Ernie: Yeah, that would be cool, but I would have people use Instant Messenging to ask questions. That would be non-disruptive and the speakers could see if several people had similar questions. I tend to agree. At the ETCON, the protocol of choice was IRC. IRC/IM tends to have less latency than blogs. Offline people were getting realtime summaries, were "phoning in questions" that volunteers in the audience proxied for them. In a panel, Dave and I were side by side, I had IRC and Radio up - he was in his outliner. I had a blast - fielding questions from the audience while participating in the panel. At one point I was nearly busted when I chuckled and Rael (the nearly superfluous moderator for this particular panel) interpreted that as a request to speak.
As I mentioned previously, I was blogging a session when I decided to scan weblogs.com and saw that Aaron was blogging the same session. I liked his notes better so I stopped. At a later session, Aaron sat down behind me and was busy tapping his keys the entire session - I assumed that he was blogging it so I did not. Unfortunately, the assumption proved incorrect.
Different modes work for different people. Some people prefer to focus on the speaker - others prefer to multitask. Some people freely share their thoughts, others prefer to listen. More significantly, some people are primarily audio, others visual, and still others textual.
Several presentations were on this topic. Dan Gillmore didn't seem too sure that he liked the direction, but could not deny its inevitability and impact. Cory Doctorow saw blogs as potentially competing not with the media but with Google in determining relevance. Clay Shirkey highlighted how much more we had to learn about computer mediated models of human interaction.
Exciting times.
12:07:06 AM 
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