Next up, the Blogging panel. Not the usual suspects: Neil McIntosh, the Deputy Editor of Guardian Online, Ben Hammersely, journo and RSS wonk, and Tom Coates, the blogger behind PlasticBag. Dave of NTK is moderating.
Ben: I have four blogs, one for each personality. One of the blogs that I write is about syndication with RSS, which subject I'm writing about for O'Reilly. Regular blogs can be just wanking, but these collaborative blogs are very useful; like email lists with a URL. Using the power of RSS, I read about 20-30 blogs a day. But I don't nead to read more, because blogs like Boing Boing reads all the individual blogs and extract the good stuff.
(I've just revealed that I read ~100 blogs and RSS feeds every day, to Dave's astonishment)
Dave: The repitition is painful. People all link to the Daypop Top 40.
Tom: Some people blog for fun, for self-promotion to pursue a special interest or to stay in touch with a bunch of friends.
Dave: Aren't blogs desined to cut down repitition?
Tom: No, my tool is designed to connect with with other bloggers with similar interests. You can get 200, 500 opinions on a given subject.
(Aside: Ben is blogging live from the stage)
Neil: The Guardian blog is only slightly collaborative — there are only two of us.
Ben: Dan Gillmor was talking about cameras built into 3G phones in Japan and said there would come an event where 4,000 people would take pictures with their phones and post them to the Web before the new media noticed.
(Aside: the accoustics here suck and it's really hard to tell what the people on stage are saying, sorry for the spottiness of this entry)
Dave: How is this different from the DTP revolution, when the Mac made it possible for every idiot to publish bad zines and allowed newspapers to fire all their people in favor of self-taught amateurs?
Dave: What about aggregation?
Ben: Aggregation is the future. RSS is the future. It's not all sites about kittens. Good blogs are addictive: Boing Boing, Kuro5hin, Metafilter.
Tom: <damn I can't make out a word> There's a need for an editor — Slwhether it's Slashdot like automation or a human being. My fave: kottke.org.
Neil: <also can't make out a word> I like scripting.com because it winds me up every time I visit it.
