BloggerCon 2003 
Dan Bricklin took this picture of me and many more bloggerCon attendees of the conference. BloggerCon BlogRoll
I got there early Saturday morning. It was great to see Dave again. Again may be a bit of a strech I had breakfast with Mason Hale and Dave one time six years ago but I have been a fan of his contribution to the space ever sense. I learned much about blogging as a new way of understanding online collaboration and collective action. The consumer as producer in the value creation process on the Internet.
Key takeaways Bloggers or Blogging is a vibrant form on online communication, collaboration and collective action. We look to identify problems and talk about them in an effort to come to an understanding or solve a common problem for what we each perceive as a common good. The group called the bloggosphere is an extreme form of emancipated online communities who actively engage in collective innovation and information production processes.
The first panel, the weblog journalism panel is a great example of the value creation process. The journalist as a profession produce news for a living. The spend time and money investigating a topic and create some text that we call the news story. These bloggers as journalist fit nicely into the value creation of the 2 way web. In this form I still think it is about opinion formation. What is true what is believed what are the social norms of behavior in the community clear to its members but foreign to me as an outsider. As a journalist they have social norms such as of checking multiple sources the right to keep sources secret but other norms like not "going public" with certain things even though in their tight community in Washington there is consensus, agreement or belief that they know some fact in this case the name of the person that outed the CIA agent. That social norm did not make sense to me because I was not exposed or educated in that line of work. Likewise many of the ways I use the medium don't make sense to them. It would be interesting to learn more or have more transparency into the way "Major Media" works meaning I currently being an outsider to that group am uninformed about why and how those individuals coordinate their actions towards the achievement of their common goal of getting the news out first and getting the news out "right" or accurately.
For the community of journalist the blogging network is being somewhat disruptive, challenging old social norms that have governed the trade of information in the news bazaars your years. Blogging is also disruptive in that it seems to be allowing a new members to emerge as leaders even though they are coming up from a different path to participation. In this way old norms of behavior are at time in conflict with new norms. What was left unanswered for me was how social meaning is constructed in this space. I think clearly the way social meaning is constructed is changing in blogsphere because when information is so freely available it becomes more beneficial to give it away more freely. In this way you become known as the go-to place. Second the readers or consumers in this new blogosphere channel are invited to become much more actively participates in the process of constructing the social meaning. Why is this so important? What the big deal? For me I think that opinion formation is key to the outcome of elections. Elections are central to the distribution of power and wealth or control of resources setting of policy in much of the world today. If the edge or the consumers are now able to be producers in this process of constructing meaning and opinion formation then their collective activity now has a detectable influence on the outcome of power distribution in our democracy. That is a big deal.
That's a start more to come.
2:22:33 PM 
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