I had a great day at CommunityOne yesterday – Sun did a great job of putting on a good community conference. It started out with the community panel – I was a bit nervous as not only was Matt Asay moderating (and he likes to stir the pot) but it was in front of 3000 people!

The day ended up being about Twitter. We had the audience Twitter us during the panel (I did see the comment about women!)  

the_contrarian @communityone Only one woman on the panel. Is that a sign of a dysfunction in the open source community? about 21 hours ago

And although we didn't get to their questions in the panel (they came a bit too fast to read!) it was fun seeing that the audience was listening and interested. Afterwards I answered all the Twitter questions in Twitter and made some new Twitter friends: @zalez, @Ryan_Singer, @the_contrarian, @rayval.

Then I went to the RedMonk unconference – they did a great job getting lots of conversation going. If anybody could keep a conversation going in the middle of a noisy cafeteria where 3000 people are swarming around you trying to get their lunch … well, it could only be the RedMonk guys. One of the discussions was around Twitter, what you hate, what you like, what you want to see, best practices … @monkchips said he'd blog it all. His theme of the day was definitely "listen more than you talk"! Another concept I found interesting was do you see Twitter as a river or a pond? It changes whether you follow lots of people or just a few … oh and don't be offended if someone doesn't follow you. It probably has to do with the river/pond idea or they might be your boss and they just really don't want to know that about you!

I met a bunch of my Twitter friends face-to-face for the first time: @SaraD, @twleung, @tmolini, @cote, @monkchips, @imurdock, @IanSkerrett, @gstein, @aglick35, … any body I missed? And I saw a bunch of my old Twitter friends: @johnmark, @webmink, @sogrady, @jzemlin, @Silona, @DivaDanese, and I saw @laurencooney several times and never got to say hi.

Now I'm off to JavaOne.