Conference blogging

I’ve been attending conventions, conferences and meetings of one sort or another for twenty-five years but this one is different. This one is wired. More to the point, it’s unwired. Many (most?) of the attendees have their notebook computers fired up and connected to the Internet via a wireless network. So, while the speakers were making their presentations, many of the people in the audience were “reporting” what was being said by posting (text and photos) to their personal blogs. Now, I don’t know if this is journalism or not. But I’m not sure it matters. Something is going on here. Steve Gibson is talking about Internet security and seconds later some guy in the audience hits the enter key and people all over the world can read about it (with photos). No networks. No editors. No filtering. How do we know that what we’re reading is accurate or fair? Well, there were probably a dozen people blogging today’s presentations. Pretty unlikely they’d all have the same ax to grind. Like I said… feels like something is happening here. [killed dead links in this post]