Thoughts before BloggerCon 2 — Part 1

Like many in the blo­gos­phere, I’m head­ing to Boston this week­end for Blog­ger­Con. My posts on the site have been light because I’ve been spend­ing more time read­ing and think­ing about how I would con­tribute. While I do plan to take advan­tage of a 3 hour trip on the Acela to work on a longer entry, I have a few thoughts that I wanted to out­line now.

The con­fer­ence pro­gram is fas­ci­nat­ing and has forced me to think about which ses­sion I wanted to attend. It’s a hard choice when all of them seem so inter­est­ing. For exam­ple, how do you decide between going to the “Vision from Users” and the “What is Jour­nal­ism?” ses­sion. And that’s just for the first hour. I’ve decided that the longer entry I do tonight will some­what dic­tate which ses­sions I’ll attend based on what came out.

The rough out­line of my entry will focus on blogs and/as busi­ness. Jeff Jarvis has cre­ated an inter­est­ing wiki on the very sub­ject. It sparked a lot of thought that I now need to com­mit to a long entry. For exam­ple, what are the dif­fer­ence between blog­ging and other types of con­tent pub­lish­ing? Is there an impact on the rest of the con­tent indus­try? Is jour­nal­ism impacted by this? Is pol­i­tics impacted by this? Are other busi­nesses impacted by this? What do exist­ing con­tent chan­nels offer that blogs do not? What do blogs offer that other con­tent chan­nels do not? Do blogs actu­ally mat­ter or are they just a new tech­nol­ogy that enables the same old stuff? Those are all inter­est­ing point that I want to explore in my next entry.

It’s going to be an excit­ing week­end and I’m sure I’ll learn a lot and finally meet face to face some peo­ple I’ve only known vir­tu­ally. And that, in itself, is already a very excit­ing prospect.