As you probably know, I was at the BlogOn conference on Thursday and Friday, and at the cost of pissing off the organizers (my site was one of the media sponsors), it was one of the weakest conferences I’ve been to in my two years of running this site.
The sessions were stale, formats were weak, and there was no feeling of any flow and real learning from the conference. My own panel was a trainwreck…the geeks took over the world, and drowned out everyone else in the process. I’m all for technology changing the world, and as a journalist, I am documenting it and making a living off that change, but please, realize that technology doesn’t stand a chance at doing anything if you have no way to figure out a semblance of business case for it.
And when they started talking about attention.xml, all they had from me was unattention.whatever.
While I am at it, please don’t ask me to shout when you can’t arrange microphones in the room…I am genetically wired to be soft in my voice…I thought we invented a solution 100 years ago, or whenever the microphone was invented. And please ask more professionally sane people to moderate the sessions…
Right before my panel, we had a great panel going with Henry Copeland of BlogAds, Jason Calacanis of WeblogsInc and Stowe Boyd of Corante, and the discussion was nipped in the bud, due to the stupid format of the sessions.
Now onto the business of a blogging conference: please don’t sell you soul to the sponsors: SixSpart is just a vendor, and there’re other vendors in the space. As Om mentioned on his blog, did anyone bother to invite the other vendors like pMachine or WordPress (Mark my words: WP has the chance of becoming the next great blogging tool…it is very rudimentary at this point, but it is very early). On a similar note, Technorati is not the answer to world peace…please give Dave Sifry a full hour to espouse his vision of the world, and how he’s the greatest leader the world has ever seen, but please do not allow him to tread all over my panel…
The good thing: the right people were there, and we had great networking opportunity. I made a lot of good friends. But the organizers and moderators just didn’t know how to ask the right questions. Period.
Please burn me down with flames now…
Related: Smells Like Dot-Com Spirit
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