Ho John Lee’s Weblog

The Blog Business Summit is actually on Thursday and Friday, but this afternoon there was an introductory session on blogging for business, led by Dave Taylor.

I’m not in the core target audience for this session, since I’m already involved in various blogging projects, but thought it would be interesting to talk with people and to hear their questions, concerns, and goals with respect to blogging.

It’s also useful to hear someone else try to explain blogs, RSS, web services, et al. I regularly find myself searching for a common starting context when talking about these topics with people who aren’t already somewhat involved in internet and web culture, especially if they’re from non-technology businesses. It’s remarkable that the tools have become as widespread as they are, given the impenetrable names.

I made good use of the free wireless service provided by AnchorFree. They’re running a captive portal that requires registration, so you’ll need to sign up for an account, but it’s nice to have. My notebook picked up three access points, all at high signal strength, probably installed in the room somewhere. Logged the location in Plazes.

Wirleess performance was okay to sluggish, I’m sure it’s a bit overloaded; something like half the people in the room had notebook computers. My session got dropped a few times, which reset my SSH sessions and required logging in on AnchorFree again using the browser. Lots of continuous partial attention going on in that room. Plus a few fully distracted people trying to get their wireless connections going. Perhaps they should hire those blog outsourcing guys.

This post is tagged (bbs05). Dave mentioned in his talk that he doesn’t like them, and thinks they’ll go away as search engines improve. I partially agree. User tags don’t scale well and in their present incarnation are highly vunerable to spam, but within relatively small communities, they can be an effective supplement to normal search engines. (Example - I could tag a collection of poetry as “haiku”, or “cinquain”, making it visible where the raw text might otherwise be difficult to locate through search.)

The coffee largely ran out after the break, hopefully they’ll have a larger supply tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Blogging, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.