Good Times at Blogher '06

Blogher '06 took place this weekend in San Jose, and it highlighted why so many tech industry conferences are a bit of a drag. For me, the primary issue is conversation.

Too many tech industry conferences debase the art of conversation by doing their best to turn most of the events into presentations and the attendees into audiences. Conversation gets squeezed into the hallways. And there's this other thing: since the conferences are usually heavily male dominated, there's a ton of posturing and preening and poorly sublimated competitive aggression--you know, all that size comparison behavior.

Because the usual male-female ratio was inverted at Blogher, male display was almost entirely absent, replaced by friendly, open conversation. The prevailing atmosphere--the oxygen--was friendliness, openness, inclusiveness.

It's not that Blogher was perfectly organized and run--if you want to see a list of complaints, just look at the Technorati-tagged blog postings. But in the larger picture, really, who measures the conference's success by whether the wifi was overloaded or that there were too many commercial pitches from the main stage? What the organizers got right was creating a space where people could talk to one another easily and freely and openly, without being defensive or aggressive.

The thing about conversation when it really works--when it's focused and intimate and spontaneous, among other things--is that it's not just enjoyable, it's productive. At its best, it leads to making new, unanticipated connections, to building on the experience and insight of everyone taking part. And Blogher provided an extraordinarily fertile ground for conversations.

Some of these took place in the sessions--especially the smaller ones, of course--even more of them after the sessions, as people talked in smaller groups or couples, following up on what they'd head in the sessions. And elsewhere, of course--as people sat at tables around the pool, that sort of thing.

These conversations are where these conferences pay off, and Blogher provided the most fertile ground I've seen in years for having them. So I'd like to offer my congratulations and thanks to the organizers and the people I met there.

I'll talk in another posting about two of the most interesting conversations I had. One was with Stephanie Hendrick, who did a presentation about creating identities, including fictional ones, in blogs--she's an American working on a Ph.D. in linguistics in Sweden. The other was with Corey Denis, who's Digital Marketing Manager at ioda, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, which does digital music distribution for independent musicians and labels.

Comments

[Donna]

You nailed it perfectly - the ease of conversation is what made the BlogHer gathering special.