Once more, because I can

Scoble’s back with more response to my response below. Where shall we start?

The average conference attendee can attend maybe 10 sessions in a two-day conference. You telling me there are webloggers who miss more than half an hour because of their 802.11 network settings? I’ve never seen anyone have any such problems. I wonder who he’s refering too.

I’m referring to your very own buddy, Doc Searls from earlier this month, to quote:

I missed some stuff while I was trying to GET THE FUCKING CONNECTION TO FUCKING WORK.

The last slide said blogs weren’t a threat to the established journalistic order (or something like that), but that it was a threat to Google — but only if we come up with some kind of standards for something or other I wasn’t listening to because fucking with technology took up all my precious and declining cycle time.

I rest my case. If I’m at a conference for work, my boss is not going to be pleased with that report, and even if it was only a half an hour out of a complete day, it was information missed. Information he paid for.

As for the rest of Robert’s response, I agree completely with him. I’m not knocking blogging a conference, I’m knocking real-time blogging it. I fully intend to blog about Gnomedex while I’m there, but I won’t be doing it during sessions, I’ll be involved in those sessions. Let me ask you a question, Robert. Let’s say you’re having lunch with a bunch of folks you admire, which seems to be an important part of conferences for you. Are you blogging it real-time? Why not, aren’t there important things being discussed? Could it be because you’re involved in the conversation? When you attend a lecture you are just as involved. As a speaker I’m looking at my audience and making eye contact to gauge how well something is clicking with you. (I don’t need a chatroom scroll on the screen to have people tell me how well I’m doing, I can see it in your eyes and body language, if you’re involved in the presentation.) If there’s no visual feedback because you are all typing most everything I say, then the session is going to suck, and it’ll get worse at conferences where everyone’s blogging real-time, not better.

A final thought, I don’t have an audience of hundreds, but I do have an audience that I consider when I write here. Therefore, I would rather give them a well-thought out overview of a conference than my ramblings while trying to blog and listen to a speaker at the same time. They deserve my undivided attention as much as the speaker does.

Follow these topics: Uncategorized