BlogNashville Day 3

I made it here and am sitting in the main conference room. If you really wanted to clean up as a theif today you could swipe thousands of dollars of computer equipment. W’e’re here at Belmont University’s student commons and am in the main area where they’ve got wireless set up.
Quote:
The old media are in trouble. They have the demographics of Matlock.
Are blogs the next tech boom? Oh God, I hope not.
I’m getting better at working my URLs into normal conversation.
(more later)
I guess I was expecting more content-heavy presentations at this conference. It is all so freeform. I feel like that is fine if I’m on a teleseminar – but I just get miffed that there is so much ego-stroking and blathering going on. Drives me batty.
In the podcasting session we went off on a massive tangent about the copyright cartel and fair use rights. On podcaster saying that she doesn’t like having to buy all these different licenses in order to podcast licensed music. A lot of scary rhetoric. My point of view is if you don’t want to pay the licenses, don’t use the music. Surely there are tons of unsigned, independent artists that would love to be featured on a podcast.
Dan Gillmor’s session was nice but again was a go around the room and talk to people type of thing. I guess I wanted much more meaty stuff to get my excited.
Now I’m in Dave Winer’s presentation ‘A Respectful Disagreement’ which is talking about having people be able to disagree respectfully. Again, this is all a lot of improv right now and I’m not sure what this is all leading to.
Maybe I’m too linear.
Had lunch with Paul Chaney and B. L. Ochman and chewed the fat about marketing and business and blogs. There is a schizophrenic Make Money Now point of view that is coupled with a Everything Should Be Free counterpoint. I still think that the initial division is not being made – making money from your blog versus because of your blog. Everyone is talking about hosting ads and such but not seeing their blog as the launching point for a product.
The attendance is dominated by middle-aged white guys. Maybe I can make it to BlogHerCon.
Oh great. Some kind of Dave-audience rage is coming out.
This is getting very tense very fast.
Dave sat down during the session as moderator. That is so incredibly childish. Evidently this is par for the course for Dave but it comes off as really immature and bratty. Of course, I should have left after that but I stayed to see if it got worse.
In the long run not much was accomplished with Dave’s discussion except to bring out animosities among different groups.
The closing speech ended up being prety much pointless. I’m not going to go to the dinners tonight – sorta blog-weary – eager to get home and relax.
Every time someone says Milblogging I hear them saying MILFblogging.