CT Biz Blogs

I went down to Podcamp NYC 2007 yesterday, April 7, and had a great time.

Valorie Luther, from Creative Concepts, gave a talk on Corporate Blogging, and I helped out by creating the presentation slides, and offering some tech support. Follow the link to the post on her blog, if you want to see the slides.

The audience was great, and Valorie is a fantastic public speaker. Anil Dash, from Six Apart, was in the audience. We had a brief conversation with him afterward, and hope to talk more in the future. He’s one of the bloggers I was reading early on, when I first started investigating the whole blogging world.

We didn’t have time to stay at the conference, but did manage to catch Adam Varga’s presentation on Building Dialog With Your Audience (using voicemail, message boards, and wikis). He is one sharp guy and really understands about building community! I came away with some good ideas and a better understanding of the technologies and issues in community building.

I was particularly struck by his points on the cons of using Wikis as a way to build community. Wikis don’t allow for a conversation, for responding to points, and it’s hard to see where the action is. You don’t see right away what’s new, what’s busy, where the latest info is. Wikis, I believe, are more of a way for an already established community to build something together. I think Etienne Wenger (who’s written a lot about communities of practice) calls that “reification.” In my understanding, for communities, reification means a documentation of already established actions, for reference and further action.

Adam did a great job and I hope he puts his notes up on his site. I’d put up mine from his talk, but I’m trying to be less delusional about how much time I actually have for things like that.

Yippee, I’m back. Gotta work on that whole work-life balance thing.