Doc Searls is usually known for his pithy entries, but he really unloaded here, in the best possible way, on the value of blogging in a conference session and the O'Reilly Etech conference in particular.  Well worth a read.

And sometimes it's a blabbosphere.

Blog eats blog is Bill Thompson's report at Spiked Online on the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. It's not kind — either to blogging in general or to certain bloggers in particular:

Sadly, hours spent with my head down the wirelessly-enabled toilet that is today's blogosphere revealed only that these many and varied comments form such a complex tapestry of overlapping meanings, that they make the reports from embedded journalists in Iraq seem like models of clarity.

Not only are the blogs of individual attendees, like the BBC's Matt Jones, available to be read, but various collaborative authoring tools have been used to create summaries and commentaries on many of the talks and discussions. This creates a seamless and essentially author-free porridge of commentary - lacking substance, structure or meaning (3).

Reading the blog coverage may not tell us much about what actually happened, but it does reveal something of interest. Within the blogosphere, we can identify some that belong to a new intellectual elite - a small influential group of people, who have managed to turn their self-publication obsession into a power base. It will come as no surprise that many of them either organised or spoke at the conference (4).

Howard Rheingold, Tim O'Reilly, Clay Shirky, Doc Searls, Dave Winer and Ben Hammersley (no, I'm not going to promote them even more by linking to them) are all what Register reporter Andrew Orlowski calls 'the A-list bloggers', the people whose regular musings on their personal websites can shape debate and make reputations (5). (Shirky may not have a conventional blog, preferring instead to post essays that are then linked to by others - but since his importance derives entirely from others' blogs, I feel justified in including him in the list.)

I think Bill's off-base when he blames quotable people for being quotable (or linkable, or whatever), and for buying into Andrew's dismissive rantings about a conference he refused to attend. But I think Bill's on to someting with what he says about the stream-of-blog reporting from the conference, and from others like it.

When it came time for me to write up what happened at the show, it was hard to pull all the loose threads together. Somehow the sum of the parts was less than the whole. And I say that even though I'd much rather have that pile of parts than the near-nothing we had before the days of blogs and wi-fi.

I discovered the stream-of-blog problem a couple years ago when I tried to do a live transcription of the debate between Microsoft and Open Source spokesfolk at the 2001 OSCon. It got Slashdotted and a lot of people liked it. Some hailed it as a breakthrough. I kinda thought of it that way myself. But my transcription text was in severe need of a copy edit, and the problem of writing live was compounded by a connection that kept going down. Worse, I missed shit. Craig Burton correctly called me on it:

Blogging in real time was cool...however, I was sitting right next to Doc while he was doing it, and he was dropping packets big time. While this may have produced fresh sap drenched blogging, it hampered actual awareness. Normally he and I can have a deep discussion about what happened at a given event but he had missed major portions of what was said and what else was going on in the room. He missed major parts of the discussion, like Tim O'Reilly's comments on "Freedom Zero."

Since then I've left the live blogging mostly up to others, some of whom (like Denise Howell) are very good at it.

Nearly two years later, the live blogging thing has taken on social qualities, to be sure. There seems to be more about what we're learning here, rather than what I'm learning. I also think this we is a lot larger and more complex than some kind of in-crowd thing. At the conference I hardly talked with — or even blogged about — any of the other names Bill dropped in the quoted section above. I would have liked to, frankly; but it didn't happen. Dave Winer wasn't even there (though he should have been).

As for the group authoring efforts, I think the ETCon wiki did a pretty good job of gathering a bunch of reporting in one place. But I also agree with Bill that the overall result was still kind of a mess. In some ways I got more from reading what speakers like David Weinberger said about the conference and what listeners like Timothy Appnel said about David's talk (3/4 of which I had to miss).

To me the main problem with the conference was that nearly everybody in the audience was qualified to speak on stage, sometimes making it hard for the sessions to compete with the schmoozing going on right outside their doors. Especially since so much of that schmoozing involved laptops with wi-fi connections.

Anyway, I think we're making progress away from one thing (an asymmetrical speaker/audience power balance based on an assumption that the speakers always know more about their subjects than the audience) and toward something else (a system by which much is taught and learned, augmented by personal and social journalizing). But we're not there yet. Not by a long shot.

[Later...] Mike Sanders agrees with Bill:

I don't think Bill was blaming quotable people for being quotable. I think he was questioning the lack of checks and balances in the blogging world that most other institutions have. Yes I know that the checks and balances often fail, but they serve an important role.

I have no problem with bloggers benefitting from their efforts nor do I begrudge them from linking more often to other popular bloggers, but the denial of this reality is troublesome. Life is full of conflicts of interest, why should blogging be any different? The problem is that without acknowledging the conflicts, there is little chance of honestly and effectively dealing with them on both a private or a public level.

First, the "power" we possess as a writers on the Web derives almost entirely from inbound links, which are essentially pointing toward quotable material. That's what I meant by "blaming quotable people for being quotable." (Not "don't hate me because I'm beautiful", as Michael Hall suggests — though it's a funny line.) And quotability is about as far as our "power" as Web writers goes. Most of us don't make money off of it. Or get elected to office. I know of a few cases where people have found jobs. Maybe a blog is good for getting a date or two. Hell, I dunno.

It's just clear as glass that this is a topic bound to generate more flame than light.

Here's the real bottom line: Being in a conversation beats being out of one. That's the whole deal. Are there cliques? Maybe. But nothing like any of us experienced in high school, or even in most of our jobs. Blogs are public journals with conversational aspects that sometimes get social (like, at a trade show or the occassional party). There is politics in everything, I suppose. Subagendas, power trips. But I can't think of any place where that kind of shit gets exposed and undermined faster, or more effectively, than it does with blogging. Again, look at Michael Hall's latest. Very well done. (Or undone, because I think what he says invites more real discussion and debate.)

Which is why I also don't get this "unaccountable" business. Blogging is the most accountable form of journalism ever invented. We not only respond personally in many (perhaps most) cases, but take correction far more willingly, and publicly, than you'll ever see from a newspaper or a magazine. We even rewrite already published stuff.

Ever notice how pathetic most letters to editors are? I can't think of a weaker thing to publish. Yet with newspaper and magazines, those who disagree, or need to offer corrections, have little recourse.

Ever notice useless corrected errata in print publications are? And don't even bother with TV or radio news. There's nothing remotely like that here.

Again, I think both Andrew and Bill have some legitimate criticisms, both of blogging and of conferences like ETCon. But power-tripping and unaccountability are not among them.

I'm sorry Bill didn't like ETCon, and that Andrew declined to attend. I think they both missed out on a lot of what went on. ETCon was one of the best conferences I've ever attended, and I attend quite a few. The O'Reilly people do an outstanding job. Hats off.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

5:22:28 PM    

Internet is dying - Prof. Lessig. .Pottersville [The Register]

Larry Lessig argues that with the tradtional media channels increasingly in the pockets of the few, the internet won't be far behind.  If you are a neo-conservative bent preserving the "Thousand Year Pax Americus" then you won't want a bunch of open-source anarchists and renegade bloggers to mess things up.  Monopoly, anyone?

4:38:50 PM