This past weekend’s SoCon07 event was a big success, with 100 people attending the Friday night dinner session and well over 200 people attending Saturday’s conference -held at Kennesaw State University. The Friday night dinner session consisted of table discussions moderated by some of Atlanta’s leading internet thought leaders, such as Jeff Haynie, Sanjay Parekh, Leonard Witt, and others. I had the pleasure of joining them as a table moderator for the discussion on “Building Online Communities”. It was a spirited discussion, not just on popular online communities such as MySpace and Facebook, but also what can be done in a closed environment such as within churches and businesses. There was an interesting social networking application that was created right here in Atlanta called Yaplet, that has some very interesting use cases in online shopping as well as general information sites. It creates a new niche in contextual chat that I think has some legs. Many thanks to Christina and Matthew Might for bringing their thoughts to bear on the discussion, as well as all the other attendees for taking the time to share their expertise and interests.

The Saturday event was kicked off by Leonard Witt and Sherry Heyl, and was then headlined by Chris Klaus whose past efforts in internet security helped put Atlanta technology companies on the map. Chris is now heading Kaneva which is doing some innovative work in creating a platform for virtual worlds. Like the “unconference” it was dubbed, discussions ranged from the esoteric to the mainstream. The main takeway for me from the event was that Atlanta’s internet economy is broad in terms of interests, and deep in talent. Many thanks to the people both in front of and behind the scenes who helped make this weekend a success.