Blogon Conference blogging

I'm coming in late to the conference, so I missed most of the first panel. By the way, here's the official Blogon blog, and there will no doubt be many others blogging in realtime.

Dan Gillmor just made a really interesting point about "constituency" in that large companies, Ford being the example, have interested parties that go far beyond simply customers. They include customers, of course, but also employees, suppliers, regulatory bodies, and even groups like environmentalists. Social software is a reasonable channel to reach these constituencies. I agree with proposition, however in the age of powerful search engines it's unreasonable to suggest that one entity can control the message.

ah, so the question from the audience is "there's social software, blogs and wikis but no combination of, so will Google do it?". One panelist, sorry don't know which one, suggests that all this blog content needs to be organized into directories. This strikes me as regressive at best because it relies on someone or some entity to decide what those directories are and how to categorize content. The IBM guy, Jim Spohrer, data mining the web looking at, I guess, the sum of ad-hoc networks insofar as the content is concerned. Sounds interesting.

Question: what are the problems that social software can help solve?
Answer (Ross Mayfield): occupational spam, using wikis to reduce the amount of redundant email

Gillmor made a comment that open API's and file formats will challenge dominant vendors hold on business applications. I think this is really simplistic and while I don't disagree with the general notion, the reality about the applications in the enterprise is that size does matter. Controlling the distribution channel is as much part of the success formula as is building great applications.

Next up is a panel on "the dark side of social media". Mary Hodder from Technorati is moderating. From what I gather, the gist of this panel is about privacy. There's also the sideshow with the EFF and their efforts to protect individuals from companies attempting to protect their trademarks (overreaching efforts by companies at times, I fully submit). Ever notice how EFF reps fall into a) the whiny ex-hippie type, or b) crusading lawyer? The EFF efforts to regulate Gmail, it was just pointed out, could also result in onerous regulation that limits social software efforts to do things like compile address books online. So Danah Boyd piled on with the question about how rigid regulatory frameworks actually are at odds with the culture of sharing that the Internet has brought. So know that EFF lawyer lady (Wendy Seltzer) has been checked into the board on both sides she is clearly struggling to get back to the waterline by talking about abstract cultural stuff... actually I have no idea what she is talking about, I don't think she is used to being on the defensive in an audience like this.

Interesting observation: the power supplies for Apple powerbooks don't work in recessed floor receptacles, they are too big to fit in the floor plate... I just watched the 4th attempt at it.

Next Session is about business transparency, Lenn Pryor, Scoble, and Jeff Sandquist from M$oft are up with Mena and Barak Berkowitz from Six Apart. Lenn did a demo of the Channel 9 community, I'm a big fan... even bigger now since I learned they are using open source software. And don't email me that "M$oft open source isn't true open source" cuz I'm not buying what you're selling.

The best thing about Channel 9 is the heavy use of video, there's just something about watching a video that a transcript never picks up, the animations of the speaker.

Mena starts out by talking on the pricing model change they applied to Movable Type that caused such a controversy months ago. Mena says that Six Apart grew and they needed the money to develop the product considering that each download monetized to about .38 cents (they relied on donations to support MT previously). The restrictions on the number of blogs that could be authorized on each license was set too low, Mena says. She says they became aware of the growing controversy through the trackback feature. The 'what we did wrong' summary is that the company surprised the community with the licensing change. I guess they are trying to say that if they were more transparent about the licensing change in advance of the licensing change they could have avoided the controversy. Possibly, IMO, but it also strikes me that they just plain got the licensing details wrong as well... which I suppose could have been avoided if they had more feedback before springing the license on the community.

After thinking about this through the morning, I couldn't help but be struck by how different the postures of Six Apart and Microsoft were on this panel. Mena Trott made a joke in her intro about how her company was relegated to "evil" status following the license blowup, and that she was glad to be on a panel with M$oft where some, I'm paraphrasing, the negativity would be spread around. But I think that's exactly what's wrong about the industry, we are collectively living in the past where we're all good and M$oft is bad. What I saw on this panel is Microsoft demonstrating what they are doing to be open and transparent about their business, while Six Apart was there talking about how they screwed up and some of the things they could have done, maybe, to not screw up so badly. Maybe that's why M$oft is so damn successful in a number of different businesses, they are a company of action not reflection.

Next up is Business Models and Business Impact segment, with what appears to be a PR focused session. Not interested, although Buzz Bruggeman is on it and he's a good guy. Follow up note: I ducked out to do a couple of things, but judging by the questions it looks like this was a good panel.

