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My experience at BlogWalk 6.0 was an eye-opening one. I’d never been to an event of its kind, never met bloggers like the bloggers I met at BlogWalk, and not thought in great detail about many of the topics discussed. The event (see pictures!) was superb for prompting discussion and bringing disparate ideas from a community of like-minded individuals together—ideas that we effectively organized into themes. What we struggled with, however, was drawing conclusions and making decisions from the powerful raw material of our conversations.

Table of contents

• BlogWalk: What is it?
• So, what did you talk about?
• The Window Wiki: Five themes
• Blogs in the corporate setting
• Blogs and money
• RSS ads
• Taking RSS further
• Differing takes on blogrolls
• Any decisions or conclusions?

BlogWalk: What is it?

So you’re wondering, “What the heck is a ‘BlogWalk’?” The full answer to that question is at the About BlogWalk page. My quick summary is that BlogWalk is an informal conference of highly motivated bloggers and tech-minded folks who want to get together for a day to talk about how technology is used and can be used. Some participants know each other beforehand, many do not.

So, what did you talk about?

BlogWalk was all about conversation (not walking! not with the snow!), and the topics were wide-ranging and free-flowing. The purported focus of the event was “Social software in organizational (corporate) settings,” but we certainly strayed considerably from this guideline. Furthermore, I felt that this topic was rather ill-suited to the group, as many participants seemed to harbor anti-corporate sentiments or were skeptical about companies’ use of blogs. But more on that later.

It’s difficult to summarize a day of intense conversation, so I think I will provide short summaries of the topics touched upon that particularly interested me. For a more “real-time” summary of the conversations, see AKMA’s before lunch and after lunch game-time blogging, and other participants’ posts can be found in the BlogWalk Topic Exchange or at the Technorati tag: BlogWalk.

The Window Wiki: Five themes

Our first real activity was to create a “Window Wiki.” (Throughout the day, we used the technical term “Wiki” [a freely editable website] in more global sense.) This was a cool activity; everyone wrote down their questions and expectations for the day with unique Post-It color and marker color combinations and put it up on the window in our room in Seabury. (You can recognize mine in the pictures as the bright green Post-Its with dark blue marker.) As we put up the expectation Post-Its, everyone also had the opportunity to rearrange the placement of the notes in order to create spatial themes.

This worked exceptionally well for organizing ideas into broad themes and allowing the group to see what everyone was bringing to the session. It accomplished this in a nonverbal, non-conversational way, which was very valuable at this introductory stage; you don’t want the folks with the strong personalities and blabbermouths (like me :-/ ) dominating the program. I recognized five broad themes in our Post-Its:

1. Event-related (example: “Better acquainted with other participants”)
2. Organization/Corporation-related (example: “Blogs/wikis as external marketing tools,” which was definitely David’s)
3. Technology/Tool-related (example: “How does existing software get in the way?”)
4. Audience/User-related (example: “Can we repeat the PC revolution?”)
5. Culture/Community-related (example: “Do certain bloggers have too much influence?” which was mine)

You might also be interested in what London’s BlogWalk 5 Window Wiki looked like.

Blogs in the corporate setting

I found that the topic of “corporate blogs” was probably the most contentious topic discussed at BlogWalk 6. Although it was nominally the focus of the event, I found the topic to be an odd one given the attendants at the meeting. It was clear to me that many of the folks were not fans of corporations or corporate style and some participants were quite open about these sentiments. But we kept revisiting the topic, again and again, butting our heads up against the “corporate blogs question.” At the end, I felt exasperated, as I think Mark did as well. Why try to fit a square peg in a round hole?

In the Open Space discussion, I had a contentious discussion with Phil and Lilia about the culture of corporate blogs. I thought my argument was pretty straightforward, but they weren’t buying what I was selling. My point was that the blogosphere has a culture all its own, predicated on openness, democracy, discussion, credibility through social rank, etc. Corporate blogs, by contrast, are reflective of the corporate culture in which they’re situated. They reflect the constraints of HR policy, the hierarchy of bosses and employees, the brown-nosing of getting ahead. All of it.

And you know what? Rightly so. If you started a blog in a prison, I bet it would reflect the culture of the prison. Why should it magically take on the properties of the blogosphere at large? So to me, it’s again: Why try to fit a square peg in a round hole?

