The International Association of Online Communicators (IAOC) has announced the papers to be given at the 2008 International Conference to be held in Reykjavik, Iceland, June 12-13, 2008. This year’s papers include an eye-tracking study involving online journalism, issues of the media and ethics when high profile child deaths and disappearances go online, how social media and broadcast meet in radio 2.0, CEO blogging and ghost writers, student-produced online news media, and a look at the impact the virtual office has on commitment the organization.

Presenters this year are from the University of Trier (Trier, Germany), Western Carolina University (Cullowhee, North Carolina), the University of Miami (Coral Gables, Florida), Richard Stockton College of New Jersey (Pomona, New Jersey), Central Michigan University (Mount Pleasant, Michigan) and Rowan University (Glassboro, New Jersey).

There is still time to register for this year’s IAOC Conference, June 12-13, 2008 at the Hotel Holt in Reykjavik, Iceland. Iceland is an ideal meeting ground for those from Europe and North America. Flights are five hours or less from much of North America and about three hours from Europe.

For those from the US, it’s an opportunity to visit a European capital where the dollar still enjoys a favorable exchange rate. For Europeans, the exchange rate is even better. IAOC has a block of rooms reserved at the Hotel Holt, www.holt.is, or contact our travel service at Lina@LTTravel.com. Be sure to ask for the IAOC rate. Registration is $199 for members, $299 for non-members. For more information and online registration visit http://iaoc2008.eventbrite.com.

The following papers will be presented at the Iceland Conference:

• Preparing Online Communicators for the Future of Information Systems, by Bill Wolff and Diane Penrod
• Using Google Applications for Online Teaching:  Competition for Proprietary Educational Software in an Age of Fiscal Constraint by Kevin Lee
• Loud Voices, Silenced Voices; The Ethics of Online Content in Media Coverage of High-Profile Child Death and Child Disappearance cases by Kathryn Quigley
• User Interaction with Time-dependent Presentation in Online Journalism, Results of an Eye-tracking Study by Peter Schumacher
• The CEO as Celebrity and Blogger: Is there a Ghostwriter in the Machine? by Sam Terilli
• Issues of Organizational Commitment in the Era of the Virtual Office, by Diane Holtzman and Evonne Kruger
• Broadcast Media Meets Social Media; Radio 2.0 and the Future of Broadcasting, by Keith Brand
• Online Newsroom by Joseph Basso and Randy Hines
• Student-produced news media, how complex have their online efforts become? by Rick Sykes
• Old Needs, New Demands:  How Online Communication has Re-shaped the Practice of School PR, by Edward H. Moore
• Research Methodology for Web 2.0, by Chandrasekhar Vallath
• Effective Tactics During a Product Recall: A Case Study of the Menu Foods Pet Food Recall by Melissa Bass
• Online Libel and the Court’s attempt to apply First Amendment protection to an emerging medium, by Joseph Basso

This week Dee Rambeau will be hosting a blog week on Iceland, the location of this year's IAOC Conference. Situated on the continental divide between Europe and America, Iceland is the ideal location for our first American and European Summit Meeting of Online Communicators. Flights to Iceland are five hours or less from North America and about three hours from Europe.

The conference will be held in Reykjavik, the world’s northernmost capital city, June 12-13. The conference starts mid-day Thursday, June 12 at Hotel Holt. IAOC members will present two roundtable paper sessions concerning online communication. Topics include:

• "Radio 2.0 and research methodologies for web 2.0"
• "The CEO as Celebrity and Blogger:  Is there a Ghostwriter in the Machine?"
• "Loud Voices, Silenced Voices; The Ethics of Online Content in Media Coverage of High- Profile Child Death and Child Disappearance cases"
• "Let's Get Together:  Options for Integrating Web 2.0 Collaborative Tools into the Workplace"
• "Issues of Organizational Commitment in the Era of the Virtual Office"

Blackline Social Media Consulting will host a complimentary reception following the round-table sessions.

On Friday an additional round table paper presentation will be followed by a European/American panel discussion on International Online Communications using RSS and other social media tools. The panel is chaired by Philippe Borremans, a leading online media consultant located in Brussels, Belgium, and Dee Rambeau, the managing partner of The Fuel Team, an online communications consultancy located in Denver, Colorado. The discussion will include:

• How to manage online collaboration on a global scale.
• Examples of organizations that are bridging oceans with social media.
• Effective multi-language website tactics
• Low-cost opt-in content delivery across time zones using RSS
• Low-cost content distribution using RSS
• Internal crisis communications across times zones

The conference concludes with a keynote luncheon presentation by Peter A. Gloor focusing on swarm creativity, collaborative innovation networks, and coolhunting. Gloor is a Research Scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence, part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. He was Mercator Visiting Professor at the University of Cologne, and is a lecturer at Helsinki University of Technology.

The registration fee is $199 for members and $299 for non-members. For more information about the conference visit http://iaoc2008.eventbrite.com/.

Join Dee all week for his personal tour of what you can expect to see on your visit to Iceland. You may be surprised at what you learn. Warmed by Gulf Stream currents, Iceland’s temperature is milder than its name suggests. Those attending the IAOC conference in June will have an opportunity to experience long daylight hours of late spring as the island heads toward its endless days of summer and the Midnight Sun.