Next panel in the Business Models topic is about local media getting blogged and this is interesting because Craig Newmark (Craigslist) is on it. The theme of the panel is about the disruptive nature of online technologies to local/national/global media platforms. Craigslist is a great example of this, I've used it a couple of times to post things for sale... it was free and highly effective, couldn't imagine using a newspaper classified service ever again.

Newmark seems pretty modest, describes Craigslist as a "simple site where people post things or look for things" where people connect with other people and through a focus on customer service have built a reputation for trust. Decidedly modest I would say, in my view, Craigslist should strike fear in every newspaper that is any population center... they could end up getting "Craigslist'ed".

Mark Pincus from Tribe Networks is also on this panel, and I have to admit that I don't know much about Tribe. He intros by talking simply about the "revolution of ants" in that people simply want to connect with other people and they need a channel to do that on. The partnership they have with Knight Ridder is pretty interesting.

ARGHH.. the UC AirBears wireless service is frickin aweful. Totally unreliable.

An interesting question was asked starting with comment that the under-35 demographic doesn’t go to traditional media, so how do you reach them? Second, for local business what kind of strategy do you use to reach this audience absent of local media. Newmark made an equally good point about how local business is where jobs are created, so they have created a small business center. Newmark also commented that the media is way behind on blogs so it’s important to get the word out. Pincus commented that the community publishing model will always outscale the Citysearch model. Bummer, the moderator is cutting this one off, on time, but there’s still a number of questions left unanswered.

The afternoon session is focused on the business of blogging and social media

this is going to be interesting because it will, supposedly, illustrate some path to a business model other than advertising, but I'm not expecting that the speakers will actually do that considering that they all seem to come from the media world.

Yep, it's all about advertising. And Jason Calacanis from Weblogs, Inc. not only looks like Squiggy, he sounds like Squiggy as well.

ok, good question about RSS, how it fits into the business model and whether it add or takes away from the business. Corante said they are switching to a technology that will allow them to deliver ads through RSS... bummer. Weblogs says they will have paid RSS within a year. So it seems pretty clear that RSS is going to see a lot of changes in an effort to fix what the advertisers say is broken about RSS... in that they can't deliver advertisements. Yeah, the panel was pretty much all about advertising for blogs.

Publishing Models

Halley Suitt is moderating this forum, I recognize her name but honestly don't know anything about her. I think she's a well known writer for a magazine. oh yeah, she's got a blog called Halley's Comment

Steve Gillmor from eweek is on this panel, which is good cuz I really like Steve. He's a big fan of RSS. The other 2 guys on the panel seem to be PR-related.

you know, what's really interesting about all the talk about RSS today is that the advertising/pr types focus on what the feed can't do, deliver ads. Gillmor is the first speaker to talk about RSS as a solution that invokes dedicated desktop clients AND services like Technorati and Feedster. So the ad guys are still operating in the paradigm of demographic and impression while the RSS guys are saying it's not about demographics at all but rather connecting sellers with interested constituencies to have a "conversation" with them (at least that's what Sifry piped up to say and I put a lot of stock in what he thinks). So it's opt-in marketing.

this tuned out to be the best panel of the entire day because of the open disagreement in so many quarters of the audience and panel themselves. There are a lot of leaders in this space and they can't agree on what the direction is, that's good for innovation.

uh-oh, I just heard the term "dis-intermediation" for the first time since 2001... that's a flashback I didn't need.

Comments

[Jeff Sandquist]

Hey there, thanks for the nice entry and feedback on Channel 9. Just one clarification, Lenn did the great opening and background of Channel 9 and it was me (Jeff) that did the demo of the site.

Thanks for writing this up and we welcome any feedback on how we can make Channel 9 a better place to hang.

[jeff]

Thanks for the clarification Jeff, I sometimes leave out too much detail when I'm writing and watching in realtime.

I think there a lot of really strong feature sets in Channel 9, much more than my brief comment on the use of video. I'm curious to see how the wiki section builds out over time.

[Jeff Sandquist]

No worries, its hard to blog events in real time isn't it? :-)

[Bill Seitz]

Microsoft tends to focus on the future for the same reason that George Bush does.

[jeff]

I think you missed the point of what I was writing about. M$oft was not talking about the future, they were very much demonstrating what they are doing in the present to be open and transparent.

I'm not making the connection to the relevancy of the other half of your statement, so I'll just leave it hanging.