BLOGON 2005... BLOGS NOT INTERESTING?

I was just wondering how BlogOn 2005 is going since none of our team could make it out to NYC, and most of us attended the ThinkEquity Partners Private Company & VC Summit. I checked out Greg Yardley's blog and he had a good post on his thoughts:

I attended the BlogOn conference for most of today - it’s eight short blocks from our office out on the west side of Manhattan - but I didn’t feel the urge to write about it in any sort of depth. It’s been pretty staid so far. Susan Mernit describes the keynote - a pitch for Seth Godin’s new startup, Squidoo - better than I can. Pretty much a product promo. Not to say the product’s necessarily bad - I do plan to try it out - it’s just not what you’d expect from a keynote. Other sessions didn’t grab me overly hard, either. I wandered out of the last one at the end of the day thinking “hmmm, blogs aren’t quite as interesting as I thought.”

Don’t misunderstand me - the blogs I read every day are interesting, the people I met at BlogOn are interesting and this blog and its personal ramifications are very interesting (to me, anyway). But blogs as a business - well, not so much. I think that’s because blogs have passed the tipping point and are successfully transitioning into the mainstream. Gil Schwartz, Exec. VP of Communications for CBS - who gave the best presentation of the day - said that the membrane between mainstream journalism and ‘blogging’ has shrunk to the point where it’s insignificant. Seems true to me. The conference attendee list is certainly thick with big media folks. There’s no particular feel or sense that blogging is a revolutionary act, something that crept into the discourse in 1999 or so and could be said without qualification until 2003, maybe 2004. Instead, this conference is all about facilitating large corporations’ adaptation of and adoption to the new medium. No ’stick it to the man’ here. That, to me, is the mark of something rapidly maturing, well-established and largely well-known. (full post)

Greg has some more afterthoughts here and a small plug for GoingOn.

Susan Mernit knocks on Seth Goldin for making his keynote a commercial here, and Jeff Jarvis has a more positive post here.

Jeremy Pepper at The PR Blog has various posts on the conference here. The one that interests me is the one on McDonald's corporate blogging strategy. If they launch a marketing blog, I would blog for it for free since I LOVE McDonald's. You're reading on a person that use to eat 2-3 sandwiches for lunch a couple times a week... Filet-O-Fish, Double Quarter Pounder, and a McChicken please... Oh, and a super-size coke. Yeah, this was when I was young and had a high metabolism.