Epeus' epigone

Edifying exquisite equine entrapments

Tuesday, 1 August 2006

Blogher - a peer group and a stiff drink

I didn't attend Blogher, but many of my friends and colleagues did, and mostly got lots out of it. I did pick up an undercurrent of discomfort from my female geek friends at what they saw as the low tech content of the conference, and even 'all these women in high heels giggling together'. Melinda Casino, Shelley Powers and Tara Hunt express various concerns with tone and with intrusive sponsorship.


The problems of sponsorship and product pitches always intrude into conferences - with the BarCamp model they get minimised by the low budget ethos and emphasis on emergent scheduling, but having watched several friends put together big conferences that involve taking over hotels for a few days, the need to raise significant sponsorship money does lead to editorial pressure on the schedule, and it difficult to walk the line between Jane Jacobs' Commercial and Guardian modes.


However, reading some of the posts by non-techie Blogher attendees, like IzzyMom and tastetheworld, what I see is the sheer pleasure at meeting people you have only known through their online writing, and making the personal connection with them. I recognise the experience I had when I crashed O'Reilly's eTech in 2003, and was able to pick up conversations with people based on what we'd been writing about, and overcome my previous inability to make smalltalk in big groups. The continual growth of blogging means that there are now many more interest groups out there beyond my techie clan. Lisa, Jory, Elise and the other Blogher organisers enabled lots of women with different interests to get together and have these personal epiphanies, and resolve Ford Prefect's quest for 'a peer group and a stiff drink' - well done.


Technorati Tags: Barcamp, Blogher, blogs, conference, emergence, etech

Posted by Kevin Marks at 12:21

3 comments:

Kevin Marks said...

Matthew Barger: favorited this.
via twitter.com

March 06, 2015 5:43 pm
Kevin Marks said...

Leif on the wind: favorited this.
via twitter.com

March 06, 2015 5:43 pm
Kevin Marks said...

Dan Brickley: mentioned this in “continual growth of blogging” :(.
via twitter.com

July 01, 2019 12:00 am

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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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