Goodbye Vienna, looking ahead to BlogTalk 3.0

Early morning, and I'm on a flight back to London after BlogTalk 2.0 [or as some have dubbed it, BlogTalk 1.1].

Overall I think it's been worth attending, although the presentation quality has been variable, and the schedule has just felt very rushed, with a vast amount of information being dumped down on us with little time to absorb it before the next speaker.

The lack of interactivity has been disappointing, probably a function of the rammed schedule, but still, a perfunctory 5 minute QA after a panel when everyone is tired is probably not that useful.

So how could this be improved ? Well, funnily enough, we were talking about this last night after dinner. Despite their best efforts to ditch me, I caught up with Torril, Lisbeth, Flemming, Anya and Mark, and we had a last beer in a nondescript but cosy bar [which we found after I pointed out that they were walking in the wrong direction for the hotel]. Torril and Lisbeth were put out by the backchannel and the number of people who had their heads down and were live-blogging / emailing / surfing / gossiping on IRC. Well, that's not going to change any time soon - we now have a new paradigm for conference behaviour, which is multichannel and multitasking, and as Lee puts it, almost hivemind-like. Personally I loved it, knowing that I could think about something that was said, not having to worry that what was being said by the presenter would be lost forever to me.

I did find the IRC backchannel a bit bitchy at times, with some comments that I'm sure wouldn't be made vocally and face to face, and then a request not to make the transcript public. I didn't think much about it at the time, but Torrill and Lisbeth were saying that they would have liked to see the backchannel be more public, or at least have a public transcript, as they felt it was a channel they had missed out on, with questions and comments that might have been valuable to them as well, and I can certainly see their point. Maybe an "official" backchannel, with participants agreeing that transcripts would be public ?

Also, I felt the split between Mac users with their lovely rendezvous and subethaediting and us poor Windows users, stuck with relying on Steph to wikify the notes. Not sure what can be done there, apart from waiting for this stuff to get properly ported to Windows.

Back the jammed schedule which left everyone feeling drained at the end of each day. Possible solutions are to add another day, reduce the volume of content, maybe by moving some of the presentations to being posters instead. Also, why no online Q&A with some of the presenters, or a real panel, where the audience fire questions which get answered ? Variety of form would have helped with presentation fatigue.

So - in summary, this should happen for BlogWalk 3.0

• More reliable wifi and internet connectivity
• Mix up delivery formats - presentations, panels, posters, audience discussions...
• Presentation slides in advance [would be great, but so tough on presenters]
• Ack and integrate the backchannel, find a way to include those people without wifi/laptops [although there will be fewer and fewer of these]
• Prevent the people sitting in the front 2 rows for doing so for more than 2 sessions in a row ;-)
• PROVIDE WATER

Oh, and we should all stop asking Mark when the Windows version of Tinderbox will be done ;-)