decision over three years ago to use WordPress for the reincarnation of this blog, and I don’t think I’ve ever been happier with a piece of software. The development ecosystem is thriving and Automattic, the parent company that governs the WordPress universe, have consistently made smart acquisitions (Gravatar, Intense Debate) that have further helped cultivate this healthy growth in WordPress as a platform. The ecosystem is so good, in fact, that it changed this developer’s behavior from one of “come hell or high water, I’m coding this myself” to that of embracing the community and taking advantage of the collective intelligence of a lot of folks who are even more enthusiastic about WordPress than I am. Here’s hoping that at WordCamp I can come away with the skills to start giving back, because my debts are great.

The keynote speaker is none other than Matt Mullenweg himself, founder of the project and Automattic. It’ll be quite a good time — if you’re there, I’d love to meet up!

The latest foray into my meteorologically-themed social media exploration is the Charleston Weather FriendFeed group, designed with some automated aggregation of Charleston weather-related tweets in mind, but also designed as a point for folks to share their weather stories and reports. It seems like a strange, nearly too-narrowly focused topic for a FriendFeed group, but I see it as an important proof of concept stemming from some goals we set for Charleston news reporting in March.

You may remember the Charleston news hashtag summit-of-sorts. The meeting brought together media members, active Lowcountry bloggers, and concerned Twitter citizens. We hashed out a series of tags that would classify tweets accordingly. There are tags for news (#chsnews), breaking stories (#chsbrkg), and the like. The goal of using these — and really, any hashtag — is to bring related content together so people can filter their streams accordingly. These tags have met with moderate adoption; I’ve personally seen some tags more than others. One of them, #chswx, is one focus of my FriendFeed group. Continue reading My weather experiment on FriendFeed »