Blogging Conference Summary by Ed Cone
Home again. Lots of good things to say about BloggerCon, much learned, many fine people met in person.
Thanks, Dave, for inviting me, and for putting together such an interesting, high-wattage weekend. And thanks to Wendy Koslow, who did so much to make it all happen.
I'll give impressions now, maybe get more granular later in the week. Betsy Devine's quoteblog gives a sense of what was said on Saturday.
Let's start at the beginning -- early Saturday morning, too damn early, but we had a lot to do.
My panel was batting leadoff. The 90 minutes went by very quickly. Lots of useful stuff covered, if only briefly. I would have like to have spent more time on the mechanics of reporting and doing basic journalism on weblogs a la Josh Marshall, and we did get some of that, along with tips on traffic-building from Glenn "More Hits than Adam Curry in a Coffee House" Reynolds. The calm and lucid Scott Rosenberg led us into the useful subject of building trust.
Funniest moment: Glenn said he didn?t really understand the Plame affair, and Josh said he also was confused, and Glenn said, see, this is hard to figure out, and Josh said no, I don?t understand how you can?t understand. I was disappointed that the discussion about Plame veered from the one I wanted to have ? the responsibility (or lack thereof) of a journalist to readers ? into the politics of the particular situation, but once the audience got involved we lost some control over that topic.
The Education panel was my surprise hit of the day. In a room full of egos and agendas (mine included), it was a refreshing and down-to-earth discussion.
Len Apcar and James Taranto had a good but too-brief discussion of blogging at the NYT and WSJ.
The Second superpower panel made me want to holler: Free Elizabeth Spiers. Too much mic time for the audience to talk about blogtopia, I never found out who is sleeping with whom in New York. But any conversation with Lydon, Doc, Jim Moore, and Adam (don't forget the rest of the planet) Curry is going to have its moments.
The clean-up hitters on the presidential blogging panel delivered the goods. Matt Gross of the Dean campaign was a man among boys. Well, Cam Barrett is a manly man, too, but he's only been with Clark for a short while and couldn't quite keep up. Eric Folley from the DNC added perspective, and Joe Jones from the Graham campaign held his own. When the audience started mooning about taking money from the web and spending it on TV, someone should have invoked Willie Sutton ("I rob banks because that's where the money is") in pointing out that TV is where the votes are for the foreseeable future. The saddest moment came when a woman stood up and basically said, who cares about the web, the numbers are so small, then in a semi-Tourettes moment blurted out that she was with another campaign -- Edwards. All you need to know
After a nice walk and conversation with Glenn Reynolds and Oliver Willis, and a chats with Josh Marshall, Folley, and others at the reception, I went for Japanese food with a great crew: Lance Knobel, Apcar, Taranto, Google/Blogger's Jason Goldman, Folley, and Stephen West. I figured any Japanese restaurant in Cambridge would be better than what I get in Greensboro, but I was wrong. By the time they brought out the plum wine in big wine glasses, nobody cared.
This morning, a great loose fun session on blogs in business, led by Halley, with valuable input from Dr. Weinberger, Doc, Phil Wolff, and many others.
Then, I was on a panel on presidential blogging, along with Dan Gillmor and Meetup's Scott Heiferman, but given the excellent and entertaining job that Jeff Jarvis did of involving the whole room, that really just meant we sat up front. Saddest moment: pro-Edwards blogger Mike Kasper asks how the Edwards blog can be expected to shine when it gets so little traffic. The room pounced on him -- you get traffic by being good, you earn your links and comment. Dean got 2,200 comments the other day.
After lunch, I hit the law panel with Eugene Volokh. He's so smart, reminds me a little of a grown-up Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory. Says companies might be able to restrict shareholders from blogging annual meetings, 1st Amendment protections apply to bloggers, local statutes might not, copyright issues do.
Split a cab with Gillmor to Logan, home at last to Lisa and the kids and the dog, all of whom I missed a lot. [EdCone.com]
1:00:37 AM 
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But specially for Sam -- and by way of saying thanks for the free lunch -- here's a stirring if scarcely Net-exclusive glimpse over a fine piece of architecture.
Bang, Stink and Simmer. 
