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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."
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
Blogs are the best thing since the Internet, no wait, blogs _are_ the Internet, blogs are the Ubernet, blogs, blogs, have you seen my latest MovableType template?, I prefer WordPress, my grandpa has a blog and now he's blogging about his rectal warts isn't that great, RSS, Atom, Atom, RSS, big media is dead, CNN should just hire a bunch of bloggers and fire all those journalists, blogs will save the rainforest, I met my ex-girlfriend on blogger.com but she's now blogging another blogger, blogosphere is such a witty word, blogs are cool, blogs are better than sex, Einstein was a blogger.
Politicians should have a blog, housewives should have a blog, my boss should blog, dogs should blog, blogs should blog, blogblogblog.
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.
What rolls down stairs
Alone or in pairs...
Rolls over your neighbor's dog?
What's great for a snack
And fits on your back?
It's bLog! bLog! bLog!
It's bLo-og, it's bLo-og
It's big, it's heavy
It's wood!
It's bLo-og, bLo-og
It's better than bad
It's good!!!
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
"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.
I was particularly interested in the seminar discussing the photography of cats and its metaphysical and geopolitical impact on greater society.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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?
Did they sing Kumbaya, too?
--- Ban humanity.
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.
"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.