Turns out I was probably wrong about my recognition skills. The first speaker, Mark Bernstein mentioned that he wished Ben & Mena were here…d’oh.
Some highlights so far:
Mark Bernstein talked about the cost of running weblogs: at least €1000/year he reckons. Some could be as much as €50,000. He also talked about the risks of flame wars starting on weblog comments and trackbacks, and asked whether, since both Slashdot and USENET had been ‘lost’ to flamers, would weblogs be next? Mark also talked about the differences between weblogs and mainstream journalism. In the latter environment “today’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish”, whereas in weblogs the archives are cherished, and there is an apparant trend towards categorising old posts.
Stephan Schmidt of SnipSnap tells us that knowledge management does not work and why. In most KM situations the tools, processes and organisation is specified at the management level, which leads to over-complicated and unpopular systems that the users will most likely shun. In his talk Stephan suggested that weblogs and wikis be used as the foundation for a bottom-up approach. Each team member is encouraged to start their own blog, with the tools of their own choice. These blogs are then combined, by overlapping communities, to form meta-communities. At the same time wikis can also be used to retain structured information. Fascinating stuff, and of course SnipSnap is an ideal platform for this – but let’s not be cynical. I think he has a very good point!
Daniel Doegl showed us a fascinating demonstration of Zoomblox, a website designed for young children and teenagers with lots of nice colours and Flash animations. Keep an eye out for Zoomblox.at in Autumn 2004 if you’re interested.