The Summit so far

My impressions of the first half of Day 1 of the first Blog Business Summit:

Keynoter Robert Scoble framed the discussion by pointing out that good bloggers had two common traits: they have passion and they speak with authority.

There's certainly lots of passion and lots of authority here. Lots of information, too. But what about wisdom? That seems to be in curiously short supply so far, given how many smart, articulate people are packed into an auditorium at the Bell Harbor Conference Center.

Partly I think it's because the whole event has an atmosphere of preaching to the converted. It says something when the speakers were often on first-name terms with all the audience members peppering them with questions.

A few recurring themes have emerged, however:

• Blogging is, at its heart, a grassroots technology and the business models it enables tend to be similarly bottom-up: contextual advertising through Google AdSense, word-of-mouth marketing via interlinking, using feeds to disseminate product info to potential consumers who then re-distribute it virally.
• One of the key advantages of blogging technology is that it's designed to help you reach people you know nothing about, and have no idea how to reach otherwise. The tools actively facilitate accidental discovery.
• One of the Summit's goals is to demystify blogging, to show businesses that it's not something to be feared. Yet the simple truth, reinforced in passing several times, is that blogging poses a real threat to any businesses that fail to understand the phenomenon. When a negative PR firestorm erupts from the blogosphere, companies that aren't prepared to deal with it -- that can't respond in the blogosphere -- are going to get smushed. Scoble cited the Kryptonite bike lock story as an example.

The group dynamics are fascinating to watch -- speakers and attendees are, in a way, still "blogging" even when they're talking to each other in the same room:

• For example, the traditional "broadcast" sessions where speakers got on stage and talked to the audience tended to be less interesting, engaging and informative than the spontaneous moments when audience members talked back or started talking to each other.
• Better ideas surface and subsume ones that aren't as good. At the start, Broback was adamantly ambivalent about letting attendees make audio and video recordings of the sessions for posting on their own sites. He cited speakers' intellectual property rights and bottom-line worries (why would anyone pay to attend if they could listen to it all online?) in requiring people to get his permission to record -- even though he promised to "enable significant recording." After the break, however, he said that some very smart people had talked him into a more enlightened approach. Now, anyone can record -- so long as the speakers are OK with it -- and post the clips on their own sites, but he still wants to be informed and wants links back to the Summit's own site.

Which raises an interesting question: Is the whole idea of a pricey offline conference antithetical to the spirit of blogging?

Also, as Dana VanDen Heuvel pointed out: "I'm not going, but I imagine that I won't feel like I missed much. The conference will be full of bloggers who are blogging the event, so you'll get almost every angle on the event."

If you want to see whether he's right, consult the Summit's home page for a list of people blogging live from the event or see what's indexed at Technorati.