Evaluating Blogtalk

Back at home, after Blogtalk, it is time to evaluate, what this conference meant for me and what lessons to learn. And also it is time to say thanks.

Live Blogging?
When I came into the conference room on the first day, the first thing I did was set up the laptop and link up to the LAN. Everybody seemed to be in a sort of geek fest mood. We tremendously enjoyed blogging live, even if it at first took away attention from presentations.

Maria has written about that, and I agree in part with her. My conclusion is that live blogging is ok, but I have to learn to restrain myself in it: no surfing for links to include or anything like that, just use it to post the notes I would otherwise have written in a text-editor or on paper (you know, the white foldeable stuff you can smear ink on). Reflection is something to do afterwards.

But the pleasure of being with all these enthousiasts in one room, and trying to beat the other to the punch of course was something we had to experience at least once. Now we have done that, and can become sensible about live blogging again.

Meeting other Bloggers
It seems that when you read stuff that resembles your own position and opinion, you start attributing a mental picture to the author that resembles your own appearance. That must be why Martin Roell thought I would be smaller than I actually was, and I thought he would be bigger than he turned out to be. We modelled our expectations to our own physique. But most of all it is a bit weird to meet people of whom you know a lot about concerning a small part of their lives. Discovering they all have a whole range of other interests, and are complete human beings is of course not very surprising, but it showed to me that at least in some part I had forgotten about that somewhere along the way.

Conversations
Conversations are the most important part of any conference. In that sense it was a shame that delays in the program were compensated by cutting down on breaktimes. However interesting the presentations, and most of them were, I would have welcomed more individual face to face time during the day. The fact that at the last evening noone seemed able to detach himself from the group, and everybody stayed on till 4:30 in the morning to continue the conversations, totally unaware of their surroundings, supports this feeling.

Presentations
One or two presentations excepted, all of them were very worthwile. Some of the presentations have been covered in this blog, others were covered elsewhere. Find a list of bloggers covering Blogtalk at David Weinberger's blog. For the papers and sheets turn to the Blogtalk website.

Thanks
First of all my thanks go out to Thomas Burg and his team, for giving us the opportunity to meet and have an inspiring two days in Vienna.

Then I would like to thank, in no particular order, David Weinberger, Martin Roell(great to finally meet you), Lilia Efimova(let's meet at home some time as well), Maria Milonas(for pointing to the problems of live blogging), Ulrich von Stipriaan(hat spass gemacht nebeneinander zu bloggen), Rebecca Blood (for her warnings of groupthink), Gilbert Cattoire(for his moving account of Sarajevo Online), Scott Hanson (I think 'plumbing' is underestimated as a profession), Joerg Kantel (for holding his keynote in English unprepared), Heiko Hebig (for taking pictures), Haiko Hebig (Danke fuer die tolle nachtliche Fahrt durch Wien), Nico Lumma (ebenfalls, who needs a map), Sebastien Paquet (peutetre la prochaine fois en Montreal?), Andrius Kulikauskas, Oliver Wrede (for the discussion in the pub), Sebastian Fiedler (hat mich sehr gefreut dich zu begegnen!), Dan Gillmor (for his insights in blogging and journalism), Jeremy Cherfas (for making us cry with laughter and letting us learn at the same time), Gabriela Avram, Jose Orihuela (for telling us there is a beer for out of a job monks to brew), Steve Cayzer , and Phil Wolff (for presenting his 'bullshit' and being a wonderful guy), for being there in Vienna to engage into conversation with. You made my stay a great event.

And then there are the pictures (coming tomorrow)