Tom Morris

Yesterday, I couldn't be bothered to respond properly to Loïc's post. Today I will.

"I always want to listen, learn and improve"

The first step is admitting it.

"That said, I must now admit that the reactions in the blogosphere convinces me blogging conferences are dead. The tools we developed have entered the mainstream and we must embrace that."

When Loïc writes "the end of blogger conferences", I have to agree to some degree - but also strongly disagree. BloggerCon was one of the most interesting conferences I've ever listened to. That happened late last year and was extremely enjoyable to listen to.

Blogging conferences is dead if you take the conference model - but blogging conferences are certainly not dead in the unconference model. BarCamp, PodCamp, BloggerCon and similar events are still well-suited for bloggers and other independent media producers like podcasters and videobloggers.

"Artists, academics, politicians and so many others have joined the ranks of bloggers and web entrepreneurs in recognizing the power of social software. We must bring them into our conversation"

Again, this is not exactly the point. I didn't want politicians excluded. I wanted politicians to be subject to scrutiny through having a lot of questions. The only way to do that is to have three or four panels with a lot more time given to Q&A. If you want bloggers to attend, you've got to let them ask the questions. This did not happen at Le Web 3, and it was extremely disappointing that it did not.

"People don't clap their hands if they don't want to"

Take a course in social psychology - if you have enough people doing something and people don't have a strong reason not to, they'll do just about anything.

"As for other aspects we have had almost all positive feedback for the top-level networking, food and physical set up for more than 1,000 people"

Ah, but food and networking do not justify a bad conference experience any more than the chance to chat to interesting people on the train is a justification for the trains breaking down. If networking is the object, then we can do it a lot cheaper - events like BarCamp and other evening events that go on in places like London let you meet people in the industry without a 300-500 Euro admissions price.

"Next year - for those who want join an open conference that brings blogging beyond technology"

An open conference? What, like this year's unconference? I'll believe it when I see it Loïc. But as I've said elsewhere, I'm not going to Le Web 4 unless I don't pay a penny for the privilege. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

"Bloggers have power"

I'm glad that has finally sunk in. One would think that working for Six Apart might teach you that, but I expect being at the center of a user-generated shitstorm helps too.

The point is that so many people got up on stage talking about that disgusting phrase "user-generated content" that, in reacting as we did, we had to say "actually, we're not just content generators - we're people, talk to us".

If bloggers have power, then the answer has to be simple - make sure they aren't there next year.

"My two reference conferences are the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos and TED both by invitation only"

That would explain a few things. If only that information were made clear right at the beginning of the cycle of promotion for Le Web, I would have stayed away.

"I want to say I made a big mistake by not asking the room for feedback before doing it. I got caught by my enthusiam and just did it without asking. Not listening to bloggers and your "audience" is a big mistake I have been warning dozens of brands, speakers and politicians for years and I did it."

"audience", huh? Why was it a "60 million people audience" when you were speaking to Sarkozy et al. but it's a scare quotes audience now that they have turned?

Later on in the post in the "I hope I responded to these criticisms above" section, Loïc links to me quite a lot (specifically in six and seven).

I do not think that Loïc has provided enough response to criticism 6 - that no or not enough conversation happened (with either the politicians or more generally). The fact is that there is a huge ironical distance between the claims of the blog pushers ("Blogs start conversations"!) and what went on at Le Web 3. This has not been addressed.

The seventh criticism on Loïc's list is something I still have to affirm - it has not been answered. Why is it that I have to show respect to Shimon Peres or Nicolas Sarkozy by closing my laptop and not blogging, but it's not disrespectful to danah boyd or David Weinberger to keep my laptop open and blog about it? Sorry, but it's a universal thing. I do not consider it disrespectful to blog or to use my laptop at a conference. In fact, I believe the absolute opposite. It is highly disrespectful to have a public conversation and not to report it. Not blogging someone at a conference is a way of saying "you're not important enough for my readers to read about".

Tags: leweb3, loiclemeur, loic le meur, criticism, conferences

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Okay, I tried to write this entry earlier only to find my laptop freeze up on me. I was out on Thursday night and was chatting with Gareth Rodger about Twitter. The subject of APIs and XML came up, and Gareth had a problem with the fact that XML languages and dialects seem to be springing up willy nilly, and that API vendors seem incapable of sticking to one XML schema - or they define their own when a simpler dialect like Atom or RSS would do the job.

Gareth had a big dream - basically, an XML parser with artificial intelligence. It would be able to detect implicit schema and data types and crunch them in to a usable format with ease. We've been dreaming about this kind of thing too, but it's not gonna happen.

This kind of thing is what leads people to the opinion that XML is like regular expressions - "when you say that you've got a problem and you use XML to solve that problem, all you've got now is two problems".

That may be so, but we can do a few things to make the situation better with a bit of hackery.

We can make some pretty good decisions about content automatically by reading schemas automatically and then producing data out of it. If we look at a schema - say an RNG schema - for documents that contain a 'oneOrMore' or 'zeroOrMore' element declaration with multiple sub-elements, we can easily match things within it to elements that we already know.

I think that what we need is some kind of central directory where we can submit XSLTs along with API documentation. Then we nominate one person to basically keep an eye on returns from APIs - this would mean just visually looking over the changes each week and making sure that nothing unexpected happens.

If a change happened that broke the stylesheet, then they could drop a bug notification in to a Bugzilla type system and then someone who is capable of changing the XSLTs could change them.

I think we'd need to think about some way of putting an incentive in place so that people would be willing to help write these stylesheets. I'm thinking some kind of semi-voluntary commercial licence to support development. Again, this is a deep alpha idea.

We already do this - the guy who maintains the Apple Dashboard widget for Tube status is a great example. I use the file he produces in order to power some little applets. He makes sure that his XML file is working - that the scraper is pulling the data from London Transport and so on. I'd love it if there were a more official way of doing this (the guy hasn't licenced it - I just opened up the JavaScript file that powers the Dashboard widget and looked for the link to his XML file).

So, who's up for this kind of thing? Remember, this is just a 'brain fart' - an idea I had this morning that I had to scribble down on my Palm Pilot that I've finally gotten around to writing it up.

Tags: xml, xslt, api, tagsoup, mashup

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