Review: Blogs in Action 2005 Conference

Well, what an interesting night!  This was quite easily the most interesting conference Connected has ever been to.  Check out my Moblog for photos from the evening.  Sorry I don’t have more pictures, but the lighting was really bad.

The event was set in the Polish Club in trendy Knightsbridge.  For those of you who are not familiar with London clubs or Knightsbridge, then lets just say that the surroundings were very swanky.

The evening started out with drinks in the bar and a chance for the respective guests to mingle.  I had an interesting chat with a journalist from The Guardian who worked on one of their four blogs as well as the main online site, as well as running her own personal blog on…. Gardening!  Sadly, I don’t have the url ;-)

Apparently, somewhere within the building, Adriana Cronin-Lukas of The Big Blog Company was offering blogging lessons to newbies but I didn’t witness this.

The main conference started promptly at 6pm, which was appreciated.  Six Apart and Nokia, the co-hosts for the event, lined up a very strong panel.

At first I was amazed at how serious people were taking this conference by how many people were taking notes or tapping directly into their laptops.  Then I realised that I was in the presence of a number of journalists and also the crème-de-la crème of bloggers. If you want to read a virtual transcript of the conference then read Suw Charman's account.  How on earth does she type so fast?  She must go through a keyboard a week!

Anyway, I belatedly pulled out of my back pocket the piece of paper that contained the directions to the event, and started scribbling…..

MAIN CONFERENCE

Tom Coates

Author of the plasticbag.org weblog which has just received the 2005 Bloggies award for Best British Weblog and Lifetime Achievement. Tom works for BBC Radio and Music Interactive and thinks about social software, personal publishing, graphic design, online gaming and the future of media consumption.

Tom made quite a big play of the fact that he wasn’t corporate at all, even though he had a job and that his blog was a personal one and not designed to make money, which he seemed to think, was a sin.

He spoke a bit about the history of blogging and his own experiences in the 5.5 years he has been running his own blog.  He drew the following conclusions:

-         The amount of blogs that get a lot of traffic, i.e. 1000 people a day, is tiny

-         4 to 5 people read the average blog

-         Blogs are social, they are conversational. It's not fun if you are writing into a vacuum, but they run down existing social groups.

-         If you start a blog then your friends might start a blog too.

Neil McIntosh

Assistant editor of Guardian Unlimited, Britain's most popular newspaper website. Since launching its first two weblogs in 2001, the Guardian has been a keen supporter of weblogs for individuals and for businesses, and now has five blogs live. The most recent launch was a new weblog for The Observer. Neil oversees the weblogs initiative at Guardian Unlimited, and was previously deputy editor of the paper's technology section, Online.

Neil gave a very interesting presentation about how a large traditional media corporation dealt with the issues of running a blog.  The Guardian now runs four blogs covering news and computer games.  Neil stated that editors worry about people commenting and journalists writing with no editor, and this fills them with fear, about libel, quality, and brand.

Their blogs have experienced some major successes such as 800 comments in one night during the US election. They also get a higher level of debate than even on the most popular news articles.

Dominique Busso

CEO of Vnunet Europe. VNU is a global information and media company. Vnunet in Europe is VNU's Business Media's network of websites, breaking technology news, thousands of product reviews and the latest software downloads.
VNU have been running several blogs across Europe for a few years, with 5 or 6 in the UK.  In total they are getting around 1 million page views across Europe.

Last week in France they launched a service that allowed users to create their own blogs, which I think, are added to a VNU directory.  Connected thought that this was a very sensible thing for VNU to do as I imagine that VNU’s readership probably has a high propensity to want to blog.

John Dale

John Dale manages development for IT services at the University of Warwick. More than 2,500 students and staff have signed up for the university's blog service, making it one of the largest academic blogging operations. John believes that blogging will open new opportunities for students and staff.

Reading John’s description above, I was expecting this to be a very dull presentation.  In fact, John’s ten minute stint turned out to be the most interesting and was also the most applicable to me professionally, given that I started blogging to see if it was a service that I wanted to offer to my ISP’s users.

Warwickblogs, was launched a year ago to offer all staff and students blogs if they wanted one.  Fellows of the Uni were initially concerned about what students would post if they were left to run riot, but the service has surprised everyone with it’s success.  To date, the service has achieved:

• 3,095 blogs
• 24,674 posts
• 51,901 comments
• 32,790 photos

John views blogs as portfolios and encourages bloggers to keep a record of what they did at university to show to potential employers. But a lot of students have published stuff, and have discovered that it's not always good to be on Google……
Warwick built their own blogging platform (watch out Typepad!) so that it could be tied into their own provisioning systems etc. and so that they could customise it at well.  The system also has some impressive access controls e.g. users can make their blogs only access able by say people in their halls of residence, or other students studying law or even just those studying a particular paper.  Of course, they can choose to be completely naked and let the whole world see their blog.

Charlie Schick

Charlie leads the global marketing and sales team for Nokia Lifeblog, a multimedia application for smartphones and PCs. In addition to having written numerous articles for online and print telecom publications, he has written various research papers in leading journals and co-authored a book on advanced phone systems.

Charlie’s presentation was very rushed and didn’t really touch on the points that I wanted to hear about.  He started out by giving the usual spiel about how mobiles allow users to blog anytime, anywhere, instantly.

People use mobile to share memories. Gave phones to artists to see what they would do. Immediate things people are sharing. Can be personal.

Charlie ran through a couple of Moblogs which I didn’t think were that impressive, including a joint blog he participates in.  He seemed to realise this and digged out a Moblog run by a model -  presumably so that we would have some pretty pictures to look at.

Charlie made no mention of any steps Nokia are making to make it easier for people to see their blogs on mobiles, which is what I really would have been interested to hear.

An interesting question was fielded from the floor, about how will Moblogging take off if the networks continue to charge exorbitant amounts for data? E.g. on my network, Vodafone, it costs me to about 40p to Moblog a quality image.  Charlie ducked the question and said that a service provider should answer that question.  He did point out though that in the US, they have a lot of flat rate GPRS tariffs.

MINGLING

After the conference, I did a bit of mingling.  The key person I wanted to speak to was John Dale, but I think he left straight away.

The most interesting conversation I had all evening was with Andrew Carton, founder of Treonauts, which focuses on the Treo 650 and is commercially successful after only seven months.  Andrew stated that the blog started out as a joke between himself and Loic and only made $50 in the first month.  After a couple of months he realised they were onto something special and now the site is making enough to buy a new car each month, which I’m assuming is in the $20-30k per month range.

As a dedicated user of Symbian phones, we had the usual ‘my phone is better than yours’ debate including a cameraphone ‘bake-off’ which was inconclusive due to the poor lighting conditions (although I KNOW my 1.3m megapixel camera would have won!)
Overall, a very entertaining night and I would like to say a personal thank you to Alistair Shrimpton from Six Apart for the invite.

More Blogs in Action links: The Book Club, Teblog, Digital Parade