BlogWalk 3.0

Had an interesting time at BlogWalk yesterday, met a ton of people, and had some interesting conversations, a little tour of the centre of Vienna, and finished up with pizza, beer, more interesting conversations, and the second half of the Euro2004 final - those Greeks eh !

Thanks to Ton [and Seb and Lilia] for organising the event. I had some interesting discussions around monetising RSS feeds [Markus (I think), was talking about his desire to pay for a full extract RSS feed from professional pubs, like newspapers, including all the stuff that didn't make it into the paper]. I felt the early part of the day was a little unfocused, and we didn't talk much about weblog networks, but there was good stuff about implied privacy/etiquette in the blog world. Made a little comment about awareness vs action networks [need to follow up on that]. Also interesting stuff around the issues of identity - Lee spoke a little about the need for federated identity, but also needing to have separate identities to ensure that work and personal blogs/identities don't overlap.

Towards the end of the day, we moved into a more cohesive/all group discussion to cap the day, for me this was the best part [excluding the social stuff]. Some talk about how to use weblogs and the networks we develop using them as tools for action. Some talk around are blogs the right tools for the job - probably not, but then blogs aren't the right tool for making my morning expresso either. There are other better collaborative/action-oriented tools and maybe what's needed is a more seemless transition between blogs [great for awareness and information networks] to wikis or other collaborative tools. Again, more thinking required, maybe even a very low-fi wireframe/prototype showing how this might work.

Anyway - great day, good discussions, but best of all interesting, smart and friendly people who are passionate about this stuff. Happy I decided to come here, looking forward to BlogTalk now.

Interesting people

Cyprien, Barbara Ganley, Martin Roell, Lilia, Piers, Lee, Markus, Clemens, Gerrit, Suw, Ton, Seb