Why BloggerCon tanked.
Call me ignorant, but I think that the much hyped BloggerCon was an experiment that tanked completely. I wasn't there, but I see the results in "blogspace" and it is severely disappointing to say the least.
I just went through about 40 of the blogs on the blogroll and what I found was lots of name dropping like "Wow, I met NNN and he/she is so cool/interesting/witty/bright/blonde", lots of "NNN just started his session on [something that you'll find on the agenda]" and other stuff that may have been well in context if you were there, but lacks any point if you weren't.
The summary here seems to bit quite comprehensive. Before you continue reading here, click the link an go read it. .... I said go read it .... Go!
What I see is people that say "blogs save the world" and people that say "people who say that blogs save the world have lost their connection with reality". There was so much hype coming out of that room that it easily beats anything I've ever seen or heard about the potential of the Internet at the height of the bubble. Now we're not only going to get everybody connected to sell them something! No! We're going to revolutionize and revitalize democracy, we'll make the world a world of total information transparency, traditional journalism has ended!
So... if it does? What's the "Blogosphere" benefit of this conference? How did that new space that you all talked about really benefit from all that? I think it didn't, because you didn't give them any context folks, just loose hyperlinked meshes of nothingness. Microsoft TechEd and Microsoft PDC aren't about blogging, but the techedbloggers.net and pdcbloggers.net portals create a hundred times more informative and better organized "blogspace" than this blogger centric event's main "blog", which hasn't seen an update during or since the conference. Where are the presentations? Where is the archive of the web stream, where the IRC logs?
Not there? Bummer. If there is a real need for a conference about blogging, there should be tangible, organized results that the much-hyped blogspace community can benefit from. Maybe it's too early given it's only Monday, but I am almost ready to bet that we won't see that, because the idea was that these results would manifest themselves in the blogs during the conference. Instead, we find incoherent crumbs of information.
If you think that Weblogs are revolutionizing communication, why have a face-to-face conference? Why not just blog?
Here's my proposed agenda for a blogger conference that (a) stays true to the medium, (b) is productive with tangible results and (c) has all the wonderful advantages of meeting face to face.
Go to a sunny and fun place with a beach, lots of entertainment and a cool scene - in summer.
Day 0:
07:00pm Dinner
09:00pm Go out for drinks and have lots of fun
10:00pm Go to next bar (repeat until 2pm, depending on how much you can handle)
Day 1:
09:00am Breakfast in your hotel room (headache and you don't want to get out of that bath robe)
09:30am Kick out the other blogger(ess) you brought up into the room when you were both drunk and silly
10:00am Dial Up, put the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door knob, lock the door
10:01am First prepped essays are posted by a few folks; start chatting, IM'ing, commenting, thinking, linking. Produce logs.
11:30am Second round
01:00pm Hook up with the crowd in the hotel restaurant for lunch. Discuss whether vegetarian meals are really healthier.
02:30am Third round
04:30am Fourth round
05:30pm Meet for a chat & early dinner
07:00pm Go out for drinks and have lots of fun
08:00pm Go to next bar (repeat until 2pm, depending on how much you can handle)
Day 2: (see above)