Michael Specht

Glenn is a PHD student focusing on modified car culture, and his paper emerged from a blog post. The title is evental (the truth of the event based on ethics) of blogs.

Two ideas, one to do with time and the other sense.

From his paper there is a very interesting quote “The distributed networks of blogging allows for a multiplicity of partial accounts that ‘make’ sense of an excess of meaning that dot not rely on the centralised institutions of the Old Media.”

Blogging centred around the concept of an event. Within the temporal series of when the event happens blogging allows the event to be covered. Hence reducing the time cycle, Trevor picked up on this same trend as well.

Glenn also discussed the whole reproduction of content and the changes made to the original content.

Again no technology, his notes are here, and his blog!

He has always been interested in the participatory process of democracy and sees blogging a way to do this.

How wide spread is political blogging in Australia? Not very wide, and the impact is basically zero. An open market for politicians to get going, I personally wonder the benefits long term that the early adopters, like Senator Bartlett, will achieve.

He conducted a survey of politicians around the world, got 13 responses. Most were just getting into the process and half had a separate web site in addition to the blog. Most started to have a better conversation with there constituencies. Which was their main goal, but they did not see this as beneficial as face to face activities.

Most of the politicians surveyed said they did not feel it won them votes. Some have had negative feedback on how much time they might be spending on blogs when they could be doing other things.

He sees a benefit in having a record of what a politician does that can be referred back to over time. Almost a authoritative version of their activities. Blogging could also be seen as pull politicians back to the original roots of politics (interactions with people), which is a good thing.

Most blogs by politicians in Australia are not really blogs, such as Meg Lees.

One reason why there is limited blogging within Australia by politicians is centred around the fact that Australian politics is more party based than individual based. Local issues are not as widely debated in Australia most of the media focus is on the leaders. However blogging does give politicians the ability to provide a focus on their local areas.

A benefit Senator Bartlett sees is the direct and transparent conversation with people, maybe an extension on “markets are conversations”?

He still does not know if blogging is worth the time at the moment on a federal level, however at a local level there is the potential.

Interesting session a bit of an advertisement for their company Zedtycho, 3 speakers and a panel of questions.

Initially highlighted the concept of “desire lines” and there influence on blogs, weblogs allow us to push our desire lines of what we want to do within our personal life.

An interesting discussion around “Metcalf and Reed’s law” versus “Sarnoff’s law” and impacts/explanation around the internet and social software.

Replication and variation is required for evolution, people don’t evolution population does.

Meme’s are selected because we like them not because they are necessarily good.

Blogs are good because they allow replication and variation of ideas, this is allowing society to evolve. Fast reproduction can influence people’s interpretation of how good something is.

Blogs are about sharing knowledge and expressing opinions, these two things open lots of legal holes. Legal discussion that are just scary around defamation, freedom of press, trade secrets, freedom of speech, privacy, employment contracts and vicarious liability. Most employment contracts has two key clauses, disclosure and reputation. You obligations to your employer may limit your blogging. Vicarious liability in Australia means that comments posted on my blog can have me been held responsible as I am the publisher!! Do I turn off comments, an interesting thought! I asked Mark Neely after the session about blogging policies and Australian organisation, he felt they should have one. He also brought up the interesting concept that most companies have a policy of who can talk to the media. If you are blogging are you talking to the media and as such in violation of this policy, an interesting thought.

SME Protection around blogs:-
* know the law
* understand the potential impact
* bury your ego
* don’t get paranoid
* say sorry if you need to

James is now following Rebecca’s fantastic speech, this morning he stated his concern over following her :-), he did a very good job.

James had some slides and was subtlety advertising his new company ;-).

“Organic cities are very different to artificial cities” Artificial cities are more like trees where as organic cities are more networked in shape.

Designing for incorporated subversion, to allow people to subvert.

Standard collaboration tools do not allow this subversion, discussion forums, shared erooms, tracking changes in MS Word etc. The collaboration is centre on the tool not the person. However blogs, RSS feeds etc are centred around the person, therefore they control what they get involved in.

James is talking about multi-layered aggregation approach within organisations. A great idea, and when overlayed with tags and a Pubsub/Technorati watchlist anyone in the organisation can find out when specific topics are discussed. However we need the aggregation to also extend to all collaborative tools.

He ended with a wonderful statement designed to generate contention, “If you are trying to facilitate effective online communication in you organisation or institution and you are not using weblogs and RSS… you’ve got a Canberra of an intranet.” A great statement! If you are not from Australia Canberra is a planned city.

No technology either, however Rebecca’s blog is here.

Some notes and thoughts, however I spent most of the talk listening coming to terms with her thoughts and ideas.

Over time generalisation gave way to specialists, and now this is giving way for things to be divided further.

Collection and cultivation of knowledge is needed and I think Rebecca was saying that blogs are helping with this.

With Open Source everyone benefits from the sharing and therefore others feel like they should share their work back into the community, which is where we got the hacker culture. This ethos is not as prevalent on the internet today as most users of the internet are not hackers. But the hackers still exist and as such they are developing tools to allow us amateurs to get online. Giving us these tools is allows amateurs to sharing information and knowledge and we all get a benefit, a circular process.

The internet is not flattening hierarchies, many still exist and new ones are being created. However the internet is creating opportunities, huge ones for us all to leverage. Everyone is an expert in something, which is one reason I feel blogs are great, and therefore sharing these expertise benefits the community, going back to her early point.

Good discussion on how authority is measured today, just linking to a post does not mean that the post is not accurate.

Just a quick note I might not get all the quotes right from the conference as they are being interpreted by me and have my personal reasoning and opinion layers.

Fantasitic Trevor had no slides after the problems this morning this is great to see. Here are some rough notes of his talk.

Creation of content what happens when you change from doing it for fun to doing it for fun and money? Suddenly you pressure to generate content otherwise you have no content and you have now traffic and then now money. Therefore we might see more aggregated blog networks appear.

In the content generation, content rules and drives traffic. But now anyone can set up a site and take your market therefore you need to stay on top of the content, because there is a low barrier to entry.

Will big media change and take control of blogging? If so the real role for blogging will not be to challenge big media, it will be about the long tail. Blogging will always be used in the same fashion as today, but it will not be used to change how PR takes place at a fundamental basis.

Great discussion on how big media reacts to new technology and how many examples there are. Not many, except Job Boards in Australia.

Just got the WiFi working at BlogTalk Downunder.

Listening to Rebecca Blood’s presentation, very stimulating discussion about the impact amateurs are having on the world. Why is this so interesting? Because we are amateur publishers! The benefit over time amateurs have had on the world is massive, and we, the bloggers, are helping drive that process. We are witnesses, participators and creators of content and information and as such shaping the world.

Hope to blog some more content over the next couple of days.