Andrew Orlowski has it in for Dave Winer. In his latest column on The Register, he unloads on Winer as if the latter was the Great Satan incarnate. He also disparaged the Bloggercon from 3000 miles away. if you are going to critique it, you should at least attend it before doing so.

Which is a pity, because Orlowski does have legitimate observations about the blogosphere and the folks who attend conferences such as this one. As I said in a previous post, it is rather allot of fuss about a medium which at its best should be an invisible conduit to the message.

But he also misses another point of a gathering such as this one. I run conferences for a living, and I've long observed that one of the main reasons people attend a conference is to meet the folks with whom they share a vocation or procession in common. And with a conference about Blogging, what's more natural than wanting to meet your fellow bloggers with whom, to a large extent, you are using your blog to communicate? This is a legitimate human desire and not one to be so easily and derisively cast aside.

This conference will be a success if for no other reason than it has enabled people who have been writing to each other to meet and swap war stories.
1:20:28 PM    

Big debate on whether blogs are a disruptive technology or not at BloggerCon. Dave Winer argues that at its essence a blog is a way for one person to communicate with others without having to go through a gateway or intermediary. On the other hand, reports are out that most blogs are abandoned after a year, and of those that are active most are produced by teenage girls. There are voices well worth reading in the blogrosphere, but in the end a blog is like a digital journal or printing press - the medium is not the message.
12:20:16 PM