Together with many of the UK [actually probably London and the South-East] bloggerati, I attended the Blogs in Action thing organised by Alistair from Six Apart.
Unfortunately, many of the same old issues regarding conferences came up: Johnnie Moore articulates the main point:
But oh how I hate this default conference format where I get to sit and listen to talk after talk...
And what is the likelihood that one person's question is going to interest many other people in the room? Of course, after enduring a boring question the urge to stick a hand up and do something myself only grows. So here we have an ingenious form of group torture where each additional question simply adds to the frustration of sitting trapped by a format that sucks.
Of all the things I’ve been to, I’ve found the BlogWalk days the most engaging and exciting. Maybe veering a little too far towards the unstructured, but I’d gladly swap that if I don’t have to sit through another presentation showing us that moblogging is cool.
John Dale was great though.
Lee from Headshift [who’s given up smoking – well done !] asks what’s next:
Also, given that much of the action recently has been around social software and social networking, rather than just blogging, it seems oddly conservative now to just look at (how great is) blogging. What is really going on is a revolution in the way we control our own communication and representation, and this is where our all of our ideas and experiments have an amazing opportunity to transform organisations and their relationships with people. Personal blogging is an important part of that, but .... [throws head back; evil laugh] .... it is just the beginning! Conversations are taking place in companies, NGOs, publishing, government and many other sectors about what this all means and how to do it, and we should be influencing them.
Anybody have a similar wish list of things they would like to see happen at social software events to be held in London? They are going to happen anyway, and I think that if we work together, however, loosely, we can all benefit from a degree of coordination and sharing of ideas. The UK and London have some really clever people, as evidenced by the fact that ETCON is now the official summer outing for a veritable charabang of BBC developers; but in some respects we are lagging behind, and conferences is one of them.
Well, count me in Lee – I think there’s a need for something on a [semi] regular basis, with a broader remit than allowing us all to pat ourselves on the back and talk about how great blogging is, and how it can be monetised, and how much advertising and sponsorship we can sell. ‘Blogs as magazines’ is a relatively interesting segment of the blogosphere, but I’d venture to say that there’s more value in looking at business and internal blogging, and broadening it out to include wikis and other social /collaborative software.
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