Random Thoughts on Bloggercon
I don’t think I really took enough away from Bloggercon III to muster any sort of coherent essay, so I thought I’d just write up a few random observations:
- Dave Winer’s “unconference” concept isn’t a bad idea, but I think it was executed poorly. The “free discussion” model that Dave is trying to promote isn’t new—in fact it has actually been done successfully in college classrooms for years. The key is that the moderators need not abdicate their roles as discussion leaders, but rather should actively structure the conversation and guide it toward some conclusions. The problem with the Bloggercon sessions was that any speaker could steer the discussion into complete tangents, based purely on whatever nits they had to pick. The people who run next year’s Bloggercon sessions should try taking a literature class to see how class discussion is properly managed.
- The idea of Bloggercon as a “user conference” was confusing, and left many of the “techies” and vendors in the audience unclear whether or not they were allowed to speak up at all. It didn’t help that Dave Winer, true to form, shut down Bob Wyman in the most pointed way possible during Robert Scoble’s “Overload” session, alleging (I think unfairly) that he was promoting commercial interests. This, of course, ensured that “meta-discussions” about the rules of the conference regularly distracted from the matters at hand.
- As is usually the case with conferences, the best part was hanging out with people. I particularly enjoyed talking to Dan Wood about what I’m doing with Cocoal.icio.us and what he’s up to these days (an enigmatic secret project), Scott Knaster about a super cool upcoming project of his, Dori Smith about an equally cool upcoming project of hers (sorry I can’t give more details on these things), Min Jung Kim about working on her roommate’s campaign for San Francisco schoolboard, Courtney Patubo about all the blog meetups I’m missing these days, and Tantek Çelik about his, shall we say, pointed criticisms of OS X and his experiments with hCard and hCal.
- At any given time, I think only about half the audience was paying attention to the sessions. I personally was ready to commit a whole bunch of Cocoal.icio.us changes to CVS by the closing session. In that sense, at least, I suppose the conference was highly productive.
- Stanford Law School’s lecture rooms have Aeron chairs. If my university experience had included Aeron chairs, I think I probably would have spent a lot more time in class!