Here’s one of the real successes of the “Open Space” conference model: I’m interested in wikis. I have some personal/business projects that I would like to collaborate on and wikis seem like they might be a good application. So I threw it out there as a topic idea, got my space, and Viola! An instant session on wikis.

Several people came together to share what they knew about wikis, to talk about how they want to use wikis, and Doug Sorocco gave a great demonstration–ad hoc–installing a wiki and editing some pages on the fly. This was exactly the kind of session that makes a conference like this great.

My first “Open Space” session of the day was one on Knowledge Management and blogs. It was a lively and interesting discussion, with two camps: the “personal voice” camp and the “enterprise blog” camp. In reality, I think both are valid approaches to blogs and leveraging them as knowledge bases. On the plus for the “enterprise blog” vein is the idea that content needs classification and coordination, the value in the blog is the timely dissemination of valuable information. This requires a more controlled and moderated methodology for content creation and publication. On the plus side for the “personal voice” approach is the obvious: content generated by the expert with a unique voice is valuable content.

In the end, I came away with some good insight that there are different applications for blogs and to state the obvious again–different blogging approaches are necessary for different audiences and applications. The highlight of the session for me were the insights from Sabrina I. Pacifici who really understands the needs of enterprise blogging as well as being a prolific blogger in her own right. Great session!

To start off Day Two of BlawgThink, Matt Homann revived the Five-by-Five feature from his blog, live. It was an interesting panel discussion featuring some heavy-hitting luminaries of the legal blogging world:

Dennis Kennedy
Ernie Svenson
Sabrina I. Pacifici
Marty Schwimmer
Tom Mighell
Carolyn Elefant

There were some really great ideas touched on that I would like to explore more and which I hope have further discussion in the break out sessions later.

So what were all the great ideas? You should have been here. I can’t give all the content away!

Well, unfortunately, I had to leave BlawgThink a little early to day to pick up my car. It was a damn shame, too, because I missed out on the last open/brainstorming session of the day.

The idea beind the last session was “Open Space” which is quite cool: people got to choose their own topics, and place them on a post-it note. There were eight “spaces” or so, and people that were interested in a topic would simply go to the designated space for whatever the topic was and discuss it. As many people as wanted to could go to a topic area, you could move from topic to topic, or stay put and discuss as long as you wanted. It’s really not more complicated than that… it sound like it would be to simple to be powerful, but I can tell you I was quite excited about it. Anyway, that type of free-form, Open Space discussion continues tomorrow and I’m really stoked.

The last “formal” session (I use that term with some hesitation–BlawgThink is not formal in any way) I attended was presented by Fred Faulkner on some advanced blogging techniques and tips/troubleshooting.

Fred’s the webmaster for the ABA and had some great techniques for making blog management easier. There was also some great participation from the attendees in the room regarding problems they’ve had with MT, WordPress, etc. and sort of a free-form responses.

It’s harder to encapsulate this session into a pithy post (like my alliteration?) but it was a good session, and I took away some good ideas for plug-ins to add to my site to help make my life easier. They could probably make your life easier, too. See? You should have come.

Another fantastic session!

This one was presented by Dennis Kennedy and Jeff Beard and involved some advanced technologies (many tagging related) for blogging.

Many of the technologies/services I already use, such as Flickr, del.icio.us, and Technorati.

However, there were a number of cool ideas/services/sites which I don’t use, and in some cases, didn’t know existed! Here’s a few that I want to explore more:

In the vein of beefing up your feeds, there’s FeedBurner and FeedBlitz. FeedBlitz lets you create an e-mail RSS subscription. I think FeedBurner might allow the same thing, again, I’m going to check out FeedBurner very soon.
In the “letting the world know about my blog” there’s Ping-O-Matic and Pingoat. Both of these services allow you to ping one site, who in turn go out an ping a ton of different blog indexes. I agree with Dennis–I don’t see how these services can make money, but hey, that’s not my problem.

I already use the hell out of Flickr and del.icio.us, so I’m down with the tags. TagCloud offers a way to create a cloud of tags based on your posts. Sounded interesting.

And finally, hosting Podcasts and (possibly) VideoCasts can take up some serious space and bandwidth. libsyn and VideoEgg aim to help with those problems, respectively.

Finally, they touched on some services like Rojo, Rollyo, and OPML. Rojo and Rollyo sounded a bit interesting, but not at the moment, and given how I feel about Dave Winer, I’m avoiding OPML as much as possible.

We all know the power of Google. This session was about how you can use search engines to your advantage and how to tailor your blog to get the most out of search engine results.

Tim Stanley of Justia.com did a really outstanding job of reviewing how the search engines work and what techniques do and don’t work for increasing your results. What I found best about this session was that it wasn’t about “tricking” search engines into getting good results: it was about consistency in your posting methods, site structure and design, and increasing your profile in the blawg/blog community.

Of all the sessions I’ve attended today, this has had the best depth of material. Although, the next session I’m attending is on tagging, and I’m keenly interested in that!

Well, perhaps my reputation precedes me… and that may or may not be a good thing! But I have met several people who have noted, “Oh, you’re Dave!”

This session was given by Matt Homann and was about building your reputation on-line with your blog. The most interesting things to come out of this session were that building your blogging reputation happens outside of your blog.

Matt had some really great ideas about how to incorporate good ol’ fashioned networking into blog reputation building: call up people who’s blogs you like and introduce yourself. Take the conversation analog, because this is about connections with people. One of my favorite suggestions (which he gave credit to someone else for, but I missed her name) is the “unreasonable demand”.

This is a great, great concept! Each week, come up with five unreasonable demands: things that it would be great if they happened, but that you have no expectations for actually happening. Then ask. Let the person know that you are making an unreasonable demand and that you don’t expect it to be filled. You’d be surprised how often people shock you and grant your request anyway!

On the technical, blogging side, Matt mentioned tagging blog entries. This is something I have not done yet, but I definitely intend to start. I’m a nut for Flickr and del.icio.us, so it seems a really natural extension of the blog.

It’s no secret that I would like to launch a Podcast. I’ve got everything set up and ready to… so what’s stopping me? Time. The “producer” in me just won’t let me “just do it”. I have to fuss and fret over production values. Oh, well.

This session was a great intro to Podcasting. Good information about utilizing and planning for Podcasts; the best thing I took away was the importance of “Show Notes” to make it easy to find your Podcast. Because audio files aren’t searchable (yet–get on that, Google) the notes that accompany your show are essential for getting the word out and letting people search to find your Podcast.

There are many issues which were only touched on briefly that I would like to see explored more: what are the licensing mechanisms and issues for using original music in your Podcast. What are the issues about licensing the content of your Podcast?

The first session at BlawgThink 2005 just wrapped. It was “Advanced RSS” with Rick Klau from FeedBurner. Overall, it was a pretty interesting session. Some of the topics we addressed were extending RSS, security issues/providing secure feeds, and touched on the dreaded “monetizing” blogs.

It wasn’t as “advanced” as I’d hoped, but given that I’ve written several books on XML, that wasn’t too surprising. I also disliked that Rick made editing RSS on your own seem “frightening”. XML is text. It has a few rules, but they are pretty easy, certainly not out of reach for most users–that aspect could have been handled better. It was an advanced session, after all. But Rick was very straight up, answered questions, and I did come away with a better outlook toward FeedBurner than I had going in. I think I’m going to give it a whirl.
Note to self for future sessions/open sessions: Seth Godin’s “Monetize This“.