Thanks to Doug Kaye and his ITConversations, I felt like I just got back from Stanford Law School and BloggerCon III. What follows is a report on Dave Winer's closing session titled The Fat Man Sings. (cute title!)
The session was dominated by a lot of audience bitching about the role of vendors and specifically why they weren't allowed to speak. (See my post listing the launch time of the legendary Overload Session encounter.) On the topic of vendor participation, I fully support Dave Winer making BloggerCon a USERS conference. His history with conferences and vendor shenanigans causes him to go extreme on the issue (as argued by several participants in the closing session and elsewhere), but I admire his adherence to his principles on the issue.
For an excellent analysis on BloggerCon III and vendor participation by a uniquely brilliant guy, check out Jay Rosen's observations on BloggerCon III. In the Making Money session (my time index post on it), Jay stood at the mike and said that the magic of blogs (from an economic and marketing perspective) is what successful bloggers learn about trust, integrity, building a brand and an audience. I knew then that this guy was an exceptional mind.
I didn't get anything from Fat Man to feed the Inner Nerd. Still, the fact that it felt like MY BloggerCon conference closing session was a distinctively cool experience when considering I attended the conference sessions from various walking paths and hiking trails around Burlington, Vermont. I do hope to attend other conferences this way in the future.
The brown of late fall before the white of winter.
