This coming year will be my third at SXSW so this time I partnered with Aaron Brazell (@technosailor) to submit a Core Conversation proposal called "Shattering Secrets with Social Media". Here it is:

What are they building? Did he quit or get fired? Who is she dating now?

As helpful as Facebook can be in knowing who is dating who.. does that really help anyone? Is that even interesting? Wouldn't you like to know about the things that *aren't* being talked about? Professionally, how can you look at a "stealth startup" and figure out what they're doing and how they're doing it? How can you learn about their investors, products, and even potential customers? How can you scare the hell out of them for fun and profit? Who are the Connectors? Where are the Mavens flocking? How can the CIA put two and two together to equal terrorist?

In the past five years that we've had site likes LinkedIn, Delicious, Digg, and Twitter, a stunning amount of private information has been made available for all to find, browse, explore, and combine. With some deep digging, creative analysis, a little bit of luck, you can find patterns and combine of information in ways that no one expected and few have explored. This discussion will cover topics and tactics to uncover, detect, and take advantage of these patterns and how to use them to change how you work, think, and interact with your communities. Three successful case studies will be presented to be discussed and ripped to shreds by the audience.

That pretty well covers the core of which, but the concept originally started with my articles a few years back on Open Source Intelligence: Linked In Part 1 & Open Source Intelligence Part 2 but expands out to a few more areas that we've been exploring. Some of the patterns are solid and easily detectable while others require a bit of instinct and educated guessing, but regardless, it's a fun discussion and we're looking forward to hosting it.

Vote for "Shattering Secrets with Social Media" today!