The schedule for the 2009 Mesh Conference, “the little Canadian web conference that could”, has been posted. Mesh takes place on April 7th and 8th at the MaRS Collaboration Centre in downtown Toronto and is preceded by MeshU workshop event on April 6th.

Friends of mine who’ll be presenting at MeshU include:

• Leigh Honeywell of Hacklab.TO: Break It to Make It: Writing (More) Secure Software
• Pete Forde, Unspace: Is That an iPhone in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

There are a number of presentations by other folks at MeshU – go look at the schedule to see which ones appeal to you.

As for Mesh itself, there will be keynotes over its two days by the following people:

• Michael Masnick, founder and CEO of Floor64
• Jessica Jackely, co-founder of Kiva.org
• Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of Mahalo.com
• Scott Monty, marketing, communications and social media guy
• David Miller, Mayor of Toronto

A few people I know will be doing presentations at Mesh:

• Mark Evans will have a one-on-one conversation with David Usher, billed as “one of Canada’s most social media-friendly musicians” and a workshop titled How to Integrate Social Media into Your Marketing Plan
• Sacha Chua will be heading up a talk with a panel featuring John Philip Green titled How the Web is Changing the Way We Learn
• Torontoist’s David Topping and Spacing’s Matthew Blackett will be on a panel called Hyper-Local Media: Does It Work?
• Andrew Cherwenka will be running the Social Media 101 workshop
• Mathew Ingram will lead The Future of News panel
• Darren Barefoot will lead a panel featuring Duarte Da Silva titled Using Social Media for Good
• Stuart McDonald will lead a panel titled Managing Your Ad Buy
• Howard Lindzon will be on the What’s on the Horizon? panel discussion
• Jevon McDonald will moderate the Benefits and Risks of Building for a Platform discussion
• Sean Moffitt and Saul Colt will be in the Using Online Word of Mouth panel
• Rob Hyndman will lead the Legal Bootcamp for Web Startups workshop
• My manager’s manager, Mark Relph, will chair the Managing Community Online panel

For more details, see the Mesh schedule.

Registration for Mesh costs CAD$492.50; registration for MeshU costs CAD$289.00.

Yes, I know that an F-35 Lightning II fighter plane has nothing at all to do with the article, but I loves me some fighters!

Captain David Faggard, Chief of Emerging Technology for the U.S. Air Force, sent me a revised version of their “rules of engagement” chart for responding to blogs and other online postings, and in PDF form to boot! You can find this chart at the original article, The Air Force’s Rules of Engagement for Blogging.

Update, January 5, 2008: Captain David Faggard, Chief of Emerging Technology for the U.S. Air Force, sent me an updated version of their chart, whose changes are based on your comments. The chart appears in this article, and you can click on it to download a full-sized PDF version.

You’ve probably seen many articles on companies and organizations saying that they take social media seriously. Here’s one such organization that you might not expect: the United States Air Force. Take a look at the Air Force Blog Assessment chart, reproduced below:

Click the diagram to download the PDF version (455K).

The “rules of engagement” are quite good. You might find them to be useful for your own blogs, whether personal or corporate.

WebInkNow recently covered the Air Force’s approach to social media, which is far more involved than many companies who only pay lip service to the idea. They’ve assigned someone the role of “Chief of Emerging Technology”, whose job is to develop strategy, policy and plans for the Air Force’s “communicators” and whose mission is to use or build web applications as a means of engaging Airmen and the general public in conversation. The goal is to make every single Airman a communicator.

The Air Force has quite a presence on the web, which includes:

• The official blog, Air Force Live
• A Twitter account
• A YouTube page
• Widgets and podcasts

As with the Blog Assessment chart, you might want to use the Air Force’s social media strategy as a model for your own. Check out WebInkNow’s article for more.