As you read this, I’ll be dashing to the airport to take off for Montréal.
Wikipedia tells me it’s famous for being one of the “world’s most livable cities” as well as Canada’s cultural capital. I remember it fondly as the home of Cirque du Soleil (a one-time client; image: Naoki Nakashima, Creative Commons) and one of the most charming cities I’ve ever visited… all of eight years ago.
So it’s with a great deal of anticipation that I’m heading there today, to speak at Webcom Montréal.
My cohort is Claude Malaison, with whom I first connected on Twitter during the Mumbai terror attacks.
We’ll be talking about our experience during what must rank as one of the most eye-opening uses of social media (and I don’t mean by us, but by everyone who leaped onto blogs, Twitter, Facebook and the like) to connect across cultures, time zones and languages.
We were bound together by a shared horror of what was happening, coupled with the urge – I believe in most of us – to do whatever we could to help share useful information that might somehow help those on the ground.
Because that’s all we could do from a distance.
I think it’s pretty amazing that Claude and I developed enough of a rapport that he’d ask me to co-present at this conference. See, this is how not to lose a girl with one tweet. I’m really looking forward to meeting him offline.
If you’ll be at Webcom, please do let me know so that we can make a connection as well. Because that’s what it’s all about.
[…] Just like I would never – never – have met Jeff Pulver had we not previously connected on Twitter and then happened to be in the same security line at Montréal Airport last year. […]
[…] connected on Twitter and then happened to be in the same security line at Montréal Airport last year. Which serendipitous event led to an almost hour-long conversation that I could not have imagined […]