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.)

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 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!

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.

Nuts & Bolts

The Charleston Weather FriendFeed group is fed from four sources:

• @chswx on Twitter, which automatically tweets forecasts four times a day and also serves as the location where I live-tweet severe weather situations
• The Charleston Weather blog, which will house longer-form weather analysis (expect this to really kick into gear as hurricane season starts up) as well as news about new services
• A Twitter search for the #chswx hashtag, with messages originating from the @chswx account and retweets of the @chswx account filtered out to lower noise
• User-originated posts directly from FriendFeed. Anybody can posts links, photos, etc. to the group.

The feed for #chswx is probably the most important one to come in, because it enables others to contribute to the group without even having to have a FriendFeed account. Having #chswx come into the FriendFeed group honors the ideals of what we were trying to do at the hashtag summit as it lets us aggregate and rebroadcast.

The only snag? Twitter Search is fed over RSS and is not realtime. The functionality’s not yet there to return realtime results to a FriendFeed group — that would be an immense improvement in terms of timeliness of data. For now, we’ll have to still monitor Twitter for the late-breaking stuff.

Why FriendFeed?

So, why FriendFeed? It’s only emerged as the best social data aggregator out there. Its flexibility and power are unparalleled, especially now that FriendFeed is completely realtime. That, combined with its discussion and sharing (”likes”) components, make FriendFeed the ideal platform. It can be delivered in realtime over e-mail or IM, filtered with a fine-toothed comb — basically, if you need to do something with the data, FriendFeed lets you do it in any way that’s convenient for you. Its rich sharing (inline photos and videos) plus integration with Twitter make it an instant win for a project such as this. Plus, thanks to tools like BackType, we can tie FriendFeed comments back to originating blog posts, which I suspect will be critical functionality in hurricane season.

Will it work?

The whole “Charleston Weather” reporting concept is a gigantic experiment; the FriendFeed group is another component to this. We won’t really know how well it’ll work until we have a heavy weather day, and people take pictures and make reports with the hashtag. On sunny days, the Charleston Weather group will probably resemble just another automated push service. On stormy days, though, it has the potential to become a great repository of photos and reports, which could be invaluable to media outlets or even the National Weather Service as they collect information for storm postmortem reports.

Expect to see more movement with the hashtags feeding into FriendFeed soon. We have a Charleston, SC group that is a great candidate to feed in other tags, such as the news hashtags, #chsfree for free stuff to do, and the all-important #chseats for announcing BBQ meatups.