Doc is moderating. Great set of panelists. Doc asks where tools are going.

Jason Shellen of Blogger: Blogger is playing catchup. They were building a tool for web designers originally. They now have 1.5M registered users. So, they’re doing a major code revision. He agrees with Tim Appnel on the previous panel that the tools will fade away; you won’t notice them or recognize them as blogging tools.

Bob Frankston: We need to try out many more ideas. We need more people to do experimental development

Dan Bricklin: 1. You have to integrate your blog with the rest of your web site. 2. The current generation of blog tools take care of the housekeeping. This is like VisiCalc and 1-2-3. We’re not yet at the level of Excel. One of the important new capacities will be multimedia. But we don’t know what will be invented.

Anil Dash of Six Apart, the company that makes Movable Type. The immediate future for them is a service for beginning bloggers. More generally, MT thinks that “the anatomy of the weblog has been decided,” e.g., blogroll, permalink, TrackBack, etc. The goal should be to work backwards from what people are doing with blogs to provide them with the tools they need.

Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter: You shoudn’t have to blog only from your PC. Their research shows that we want at least two bloggable devices.

John Robb of Userland: They’re getting ready to release Frontier 9 with spiffy new features. On the Radio side, they’re looking forward to synching up with multiple desktops. There will be continuing need for desktop clients as more multimedia gets included.

Jason tells us to check QLogger.com, whose creator is in the audience.

Anil: We can broaden publishing so that you can present a much fuller picture of yourself, including potentially all the audio you hear all day. But then we’ll probably want to control who sees/hears what, he says.

Bob says we’ll get very good at creating “synthetic personalities.”

Doc is now dinging the panelists for features. Dave has just promised to add the ability to add a link within Radio without having to go to a menu.

Kerfuffle about what to call MovableType’s code: Open Source? Nah. Editable source? Yeah. The panel did not go off the rails on this the way it wanted to.

Doc wants to be able to serve up photos from his desktop. Dan says that that is unlikely to come through blogging since blogging is too complex; people will want to dump their photos onto the machine and have magic happen. (Major paraphrasing.) Anil wants to be able to store it in The Cloud rather than having to connect up at home.

Bob says the real innovation is going to come out of Japan.

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Here’s a list of conference bloggers, lifted directly from Joi Ito.

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Speakers: Timothy Appnel, Mike Amundsen of EraServer.net, Bill French of MyST, John Robb of Userland, Willilam Stow of Tsunamin, and Adam Weinroth of Easyjournal.

The panel is trying to disambiguate blogs and content management systems. Blogs are a type of content but they’re tough to pigeon-hole. Willilam Snow warns about thinking about blogs are content to be managed. CMS is about control, he says, which will kill what’s valuable about blogs. Mike says, “No one talks about content management for email” and the same will happen for blogs and other content.

The panel generallly agrees that blogging will get so easy that it will practically disappear from notice: you’ll just do it. Tim says that we’re going to see more and more widgets for doing webby stuff, apps will be integrated, and blogging will be lumped in with other ways of putting stuff onto the Web.

(Meanwhile, I’m sitting next to Doc who squirms every time someone calls blogging “content.” In fact he just took the mike and said: “I write a blog. I don’t produce content. I do that on the john.”)

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At the back of the conference are some round tables at which people are sitting, laptops sprawling. They’re doing what the rest of us are doing: listening but also IM’ing, checking email from time to time, looking up links. Somehow it reminds me being at a drive-in: there’s a movie playing at the front, but attending to it is a social event.

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“Strategies and Tips for Business Blogging Success.”

I missed the first couple of speakers because I was decompressing from my keynote. Ok, so actually I was talking with Bob Frankston.

Halley describes how she came to blogging. She started writing about her father’s dying. Now, of course, her blog is lustily intellectual and intellectually lusty.

