This post is cross-posted on my personal blog and on the NetSquared Blog.

On Thursday, I attended the unconference/open space portion of SOCAP09 (Social Capital Markets 2009). I found a few tech sessions that were relevant to the purposes of TechSoup, and as is always the case, I collected the business cards of some intelligent people doing good work. The spontaneous conversations in the halls, are really the reason why we go to conferences, right?

That is really the reason we even do face-to-face these days, as much of the content at conferences is pretty much the same conversation again and again, at least in the nonprofit tech world (Twitter or Facebook? What's the best platform to use for online collaboration? And so on.) Here is what you missed, so you don't have to regret not having gone.

Meet these smart people whom I met, and you may not know about, but should:

• Jill Finlayson, Social Edge Social Media guru
• Greg Berry, Systems Designer of Nuance Intelligence
• Boyd Cohen, of 3rd Whale
• Dawn Bowles, of Dreambank.org

These people were talking about very different topics, but there were some emerging and complementary high-level themes that I observed across conversations.

One such theme that emerged is that there is a justifiable fear of the duplication of efforts.

Windows 7 is being touted as the simplest version of Windows yet.

TechSoup is starting to prepare all the information that nonprofits will need to know about Windows 7 when it launches on our site on October 22 and becomes available for donation requests on November 1. We want to gather any and all questions that the nonprofit community has on the product. We are wondering what your concerns may be about the product. For example, why you would want to upgrade, if upgrading would interact with your existing data, what the hardware specs are that would be needed for this upgrade, what the different and enhanced features are with Windows, etc.

Reply to this thread in our community forums, and let us know what you are wondering about Windows 7. All opinions and questions welcome!

This post was originally published on The Huffington Post on June 8, 2009. Copyright © 2009 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

The setting was an amphitheater filled with attendees from around the globe. The scene sounds fairly usual, although the attendees were sitting amongst a Panda — wearing a shoulder-ferret (looks exactly like it sounds), a bald English woman levitating in lotus position; a small penguin; a punk-rocker girl, replete with a bull's style nose ring; and yours truly, Glitteractica Cookie (Susan Tenby by human/legal standards), a pink-skinned cat-lady, emblazoned with paw-print tattoos, wearing a tuxedo T-shirt and a tutu, though I was both virtual and present in real-life, which is not as tricky as it sounds.

The small conference room in San Jose, California, was dimly lit and buzzing with intensity, while being relatively silent, except for the tapping of keyboards and the occasional chuckle or sigh. The reason was because many participants in the room were participating from both Second Life and the room in San Jose, and they are doing so, in avatar form. Avatars are virtual alter egos, that are our embodiment (not always human, as I noted) in a virtual world.

If you haven't heard of Facebook, I'm sorry to break it to you, but you are living under a rock. However, if you haven't seen a use for Facebook for your organization, then you are not alone, and we are here to help. Many people view online social networking tools, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Myspace as time-draining distractions. But a benefit of Facebook that may not have occurred to you is that Facebook will allow you to aggregate content from around the Web, and easily pull it into one central page, which will help you spread the word about your organization. Facebook also has the benefit of having your installed audience, your network of friends at your fingertips, so you can easily announce new activities, campaigns, and events to your self-selected constituency of like-minded individuals and groups, without having to email a large group of people and risking the effects of a spam filter's black hole.