Alliance for Community Media Northeast Region

ACM conferences are a great time to connect with your peers. The recently held ACM-NE Spring 09 Conference in Burlington VT put a new spin on this connection. Not only were we talking in the vendors' area and meeting up in the hallways, we were checking our phones for tweets and looking at just completed sessions on blip.tv, while uploading our status on Facebook and sending photos to Flickr. These new ways to relate didn't take away from the old ways, but augmented them by allowing us to include our absent friends, and even share inside messages with people who were at the conference, but out of our field of vision temporarily.

If you haven't checked out the ACMNE09 conference information on these social network sites, you just might want to do so. For those of you who were there, it's a great way to relive the experience and perhaps remember things that you missed on the first pass. And for the folks who couldn't make it, you can see what your friends were doing and cruise a workshop or two. It's good stuff. You can get connection information on the front page of our website (see the poster image.)

Now that the spring conference is in the can, the region board will start working on the fall video contest and festival. You should be getting information from us via enews, tweets, and blogs over the next month or so, with the Video Contest call for entries going out sometime in late June or early July. I pretty excited about being able to reach you using these new tools. And we'll continue to use some of our old methods of communications - newsletter and printed brochures - too, just in case you haven't yet logged into the new stuff.

Thanks to the social media techies led by Rob Chapman and his crew for their great work, both teaching us how and putting content up. Although I really dislike looking at myself on TV (how can I possibly look that bad?), I enjoyed watching the opening plenary :) on blip.tv. Now if I can just figure out how to get tweets on my Iphone ...