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

Dave Winer:
Blog outlines have a double life. They’re opml when I’m editing them on my computer. When I save it, it turns into an html document with headings, etc. “Rules” (kind of like cascading stylesheets but invented earlier) tell how to use type size, indentation to show different outline levels.
opml, manila on the backend, radio Userland on the front end. You could do this with other softwares.

What about another BloggerCon? Should there be one? Where? (My comment: Andrew Orlowski might host the next one completely free, just to show how his model can work.)

The usual conference model is that you have a bunch of vendors talking down to users. The users end up not getting what they want, so they don’t pay anything for it, and the companies go out of business. How about having vendors let you talk with them 15 minutes to answer technical questions?

Goals for next BloggerCom:

• Steve Gillmor sent an IM to Doc to suggest, IM connectivity so we can all participate in discussions. >
• Henry Copeland, BlogAds: Could we plan the conference using something like a wiki?
  • Dave’s answer: Not a wiki. For example, someone would edit the price of a ticket down to where they thought it should be, and somebody else would throw in that we should accept their niece into Harvard. The problem with a wiki is you get a lot of spam, vandalism.
  • Kevin Marks: Wikis don’t have that much of problem with vandalism, because of the revert change feature.
  • Dave: Yes, but don’t you get flamed when you change someone’s post? I’m willing to try that on a thread, though.
• Blogs in business? Dave: We had two sessions on that today–Halley Suitt did one and Phil Wolff did another. The Cluetrain session yesterday is also business oriented.
• Broader sponsorship?
  • Dave said he didn’t want to sell potential sponsors what they wanted to buy–the opportunity to have their own speakers on panels, without notification that this was a paid advertisement.
  • I (Betsy) said we should have democratic input about how pure users want the next BloggerCon to be–do people want to pay $500 for a vendor-free conference, or would people rather pay $200 for a conference with vendors showing their stuff between session. In between being a virgin sitting on a cake of ice, and being a red-hot mama in bed with 5 guys, there’s a lot of space.
  • Dave said: For this first one, we wanted to be the virgin on the cake of ice.
• Phil Wolff: How about a Day 3 tech track, where developers can talk about technical issues? Dave: Only if you require that all developers go to Day 1 and Day 2. Only if regular users can also go to Day 3. And only if all discussion is held in terms the users can understand. Otherwise, I don’t want to do it.
• Tom Barrett: You’ve got to define your scope so you can set expectations.
• Frank Paynter: I’d like to see some different tracks–a user track, a software development track, a business weblog track.

Dave: I’d like to keep this planning discussion going after the meeting is over. We aren’t the only blogging conference that ever happens. There was a Jupiter conference in June that was really good. And now, here’s Joey the Accordion Guy.

OK, more later, I gotta try to remember the chorus to “Born to Be Wild”…