July 13, 2004

My T-shirts Were in The Guardian (And I Didn't Even Know It)

Just read on Loïc's blog that there was coverage on BlogTalk in the weblog of The Guardian. I went to check it out, and there even was mention of the two t-shirts I wore there (although, to be fair, there was a woman there who also sported an "I'm blogging this" tee, so maybe their reporter saw her instead).

Guardian Unlimited | Weblog I am disappointed by the lack of geeky T-shirts, with only two spotted so far: one read "I'm blogging this" and the other was "Don't ask me to fix your computer"
(note the lack of permalinks, you'll have to scroll down to find the passage)

And, as such things go, whenever a journalist writes something about an area in which you are an expert, you immediately spot the mistakes in the coverage. Since I am an expert on what is on my T-shirts, I can conclusively tell all of you that my shirt read "No, I won't fix your computer". Proving once more a point I made during the IRC chat at the conference, about the greater reliability of bloggers compared to journalists when it comes to knowing what they are writing about on specialized topics.

July 09, 2004

Ben & Mena's BlogTalk Speech

Mena just blogged their speech, because they didn't get to say everything they wanted in Vienna due to time constraints. Read it here: Mena's Corner: Blogs, Bandwidth and Banjos: Tightly knit bonds in weblogging.

July 07, 2004

Topic Exchange

If you are a blogger who wrote something about BlogTalk 2.0, check out this page and leave a link to your posts... Topic Exchange: Channel 'blogtalk_conference'

Back Home

We arrived home after a nightly drive from Vienna at six in the morning. I've been able to get some sleep and get some work done by now, so it is time to look back at my BlogTalk experiences...

Random tidbits I picked up which might be useful in the coming weeks and months as we launch TypePad in Dutch/French in Belgium and the Netherlands:

  • Getting some good 'seed' blogs early on is important
  • The main reason why beginning bloggers quit is lack of exposure and comments, we'll need to make sure there is an audience for them
  • A large minority of blogs is private or protected by a password: some bloggers actually want only a small audience
  • Blogs in an educational or professional setting often cause people to get to know each other much better than they normaly would (class blogs, project blogs...), bringing out unexpected skills and talents from a group and getting people to show their true personality in their postings, comments etc...
  • Blogs are not a 'universal solution', far from it, but they are a great tool if used correctly
  • In smaller blogging communities, the famous 'power law' governing the number of links/visitors is not very strong yet, and multiple small 'clusters' can still form and evolve
  • The collected blog posts of a person can yield interesting information when applying all kinds of statistical word analysis algorithms etc. on them

    Some of the interesting people I met:
    Flemming Funch, a Danish-American or American-Dane living in Toulouse
    Ton Zijlstra, a person to talk Dutch to during coffee breaks etc.
    Tom De Bruyne, another Belgian even, whom I'll definitely be meeting again in the near future
    Heiko Hebig, my German new co-worker
    Niko Lumma, proud father of Frederike Sophie
    Martin Roell, providing neat entertainment on IRC during the Deutsche Welle presentation
    And many many more...

  • July 06, 2004

    For Those of you Wondering...

    Some of my regular readers might be wondering what all the blogtalk stuff of the past two days is all about. Basically BlogTalk is a conference in Vienna about blogging, and I wanted to write a long post explaining the whole thing. But one of the people I met here, Flemming Funch, has already done a splendid job of it here and here.

    BlogTalk Wiki

    Joi Ito has a Wiki site up with semi-live notes about the conference I'm attending. If you are into that sort of thing, check it out!

    BlogTalkViennaNotes - Joi Ito Wiki

    Watch Your Mouth

    Gotta be careful at conferences like these: anything you say can and will be used against you ;-)
    Das E-Business Weblog: [BlogTalk] Quote of the Day

    July 05, 2004

    Finally Meeting a Colleague

    Well, I've been at my new job for over a week, and this is the first time I've actually met a co-worker face to face...

    Picture268_05Jul04

    Heiko Hebig

    Live from BlogTalk

    Just saw the second keynote speech, which could use some editing, and am now listening to the talk on community formation, which could use some more explanation on the various graphics used...

    Picture267_05Jul04

    Picture266_05Jul04

    More pics to follow...

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