A few thoughts on attending BloggerCon II this weekend.

It was alright. Obviously, the best part was meeting so many smart, interesting people. Jeff Jarvis was dynamic doing his very popular Blogs as Business session, as was David Weinberger doing his Blogging in Business session. Had a nice chat with Oliver Willis, who's pretty funny. Caught up a bit with buddies Henry Copeland and Steve Hall. Rode up from NY with Paul Frankenstein and Amy Langfield and back down with Jason Calacanis and Judith Meskill. Shook hands briefly with Dave Winer, though I doubt I made any impression on him (first time we've formally met), which is just as well. Chatted for a while with Seth Finkelstein, who is really, really smart. Heard bits of Rebecca MacKinnon's fascinating life story (former CNN reporter, who lived for years in China and Japan). Stared moon-eyed at Meghan Stier for a while. And so on.

Basically, it was all about schmoozing and name dropping, as far as I was concerned. As for the content, well, imagine getting a few hundred bloggers in the same space for a day talking all about blogs, and you pretty well have it. If you're interested in more thoughtful analysis, check out this list of who blogged about it on Liloia.com.

My biggest complaint about the whole event was how much the event's own blog stinks. For one thing, the URL is obscure, while it's not clear what's going on with BloggerCon.com. More significantly, though, the event's official blog wasn't updated at all during the conference. Importantly, I felt that they should have included a wiki on the site where people could have self-identified their own blogs so we could follow what everyone was writing about the event. There were a lot of people who couldn't attend the event in person discussing the sessions live on IRC, but I haven't seen those transcripts posted anywhere. I appreciate it was a lot to bring together and was all done on a volunteer basis, so no surprise that it was somewhat ad hoc, and from the event's standpoint, everything I witnessed came off pretty well without a hitch, but I was disappointed that they didn't go the extra effort to organize a record of it online, considering, after all, it was a conference about blogging.

The most significant conclusion of the event, to my mind, was Jarvis leading his overflowing session to agree to try to start an an "industry" assocation to help measure the impact of blogs on the web, provide some guidelines for common standards, and otherwise try to provide a regular forum interested parties can join to help give common voice to this movement, particularly for those bloggers who would like to try to earn some money off their efforts. In the spirit of community support, I registered BlogAssociation.com and .org, which I will gladly donate to any such organization, if it ever comes to fruition. I also told Jeff I'd be interested in helping organize such a body.
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