BlogWalk 3.0

Today was a great day meeting the folks of BlogWalk 3.0. It´s rather unusual for a Sunday to do some heavy discussion and though building, but the loose program on weblog networking and weblog networks went especially well. I have lots of new interesting weblogs to visit - and thats only after day #1 of BlogWalk/BlogTalk (get there or check out the stream).

Check out some photos from the conversations and the walk around the city of Vienna.

One discussion topic was scalelability of weblogs (AVI 3.6 MB Ton Zijlstra), how to evolve a blog with securing a good content to noise ratio and also how conversation develops in blogs, especially between internal closed group weblogs and open external weblogs. For building up certain concepts, papers or proposal closed invisible groups are essential, once a topic is ready to share with everyone they can be moved to an open weblog.

Sue Charman mentioned writting some post only for her - and thus only visible for her - and the rest for the rest of the world. Generally, it was acknowledged that certain activities and group decision making is difficult in a weblog. To structure information or to setup how takes over which tasks in a group, a wiki would be much better than some comment entries to a weblog.

Yet, despite other better tool available for group projects, for emergent behavior weblogs are better, as switching to other tools after posting the initial idea would be time consuming and preventing the ongoing interaction on the weblog. Hear some comments from Sue on that (with some rather really not good sound quality though - WMV 2.6 MB).

Apart from classic group tools such as Lotus Notes, Groove and others, tools for a deeper communication beyond weblogs are - surprisingly again - IRC and Wiki´s and for a personal communication IM.

Andrius Kulikauskas from Lithuania asked how to attract the blogosphere to an interesting idea or project. The simple answer is to set up a weblog as a means to open sourcing oneself, set up a webfeed and wait for other bloggers to catch the story - so it´s not for some very short-notice projects unless you´re well known to the blogosphere already anyway!

Lee Bryant thus called a weblog a honey pot to attract like-minded-people. Stephanie Hendrik, whom I already met at last years BlogTalk conference, told the group that weblogs are great for introduction - follow-up then can use other tools.

Another hot topic was the danger of saying things online, saying things you may regret later on or other people may disagree with. Andrius Kulikauskas express his views on privacy, on holding back some information, like of your family due to a sometimes weird world out there (WMV 1.6 MB).

When talking to journalists, people always know that everything they say will end up in an article unless they expressively say that they don´t want that to happen. When speaking to a weblogger, that´s not so clear. Still when information is given online, even in email, you are risking seeing it somewhere in public sometime. eMail maybe forwarded to the wrong people. Something said on the web forum or a weblog will stay in the blogosphere and the web, even if it´s deleted later (GoogleCache). Who decides where a given space is public or private? Is a conversation on IRC private or public, is it OK to post about it on a blog?

Some participants express their anger with comment and trackback spam. JJ Merola coined for that the phrase "people go to great lenghts just to annoy people", such as using trolls (automated scripts - so it´s a good idea to change script names on a webserver regularly) to post comments - even if only to disrupt conversations.

The meeting was organized mainly by Ton Zijlstra, with many other great participants listed on the BlogWalk 3 website as unfortunately I don´t have any time to list all of them.

In the evening, I spent a nice evening at Schwedenplatz discussion linguistics, weblogs and other important and unimportant stuff with Horst, Suw and Stephanie.

A few more name nevertheless: Matthias Jugel (from SnipSnap, a software that´s both Weblog & Wiki), the wonderful Lilia Efimova, Elmine Wijnia, Gabriela Avram and a group of german bloggers including Heiko Hebig aka the guy behind Typepad Germany.

Comments

[JJ]

I'm afraid it was Suw who said that, not me. I was the one that talked about burping and backtracking...
Or maybe I did, but I just don't remember...