Today, Sassy and ’dib and I went to the Triangle Bloggers Conference and it was much better than my "wanting to sleep self" thought it was going to be at 8am. There were discussions of community, building community, what the roles of 'blogs were in community, what the purpose of 'blogs were w/r to journalism and mainstream media, etc. I actually took notes for part of the conference and learned a new word.
The quote of the conference was by Anton Zuiker, he said "I'm here to learn from you and become wealthy" - ok, not exactly what I would have thought I'd hear at a blogging conference, but I come at this thing a little more personally and non-commercially oriented. A cool blog/concept was at http://trixieupdate.com/ where Ben MacNeill has embarked on what he describes as a "somewhat anthropological" project of documenting his kid's life. He's got a diaper count (lifetime and daily) including daily mess, sleep meter, breast milk stats, etc. He built simple little web apps that track some of this stuff where he can just click (the computer is always on) and register when she sleeps and when she wakes. Idea one of the things that just occured to me is that we could track game stats/interactions using similar tools then analyze them over the course of game genre's and years i.e. #fights per session, #riddles, problems solved (the types of problems), etc. - I'm sure we could find lots of different things to measure that might be of use to role playing analysts.
MacNeill also talked about some of the things he did intentionally to keep himself sane and set up the expectations of the readers of trixieupdate so that everyone kind of knew what to expect. His intent was to document what raising a kid was like by merging a statistical and ethnographic method and share this information (hopefully with parents). A narrow focus blog.
Sid Stafford (aka. BigWig) talked about driving popularity and The LongTail (and longtail.typepad.com) as it pertains to blogs; especially as blogs represent "niches" in communities and thus provide a lot of reward for a few folks. He also talked about the Carnival of the Vanities which originated as a way to game Google to and Blogdex to get more hits.
Ed Cone talked a little about how to get flow through your blog and how he actually pushes out interesting posts to people via email. His good quote was to get people to read your blog "know something and don't suck" - simple and succinct.
Another good quote "blog like no one's reading" from the man who blogs in a bathrobe.
There was a lengthy discussion in the last half of the conf. about the role of blogs as they pertain to keeping stories alive in the media or raising awareness such that things "bubble up" to the NYT or CNN. There was also significant discussion of local (geographically) oriented blogs such as orangepolitics.org but for the most part, the conversation wandered all over the place with a degree of self-importance about how blogs influence the media. Blogs do influence the media and I think that they can play an ever increasing role in acting as a media watchdog as well as bringing things to the surface that would never get discussed by mainstream media. I think though that to rely on blogging to reform the media in anyway is silly. Dan Coleman said it best when he said we have to look at what is behind the journalists, meaning the media companies who play by the rules of capital and thus are money making organizations at the core. What makes money for them is what they will sell. It was followed up by someone else and it cannot get lost. Capital's role in our society and in the media will influence the way we think and get entertained. "Most people get their goods at WalMart and are entertained by TimeWarner, Viacom, etc." (this is kind of paraphrased, but that was the gist of the quote).
Capital's position in U.S. society allows it to dominate what we conceive of as "Common Sense." Another point raised was the lack of critical thinking taught in K-12. These two things are not unrelated, but I'm off topic and will make them part of another post at some point.
Overall, the conference was great. I enjoyed myself and learned a new word:
"Blogmaster" Since 'dib operates in this manner for us out of his own good nature (and vehement hatred of comment spammers) I nominate him as official Meekmok Blogmaster.
