Back from BloggerCon 2

Still pro­cess­ing a lot of the dis­cus­sion. There were a lot of inter­est­ing com­ments from peo­ple that are far smarter than me. Got to meet a num­ber of inter­est­ing blog­gers and get involved in some fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cus­sions. How­ever, I have to think a lot about what was said: was it all rehash of what’s been said in the past or was there any­thing new that came out of it? I’m still not sure but I know that I had a great time either way. Thanks to all the peo­ple I’ve met and chat­ted with.

I’m still not con­vinced that blogs are that dif­fer­ent from the web rev­o­lu­tion that started in the early 90s. The dis­cus­sion at Blog­ger­Con was cen­ter­ing around a num­ber of sub­jects that were dis­cussed at the begin­ning of the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of the Inter­net: how do we keep this hon­est? how do we make money at this? how do we get tra­di­tional insti­tu­tions to rec­og­nize this as legit­i­mate? To me, the only things blog add, com­pared to the rest of the web, is an abil­ity to pub­lish with­out know­ing HTML.

Update:

Seth Finkel­stein has posted an inter­est­ing entry high­light­ing how clubby the A-list is. It’s an inter­est­ing thought in terms of the power laws and some­thing that was not touched on dur­ing the dis­cus­sion of Shirky’s power laws. The anti­dote to this, of course, is to cut the A-list out. Many A-listers men­tion that they link to A-listers because the other guys link to them. What would hap­pen if non-A-listers started to link to sources other than the A-list? Would more flu­id­ity be cre­ated as part of the process?