Ted Shelton: "Frankly I felt that BlogOn was a waste of time and money."

I think the BlogOn conference was overproduced. In the name of professionalism the organizing firm turned off potential speakers, oversubscribed sponsors, etc.

I would have liked a debatable topic (aside from *blogging = journalism*. Two people slugging it out. Or a devil's advocate taking challenges from the floor.

I would have liked more hard numbers. Facts. Charts. Diagrams. We have the analytic tools to BS-check them; harder on vague opinions and single-points-of-observation.

I found it disturbing how much money was being commanded (from both attendees and sponsors) for a conference at a university. Maybe it was because it was at Berkeley? Maybe we should have taken over a community college or a Cal State or a DeVry. The facilities costs would have been cheaper at least. I heard an organizer apologize and say the next one would be at a hotel, like that would have been better.

Cost wasn't the whole problem. We're at a stage where early adopters are meeting folks who want to leap the chasm. Huge gaps in knowledge, experience, context, culture, vocabulary. It's the gap.

There are huge ideas to be explored, even in the world of applying blogs to media strategy and the enterprise. And most of the big ideas weren't even on the agenda at BlogOn. Probably because it was catering to those who want to commercialize, fund, and otherwise exploit (excuse me, "get in on") the emerging medium.

Let's fork these conferences so advanced topics on business and technology and culture fit the participants. 

[a klog apart]

The Social Tools in the Enterprise Symposium had fewer corporate attendees and more academics and consultants than I expected for a business conference. Then again, it's mid-July.

Stowe Boyd was a great host, a cross between David Letterman and Columbo. If you've never seen him in person, he has the voice and affect of actor Robert Patrick. (congrats on the brown belt, Stowe.) In the run up to the event, Stowe wrote an piece for Darwin on the convergence of social tools, blurring the lines between "the four co's": coordination, collaboration, communication, and community. This theme came through in the symposium.  

Some high notes.

My presentation (maybe a low note) was a recap of the positive feedback that conditions blogger behavior. A collection of aha! moments that promote expression, control, ownership, sociality, and introspection in a blogger. Before managing a fleet of bloggers (always looking for that plural), let's understand that virtuous cycle and create tools and behaviors that support it.

It was great seeing George Por again. He extracts layers of depth with quick comments, often from his collective intelligence view. [note to self: I think this fits into the third layer of maturity in collective blogging.]

Marc Eisenstadt showed some of his team's tools for knowledge workers: hacks of maps, presence integrated with a video wall, and instant messaging. Marc Canter would have been yelling "Dude! That's a Digital Lifestyle Aggregator!" if it wasn't so workplace focused. This brings home the hard fact that most blogging tools are still too hard to use. Industry needs a ten-fold improvement in user experience in writing, reading, and navigating blogs (imho, especially the writing). Why is UserLand the only vendor using WYSIWYG authoring?

I enjoyed the Q&A about Lee's presentation. It's a great case study, one that will be repeated.

Martin's write-up of the sessions is thoughtful, although I think there are 40,000 blogs in China, not 400,000 (but give them a two minutes).

After the show, Allan Engelhardt said content is the slug’s trail in social software:

But the real value of social software in the enterprise is not in the content. Content doesn’t do anything. People do; and what makes a difference to the enterprise is people coming together innovating and changing the organisation. The value of social software is in creating social connections where none existed, or in strengthening existing connections.

Other items:

• No Internet connectivity during the conference because the local tech/facilities guy didn't know what a proxy server was.
• Doc Searls was in town, showed up for the night-before and night-after dinners. Between Doc and Stowe I'm starting to look harder at low-carb, or at least looking at my sugar intake. Shots of Doc and others lost while attempting upload.
• Talking blogging, small business, etc. with Matt Mower on Friday, during an extended walk from Holborn through the city center. Matt knows why I no longer trust him to pick random pubs for a beer. Suffice to say I didn't pack my leathers.
• The Bonnington Hotel in Bloomsbury is a three star hotel with five star service. Dozens of problems, only a few from the hotel, but all of them addressed promptly with cheer, courtesy, professionalism, and concern. I'd stay there again.  
• All the walking and tube hopping helped me connect areas I'd thought of as disconnected. It's reassuring that long time Londoners still carry or consult street/underground maps.
• Most of the underground network is intentionally bright, with extra lights and white tiles on walls and ceilings, to stave off claustrophobia. It was sad that emerging from the Holborn station on Saturday, it was darker outside midday than inside the station.

During my UK visit I forgot to:

• Visit with the Big Blog Company folks. If I haven't said it before, great blog, great work, spread the word.
• Hit the museums. I just wasn't in the mood, too nice outdoors.
• Visit Oxford. They had three guys at STES, so they must be up to something.
• Walk. I walked for a bit, took the tube too, but there was much more to do.
• Take time in the country. England isn't London, though it likes to think so.  

• The virtual's not that rich.
• The virtual's mainly broadcast.
• And you miss the interactions that occur during breaks, meals, pub crawls, and the other cracks in an official programme.

So I leave my computer, my home, my city, my country.

