Category: It Happened to Me

BloggerCon 2 Photo Album Up!

My BloggerCon 2 Photo Album is up. Here’s a sample: my 24-ounce T-bone steak from the dinner at Durgin Park.

Meat-a-riffic!

Saturday, April 17, 2004 — 10:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.
David Weinberger, discussion leader

Blogs seem to have underpeformed in businesses that would benefit: business that have high contact witgh their customers
In
the mid-90s: “Create your own homepage” software was all the rage. It

didn’t take off, but blogs — a variation on that theme — did
“Maybe weblogs don’t fit very well in the business world”
“What is the Blogging ROI?”

Discussion on internal blogs
(i.e. blogs accessible only by those within the company

There are legal issues: whatever appears on an internal blog could be considered property of the company
The content of an internal blog could be subpoenaed
Blogging as cheap knowledge management software: blogs let you look up solutions to problems found months ago
Ethan Zuckerman: Prospect Foundation taking on blogging as an internal communcations tool.
An interesting intersection of blogging and intellectual property: a biotech company’s lawyers:
- Don’t want the sales/marketing department blogging internally, as the entries may contain subpoena-able competitive info
- But they do want the scientists blogging internally so they can see their ideas and scour for what’s patentable
Blogging
can be a useful way to get the message across within a company where

email fails. Email is often perceived as “permanent and negative”,

while the same thing said in an internal blog will not be seen in the

same light.

Discussion on external blogs
(i.e. blogs accessible to the public)

What do you do when the rank and file are perceived as speaking “on behalf of company”?
The
marketing/PR department of a company would probably resist blogs: it

encroaches on their turf and surrenders their control of “the message”
Legal department of a company would probably also resist blogs: headaches
Lawyer’s
dilemma: What if you’re a lawyer, you argue one side of a case in your

blog and then find yourself arguing the opposite in court? Can your

blog entry be used against you?
Weinberger: Would CEOs even
blog? Don’t they still print out their email? [ Our CEO, Elliot Noss,

has probably forgotten more about email than I will ever learn. And

yes, he has a blog. — Joey ]
Useful for companies with international clientele: it’s great at overcoming time zone and real-time issues
It has been recommended to many companies to get a blog simply because it helps you get a better ranking on Google
Examples of business blogging at businessblogconsulting.com (Rick Bruner’s blog)
Re:
fear of putting out the wrong message with a blog — We’ll all

eventually be able to embarrass each other via Google. Is that going to

happen in business?
Weinberger: Will Prell ever have a blog for their shampoo?
For small businesses that exist only online, blogs are useful
Ethan
Zuckerman: Once worked with a Hollywood studio on a system that allowed

fans to create their own fan sites. The studio insisted that all sites

had to be vetted.

Blogs and perception of the company

People know a fake when they see one — fauxblogs, like Raging Cow were a bad idea
Blogger damage control: witness the Plaxo debacle. It got so bad that at PC Forum, their Privacy Officer had to respond

A cute phrase that came up during the discussion: “Blog-curious”

Weinberger: It doesn’t make sense for companies to just jump into blogging. They’re going to read them first.

Saturday, April 17th, 2004 — 9:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.

Lisa Williams, discussion leader

Lisa: Developers work in the dark
A couple of answers to Lisa’s first question: “Why do you blog?”
- “I’m a poser, I don’t blog”
- Dan Bricklin: Likes the feedback, does it for business reasons, express himself, connect with people
Some discussion about categories — someone remarked that they wish categories could have subcategories [ Blogware does this! — Joey ]
Comments discussion
- Does any one have problems with comments? Technical or people?
- Jeff Jarvis has “rules of engagement” (which appear in the sidebar of his blog)
- Lisa has her own set of rules, including the Living Room Doctrine for comments (which appears in this post).

Wishlist
- A service that let you republish someone else’s RSS onto your site
- A blogging tool for note-taking
- Different kinds of entries with different features, depending on the entry type: journal, link, opinion, response, etc.
- Threaded comments which allowed you to respond to other comments rather than just the article [ Blogware has this! — Joey ]
- Would like to Subscribe to a comments thread [ Blogware will have this! — Joey ]
- Would like to be able to draw pictures
- Text-to-speech blog: would like to be able to listen to blog while driving or working on other things
- Better support for audioblogging
- Better support for videoblogging
- Better support for accessibility
- A way to migrate a comment to the level of a post
- Some way to automatically blog my comments made on other people’s blogs — maybe in a sideblog
- Ability to ignore a specific commenter
Jeff Sandquist: Different people want to converse differently — comments / discussion group / chat etc

Saturday, April 17th, 2004 — 8:15 a.m. to 8:45 a.m.

Dave Winer, discussion leader

This is a user’s
conference, not a developer’s conference. There are plenty of

conferences catering to developers, but few address the concerns and

needs of the users. Yes, as bloggers, we’re all users, but it’s too

easy for us to think like developers.
The sessions are discussion groups — there are no “panels”
nor “speakers”; just a discussion leader and all of you, the

participants.
Everything said is on the record and for attribution. You need to explicitly state it if you want to say something off the record.
We’ve got lots of interesting people here, including
- Jeff “Buzzmachine” Jarvis — “Big Media is your friend”
- Dan Gillmor
- Rebecca MacKinnon, leading the International Blogging discussion
Things to consider through the course of the day:
- Can we make money out of blogs?
- Compare our ideas and experience
- How are we better than other media? How are we worse?
- At the end of the day, can we get a list of deliverable:”If we
  only had this and this…”, “Here’s what we need as an industry…”
The Star Spangled Banner played by Yours Truly on the Crucianelli accordion (a.k.a. “The Good One”).