A specific demographic of users have latched on to Google’s social service quickly, and that’s photographers. Virtual photo walks have been a mainstay of Google+ almost since its inception, and the platform has become the home to some of the world’s most popular photographers.

Some of these photographers even created their own book to benefit charity called the “Plus One Collection”, a first for Google+. It looks like these groups of photographers are about to have another first by holding their own conference in May called the “Google+ Photographer’s Conference“.

On May 22nd and 23rd, some of the most avid users of Google+ will meet at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco to discuss photography. The conference has been put together by Scott Kelby of the Kelby Media Group, and will focus on how photographers can build their brand and best use Google+ to share their work.

Here are just a few of the impressive speakers that will be discussing photography and how to take your work social:

Scott Kelby
Trey Ratcliff
Guy Kawasaki
Jeremy Cowart
Alex Koloskov
Bradley Horowitz

While this isn’t an official Google event, the company is one of the sponsors, along with Adobe and Wacom. The price to get in is $299 if you register before April 30th, so get your tickets now.

Along with the speakers and tracks of training, there will be numerous photo walks happening around San Francisco, which are free if you sign up for the conference.

If you’re a photographer and are looking for ways to make a name for yourself, this conference is definitely for you. It’s been fun to see this group of users find a voice on Google’s social platform, and I imagine that we’ll see a lot of these types of events pop up in the future, just like we’ve seen with Twitter meetups and unofficial mini-conferences.

Today I was hanging out at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco, which consists mainly of marketing professionals who are looking for the best way to integrate social into their advertising campaigns. During a keynote with Guy Kawasaki and our friend Robert Scoble, the location-aware app Highlight was mentioned. A few times. And by a few, I mean about twenty. That’s cool though, Robert is a huge fan of the app and let us know that fifteen people in the room also used the app.

I wasn’t sure how the Highlight app fit into a discussion about trends in advertising, until Mr. Scoble dropped a bit of a teaser about an upcoming feature and functionality of the app:

Highlight shows you who’s around you, and soon…what’s around you.

His tone was extremely coy, as if he had just let a purring cat out of the bag. This kind of functionality isn’t new though, remember foursquare’s “Radar’ feature? The idea is that you’d turn this feature on and you’d be pinged with a notification when you became close to a popular location on the platform.

Only problem is, like Highlight, it eats the shit out of your phone’s battery:

I’ve made it clear that I’m personally not a fan of location-aware apps like Highlight, but if you’re in the Bay Area, there’s no way to get away from it. People are talking about it at meetups, mixers, and conferences, so there’s definitely a market for services like it.

If we take the battery drain issue out of the equation, people are finding this type of “always-on” real-time sharing to be helpful. If Highlight does indeed launch the feature that Scoble mentioned today, I can see how it could leap-frog foursquare’s Radar feature, which hasn’t gotten a lot of love from the team lately, and build a nice platform for small businesses to draw attention to themselves.

It’s surprising how much of the “creepy” factor we’ll ignore when we’re getting something “valuable” in return, but that’s how all of the big companies are handling things these days. We give all of our data to Google and Facebook but don’t worry about it since we’re getting something we use daily in return.

We’re not sure how soon this feature will be made available, but we’ll keep you up to date.

Are you a fan of location-aware apps? Let us know what you think in the comments.