Boston Conference Notes

Random notes from the Jun'2003 Jupiter Media WeblogBusinessStrategies conference:

One think I like about Boston is that there are real DunkinDonuts places here. In NY, DD is usually part of some like corner dive that doesn't get enough flow to keep things fresh. But even here you can see the huge difference in comfort - if you want to stay there to drink, you're better off going across the street to StarBucks. But I had the "continental breakfast" at the B&B I'm staying at, courtesy of Entenmann's.

I think people haven't faced up to the business vs voice issue. We all perceive through filters, and we all "speak" through filters. Some people can't talk about their business without sounding like a marketroid. I'm not sure what that means. And I'm not sure it's avoidable.

• I think Dont Ask Dont Tell is probably the best attitude, at least for employees' personal blogs. OK, maybe not, but god what a rat's nest.

• I like Halley's point

• Similarly, the mentality of "managing" business blogs smells wrong.

gee, this room has WiFi, and a Topic Exchange aggregator - but where's that IRC room? maybe I'll try to create one.

• the danger: Don't make me laugh! I'm in the front row, you bastards! (I won't tell you who said that...)

Hey, why isn't Jon Udell here? He even lives in the northeast...

David Weinberger: every time you make a link, you're sticking it to the man

subcultures I perceive here

• Marketing gullet-stuffers

• public Blogosphere crowd

• Knowledge Management/Collaboration Ware types (not yet visible, but probably around here somewhere... aside from me) (oh, yeah, the Traction Software guy is here)

alternative taglines (author and blog )

• visit foreign lands, meet interesting people, and blog them

• visit foreign lands, blog interesting people, then kill them

hmm, will product-blogs make it harder to find concise "well-organized" information about a product?

after you capture knowledge, do you kill it, or just keep it in a cage?

Bill French:

• to talk about something as a blog is to limit your thinking about what it can be, because it's a flexible chunk of information (rough paraphrase)

• blogs different from CMS in terms of velocity of content flow

  • what that allows blogs to do is derive an insight

Bill Stow: but corporations will want to control that flow for the benefit of "re-use"

Michael Gartenberg just mentioned that many people will have multiple devices, and want to blog from all of them. One argument for (a) Thin Client apps which (b) use SmartAscii.

Tsktsk John Robb, sitting on a panel (your 2nd panel in a row), they show your blog onscreen, and it hasn't been updated in 3 weeks!

re WebLog software vs CMS - see old John Hiler article

someone pointed out that when you have internal weblogs that may point to outside (e.g. competitor) sites, you want some way of disguising the Browser Referer data, so that they don't learn about your interest from their referrer logs.

MovableType is not Open Source. The term Editable Source came up (this could be applied to UserLand stuff as well). Or is that Edible source?

Movie ticket sites make the bulk of the money from Paid Content, not from ticket sales.

By the way, for the sake of anyone actually attending here, if you want a demo of a Wiki, and esp. a cool Touch Graph interface to a GUI, come find me...

Join the Always On network, become a Share Blogger.

Some notes for my Phil Windley panel involvement - WebLog for Large (IT) Organizations - see Corporate Blogging