Where the tacit and the explicit meet

Some reflections on BlogTalk 2.0. My ambitions before the event: do some sightseeing (first visit to Vienna), check whether my conversational German is still sufficient and find out whether blogging is here to stay.

The first surprise was the beautiful weather in Vienna making the sightseeing even more pleasant. The next surprise was that just about all of the panelists had prepared their talks well and, generally speaking, they had a message to bring across. A weak point was a lack of new ideas and directions. Apparently most of the panelists were at the centre of the blogosphere and they were reluctant to explore the fringes.

The format of BlogTalk needs some consideration. Interaction between speakers and the audience was next to impossible for at least two reasons: (1) a significant part of the audience blogged during the presentations; (2) questions could only be asked after all presentations in the same panel were finished. Several panelists I talked to did not like this and I have to agree.

Socially BlogTalk was great. Somehow, the event attracted a great many interesting people from different backgrounds and this resulted in animated discussions intertwined with food and drink.

What did I learn? The somewhat cheeky summary is in the title of this post. A very exciting idea I will try to incorporate into daily practice is that software can also be social. Our presentation sparked some enthusiasm and in the blogosphere people are already proposing extensions and alternative uses. This is very stimulating.

Congratulations to Thomas and his team for organising BlogTalk 2.0. Perhaps next time he should tell everybody it will be sloppy but good.

Comments

[JJ]

Do you really think that we're afraid of the fringes? We are already at the fringes... besides, the field is still so new that's it's full of fringes!

[Lilia]

Anjo, what do you mean by "center" and "fringes"?

[Anjo]

JJ and Lilia,

I would be interested to know which talks at BlogTalk touched the fringes. As I see (saw) it, most of the talks discussed (1) What blogs are; (2) How to apply blogs in professional settings; and (3) Socio/statistical analysis of blogs. All of the above are more or less standard. So, if you replace fringes by "advancing the state of the art", what was new?

Anjo.

[Ton Zijlstra]

Hi Anjo,

what was new to me were the attempts to understand (the effects of) blogging from sociological/communicational perspectives. Thus opening up existing bodies of knowledge to help understand and then consciously use blogging tools. This is a way to move from fringe to the mainstream.

Also new were the several avenues of tools sketched. The presentation on videoblogging, and especially the use of geographical information and ridf were examples of that. And also your own tool (which I would very much like to see released!)

Now I know that most of the elements named in those presentations were not new, but there were new ways of using existing stuff presented and that was exciting to me: disruptive innovation usually comes from building existing and readily available elements into new structures (and usually in an imperfect and uncompetitive way). I saw traces of that throughout, which I think is promising.