socialmedia.net is one of the sponsors of BlogTalk, a conference taking place at the National Univeristy of Ireland, Galway on the 26th and 27th of August. We will have speakers not only from Ireland and Europe, but we also have some who are flying in from America especially to present.
These conferences are important because even though the wonders of the Internet and its associated social media services allow us to be more accessible to each other than ever before, there is stil no substitute for getting a bunch of people into a room and having them meet and talk to each other. Despite all our wonderful technology, there are some things that can only be communicated in person and in not in any other way.
As is becoming more apparent in the conference world and in the ideas underlying the notion of unconferences, the audience is equally important if not actually more important than the speakers. To quote Dan Gillmor, one of our scheduled speakers and whose interview with socialmedia.net we will be publishing on Tuesday, August 17th, “The Q&A portion of a talk is always better than the talk. I’ve been to and done several conferences where it was assumed that the main panelists were the people in the audience.”
The first was a blog entry on the 24th of July by 
