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The Scoop on Bloggercon III
Trizor writes "Bloggercon III commenced today with the opening session ending in a singalong of 'This land is your land'. The sessions ranged from introductions on blogging to a comparison of bloggers and journalists. The developers at O'Reilly have provided notes, coverage, and commentary on the event."
Blog? Web log? I've always taken the definition to mean "fairly personal" content would be included. Slashdot is a news site.
Dan
"What a waste of time!"
Although Phil snorted this in response to a woman's claim of having studied 19th century French poetry, I think I can hear the collective snort of many people in reponse to a story about the blog of a convention for bloggers.
Blog me with a spoon.
Cool, but useless.
I'm sure there's some bloggers out there got themselves stuck in an infinite spiral of syndication.
Better be careful with those little orange XML lozenges; just one in the wrong place could kill.
The thing about blogs is that I think it was a really obvious idea. There were loads and loads of people doing webpages, updated daily, when the blogging concept took hold. For instance, when I relaunched my website around 2000, I had my designer build a custom database so that I could easily post content from a webpage. Then blogs started getting big, and even though I didn't call my site a blog, it had a huge amount of characteristics in common with blogs.
I think the most important story about blogs is the emergence of back-end software like movabletype and wordpress. No longer were the developers of content stuck with the obvious kludge of using Frontpage or some other mediocre web site creator to post daily content. Wordpress and its ilk lets you post content, and incorporate a bunch of useful blog-related features, without reinventing the wheel.
But, as I said, I just don't find the "blog" concept that interesting. It's an obvious concept that was being practiced by thousands of websites long before somebody tacked the repulsive-sounding name "blog" on what they were doing.
In my eyes, far more interesting than blogs is the emerging iPodder concept. Here, people are adopting the very same tools used in blogs (wordpress, movabletype, etc), and using them to attach mp3 files of radio shows to the Internet. Internet radio has been around for a while, but the iPodder concept that taps into RSS sites is incredibly interesting.
To put it another way, blogs made me yawn and say, "I've already been doing this for months." Whereas podcasts made me say, "This is truly revolutionary. We finally have a way for individual content creators to break the Clear Channel hegemony."
Two months ago there were fewer than fifty podcasted radio shows. Now there are well over 200. I've been having a great time doing mine, which I post to a RSS feed for users of ipodder, and post to my website for people who visit it regularly.
One last comment on podcasting. There is a huge but limited number of people who want to surf the web or fire up their RSS feeder to read a variety of blogs. That circle of people draws from a very different population than those who want to listen to radio shows. And shows like mine can offer compelling content that there's a big demand for, but that traditional advertisers would boycott. The real news about the democratization of media isn't happening at a third annual blogging conference; it's happening right now with the emergence of ipodder radio shows.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Blogger con is just Dave Winer's latest lame attempt to be relevant and hijack internet hipsters into endorsing him for High Priest of blogging. We don't need any idiots like Winer telling us what we've already been doing.
As for the conference its the most open and accessible I know of with live audio, active IRC rooms, a wiki, audio available afterwords and no vendor advertising. They even put the IRC window up on screen at times. And its held on the weekends so I can attend virtually.
Anyhow I just wanted to represent - oh and try podcasting if you haven't it's the shiznat. Peace out.