Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

1. Just as at BloggerCon I, a lot of great ideas came from bloggers I didn’t know.
• I’m promising myself to keep up with what Dick Bell, Henry
  Copeland, Judith Meskill, and Ethan Zuckerman are up to. 
• Also Hoder, who joined us from Toronto, via IRC.
• I’ve bookmarked the list of BloggerCon registrants, which links to blogs and feeds and an OPML file.
2. Integrating IRC chat in the discussion was a huge plus–for people
   inside the room and for those left outside. The IRC was free because
   the non-profit heroes at irc.freenode.net raise money to keep it that
   way. How about a few dollars in their collection box? 
3. IRC was great, but a lot of interaction happened in face to face. So “being there” really adds
   value.  Some amazing people I now know just a little:
• Dan Gillmor (whose book is going to be great!)
• Mary Hodder (when I saw her bar-blogging, I knew I was going to like her)
• Julie Leung (whose blog I enjoyed long before I met her)
• Lenn
  Pryor (who gave me some great advice about working “remote” from headquarters)
• Ross Rader (who let me write nonsense in his moblog)
• Jim Roberts aka JR (another blog friend and a super photographer)
• Jeff Sandquist (whose thoughts on the Echo Chamber, now blogged, were fascinating and a very good omen for Microsoft’s Channel 9.)
4. Let’s all spread the meme of Discussion-Not-Lecture!!!!!  Unconvinced?
• Picture a room with 100 conference-goers.
• What’s the chance
  that one of them could hold you spellbound with an hour lecture?
• What’s the chance that a dozen of them have 5 minutes worth of exciting info to share? 
5. If I ever want to organize something as ambitious as BloggerCon
   II–gee, that’s a scary thought. I hope I’d have people as wonderful as
   Lisa Williams and Jay McCarthy and Wendy Koslow and Susan Kaup (Sooz) to help me. (That’s reverse alphabetical order, just for a change.) Especially when I
   consider how huge a project it was for somebody as energetic and
   experienced and plugged-in as Dave Winer. 

Thanks, Dave, you created
something wonderful.
Again.

Amazingly, I’m not the only person still posting about the stuff I
learned at BloggerCon. Tara Liloia is doing a great job of aggregating
links. Not enough? Check out the Feedpaper for BloggerCon
at http://now.feedster.com/BloggerCon –that pulls from only about 50
feeds of people who attended–or get even more posts with a Feedster search for bloggercon.