Recently, AD:TECH ("Eyeballs for sale! Fresh steaming eyeballs!") and PlaNetwork (Kumbaya embraces digital identity), both in San Francisco.

Coming up:

I'm going to try for the Bio 2004 conference exhibit hall, this week. Especially interested in new bioinformatics and the publications systems that try to promote innovation without giving away secrets. Innovation World's Michael Boland and Mary Kate Stimmler are blogging from the conference.

This week and next are full of East Bay Kerry stuff. A Democratic Party Meetup where East Bay Kerry recruits volunteers. Committee meetings for Fundraising, Chairs, Media Relations, Visibility and GOTV, and Writers. We're having our first Speaker Training & Kerry Teach-In. And a big bunch of us are going to the Oakland A's vs. Pittsburgh Pirates game to show Kerry love to all those Pennsylvanians watching the game. Gary Hart is signing his latest book. And we're sending envoys to other political meetings, like the Lamorinda Democratic Club and the MGO Dem Club. All the time compression of a startup, none of the cash flow, and hard deadlines.

I've started going to Mark Finnern's Future Salons. Smart people, challenging topics. Next one June 18th at SAP Palo Alto. Saw him at Planetwork, first time in daylight. You owe yourself a venue to talk about 10, 20, and 50 years out. Great context and fodder for work and life planning.

In two weeks I'll attend the first day of Supernova, blogging a technical and policy discussion of today's convergence. Time to bone up on spectrum allocation, grid computing, WiMax, and more. I'm glad the wiki (thank you, SocialText) and rss feed (thank you, TypePad) are up.  

I'm spending July 4th in Vienna, Austria, for BlogTalk 2.0, the conference by Thomas Burg and the Center for New Media at Danube University. Getting there a little early to spend time with the Actionable Sense Troupe ("How do you switch between Discussion and Action?") and BlogWalk 3.0 in beautiful Krems. 

Then to Bloomsbury Square for the first London Symposium on Social Tools For The Enterprise, 12 July. This scans like etiquette and finishing school. It's really about blogs, wikis, social networks, IM'ing, and the like. And turning them into workplace tools. Matt Mower of Evectors Software put it together. Stowe Boyd's there too. I'll have a week in London. Favourite pubs, bookstores, museums, clubs, bordellos? Blogger events?

Back in town for the BlogOn conference. Read Susan Mernit's post. They have a boot camp, similar to workshops I proposed for London. What do bloggers know that others don't? To understand social software, managers need the insights that make blogging and other social tools "click" for users, and to frame those "Aha! moments" into a useful context.

What should I do this fall?

Brian Sarrazin turned me on to this Social Networking Forum at Cal. Wednesday, April 28th, 2004, 7p-9:15 pm. Wells Fargo Room on the Haas Campus. Topics look worthwhile:

• the economic incentives of SNT and the concept of “incrementalism”
• the efficacy of SNT in building long-term relationships
• the opportunities of ubiquitous computing, efficient user interfaces, database scaling and more intelligent query engines
• the global marketplace as facilitated by SNT; market consolidation

The poor sods roped onto the panel: Eytan Adar of HP, Bobby Chao of Chinese friendster YeeYoo.com, VC Skip Fleshman, Andy Halliday of Spoke (formerly of In-Q-Tel), and Marti Hearst of Cal SIMS. Bonus: PhD Research Presentation by Harvard's Wayne Lim. $15 includes a quick dinner; rui@berkeley.edu for tickets. Bring Bullfighter but listen to voices of skepticism and experience, to what isn't said.

[aka community]

Judith Meskill tipped me that Silicon Valley Web Guild is hosting a panel on social network systems, another evening of YASNS puffery. May 6. Four smart people are speaking for their products. Tribe's Mark Pincus, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman (whom Marc Canter says I must get to know; Hi, Reid!), Adrian Scott (who preceded Ryze with an insightful essay on why you must scale your address book), and Spoke's Andy Halliday.

I have a challenge for moderator Rosemary Remacle:

Channel danah boyd.

The honeymoon's over. Ask tough questions.

All these systems depend on people volunteering time and attention, on their pimping friends into the system, on believing you can turn virtual connections into social capital, web pages into gold.

• What's in it for me?
• Do social network systems (SNS) get you love, sex, or friendship? get you competitive career advantage? get you elected? get you productive?
• What's in it for the person who only has a few "friends"? 
• Do SNS's turn into anything more than a slightly smarter address book?
• What is your early conversion rate, the proportion of people who try your system and stick with it after 30 days? after 90?
• How do you avoid the Geocities problem of web page tombstones, profiles grown stale and abandoned?
• Why do you think your forms are a useful representation of me as a person?
• Are you modeling how people really interact or some oversimplification?
• Can I leave my contacts to my children?
• How do you turn my contacts into action?
• Aren't you making it easier for bad actors to be more effective at identity theft, stalking, and emotional abuse?
• Don't your systems burn my contacts, expending my social capital without real benefit?

Then ask about the enterprise version.

