BloggerCon: BloggerCon Local Host Committee

BloggerCon Local Host Committee

Posted by wkoslow@cyber.law.harvard.edu, 7/30/03 at 9:34:50 AM.

Last night marked the first meeting of the BloggerCon Local Host Committee, a small group of Boston-area bloggers who will provide support and ideas leading up to the conference. They are:
Tracy Adams
Jessica Baumgart
Larry Bouthillier
Andrew Grumet
Halley Suitt
Jon Udell
David Weinberger (who was unable to join us last evening)

and of course, Dave and myself. The discussion ranged broadly through the evening, but here are some notes on the topics related to BloggerCon.

Review of panels
- Dave went through the journalism and Cluetrain panelists
- Brief review of the panels in development: tech and education
Technology
- For panelists, we want unintimidated users who are nonpartisan (as in not vendors)
- We could use a blog to get people to interact, in order to find these people
- We have to ask the right question - if we take a position, people will be likely to respond
- Good Question - what technology would improve your user experience?
- "All feature problems are solved - you just have to adopt the solutions" - Discuss!
- Maybe good panelists would be people who are creating their own blogs, not using the major software available
- Another Question - Say two people meet in business, but they already know each other from their blogs. What do the images they project online really mean?
  - Every profession has the same issues here
  - Does it give people paranoia? Leverage? Something else?
- Discussed what we personally would want as new features
  - A digital librarian
  - A scratchpad
  - Just a way to make information management easier
  - Filtering - if you like X blog, you'll like Y blog
Education

Different aspects of education, students and teachers - why use blogs?
In this generation, it's not just "I went to class and had a blog" - they have blogs anyway
Should we use under-18 bloggers? Under-21?
People don't realize they need blogs, and people who want them don't realize they can get them (MIT)
It takes courage to blog!!
Homeschoolers & blogs - blogs will be the new way for us to be educated?
Use technography - how will we know blogs are a success in education?
How about librarians on the educ panel? Instead of educ panel? How do we get people excited about librarians?

We want the people who are activated by this topic - having a blog is not necessarily required
Thinking about how we are going to use our new medium
No end-to-end lock-in