How closely should the content of a business blog be managed? Major Chris Chambers of the Army says that you should find “trusted agents” who will express themselves in appropriate ways. Halley was impressed with Chris’ blogging from Afghanistan; it had a lot of voice and established a “customer intimacy.” The Army uses a broad array of networked technology but not blogs, in part because of security issues. (Adina raises issues in her blog coverage.)

Greg Lloyd of Traction Software says that on the West Coast, police organizations are using weblogs as a way to pull together information from all over.

Don White says that the conference is more focused on personal expression than on blogs that are about expertise; the latter will drive blogging into the corporation.

Well moderated by John Lawlor of Blogs4Business.

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Panelists: Jason Butler of the online employment capability of BostonWorks.com. Adina Levin (my old friend) of Socialtext [Disclosure: me and everyone else is on their board of advisors.] Biz Stone, author of Blogging. Jimmy Guterman is moderating.

The panel discusses practical tips for corporate blogging. What tools? What policies? How to make the case to management? Unfortunately, I have been working on my keynote for this afternoon and haven’t been paying enough attention to the panel.

Here’s the ending point: Adina discusses how software for corporate-wide blogging has to be different from that of personal blogging. She adds that internal Technorati‘s will arise to capture and measure the interlinking of weblogs. Good point. And anything that makes money for David Sifry I’m totally in favor of.

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Joi Ito has a list of people live blogging from the Weblog Business Strategies conference.

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“Are Weblogs a Threat or Opportunity for Enterprises?” Panelists include Rick Bruner, Beth Goza, Michael O’Connor Clarke, Carin Warner, Jeff Mooney. They are PR folks, a journalist, and a Microsoft employee who took down her blog for corporate reasons.

“The only blogging strategy a marketing department should have is no blogging strategy,” says Beth Goza (of Microsoft) to applause: just let ’em blog. “Blogs personalize this big, monolithic corporations and expose the face that they’re really a bunch of passionate people…” It’s “marketing by default,” i.e., unintentional marketing.

Rick Bruner asks the eternal question: What is a blog? We shouldn’t assume, he says, that a blog has to be all rant-y. Michael O’Connor Clarke disagrees: you can’t take the personality out of blogs. Dan Bricklin from the audience says that a blog should have either personality or expertise and possibly both. The panel seems more focused on personality perhaps because the panelists are mainly PR and media people.

Beth, who began by saying she’s nervous, keeps banging out the quotable insights: “I think of blogs as the anti-popup” because blogs pull rather than push.

Michael advises CEOs: “If you believe that what your company is good and right, get the hell out of the way” and let people blog.

The panelists are excellent. And funny. (I’m a big fan of my old friend, Michael O’Connor Clarke.) Excellent. It might have been even better if it hadn’t been so pro-blog, to give some of the issues a heavier workover. (The only truth is bruised truth?)

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Dave is keynoting. He takes his usual expansive view of what is a blog. And, he gently chides Michael Gartenberg for saying that you should keep your business blog free of personal opinion. Dave says that by including personal stuff you give your customers, clients and partners a sense of who you are.

He sees blogging as part of a much broader social change: speaking in your own voice, admitting that you’re not perfect. (At one point Dave used “We make shitty software” as a disclaimer for his company.) He ties blogs to The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Dave has an equally expansive view of journalism: if you disclose your conflicts of interest and you don’t lie, you’re a journalist. That allows for a lot of overlap. Dave takes a question: Doesn’t journalism have to be edited? Dave says that editing doesn’t always improve the article. Doc says that all of his stuff is edited: some gets edited by an editor and some gets edited by his readers. Now there’s an audience free-for-all about the differences between blogging and journalism. Few hold out for a strong distinction. (Jeff Jarvis argues for a difference between having a trained journalist reporting from a site and a blogger commenting on it.)

Very interactive for a keynote. And his last line: “Idealism: Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”

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A TopicExchanage has been set up to aggregate conference blogs.

If you’re blogging the conference, you ping http://topicexchange.com/t/weblog_business_strategies_conference/

Thanks, Martin Roell, for setting this up and Adina for IM’ing me about it.

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