After lunch, I talked more about corporate blogs in a different group, touching upon different areas. We decided that three types of corporate blogs exist:

1. External, customer-facing blogs
2. Internal, employee discussion blogs
3. CEO blogs

I tried hard to promote the idea that corporations should remain skeptical about blogs (they do have a lot to lose!) and that blogs are not always the answer to companies’ problem of connecting with investors and customers. This idea totally fell flat. I found that I was in a room full of true blog believers and my note of skepticism was not well-received. That’s okay, though.

Blogs and money

Perhaps the most fascinating conversation of the day for me was led by Matt and focused on monetizing blogs. In the afternoon, we discussed the challenges and parameters around making money off blogs. I liked this conversation because we reached conclusions.

We arrived at the conclusion that blogs should remain free and bloggers should attempt to make money off complementary items and projects. Specifically:

• High priced reports. It’s easier to sell five PDF reports for $500 than 500 reports for five dollars.
• Consulting. In fact, Martin, BlogWalk 6’s master of the “phrase that captured the moment,” called the blog in this context a lightweight form of consulting.

I was also interested in what will happen when traditional companies learn how to blog. Or perhaps more realistically, when new companies are formed specifically with the blog model in mind. Right now, only a few blogs make much money and those blogs are run by individuals. I’m waiting for lean, flexibile organizations of five to ten employees to crop up, exploiting the profit potential of the blogosphere. In the abstract, such an organization, with far greater resources and people power than an individual blog, should be able to change the entire profitability model of the blogosphere.

RSS ads

We all agreed that RSS ads are coming soon. Stuart is planning on them for his site. We’re in the Golden Age of the ad-free RSS zone right now. Matt (whom I thought was really smart) said that the readers he cares about use RSS and don’t see the HTML ads that he serves on his website. Therefore, he doesn’t care as much about serving those ads.

Taking RSS further

At this point, I had something of an “a-ha moment” (Martin’s term) about how RSS could be utilized more effectively. Given that some pretty sexy textual analysis technology exists for gleaning taxonomy and meaning from collections of text (example: Inxight software), how cool would it be if:

1. Users categorized theirs RSS subscriptions into buckets.
2. The newsreaders then ran sophistical textual analysis against the full-text, archived feeds of each bucket—it could be a day’s worth or a year’s worth of text.
3. From this analysis, a long and informative list of keywords (or even a taxonomy?) could be gleaned, which could be used to search services such as Feedster or del.icio.us.

I also had a fruitful sidebar conversation with Dennis about improving RSS feeds at the site and/or client level, particularly for group blogs. Ideas:

• Allow users to build their own feeds by selecting the authors and topics that interest them. This is superior to publishing category- and author-specific feeds, which would always produce at least some irrelevant content.
  • Out of a five-person group blog, I select two authors.
  • The group blog has seven categories, of which I am interested in three.
  • The resulting matrix creates an RSS feed specific to me: Include in my RSS feed only posts from Authors A or B matching Category A, B, or C.
• Alternatively, include the full author list and category list in the RSS/Atom feed so that client-side filtering can be accomplishing (in the same fashion as described above). I don’t know if the specs for the various syndication formats allow this, however.

Differing takes on blogrolls

We disagreed on the whether blogrolls are worthwhile. Approaching the question from my usability background, I claimed that Javascript includes suck and that blogrolls are an inefficient use of screen space. Other participants were unimpressed, and Steve said that he likes the fact that a blogroll defines a community. He said that if he reads a blogger, he’s likely to find other blogs in that author’s blogroll interesting. Because he uses Bloglines to read feeds, he actually sees the blogrolls, unlike others who use standalone aggregators.

I can buy this argument. What I’d like to see is blogrolls that are specifically relevant to context; in other words, category-specific blogrolls. I also mentioned that there is a danger to publishing one’s blogroll without oversight and care (especially if done via Javascript), since it’s easy to continually add to your collection of feeds and thus blogroll someone with off-the-wall opinions. This can damage one’s own credibility. David mentioned that he’s a careful gardener of his blogroll, deleting feeds from his collection on a weekly basis. If everyone did this, we wouldn’t have such a frickin’ problem with 200 link-long blogrolls clogging up the Intarweb!

Any decisions or conclusions?

BlogWalk 6 was a fantastic event for conversation and idea exchange. It was not a place for decisions or conclusions. As the clock neared 5:00 p.m. and participants offered closing thoughts, many echoed the theme that BlogWalk had been for them more about questions than answers. I would agree. Yet participants were able to answer the all-important question of who the people behind the blogs are, a question I posed on a Post-It on the Window Wiki. To many of the participants, this was more important than any question about the future of blogs or the blogosphere.

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