The breakfast session with Jeremy Pepper (Weber Shandwick Worldwide), Jeanetter Gibson (Cisco) and John Starkweather (Microsoft) just broke up. They talked about the future of blogging and blogging as a tool for the future.The most interesting thing they discussed was the individuation of communities and how, as target communities more differentiated, the "membrane" of community is pushed and eventually broken through. Look at the use of cell phones and blogging, which is just starting to take off.
While communities wanted to be connected all the time and technology complied, technology also targeted those communities that like being able to connect on the fly. There was also a great comment about Second Life and the difference of the Second Life community compared to blogging. Second Life is opaque - you can be what you want to be. Within Second Life anything goes and users need to be aware of that. Blogging, on the other hand, should be transparent. Both mediums interact with community (rather than talk to or sell to), but the means and transparency of those means are very different.
Not a bad panel discussion. Unfortunately, panel discussions tend to wander all over the place. Next up is Jason Calcacanis' keynote.
I apologize for the louse photographs. I forgot my camera, so I bought a cheap Logitech webcam...
Update:
Tris has a good point - attendees are more interested in the now than the future.
I'm not sure that attendees are not interested in the future, like most business users they are in shock of the future. They want to believe, they want to have fluffy-white dreams, and they want to understand...
Trying to get someone to have faith or true understanding in what the essence of blogging and where the blogosphere is heading could be compared to teaching some of them a new religion.
As far as Second Life- I think they encourage creative avatars and personalities... but there are a few real world groups that are trying to use Second Life with a transparent idealogy as well. Perhaps there should be a fantasy land version, and a real-world counterpart version of Second Life?
Posted by: Barry Hurd | October 26, 2006 11:06 AM | Permalink to Comment