First of all I would like to thank journalism.co.uk who enabled me to attend the conference.

As you can read on my badge the tagline of BLOG08 was “rockstars of the web” and many rockstars of the blogosphere had been invited to speak at this first Dutch conference on blogging. However, blogging is also the domain of the average web user, who does not feel or act like a rockstar online. On top of that the blogosphere is very diverse and I think some perspectives were not represented. I missed a solid (academic) critique on blogging such as Geert Lovink’s essay Blogging, the nihilist impulse. I could have done without GabeMac’s “performance” on videoblogging which I summarized on Twitter:

Instead, I wish Paul Bradshaw from the Online Journalism Blog had done a longer presentation instead of the few minutes in the poorly moderated Journalism panel. During the break I had an interesting chat with him that moved beyond the never ending journalism versus blogging debate. Bradshaw is also a lecturer and we talked about using blogs and blogging in our classes. He put his BLOG08 video impressions online.

Overall, it was a good first blog conference and I hope that next time organizers Ernst-Jan Pfauth and Edial Dekker will keep in mind that not every great blogger is a great speaker and that blogging can be approached from even more different angles and perspectives.

Thanks guys!

Loren Feldman is one of the loudest videobloggers I have ever seen and heard. His talk starts with an energetic tirade against the recent Wired article that claims blogs are dead which I also responded to. In his opinion blogs aren’t dead because:

The most important thing in your digital life is your personal blog. Not Facebook, not any of the studentgroups you belong to, any of that. None of that matters. The most important thing is your blog. Because that’s who you are. That’s where you have the most control. Your blog is your slice of digital heaven and nobody can fuck with you there. On Facebook and all these other places you are just a common machine. That’s all you are. Facebook doesn’t care about you, Google doesn’t care about you, frankly, I don’t care about you. Who cares about you? You care about you. And that’s why you should put all your energy into your blog.

(write-up by about:blank)

Loren Feldman at BLOG08

What I thought was Feldman’s most insightful reflection on blogging and social media is how he states that social media services live on and feed on your fear of being alone in this digital world which is represented in the “zero comments” phenomenon.

As human beings we want instant feedback and this is exactly what these services provide. The New York Times recently described Twitter as a form of micro-blogging which provides and contributes to “ambient awareness”

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.

Watch Loren Feldman’s at BLOG08:

Boris van der Ham has been voted the most web savvy of the Dutch House of Representatives and thus apologizes for presenting from paper. The main thread of his story is why a politician would go on the web and start a blog.

The first thing he did in 2002, when he ran for parliament, was to build a website. While he thought the design was really poor he used the website very often. Three years later he started a blog on the large Dutch social networking site Hyves. He did it as a PR tool, to be able talk to his voters and try to connect to the people voting for him. Van der Ham calls this the most superficial reason to start a blog as a politician.

One of the other reasons was that the blog enabled him to reflect on things. He has a very busy agenda and he noticed that when he sits down for fifty minutes a day he has time to think and to reflect. The main topic he writes about are his daily experiences. Taking time for his blog entries enables him to find the exact right words for it and he can be more creative. He uses parts on these reflections for television interviews or newspapers and enables him to rehearse for what he refers to as the fast “20 seconds” media. His blog helps him to prepare for the media.

Blogs have often been compared to diaries and Boris van der Ham also picks up the diary metaphor. He had been keeping a diary til the age of fifteen and now he’s been writing one online for three years. What he likes about documenting his reflections online in the form of a blog is that he can go back in time to see what his ideas on a particular topic were two or three years ago.

One of the more political reasons why Boris van der Ham keeps a diary is that you’re not attached to the constrains of your political party. Every political party is very strict on what you can say, especially if you’re not the spokesperson of that topic. What van der Ham dislikes about (the Dutch) politics is that only official spokespersons can talk about certain subjects. Now he can be more open on his blog. He sees his blog as a good instrument to break open the rules of party discipline. He considers it to be a democratic good thing to have a blog. A blog is a personal thing, just as politics are a personal matter as people are looking for personal recognition in a politician. He admits that blogging will never open politics for a hundred percent but his personal reason for blogging is the hope that it will help to open it a bit.

