by Flemming Funch
So, I'm here at BlogTalk in Vienna. Or, rather, the first of two days is over. Just came back to the hotel from dinner. I don't particularly blog well at the event itself.
The conference is mostly academically oriented. I.e. the presenters are mostly researchers and professors who write papers and then present them here. I usually expect that to not really work for me, but it usually does anyway. Quite a bit of material that is interesting and that one can build on. OK, that's the thing about academics, that is it is ok to focus on things that are interesting without them necessarily having any immediate use. As long as you can back up your field of inquiry with lots of references and data. But I can sometimes go for that, even if I don't necessarily have the same kind of references handy.
So, what went on? Well, hard to summarize quickly, and I certainly didn't catch everything. Check Topic Exchange for what other people are saying, and the collaborative notes created live by several smart people with Rendezvous networking and SubEthaEdit editors.
Mark Bernstein of Tinderbox gave a keynote. Tidbits: Some people worry about having only a few readers in their weblog, but it is ok even if only your mother reads it. It is perfectly nice to write to your mother, isn't it? Does blogging change writers - do they become better writers from it? Hard to answer, I guess. How has the Internet resisted turning into broadcasting, like most other media have? Something worth studying.
Stephan Schmidt, one of the developers of SnipSnap talking about bottom-up knowledge managing. You know, most big scale knowledge management systems end up not really working well, mostly because they are too complicated, and their structures don't really match how people think, so they end up not being adopted by users. More simple tools like weblogs and wikis in turn are more likely to be adopted, and usually in a bottom-up way. In organizations people are likely to just start using them, without management knowing, and then self-organizing amongst themselves.
Stephanie Hendrick and Therese Örnberg talked about blogs as an immersive space. Presence, co-presence, dispersive presence. How to create a shared asynchronous cognitive space. Well, that's what blogging is, but some fancy words help sometimes.
Lisbeth Klastrup from Denmark talked about 'live'-writing and weblogs as a parallel to reality tv. How fascinating it can be to have an intimate look into the lives of ordinary people. The affective un-predictablity of seeing what might be next. Immediacy, intimacy and authenticity driving a distributed community.
There were many more things, but that's enough for now. But read more for example: here
|
|