I left Harvard last night feeling exhilarated, exhausted, fried, frustrated and awed, all at once.
What I most appreciated about BloggerCon:
The amazing amount of work that went into organizing the event. Thanks Dave, Wendy and all those unseen and unknown worker bees who made it so.
Dave's challenge to keep things "optimistic" and to further the "win win" model.
Those tireless "disrupters" who insisted that it was not pessimistic to acknowledge problems and to think critically about what we were all about.
Those who continued, in spite of the dismissal, to remind "us" that we were a mostly white, mostly male cohort.
References to Socrates.
That you can get protection against libel through your homeowner's insurance.
The Ted Baxter philosophy: That if you link to people who are smarter and funnier and better writers than you are, you will lose them. I think this was Glenn Reynold's theory.
Jay Rosen's thoughtful, wise meta comments throughout the day, including the fact that readers are now writers, and that there are no masses, just a way of seeing people as masses.
Jenny Levine's tireless and patient attempts to remind and educate us about the amazing potential that resides in public libraries.
Patrick Delaney's dedicated and inspiring work in ,his palatable (to technophobes) concept of digital paper and his blog rats.
The question posed by somebody, " Should blogs be a lifestlye or is it like singing?
The amazing Rashomon like phenomenon of a room full of bloggers blogging their simultaneous experience of bloggercon as it was webcast, while they were discussing it on IRC Chat while they were experiencing it....
Scott Johnson, Feedster
founder and all around helpful and friendly guy.
Adam Curry's reminder that we, the US, are not the center of the universe, though in our ethnocentric way we like to think we are, his wonderful link to the Zen TV exercise, and his schoolblogs.
Christopher Lydon's elegant and practiced moderating and his notion that blogging is done out of love...."a soul and a heartbeat....that is the promise of the transformation."
The challenge I think is for this group of mostly very smart, mostly very white, mostly very male folks to pool their amazing wisdom and capacity for innovation and think seriously about issues of diversity and lack of access. To ignore these facts and sluff off remarks about lack of diversity as unimportant or an attempt to move away from the positive, diminishes us in our effort to truly effect some kind of transformation.
It was long, full, virtual, digital, analog, p2p, face to face, and more. While I would love to attend the free smaller workshops today, which span the spectrum from spirituality to how to blog, duty calls. Classes to plan, food to prepare, sins to atone for and a fast to begin.