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The Scoop on Bloggercon III

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the used-to-call-them-diaries dept.

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."

5 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Is Slashdot a "blog"? by turnstyle · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I've seen other sites refer to Slashdot as a "blog" but I don't really think of it that way.

    For starters, it's been around long before the term "blog" was coined.

    Just wondering if others here think it's weird when Slashdot is called a blog.

    --
    Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
    1. Re:Is Slashdot a "blog"? by ChrisFedak · · Score: 4, Interesting

      A lot of webloggers allow the owners to post articles, and then have a section for comments attached to each article. If you check out an active blog over on Livejournal, you'll find that most postings have a fair number of comments. Slashdot shares this characteristic in spades. Slashdot also gives each of us a journal. On the web. One might almost call that a weblog. The usual connotation of weblogs as a journal of personal information rather than bleeding edge nerd commentary is probably what makes the classification seem wierd, and I'll admit that I felt the same when you brought it up.

  2. A con for blogs, who knew? by YetAnotherName · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I thought weblogging would be a passing fad, especially given that the majority of such blogs are updated by people with poor writing skills and dull lives. The pathetic stream-of-consciousness musings of a acne infested high schooler can only keep your interest for so long.

    Sure, there are exceptions that prove the rule; the rapid punditry of certain election blogs were interesting, too.

    What would be most interesting to me is to find if there's a business strategy in exploiting blogs. I recall just a few years ago Micro$oft finding some business use for instant messaging (and not just as a communications enhancement, but for things like EDI); I'm sure there are some plans already to deploy Business Visual Blog Server or some such product, to what end I can't fathom. I'm sure another company will say they've patented blogs and/or blog technology, and then we'll know that blogs have really arrived.

    1. Re:A con for blogs, who knew? by Bishop · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I would go so far as to say that a blog is just a mailing list and Usenet newsgroups moved to the web. Not that moving to the web is a bad thing. Certainly blogs are more accesible, and authors have more control then either usenet or mailing lists allowed. But looking at the "blog community" I see the same sorts of people I did back in the pre-spam newsgroups. So I don't see how blogs will revolutionize the world.

  3. Why "blogs" are not all bad... by Fnkmaster · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "Blogging" (admittedly a godawful word - I would never attend a tech industry event called BloggerCon, I'd have to hang my head in shame for the rest of my life) is just a move back to what the Internet was originally about anyway - namely, democratization of content production and publishing.

    Blogging software is just simplified CMS software, a more accessible form of what's been around since the start of dynamic web content and database backed web sites. That's it. Nothing more or less. Let's not ascribe any gradiose proclamations to it. I don't think "blogging" is a fad that will ever go away, I just think a lot of boring people with nothing interesting to say will eventually lose interest in blogging.

    Easy-to-use content management software has just made it more reasonable for people to keep well-updated, more relevant sites without having to laboriously manage static HTML pages. The plethora of good (or at least decent) blog software out there has also done a lot to increase the importance and use of web standards like CSS and XHTML, and actually finally pushed forward useful metadata on the web in the form of RSS/Atom. These are all good things.

    As for the rantings or ramblings posted by people you disagree with, and generally stupid or sucky content that just don't interest you, you certainly don't have to read it. Slashdot has plenty of this too. While quite imperfect, moderation helps separate the wheat from the chaff. Given the development of standards like Trackback by the "blogging" community (god I hate that word, it really kills me to use it), I wouldn't be surprised to eventually see distributed moderation systems or communities and webs of trust factor more heavily into the culture of blogs too (hmm, maybe we can call it the "culture of distributed content" - I refuse to use the word 'blogosphere').

    I just wish that somebody would get rid of the damned word blog, negative connotations, hokey sound and all. And get rid of the meaningless catchphrase "social software" while you're at it.