Another speaker at CNMS was Jane Hirt, recently named the new managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. She spoke about her success managing the Trib’s commuter tabloid the RedEye – a rare physical paper that has been a financial success in recent years. One thing she mentioned was that they see the competition of the RedEye as anything people do to pass the time. I wonder how that translates to the mission of the Trib? Here’s Chicagoist’s take.

Bill D. Herman presented on web graph analysis using Issue Crawler to view the network of web sites related to copyright policy issues. He was able to show pretty clearly how those advocating less restrictive copyright have a much more central place online than they have in offline venues such as congressional testimony or mainstream print media, which is obvious, but it’s very important to have valid numbers to back that up.

I was also pleased with how Eduardo Neiva integrated his talk on Marx’s theory of technology and game theory as an alternative paradigm, with my much more applied type of presentation on using a wiki in the classroom.

The technology setup was excellent – a difficult and under appreciated task. In the first group of presentations I attended one presenter joined us via Skype – something that shouldn’t be difficult but could have easily gone wrong without good setup. I had two movie clips in my presentation and I needed to use the internet, but all the equipment I needed was already in the room and it wasn’t a problem at all.

After that, a tag was agreed upon in the back channel “hyperlinkedsociety.” This, I think, probably suffered from a lack of pre-coordination more than the back channel because even people who use tagging sites may have missed it there. An announcement would have been fine for that too I suppose, it just didn’t happen.

It seems there is more value at a conference like this one for tagging photos rather than web pages mainly because everyone heard the same presentations and wrote down the links they want to visit. Other types of links probably need more context in a blog post so Technorati tags would be good for giving a bit more exposure to all bloggers who post about the conference, not just people visiting the blogs they already know.