Conferences and weblogs
Esther Dyson has a nice (and widely-read) piece on weblog reports at conferences -- including weblog debates undertaken while a presentation is under way.
"In some sense, the power of the conference moderator is reduced. Bloggers can add their own value ... and they can relay their version from inside the tent to those outside the tent and out of the organizer's control. "
Weblog reports after conferences have become terribly important as well. Nobody else seems to be writing about last weekend's ELO meeting, but a simultaneous conference in Oslo is being talked about by Torill, Jill, Anders, and probably others. This tends to convince me that the conference I attended didn't really happen, that the real meeting was elsewhere.