California, here I come

Only 8 days until I fly to California – it's been pretty much a year since my last visit and oh am I excited. (For those who don't know, I spent four months down there early last year, near Santa Cruz, and I miss the place. I loooove California.)

It's going to be a whirlwind of a week, I'm realizing. I arrive early Thursday morning, and will probably spend Thursday and Friday in San Francisco. Looks like I'll be spending the weekend at WineCamp, though I haven't yet registered and I'm fearful of geek-overload. I think it would be lovely to spend a fun weekend with cool people I'd like to meet, talking about social change and geekery, but I fear that combined with NetSquared the following week, my brain might turn to mush. Who knows, though. Maybe I'll just blast off into a different dimension of zen-ness with my laptop. Or maybe I'll spend the weekend having fun with real people and won't feel like it was a geek-out? That sounds wonderful.

I'm hoping to squeeze in a night at Mount Madonna, where I used to live, but that'll be tight, since NetSquared starts on Tuesday. And I'm excited. I'll be wearing a couple of hats – my Web of Change conference coordinator hat, and my DeSmogBlog Community Manager hat. Eager to recruit new WOCers, and eager to get great advice on how to help the Blog go next-level!

I've been poking through the session offerings at the site. I have a feeling it's going to be a 48-hour case of FOMS – Fear Of Missing Something. But some of the sessions that sound interesting to me are:

• Gender and the social web: new tools, same...stuff?

• From a Voice in the Wilderness to the Wisdom of Crowds: Citizen Journalism, Nonprofit Organizations and Social Change

• Social networking systems - chat rooms on steroids or a real tool for social change?

• The distributed grass roots marketing team... letting your community, advocates, evangelists, and fans do the heavy lifting

• I tag the hand that feeds me: examining aggregation and tagging in the nonprofit world

Phew. Participants have been encouraged to comment and add thoughts and questions to the topics... so far I'm feeling too overwhelmed by my actual obligations to get into it. But I think I'll try and contribute something in the next week.

So that's it from me... watch for an exciting announcement in the next day or two. Okay, it's probably more exciting to me than it is to the general public. But I'm *stoked*.