I spent this morning at the Social Business Edge Conference in mid-Manhattan and it was pretty good; I tried taking notes and even tweeting but wireless wasn’t working for me and my ATT iphone service wasn’t much better – decided to just pay attention and remember as much as I could contain.

One thing that was different about Stowe Boyd’s conference is you had to be invited to it in order to attend.

I’ll recount up till lunch after which I left because I can’t pay my bills just going to conferences all the time – unless conferences start to pay me to attend ….

Anyway, after a nice introductory talk by Stowe Boyd about how business will change and the flow of information will be it’s center (in the future) the first person who spoke was part of the Onion magazine.

He has authored three books, including Keep Jerry Falwell Away From My Oreo Cookies, was nominated for the Bill Hicks Award for Thought Provoking Comedy, declared a Champion of the First Amendment by Iowa State University, and called “someone I need to know” by Barack Obama. He hosts “Popular Science’s Future Of” on the Science Channel, and is the Web and Politics editor for The Onion.

Baratunde Thurston

Baratunde Thurston is a comedian, vigilante pundit and television host. He is the co-founder of Jack & Jill Politics, one of the top 10 black blogs and also blogs for The Huffington Post and his own site www.baratunde.com.

Baratunde Thurston talked about rewiring twitter to create different kinds of conversations – focusing on educational issues like Swine Flu and the Volcano Cloud over Europe now – there was a bit of humor in his talk (he works at the Onion after all) and he muttered that it’s ok if he vents off online and isn’t always interested in a two way conversation or even in engagement in conversations that don’t always suit every situation.

Jay Rosen

Rosen is the author of PressThink, a weblog about journalism and its ordeals (www.pressthink.org), for which he received the Reporters Without Borders 2005 Freedom Blog award for outstanding defense of free expression; he also blogs at the Huffington Post. In July 2006 he debuted NewAssignment.Net, his experimental site for pro-am, open source reporting projects. The first one was called Assignment Zero, a collaboration with Wired.com. A second project is OfftheBus.Net with the Huffington Post; author of What Are Journalists For?; he served the director of the Project on Public Life and the Press, funded by the Knight Foundation; Rosen is also a member of the Wikipedia Advisory Board.

Found Professor Jay Rosen’s presentation engaging – almost hypnotic – he went on about how a 400 year old profession – Journalism – had increasingly been associated with “The Media” when it’s in fact, a separate discipline.   Jay brought up an interesting point – while journalists like to think they are objective and make decisions based on their craft – they often are coming out of a production process (miracle of the daily paper getting published, at all) according to a study Professor Rosen cited that was performed in the 1970′s.

As the internet came into being, the role of the journalist changed from a closed, one way profession to a more open collaborative model that is still being worked out; he gave a few examples of what the changes and what he thinks they mean.

There were a couple of speakers who could not make it and were stranded in Europe including Micah Sifry – in two cases Stowe Boyd played a video clip created by the missing speaker in lieu of an appearance.

The final speaker of the morning was John Hagel and he spoke about a few key concepts including ….

John Hagel III

John Hagel III, the internationally acclaimed author and strategist, has agreed to join us at the Social Business Edge in April. He serves as the co-chairman of the Deloitte Center For The Edge, and has had a long and stellar career in strategic advisory roles. John is the author, with John Seely Brown, of The Only Sustainable Edge, and is the author of other works, including Out Of The Box. He will be releasing a new book that he wrote with John Seely Brown and Lang Davison called The Power Of Pull the week before the show.

that real productivity has been declining steadily since  the 1970′s and is going down to near 0 in the next few years.   He also said change rarely succeeds on visionary desires but does succeed when you back is against the awll.

John Hegel said a lot more and I found him to be a very good speaker – but you can see for yourself with this playlist I made this morning.