I am always amazed about the coolhunting qualities of the Finns. I am currently teaching our annual virtual COIN/Coolhunting seminar at Helsinki University of Technology and as happened to me the previous three times, the cool trends being set here just blow me away. It starts with well-known things like the Finns’ ubiquitous use of mobile technologies. Nokia communicators are everywhere. They are used as browsers in the restaurant, to call up Google and resolve the burning question of which is the oldest church in Finland. To find the restaurant in the first place, the communicator of course also includes a navigation system which easily guides us there through the narrow streets of Helsinki. And when we take a taxi back to the hotel, we pay the taxi driver using our cell phones. Quite different from the US where most taxi drivers in New York still want to be paid in cash!

Finns are also eager users of blogging and social networking. They were among the early adopters of LinkedIn, and they are currently actively embracing Facebook extensions and plug-ins. They even coined a new term for people who buy tech gadgets to obtain the right to belong to their own self-chosen digital tribe. “Yhteisöllisyys” comes from the term yhteisö which means “community” or “society” in Finnish. But as was explained to me, Yhteisöllisyys is more than just the Finnish word for community. It stands for a self-selected group of people who get part of their meaning of life from belonging to a loose association or virtual community sharing the same passion for a high-tech gadget. I am not sure if I understood the meaning completely, but from observing my son playing “world of warcraft” it seems to me that he is definitively part of that Yhteisöllisyys. It is not enough do be part of a virtual community, what counts is to be a passionate member of the virtual community. Surprisingly often, what Finns are passionate about becomes a trend very soon thereafter in the rest of Europe or in the US.

If there is a subtitle for last week's "Where Content Meets Technology" at the IBM Forum, Brussels, it could be "Where Audience and Presenters Interact."

The conference opened Thursday, June 15 with two sessions of roundtable presentations. The roundtable format was a new experience for most, and many--both those listening and those presenting--reported a high level of satisfaction. The two things people said they like most is the informality and how easy it is to interact. And the interaction isn't simply two-way between the presenter and a questioners. It often becomes a conversation that involves everyone around the table.

"It's hard not to be engaged when you're part of a small group where everyone is part of the discussion," Suzanne FitzGerald observed in reviewing the first day's events at a post-seminar reception hosted by IBM.

"I really liked that it's not just the presenter who has an opportunity to talk," an educator from Belgium agreed.

We certainly gave the roundtable's ability to engage a real test in starting the first session on the heals of a generous luncheon at the IBM Forum. I didn't see any lunch-laden yawns in my groups, and the sessions went long, with group discussions spilling beyond the time allotted. When time for the reception arrived, with food and drink awaiting just outside the conference room, many stayed with their groups to continue there discussions.

Dr. FitzGerald, who is chair of the PR department at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ, was the architect of the roundtables at the IAOC seminars in Valley Forge, PA, and Brussels. In explaining the process to our group, Suzanne freely admitted that she stole the concept from the IPR conference in Miami, where she has presented papers herself.

The meeting's dedication to discussion and conversation flowed into the next morning, with another round of roundtable discussions, followed by a "New Media" panel with Guillaume Du Gardier, Director Online Communications Europe from Edelman PR and Nico Verplancke, Program Manager at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Broad-Band Technology in Belgium. The panel was moderated by IBM PR manager and IAOC founding member Philippe Borremans.

Philippe announced to the group that he was so taken with the success of the roundtable format (his first experience with it) that he moved his panel from the formal classroom setup in the conference room next door, back into the room where our roundtables had been. He removed the tables, put chairs in a semi-circle around the room, and placed his panel inside the circle. The result was a panel fully engaged with the audience, with questions, ideas and comments flying around the room.

I can't possibly do justice in this post to all that was discussed in the panel or the keynote presentation that followed with Neville Hobson (and Shel Holtz joining in from California via Skype). The beauty of this being an online organization is that I don't have to try summarize for you, and this discussion isn't limited to those lucky enough to have attended.

Philippe has committed to bring his panel online for a Blog Week discussion of new media. And all of the paper presenters have been invited to host a blog week here on the IAOC blog. The papers also will be posted on the IAOC website. Neville and Shel have posted their presentation on their Podcast, "For Immediate Release." Download the podcast here or sign up for this and future RSS feeds here. Download the PowerPoint that accompanied their presentation here.

One last piece of good news from the conference: Guillaume has agreed to roundup the same group of European bloggers who gave us a lively week of discussion on the IAOC blog exactly one year ago. So watch for "Blogging Europe – Round 2" coming soon to the IAOC blog. You can find all the posts from last year's discussion in our Europe archive folder.

Don Dunnington

Here they are, the first pictures of the IAOC European Conference in Brussels !

Susan Fitzgerald and Don Dunnington kicked off with an introduction on the IAOC and explaining the - for us Europeans - strange set up of the conference (moving from table to table...)

You can see the pictures on a trial wiki we're testing out.

We're in the first paper presentation session till 3:34PM. We have 25 people right now, more to come for the next session and the full day tomorrow.

Updates regarding the conference will happen on the wiki.