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Andrew Sullivan gave the lunch keynote. Hard to blog because we were still eating and the room was packed, so getting out the laptop was not a good idea, there was no room. So below under More are my hand written notes. The rest is updated periodically... as I attend panels.
Update: while I was listening to Sullivan, I kept having the feeling that while everything he was saying is exactly what I've experienced here (not the 1.9 million readers but the qualities of this medium, the interactions and relationships with other bloggers, and the value of writing daily), and it was the only time, other than listening to Rob Curley or Jeff Jarvis, where I felt people were expressing some understanding of digital media, and trying to work with it, in energetic, fun, creative ways instead of fighting it, scared and from a position where they don't use the Internet so much and so they don't understand. Sullivan is a great guy, really a lovely person, interesting and articulate, and really humbled by his readers and the attention and hits he receives on his blog. It felt liberating to listen to his talk, after the past two weeks of fighting my urge to yell that media people just don't get what the Internet/digital media is about.
Also, Jeff Jarvis on Andrew Sullivan.
See below also for some on the panel on Flogging the blogs: Debating best practices. Ken Sands, Managing editor of online and new media, The Spokesman-Review moderated and it had these people on it: Denise Polverine, Editor-in-Chief, Cleveland.com, Sheila Lennon, Features & Interactive Producer, projo.com, Tom Regan, Associate Editor, csmonitor.com, Jeff Jarvis, President & creative director, Advance.net.
Jeff notes on his blog that he probably came across as a lunatic, but in fact he was articulate, talked about a lot of the issues he's discussed on his blog in the past 10 days about blogging and media, that are very good useful points. I'm not sure how many in the audience got it, because they bring all of their often traditional media experience that goes against these counterintuitive ideas. But it was still useful and concise and very good. The others were good too, but not necessarily so packed with ideas and tips. Read the notes below the Sullivan notes.
Andrew Sullivan, Keynote speaker at lunch:
Defined blogs. Since we were sort of still eating, I took handwritten notes, and at the beginning, caught key words. His talk was excellent, and described my experiences with blogging, and my feelings about online interaction.
Describing blogging: provisional, modest, Rue de Montaigne who wrote essays and constantly revised his information, instant, truthful but revisable if the voice is honest and transparent, linkage is related to transparency, conversation, collective brain, communal, post-modern. This style of writing is post-modern, different. Questions he has relate to how to separate blogging from life, because he gets 600 email a day, and while he takes August off, it’s hard, requires a lot of attention, and the blog conflates the two (life and blogs).
Q â€" Hollywood reporter guy: Have you seen the Stephen Glass movie, and what lessons are there about blogging?
A â€" SG couldn’t do that sort of thing today on a blog, because people would catch it, and it probably wouldn’t go on for so long in a blog. But it was one of the weirdest things of his life, seeing a place he’d worked for 10 years portrayed; fortunately he left the New Republic before SG got going, but sociopaths are hard to cover.
Q â€" News blogs? War Blogs? Do you use them?
A â€" Rely on war blogs a lot, but blogs don’t replace, they add. Link to news, need editorial judgment, he studies Drudge, because he is the biggest, most successful, people treat him like an alien, but he is very powerful, is the biggest director of traffic to the NYTimes.com. But people want filters and editors, in both blogs and trad j, but trad j has lost the ability to focus people’s attention on a particular thing.
Q â€" What are the limitations? When will the problems that occur with traditional j happen with blogs?
A â€" We will always need formal J, but we (bloggers) are parasites, or editors (laughter) maybe, but blogs are dependent on original data, we can point, link to original data, and it can direct people to information they might not otherwise look at: full transcript of a presidential press conference. Blogs are half way between op ed and talk radio, but not so entertainment driven.
Q â€" Other blogs, in other languages?
A â€" Don’t know that much about stuff, there are French, Chinese, Spanish
Jeff Jarvis: 100k Iranian blogs now…
A â€" one thing is blogs can be used to sidestep traditional control, now you can just post information so the monopoly control is lost, can now get thoughts out there in a way you never could before.
