[Editor’s Note: This is part two of an annual editorial series started in March of 2008. See the post: Observations from Outside the Echo Chamber at Mashable for part one. – mrh]

During last year’s Wordcamp Dallas, I came away from the event with a completely different perspective on what was going on with relationship to the rest of the “bubble,” as we call our isolated little Web 2.0 community in the blogosphere. I wrote about it in pretty great detail as I described what was illuminated by the lightbulb that went on over my head.

Last year, most people were burnt out with constantly hearing about “biting, poking, super biting, or super poking,”  Most of them didn’t get Mahalo, which was the topic du jour at the time, and didn’t really find FriendFeed particularly useful, and didn’t see it as the next Twitter, which was prevailing opinion amongst the early adopter set back then.

Most of the people I talked to, as well as how reality bore out, showed me that the impressions of this crowd were fairly prescient. Facebook has increased greatly in value, but engagement continues to be a challenge there. Most people still don’t understand what the heck Mahalo is for, and Friendfeed has failed to capture the imagination of the mainstream in the way Twitter has.

A Different Point of View
Last year, I approached the conference as an observer and as a reporter.  This year, I find myself more in the role of an editorialist and educator.  My work here at SiliconANGLE is more research and analysis oriented than it is a straight up reporting of the news. As a speaker at the conference this year, many of my conversations were lead by the inquiries of others than my own.

As a result, most of my observations on people’s attitudes towards specific social media technologies and companies were anecdotal and eavesdropped, but what I heard signaled a fundamental shift in the way we regard these tools.

 
This year, as it is with most Wordcamps, the group was dominated by business folk, with large chunks of new media journalist, social media consultants, software and site developers and community activists stirred in for flavor.

If you heard a conversation about a specific social media tool, it wasn’t about the viability of that tool as a business or if it had a likelihood of taking off, but was a conversation oriented about the usefulness of that tool in the larger toolbox of technology.

That, to me, says that we’re past the Luddite vs. early adopter stage of the fight, and more towards the acceptance phase of adoption.

What About the Rest of the World
Is the rest of the world ready to accept social media as a means of doing business?

The answer to that seems to also be yes. Thanks to creative destruction, to the extent we’ve allowed it to occur in this country, businesses big and small seem more willing now than ever to take on social media marketing and customer service campaigns than ever before.

Economic pressures force companies to cut back on spending in marketing and customer outreach, and after the effects of that on companies’ overall bottom line became clear in the shakeout starting in February or so. Companies looked at what they wanted to spend on traditional outreach and advertising methods, looked at the costs involved with doing it the new media way, and decided to take the leap into launching a blog, paying for a social media consultant, or opening up the Twitter account and Facebook fan page.

It was a story I’d heard first hand a number of times from those who were developing traditional websites, and saw demand skyrocket for blog and template work.

It’s quite clear that the world is changing, and our role as evangelists will decrease dramatically soon, while the part of our job where we must actually start doing something with what we know will come into greater demand.