Hello folks! 

I will be hosting a pre-conference dinner Monday night, from 5pm until the reception starts at 7pm.

NOTE: The venue was to be Nicolino's Garden Cafe, but it is closed for memorial day.  Please join staff at La Fontana restaurant in the Hilton if you were planning on coming here 

The topic is "Technology of Social Networks", a discussion of the technology powering social networking sites.

You don't need to be a techie to enjoy. Technology is not the closed-up, tight-lipped death-star fortress that it used to be.

Hi! I am Dimitri Glazkov and I am the Chief Technology Officer of Estrada, a software development company hailing from Birmingham, AL.

My journey into the social networking began in 1999, when at University of Alabama at Birmingham, a bunch of us built wow.uab.edu, a site that was created as a conversation between scientists, travelling in remote parts of the world (Antarctica, for instance) and those interested in science.

This was kind of a big deal back then, considering that the site offered tools for open, two-way communication: scientists wrote entries (with pictures) in their journals, and readers commented at the end of each post. We ought to have named it then. Perhaps something more elegant than the now ubiquitious moniker -- blog, but we didn't know better. We were excited about the elementary school kids, coming back daily to check on the replies from the team on the frozen continent. We were watching the online community form around something as boring-sounding as chemical ecology.

Look at all the stuff going on! So, this is how this "remixing for social change" thing works!

I am Dimitri Glazkov and I will be talking about Millenials and TheirSpace (naturally, they call it MySpace) wth Bob Robertson-Boyd, Ginger Thomson, immoderated by Ami Dar. This is going to be so much fun, I can hardly stand it.