The journalism/blogging panel aims to answer questions gathered via de Nieuwe Reporter, one of the largest Dutch journalism blogs.

Tim Overdiek from NOS News shares that over a hundred NOS colleagues from a total of 400 have contributed to weblogs.nos.nl. Only forty employees are active bloggers but a hundred contributions in the form of either comments or blog posts is a certainly good number. He remarks that professional journalists often don’t see bloggers as collaborators but as a form of contribution, as something they can use. There is no direct participation. The participating journalism that Dan Gillmore refers to is not happening in the Netherlands according to Overdiek.

We’re currently moving beyond blogs, and the practice of blogging has gone beyond the medium of the blog and has partly moved to Twitter for example. There is a whole world to gain for bloggers and also for organizations to actively set out to get people blogging.

It is interesting to note that during one of the previous sessions Tim Overdiek sent out a tweet to remind himself to create a 101 Teletekst Twitterfeed asap.

Twitter: Tim Overdiek

Teletekst is the Dutch equivalent of the BBC Ceefax and the 101 page is the standard page for news headlines. It is interesting to see how one of the most popular ways to keep up with the news is going to be syndicated on Twitter in the near future. The NOS is focusing on embracing the new social media and sees syndicating existing content on different platforms as the next step.

The question that was selected from the Nieuwe Reporter is a rather odd choice since there was a lot of discussion about the relevance and phrasing of the question in the comments (in Dutch). Unfortunately the question also eventually drived the discussion nowhere.

Imagine there would be a stock exchange for newspapers, broadcasters, magazines, weblogs, and other media. Which stocks would you buy when taking the next five years in account?

Tim Overdiek: Buy stocks in NOS, we have great outlets, we have different platforms such as mobile TV, blogging and Twitter. The NOS media department is pretty tech savvy. However, he advises not to bet on just one company because there are too many interesting things going on in different places.

Bakker would buy stocks in magazines because the problem with blogging and internet is that to monetize it is quite difficult.

Bradshaw would also buy stocks in magazines because all of the advertising on the internet pretty much goes to Google. Offline and online advertising are not on the same level yet and on top of that magazines have a lot of muscle. Bradshow thinks that they will buy out successful blogs. Newspapers are also trying to be more like magazines which shows the bright future of magazines but they don’t see it quite yet.

Journalists should work with bloggers on a level playingfield. He mentions the example of a newspaper that recently recruited 40 bloggers but it’s not a top down relationship with one main editor that makes all the decisions. He sees this as a good way forward because journalists and bloggers should treat eachother like citizens.

Pete starts with his main mantra to “build something you love” which not only applies to forming a blog but to any successful company. He uses the Waybackmachine as a resource to show screenshots from Mashable’s history and talks about its development over the years.

People spend many weeks on tweaking their blog to look really professional but according to Pete it’s a waste of time. To prove the viability of a blog you just have to sit down and blog. Just do it! was Pete’s slogan before some sports company ran off with it. Blog, eat, sleep and repeat. Don’t mess with templates and funding and waste your time.

Start at WordPress.com and if you have the skills install WordPress on your own server. Pete is obviously a member of the WordPress fan group and slightly bashes the Six Apart products and Blogger.

So what is important when building a blog empire? Stats. Find what your readers want and give them what they want and then monetize it. When asked, hardly anyone in the rooms actually wants to monetize its blog. Pete is kind of surprised, especially if he asks the same question in the US where everyone raises their hands.

Q&A: Apparently blogging is dead, it’s all about microblogging. Blogging is hard now. How do you compete with blogs created by established media empires who create blogs? Find a niche. What’s the future of blogs? According to Pete it is about how do you aggregate the dispersed conversation that’s on FriendFeed and Twitter, or do you want to completely distribute content as a brand?