Tuesday, May 04, 2004

In this installment we have a roundup of the Technology panel and the Editors panel.

Technology Panel: Anil Dash and Meg Houlihan, Moderated by Paul Ford

Standard Deviance doesn't have nearly as many notes on this panel as the others, and those of you who have seen the crappy design of this site displayed in Netscape or Mozilla will understand why. This is not the part of blogging that captures my main interest. However, given that I use these blogging tools to get my beautiful prose out to the masses every day, it is certainly an essential topic.

The main theme of this panel was that blogging has to be made easier for the non-technologically inclined. Meg also spoke quite a bit about offering bloggers topics to write about, and thus removing that mystery of blogging, and Anil focused on giving more options to higher-end users such as restricting the people who can view the site. I found this panel to be a tad less interesting than the one before it because it was less contentious and less focused. However it is still very interesting to see what the brains behind these blogger tools think. As my notes on this panel are limited, please check out EverythingNY's exhaustive coverage of the panel.

Moving on..

"Editors" Panel: Jen Chung, Choire Sicha, and Lockhart Steele, moderated by Felix Salmon

The panel opened with Felix insulting all three of them. Excellent beginning.
Again, as with the Publishers panel, quotes as I heard them are in quotation marks, paraphrases are not, and my comments are in italics.

Why are you doing this?
Lockhart: "I like to write", I didn't intend to get any attention from this. I think I heard some sneezes in the crowd that sounded like "Bullshit", but I'm not sure.
Choire: "They ask you to do something and you do it." That's what you do in New York. "How great is that for me? And how horrible for so many other people!"

Is the community of bloggers too forgiving?
Jen: "Bloggers have to fight for credibility."
"When the attacks come it's like you're attacking a little bunny-rabbit."

I may have heard a heckler in the back of the room, but seeing how I was sitting in the front, I couldn't really tell.

On PR agents:
Choire:Someone has offered me a free trip to the Rockies. I didn't accept.
Felix:"Do you have an ethical obligation as a blogger to turn down free trips to the Rockies?"
Choire: "No, I don't like Skiing"

Somewhere around there the panel devolved into a lot of laughing and questions as to whether the bloggers were getting laid through their blogs. While it was amusing it was not necessarily all that informative. If you are a loyal reader of these three blogs (as I am with Gawker and Gothamist) you may have known the editor's opinions on these topics already and thus found the panel slightly redundant, although entertaining.

Also, Choire unveiled a new Gawker Media blog called Defamer that describes itself by saying "LA is the world's cultural capital. Defamer is the gossip rag it deserves." So now the Lalas have their own Gawker. Good for them! And the editor is anonymous. Even more fun!

Ah, and finally the panels were over, and the bloggers were off to Merc Bar.

Stay tuned because up next we have the fun part: THE AFTERPARTY