Ho John Lee’s Weblog

The main sessions on Thursday and Friday were in the larger hall downstairs at the Palace Hotel. This event was pitched as a “Business” blogging event, and the audience seemed to be predominantly PR, marketing, and advertising folks. The general mind set was something like “what exactly is this blog stuff and what do I need to do about it?” In a show of hands, a significant fraction (more than half?) of the attendees were not blogging, either for their business or personally, but more than half were occasionally reading blogs.

A lot of business (and human) behavior can be attributed to a combination of fear and greed. In this case, some of the “fear” would be:

• Losing control or being blindsided by negative PR. The Kryptonite bike lock hack was frequently cited in discussions.
• Legal exposure if my employees are blogging, or PR exposure if negative comments or hate speech left by comments.

On the “greed” front:

• Blogging is new, and could become a competitive advantage (or disadvantage, if the competition is doing it) for existing products and services. Ford vs GM was cited several times, also Clip and Seal.
• Opportunities to recruit new customers, influence consumers through more authentic word-of-mouth vs mass advertising.

Assuming that this crowd is representative of the interest and awareness of businesses, there’s a long way to go in educating companies about the changing opportunity, risks, and characteristics of blogs and syndicated web publishing. There’s also an usability / explainability issue for the software and services vendors. I’m not fond of Microsoft’s “Web Feeds” push, but it’s representative of the sort of changes that will be needed to get out of technology-focused discussions and into conversation about potential business value among the mainstream, vs early-adopter market.

Other stuff:
Wordpress demo and announcement of wordpress.com (hosted Wordpress, like TypePad)
Movable Type 3.2 demo and release

The wireless service on Thursday was extremely unstable, probably due to the large number of users. On Friday, the Anchorfree team turned off the RADIUS authentication which seemed to improve the availability of the connection.

Lastly, Microsoft came up with some nice Ogio messenger bags. One of my old bags just bit the dust a couple of weeks ago, and I’d just started looking for one, so I think I’ll give this one a try for a while.

See also: BBS05 - Wednesday

This entry was posted on Monday, August 22nd, 2005 at 12:23 am and is filed under Business, 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.