Q â€" How is your writing different in blog than elsewhere?
A â€" the conversation helps develop ideas, but on the other hand, short snappy style is a way of thinking, and so when he goes to do a long essay or work on the book he wants to write, he has to get into another mode of thinking, and his blog is intensive, so hard.
Q â€" Should blogging be taught in Jschools?
A â€" Well, that’s one sure way to kill blogs, but yes.
Q â€" Michael Rodgers, Newsweek, said he’d blogged for 3 years, and found a scaling problem…
A â€" Yes, AS finds that too. It’s a lot of work, a lot of email, growth rate is 100% year, for 4 years. Last December, 1m unique visitors, now in Nov, they are at 1.9m. The genre is individual, you can’t deputize another to write it, though he does have an intern to post email, but otherwise, AS has to do it.
Q â€" Future of blogging?
A â€" Op ed is a dinosaur. In future, op ed online may be 5 blogs on a site, and no trad op ed columns. Slate today, compared to past, has evolved to shorter, bloggier articles, and it may be that online media heads there…5 minutes. At the beginning, he looked at two most popular New Rep things: notebook and diarist. Put them together: blog.
A â€" Re: pay, hard, don’t know, but has 5k subscribers that pay $20. So it’s experimentation.
END
Panel Three: Flogging the blogs: Debating best practices
Moderator: Ken Sands, Managing editor of online and new media, The Spokesman-Review
Panelists:
Denise Polverine, Editor-in-Chief, Cleveland.com
Sheila Lennon, Features & Interactive Producer, projo.com
Tom Regan, Associate Editor, csmonitor.com
Jeff Jarvis, President & creative director, Advance.net
Regan: Blogging without editing bad.
Sect. 230 of CDA? Blogs are wonderful,
Says any content from 3rd party content you are not libel for…
Jeff: used to be a news man, now blogboy. Interactivity is about interacting. Not pushing buttons. First obligation is to listen to the community, listen to them, make them stars by linking to them, but what this panel should be is to have bloggers why they don’t like us, it’s a conversation, some have legitimate complaints, people are interested in other things than the editors, Advance.net believes this is the people’s medium, and forums are Sat night at the bar and no one remembers you the next day, blogs are this is my house, and don’t come crap on my lawn, comments are discourse, started my own blog to learn about blogs, didn’t want to do under the company banner, made friends around the world from blogging, this is a medium of relationships.
Weblogs at work: unleashes creativity that he had dastardly tamped down, and now those people could do that stuff… then found people in the community next, and now working on hyperlevel content, trying to get to the point that they have citizen journalists, in the information business, are blogs as reliabile? No but the audience is smart enough to figure that out. Trying to do citizen journalists bloggers, using ads and experimenting with autoads, tyring ethnic groups. With blackout, used MT to publish. Invite people to blog, but not a service company, a content company. Get people in your org to cover blogs. Smart people are paying attention. Gawker was on the front page of the NYTimes, Dan Orkent should blog. One more thing, Iran, Hosein Hor, started detailed instructions in farsi about how to do a blog, and two years later there are 100k blogs out of Iran, and they are writing about music, sex, politics, things they can’t write about in a place with no free speech. In Iraq, he was hoping there would be a blossoming of blogs, but â€" healing.blogspot.com, dentist in Iraq blogging. One last quote, what Hugh McLoud: perhaps online news orgs should stop seeing…. Link…
News is a conversation, it goes both ways, if we ignore people speaking, then they will ignore us.
Q â€" provide any level of fact checking?
A â€" Jeff â€" after the fact
A - bloggers tend to edit themselves and each other, more copyediting than content editing.
Q â€" could millions of blogs fragment society further?
A â€" jeff: proprietorship of blogs changes things compared to forums. No barrier to entry, but control is good. Natural waterlevel people go to is to find their communities. But what scares big media is that they cannot control blogs.
End.
Posted by Mary Hodder at November 15, 2003 02:16 PM