Ulrich is a journalist doing public relations for the Technische Universitat Dresden’s Civil Engineering department. (His presentation is here.)

He tried to get 50 faculty members to start up a weblog. It was difficult to cajole them into it. He wants them to write in a journalistic style, not academic.

He needed simple tools and thus turned to blogger.com, although he would like to be able to search and comment.

The site has been up for about half a year. It has a small following, but Ulrich is working on make it more valuable and more known.

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Jeremy tells the story of how he had to fight the IT Department to build a usable page for the International Plan Genetic Resources Institute. He’s very funny. He talks about showing the IT folks how great weblogging was, but they didn’t quite see it that way. “I got permission from them to maintain my own web site … on my friend’s server.” Jeremy set himself up far faster, cheaper and “webbier” than the IT Department could. (A draft of his presentation is here.)

Why was there such resistance to blogging? “I think it comes down to a combination of insecurity and a lust for power.” They don’t listen to their customers. “I’m sure there are exceptions. But I haven’t met any in my professional life.”

Very entertaining, and encouraging for anyone encountering the same resistance.

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Here are the URLs of some of the bloggers blogging from Blog Talk:

Azeem Azhar

Gilbert Cattoire
Marysia Cywiñska-Milonas
Adalbert Duda
Lilia Efimova

Sebastian Fiedler
Dan Gillmor
Scott Hanson
Haiko Hebig
Heiko Hebig (with pictures)

Jorg Kantel
Nico Lumma

F. Matthes
JJ Merelo

Jose Luis Orihuela (also here)
Steffanie Mueller
Stephanie Nilsson
Martin Roell
Kieran Shaw

Erik Stattin
Ulrich van Stipriaan (and on non-BlogTalk topics)

Ton
Fernando Tricias

David Weinberger
Phil Wolff
Oliver Wrede (auf Deutsche)

Also, two students are live-blogging it, says the organizer, Thomas Burg.
Some photos of Vienna by Ulrich van Stipriaan. A few more conference photos
here.

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Phil says the conference presenters have been well-prepared and studious. “We haven’t had enough bullshit. That’s what I’m here for.” He has three predictions:

1. “Blogs will merge with other media.” It’s already happening. Blogs and wikis and who knows what.

2. “We’ll have bloggers that aren’t people.” He points to Tivo’s recording history: a reverse chronological log of the system’s activities. He expects more apps to do this, including factory lathes and cars.

3. “We’ll start blogging things that aren’t bloggable today.” Blogging tools will offer “pools of richer expression,” new community services, etc.

He also predicts there will be a backlash against blogs once it goes mainstream.

(Phil says: We don’t have a single voice. We’re a chorus. On Monday we’re a cranky SOB and on Tuesday we’re a passionate fan of something.)

[Excellent bullshit! Really.]

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Be sure to go to the Amazon registry to get the lovely couple something that will help make their material lives as complete as their spiritual life together.

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Lilia did two online questionnaires with open-ended questions. She got replies from 62 bloggers and 20 would-be bloggers. The full study is here. She acknowledges that the bloggers came from her “corner of the blogosphere.”

Is blogging mainstream already? Not yet. People have started weblogs to experiment, out of curiosity, etc. It’s still for early adopters. [Especially for the Spanish-speaking world, according to yesterday’s presentation :)] The rest of the results she discusses confirms common sense: people blog when they have something to say or want to clarify ideas; they don’t blog because don’t want to reveal too much or because they don’t have time.

What can we do to help spread blogs and make people successful at them: Make better tools and support “emergent uses of weblogs.” Educative marketing. Support would-be bloggers.

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Exponential growth threatens the media, says Henry. (Here’s the written version of his presentation.) The New York Times has 11M unique visitors a month, more than the 10.5M readers of the print version; they get 350M page views per month. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds does 1% of the page impressions of the NYT. This is a big universe. Advertisements get lost in the ever-expanding space of the Net.

We need new way of organizing media, he says. How? First, there’s passion. Blogs generate passion. Look at Slashdot. But why? Because blogs are “proxy personalities.” And they become little clubs with partisan members.