• How will this create value within a mid to large organization?
• Why is this more urgent than, say, spending another $100 per head on social skill training or antispam software or giving everyone a news portal?
• Will your system work within firewalls?
• How will your system work across firewalls? How do you expose just some of the profile of some of the people in an organization to some of the public?
• If my company has Spoke inside and my customer has the Google Orkut Appliance, how will they work together?
• What about cultural boundaries?
• Why should employees invest their time and trust in an enterprise SNS when they know their profiles will be left behind when they move on? 
• Why is your explicit declaration of relationships better than their tacit discovery?
• With what other enterprise IT systems will you integrate your SNS?  

Then speak for those of us who invest:

• How will you make money now?
• How will you compete when AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft follow Google into social networks? You know they're going to turn their buddy lists, email groups, blogrolls, and discussion forums into some version of an SNS. What will you do better and differently?
• Orkut was one programmer's side project. Where's the barrier to entry?

This should be a trial by fire, Rosemary.  They're smart and have been on the road for more than a year, bored to their gills. Do them a favor. Pull teeth until they give up the answers. Be the skeptical interrogator I know you can be.

[aka community]

Tonight is the first night of Passover, the night when we tell stories. For the kloggers among you, storytelling is part of Jewish tradition, one way our memes propagated and persisted through millennia.

The stories we tell on Passover are as political as they are spiritual.

Speak truth to power. Moses telling Pharaoh "Let my people go" despite being young, of common blood, on bad terms with the emperor and a speech defect.

Social networks aren't new. Get the word out to mark your doors tonight. To everyone in your community. Without the Internet. Without email, or Orkut, or AIM, or SMS. Just people telling neighbors to pass the word, spare your firstborn.

Freedom is worth a fast march out of town. When we had the chance, we ran out of Egypt. We ate crackers on the go. And it was worth it. Freedom from a state favored religion. Freedom to gather and assemble. Freedom to teach your children to read, to write, to know their heritage. Freedom from state approved murder and torture and rape and all the other trappings of slavery.

Are you more free now than you were in 2000? in 1990? in 1776? Is your government broadening and protecting your freedoms?

Invest in your future, not your fears. The lifetime wandering in the desert was worth it. For their children and the preservation of all they believe in. How are we repairing the world? How are we leaving it a better place?  

Some people just won't listen to biological warfare. Ten plagues. Countless deaths and deformities. And still the Pharaoh would not relent. In our time we've seen anthrax used on American soil, and other WMDs used in Iraq. So today's Paharaoh's and downtrodden have bioweapons. Asymmetric warfare with power in mankind's hands, not God's.  

Remember the little guy. Rabbis of 1800 years' ago set the seder plate with bitter herbs and a sweet mixture. You eat them together. The mixture to remind you of bricks our enslaved ancestors made. The horseradish to remind you of their sweat and tears. So we make the connection between ourselves and those still in physical and spiritual bondage. And if we're lucky, we act on that connection. What are we doing to assure that every kid gets an education? What are doing to eliminate hunger in our country? How are we forcing our criminal justice system to protect a poor person's civil rights? How are we protecting women better than we did last year?

Set a place for the stranger. You leave a cup of wine for Elijah, should the prophet come calling. But you open your door to anyone who is hungry. Hospitality is the least gift we can give to a stranger or to ourselves. We don't ask for ID or check with Homeland Security.

If you're looking for a haggadah for your seder, I like the Open Source Haggadah Project, a spinoff of Douglas Rushkoff's Open Source Judaism. It helps you roll your own from traditional and modern sources. In our civilization's spirit of inquiry and dialog. Chag sameach. 

I have a bad case of blogstipation: pent up posts rattling in my head after two weeks on the road. My first was in Whatcom County, Washington, the week before their Democratic caucuses, with a day in Vancouver. I had part of a weekend home, then off to the Electronic Democracy Teach-In and O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego. And I'm back. And catching up on email, sleep, surfing, the local campaign (how strange that they're prospering without me).

This by way of letting you know that I'm about to go running off at the blog for the next few days.

[aka propagandart]

I'm coming up to Vancouver, B.C., on Thursday. Anyone for lunch or dinner? Call me: 510-444-8234 or email philw et dijest. com. Can you suggest spicy noodles, or other fare? Roland? We can talk about social software, politics, the horrible commercials on the superbowl this year, blogging, whatever.

Nick Finck:

Blogging for Business - Blogs have changed the face of the Web, and they're not just for geeks and students anymore. Join D. Keith Robinson (Digital Web Magazine's Editor In Chief), Phil Wolff (A Klog Apart), Nick Bradbury (creator of Homesite, TopStyle and FeedDemon), DL Byron (creator of the Clip-n-Seal) and yours truly in Austin, Texas as we discuss some real world business applications for blogs and blog related technology at the 2004 SXSW Interactive Festival. The festival will be held March 12th through 16th at the Austin Convention Center.

Put it on your calendar:

WHAT: Ed Blogger 2003

WHEN: Saturday and Sunday, 22-23 November 2003

WHERE: San Francisco. Places under discussion.

WHO: People interested in weblogs as a tool for education.

Somewhere along the way I want to see blogging as fodder for academic research. Let the grad students develop a theory for the medium. Integrate blogging into existing theories of learning, behavior, and motivation.