This past week has been incredibly busy. Between the America’s Future Now conference and the Massachusetts Democratic Convention, I’ve missed much of InternetWeek and all of Computers Freedom and Privacy ’09 Conference. I haven’t had a lot of opportunity to write about the events I did attend, so today is catchup day.

Thursday afternoon, I attended Beyond Facebook: How will today's students use the Web of tomorrow? at finding Dulcinea. I wasn’t really acquainted with finding Dulcinea before I went. Back in 2007, TechFold dismissed finding Dulcinea as a Mahalo clone.

The session started off weakly. Jordan Goldman, Founder and CEO of Unigo did a less than compelling pitch for his website. Another listed speaker was Michael Staton, Founder and CEO, Inigral. I must admit, I can’t even remember if he was on the panel. If he was actually there, I guess that shows how much of an impression he made.

James Rohrbach Founder and CEO of GulliverGo was one of the next speakers. As it started off, I was afraid that this was going to be as bad as the first speaker. However, he made a reference to the Senator Paul Simon Study Abroad Foundation Act. This act, he believed, would result in an increase in student travel abroad and he believed that GulliverGo would be well positioned to help students with this and make a nice little profit at the same time. It is interesting legislation I should follow.

One of the things that was particularly interesting about GulliverGo is that they provide Cost Per Action advertising. He noted that CPA advertising is normally done for microsites instead of destination sites, but that they were being successful with CPA as a destination sites. I’ve followed GulliverGo on Twitter and will be interested to see how they do going forward.

Next up was Ariel Aberg-Riger, Creative Development & Marketing Manager for Fourth Story Media. She spoke about The Amanda Project.

“Amanda is brave, beautiful, an original, fierce, spiritual, otherworldly, total weird, diabolical?, a mystery. Amanda is missing.”

The Amanda Project is a site aimed at teenage girls so they can join in a collaborative story about a new mysterious girl at school called Amanda. To me, it feels like an effort to take fan fic, bring it into the mainstream and commercialize it; fan fic of Blair Witch Project meets Miley Cyrus.

Ariel, not to be confused with Amanda, did a great job of talking about different sites that promote engagement with the site. She talked about project based sites like Stuff on my cat. She talked about category based projects like FML, MLIA and GMH and she talked about niche projects like Beautiful Losers.

Not to be outdone, Kate Hillis, Co-Founder and Partner of NextNext Entertainment, Chat the Planet and Qwidget spoke. Qwidget is an interesting idea. You create a widget with a question. Initially people answer the question as a yes or no, then they get drawn in by being asked to explain why they answered one way or another. The same question can be on multiple sites at the same time and this provides a great way to cross pollinate discussions. It is not yet in beta, but the signup site asks what sort of site you plan on using it on, and I was glad to see that it included Drupal.

After the panel concluded there was a small reception and I had some interesting discussions. Particularly, I want to shout out to @WickedRB, and @hummingirl who are both from finding Dulcinea as well as @thinkglobally.

My next stop was the Digg party. I was hoping for something closer to the party at finding Dulcinea, but the Digg party was more like a rave. I didn’t find any opportunity to talk with people about QRCodes and Digg. I had printed out some QRCode leaflets with a QRCode pointing to the Digg page for my article. Unfortunately, no body that I spoke with had a QR Reader on their phones. However, I did get a message on Twitter about QMCODES Q-Lytics. Scan this code to give it a test:

qlytics QR Code for Orient Lodge, originally uploaded by Aldon.

Saturday, I was at the 2009 Massachusetts Democratic Party Convention followed by a local carnival, so I didn’t get a chance to go to the Webutante ball last night or Twiffleball today.

However, tomorrow I will go down to Digiday:Networks and Digiday:Target. It will be interesting if any of the speakers can will have thoughts about Cost Per ReTweet advertising (CPRT).

In the evening, I expect to be too tired for the Webby Gala. If I do have energy, I’m more likely to try and get to the A New Way Forward discussion at The Tank Space for Visual and Performing Arts on 354 West 45th St.

More soon...