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blogtalk: who’s here?

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I’m still not sure who’s here exactly. Yesterday we heard a rumour that almost everyone here was at one of the two previous BlogTalk, and that it was going to be a very closed social group. However, most people we’ve talked to haven’t been here before – perhaps we’re drawn to other outsiders, or perhaps the rumours were wrong?

So far, Scott and I have talked with Anders Fagerjord,Kathleen Fitzpatrick, danah boyd and a few other people.

We just heard a talk by Lee Bryant from the London-based company Headspace. Using beautifully designed slides he presented a case where his company designed a system combining wikis, blogs and tagging for a large international law firm. There were a lot of questions (I wish there’d been time for questions after the previous talks) and almost all were the sort of questions you’d ask if you were going to design and/or sell similar systems to similar corporations. Perhaps most of the audience is from industry, or more precisely, small companies and consultants selling social software and blogging to companies?

A lot of the people here seem to go to conferences like ReBoot, at E-tech, at SHIFT, which I think are all more for people selling social software than for academics. Which is interesting, and interestingly different.

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