Blogwalk Chicago

• Blogwalk Chicago was interesting! The original emphasis -- social software in corporate settings -- wasn't the primary interest of most of the particpants, and the open format permitted and encouraged topic drift. This was good when it let interesting people talk about what interests them, and bad when we kept wandering back to off-topic but widespread anxieties like "how do I get the world to recognize the value of my weblog".
• AKMA blogged like mad. We didn't get to talk; that's a shame. I read that he liked iWork, and immediately ordered a copy; software is like that.
• Best distinction: feral weblogs (weblogs in the wild) vs. caged weblogs (weblogs behind the firewall)
• Denham Grey suggested that the value of folk taxonomies lies chiefly in the tails -- in the very common and very rare tags. I suspect that's right, that all the rest will eventually degenerate into semantic mud. But, can we distinguish interesting low-frequency tags from typographic accidents?
• It was easy to get people worrying about Bad Corporations that might dismiss employees who blog, but hard to get people to discuss why a Good Manager like you or me might need to fire a blogger.
• There's a sense in this crew that the real action is Somewhere Else, that they're at the margins. Conjecture: all reflective researchers these days feel marginalized, even when their field is Technology Of The Year, on the cover of news magazine, and in every cartoon and TV drama.
• People who work on collaborative software just want everyone to be nice. Me too. But we've been doing this a while now, and we keep finding trolls and snerts and rivals -- and in the business world, we've got plain-old competitors, too. This leaves social and collaborative systems under constant siege -- we keep adding plugins and interfaces and whatnot to block new kinds of spam and trolling and bad-deed-doing. Maybe we need to design for a world with Bad Guys; I bet we can find a way to do this without walling everything into little fortresses behind bristling security.

I'm hoping to write more about Blogwalk Chicago for TEKKA.