Events List - courtesy of Jeff Cutler's Plancast

Here are some of the events happening around the world of tech, social media, arts and leisure. Enjoy.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

What's in a name?

There's been a lot of praise for the WithJeff Calendar and our approach to crowdsourcing Boston events. What has also happened - and this was only last night - there was some confusion about the naming of certain events.

While we all sort-of know what a tweetup is. And we know that the Nog-up was my creation and the Social Media Breakfast began with Bryan Person and now has iterations all over the free world, there are some other events that might not be as well defined.

Take for instance, Social Media for Social Change; Social Media for Social Cause; Tweetsgiving; Social Media Club; social media group; etc.

In fact, the issue that jumped to my attention was the trio of Thanksgiving fundraising events right here in Boston that were all named Tweetsgiving! Really. Well, what we're going to start doing (akin to having more specific hashtags for tweetups) is adding host names to the titles in Eventbrite. Then, if someone does TechInno it won't be confused with WebInno or MassInno as long as the official label is TechInno by Warren G. Harding, or some such iteration.

Good plan? We'd like your comments and participation. If you've got events that need some exposure, leave a comment here and we'll add you to the contributor list.

Thanks and Have Fun Out There!

2 comments:

Keith Burtis said...

Jeff, it sounds like a great Idea. The other thing we could do is stop adding 'tweet' to the beginning of every word. Boston is special in this case along with cities like Toronto that they have so much interaction. In my city of Buffalo I have no naming problems. Just attendee problems.

Jeff Cutler said...

Keith, how would we know if events are true tweetups if they don't have the term tweet at the beginning? :-)

Kidding!

It's an oft overused phrase - and when Google buys Twitter in February (not telling you how I know this), then everything Tweetastic is going away.

For some friends that might mean no more conferences. For others it might make their companies or their books immediate collector's items.

But you're right that we are a little hung up on categorizing events with a naming convention and too ignorant of the fact that all we're doing is making connections.

Maybe I'll coin the phrase ConnectUps.

Thanks for writing!