BlogTalk 2008
More events! My life is a tornado these days. I spent the last few days in Cork enjoying the gorgeous Kingsley Hotel and the buzz at BlogTalk 2008. I wasn't quite sure what to expect with this event; perhaps lots of professional bloggers, academic bloggers, people who are, like, totally over blogs and only Twitter now, those defining Web 10.0, who knows.
What a fascinating group of people! The size of the conference was perfect, as it was large enough to cause you to meet new people at every break, but small enough that you got to know people fairly well. People came from all over as well. I met three Microsoft people I had no idea who were attending (two from Microsoft Japan who came just for fun!).
I think most delegates would agree that the caliber of presentations was generally quite high. I fell in love with Mark Bernstein's gorgeous slides with intricate fonts, images and text - go check them out, they're a whole new level. (His presentation was also great - think there are qik videos of it somewhere...I'll post a link if I find them.)
Salim Ismail gave the first keynote on Monday morning. Salim, besides being an incredibly nice individual, is also a great speaker. He really understands this space and had lots of words of wisdom for people in the industry. Salim talked not only about good and successful ventures but also unsuccessful ones, and how past experiences help him mentor and guide folks in Silicon Valley. Having someone as experienced as Salim to discuss some of the pitfalls of startup land and web ventures was exceptional, and I learned a lot from his talk.
I also really enjoyed Nova Spivack's keynote about Twine. I knew nothing about Twine before yesterday, but am interested in getting on the closed Beta now. Twine is like Wikipedia on crack. It lets you do social research / data mining around topics of interest. Something like this would have been great in school for doing joint research and projects. You can pull in information from all kinds of sources, give it tags and appropriate links and add it to your Twine on whatever topic. One question I have is whether the information is at all dynamically linked. For example, you bring in some data from Wikipedia, and it gets updated or is incorrect. Do you need to delete & readd the information to Twine? Or does Twine detect the source update and correct itself? Not sure, but when I get on the Beta, I'll let you know! Anyway, Nova was a fantastic speaker, and I really liked his explanations of the evolution of Web2.0 to Web OS to intelligent Web.
There were two very interesting panels, one chaired by Sean McGrath and one chaired by Stephanie Booth. Sean's panel, revolving around microformats, seemed to end with a solid consensus that microformats are generally a good thing and the way of the future. Stephanie's panel talked about patterns around blogging & microblogging which I found quite interesting. This audience had a lot of early adopters. Like Stephanie, I expected a lot of them to have been affected by microblogging regarding their blog content. Stephanie mentioned that once she got into microblogging, she blogged differently. Some things which were previously eligible blog topics became more appropriate microblogging content. Tom Raftery, Irish blogger/podcaster extraordinaire, also mentioned that he blogs less due to microblogging taking up more time, but that he's okay with that as he finds himself having more actual "conversations" via Twitter. I've only been blogging for just over a year (in fact I started blogging mostly because I wanted my current job!), but it's taken me a while to get past the idea that every blog entry doesn't have to be a perfect technical article, and that kept me from blogging more often a lot of times. However had I been blogging for much longer, I can see how getting into microblogging would have definitely changed my ideas of what becomes a "twitter comment, maybe with a link" versus a "blog post with more commentary." I have another blog post coming up related to Twitter, so I'll leave my other thoughts to that.
Anyway, great conference in Cork. Highly highly recommended. Tom tells me the next one is in South Korea which sounds pretty great to me. See you at BlogTalk 2009!!
