First post regarding Les Blogs. The start of the conference was challeging: limited network coverage, very long process to get all attendees through, etc. So we got going almost an hour late, but that’s fine. After a welcome message from "Le Club Senat" and Joi’s comments, we got going on the Product panel, which was loosely moderated by Loic and engaged almost immediately with the audience: Were on the panel:
Barak Berkowitz, Six Apart- Meg Hourihan, consultant & co-founder, Blogger.com
- Caterina Fake, Flickr
- Charlie Schick, Nokia
Since the panel was not too structured, I am just mentioning snippets of what everyone said.
Caterina:
Photographs are easy to produce, share and consume. More and more people will
have a blog that will be comprised mostly of photos, shared with a few people,
with tagging and social networking features. Videos are more challenging to
produce, consume and search.
Meg: Evolution of
the concept of "blogging", which will evolve towards the democritization of
content production, distribution and remixing. It is a new way of conneting with
the world.
Charlie: Growth will
be in leveraging media distribution as an excuse to connect and engage in a
conversation.
Barak: It is not
about Media. Study: "Bloggers are people with too much time on their hands,
thinking way too much of themselves". SixApart wants to change this image, and
has therefore a large platform strategy.
Stewart: "The Cat
blog is fine" (Meg had sort of downplayed the personal blog). And points to
Scoble as a unique brand that will make it difficult for Microsoft to
"unload".
Caterina: "If I was
to have another career, I would want to be fired for blogging – it is a big
career blogger".
Caterina: "Key for
success: open APIs, be blog friendly, and integrate well with the rest of the
ecosystem."
Barak: "There is a
huge need for independance, outside of the walled gardens (AOL, Yahoo,…).
Hence the possibility for SixApart to thrive. And blogging is a powerful
asynchronous communication mechanism.
Question: on fear of
changes in the legislature that would stiffle communication. There are a few
suits going against bloggers (Joi, Apple suing,…), and there is a debate
around providing bloggers with the same legal protections as journalists. Barak
points out to the fact that sometime bloggers behave as if they were not subject
to law, and then are "chocked" if they get legally
challenged.
As a bonus, a few of my pictures of the conference:
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