The first couple of sessions were a bit of a let down actually. There wasn’t much being talked about that stood outside of the normal questions. I can excuse that however. This is “the business of social media”, and it does seem like a much more business focused group than a lot of other conferences. So I can chalk a lot of this up to businesses being focused on what is somewhat known already, and not the really completely witchy edge of trends. This stuff still is pretty much “out there”, even if those of us who live online find it old hat. Given that however, I’m really hoping that we get deeper into the business issues than other events have. I would like to see info about how to make money using social networking, or how to measure savings within a business from hooking people together within an organization using blogs and social networking. We make these nebulous statements like “hooking together people within an organization gives you better access to your internal information resources.” Sure. But how much? How can you figure out if a roll out is successful or if it failed? How do you measure “better connections” after they happen, let alone estimate them before an implementation? I’m hoping to see these kinds of issues discussed. I should add them to the wiki.