I wanted to share some exciting conference bits. First, i have four upcoming public conference speaking gigs that might be of interest to folks:

1. In January, at HICSS, i will be presenting a paper: “Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster.”

2. In February, at AAAS, i will be speaking about digital youth alongside Henry Jenkins, Justine Cassell, Amanda Lehnart, and Dave Huffaker. The panel is called “It’s 10 pm: Do You Know Where Your Children Are . . . On-line!”

3. In March, i will be giving a talk at Etech. The talk is called “G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide.” This will be a long talk, written explicitly for the Etech community, addressing the tensions between global and local that are emerging in social software. For all of you industry folks, this will be the most relevant talk i will give this season.

4. The next week in March, i will be organizing a panel at SXSW alongside Jane McGonigal, Irina Shklovski and Amanda Williams. SXSW will be full of many different fun panels and lots of good socialization.

In addition to my upcoming talks, i am also on the steering committee for BlogTalk Reloaded. The CFP was just released and is of particular relevance to many of you since the scope of the conference has expanded to think about social software more broadly. There are three separate tracks: academic, industry and practitioner. It’s a good opportunity to meet with all sorts of social technology minded folks.