Second, there’s what Henry calls “Hubness,” in part to play on “hipness.” “I believe that blogs, connecting broad audiences of individuals who are themselves pivotal communicators in their respective online and offline communities, are the hubs of the new information age.” [From the written version.] The “coordination effect” is the need for people to know what other people are doing in order to decide what they ought to do. E.g., people don’t like eating in an empty restaurant. Advertisers will tap into groups of bloggers who can move in a direction together. (He recommends a book by Michael Suk-Young Chwe. which I believe is Rational Ritual.)

[Oooh, he said the words “ad” and “blogs” in the same sentence! :) Excellent talk. Someday advertisers will indeed figure out how to use the Internet and it’s good to hear studied reflection on the issue.]

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[I missed the beginning because I got off the subway at the wrong stop. Ach!]

Rebecca is being sobering and reflective about the drawbacks of blogging. We tend to read the sources we agree with. Weblogs form an echo chamber in which we shut ourselves off from opposing viewpoints. “An environment that creates the illusion that everyone agrees with you destroys the urge to investigate further.”

She points to two sites designed to present different points of view. Slugger O’Toole brings out all viewpoints on the Irish conflict. Dialogue Now does the same for the India-Pakistan conflict.

[I think I largely disagree with Rebecca, while completing agreeing with her. The echo chambers occur around the most divisive political issues. But those are the exceptions in human discourse. Further, understanding and conversation require shared assumptions. Thus, conversations occur among people who agree with one another one way or another. Usually conversations make progress by arguing over the shades, degrees and details, which may look like – and sometimes be – “minutiae,” as Rebecca calls it. Of course, her overall point that we should try to engage with those with whom to disagree is important and incontestable; the question is how well the echo chamber characterizes most of our blogging experience. It’s an important question.]

I asked Rebecca about this in the Q&A session afterwards. She does see the clustering of homogeneous opinions even on less contentious topics.

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Here are the URLs of some of the bloggers blogging from Blog Talk:

Azeem Azhar

Gilbert Cattoire
Marysia Cywiñska-Milonas
Adalbert Duda
Lilia Efimova

Sebastian Fiedler
Dan Gillmor
Scott Hanson
Haiko Hebig
Heiko Hebig (with pictures)

Jorg Kantel
Nico Lumma

F. Matthes
JJ Merelo

Jose Luis Orihuela (also here)
Steffanie Mueller
Stephanie Nilsson
Martin Roell
Kieran Shaw

Erik Stattin
Ulrich van Stipriaan (and on non-BlogTalk topics)

Ton
Fernando Tricias

David Weinberger
Phil Wolff
Oliver Wrede (auf Deutsche)

Also, two students are live-blogging it, says the organizer, Thomas Burg.
Some photos of Vienna by Ulrich van Stipriaan. A few more conference photos
here.

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At 6pm, after a full day of stimulating papers – it’s been a good day – most of us have stayed for a “birds of a feather” meeting that is in fact a tech demo session.

Marc Barrot shows a Web outliner he’s developing. Very cool. It’s based on OPML and is smart about pulling in photos (resizing dynamically for the frame) and even other outlines. You author locally and save to the Web. And there will be features to support group writing/editing. Looks beautiful.

Paolo Valdemarin and Matt Mower want to make it easier to find blog posts, so they invented a way for users in a group to share the topics their posts are about. They call this “K Collectors.”

Matt shows the K-Collector client. It suggests available topics when you blog and lets you choose them by clicking buttons. The suggestions are currently based on looking for word stems, a relatively simple agorithm that could be supplemented with something more sophisticated. Easy News Topics is their public specification for the easy inclusion of topics in RSS fields. ENT is way of transporting topics across applications. (It’s also OPML-based.)

The K-Collector server is an ENT-enabled RSS aggregator that can show different views based on the topics. You can show topics “related” to yours, and browse based on that.

Note from Matt Mower: “Although the topic roll part of K-Collector is OPML based, ENT is not (it’s an RSS 2.0 module).” Sorry for the confusion.

Very cool. They’ve lowered the bar to entering topic metadata. My question is whether the bar can ever be lowered enough without it still being a bar, except within specific, disciplined domains?

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