i agree

Just wanted to tell you that I thought your session was delightful yesterday. You managed to really evoke the psychological reasons for blogging – especially the fun of it – in a way most of bloggercon did not. And thanks for Travels with Samantha. I started it last night and it promises to be a wonderful read.

i think the sam thing that Microsoft needbe to provide links, on their homepage.

I bet on the lotto so I can be a billionaire. I keep stage makeup in the trunk of my car in case I’m discovered one day. I work two jobs and study at night so I can buy my own airplane, house, Benz, and a swimming pool.

And I blog despite a readership of 6 because if I just stick with it I’ll be an A-list blogger eventually.

Blog Ambition: An American Dream.

Thanks, Mike. I’m now convinced that you should be moderating this meeting instead of me! I hope that you’ll be there to keep me from screwing up too badly.

Since you’re forced into the Town Meeting format, it seems like you should try to have a debate, or a series of small debates.

It’s true that a 100-person chat is unwieldy… but “dividing into small groups and having them report back” is exactly the sort of format I used to dread back in high school. Your group meets. The group has no leader at first, so it takes 10 minutes of Shrugging Out Loud (”Gosh, I have no ideas. Do YOU have any ideas?”) before everyone figures out who the leader is. Then you have an abbreviated discussion, which gets about halfway to its natural conclusion before time runs out. Finally, you have the presentations, when you get to hear one person from each group present the results. This is always boring, because (a) listening to the Powerpoint summary of a conversation is a lot less interesting than the actual conversation itself; (b) the groups are independent, so they don’t address each others’ points – the presentation is not a conversation; and (c) you’re so busy worrying about how embarrassing your own group’s presentation will be — and, if you’re a presenter, your short-term memory is so preoccupied with formulating your little speech — that you don’t even listen to the other groups very carefully.

Hm. The good news is that I’ve just written a little essay on the topic of why the Blogosphere tends to resemble a few top bloggers discussing amongst themselves, while the rest of us watch from the sidelines. The bad news is that I still haven’t helped come up with a format. I suppose you could spend the session debating what the format of the session ought to be.

Maybe you should have a design meeting. Summarize Shirky’s main points. Talk about the political implications. Then announce that the goal of the session is to redesign the Blogosphere: Pretend you are Dave Winer, or Berners-Lee, or God Almighty. How would you redesign the Web (or network television, if for some unearthly reason you think that’s a better starting point) so that each voice gets its “fair” hearing? Or so that important factual information gets taught to readers while outright lies are deemphasized? Or… whichever other quixotic goal you wish to attain?

Provide an example of a proposal. The degenerate proposal, of course, is to do nothing – because Shirky is wrong, or because the concentration of readership is just fine. But there are other possibilities. (”The problem with weblogs is that nobody reads mine, which is the source of all wisdom. I propose that Microsoft should be forced to provide links, on their homepage, to the most thoughtful blogs.”) Then open the floor and allow people to make proposals. Write the proposals down someplace. Perhaps you should collect a few proposals, vote on the two or three that look most interesting, and have a more in-depth debate about each of those, rather than just entertaining more and more wacky ideas until time runs out. Or maybe wacky ideas will be more fun.

I have no idea if any of this would work, of course. But the good news is that I’ve always found your meetings immensely entertaining, if not always productive. Whatever you do, you’ll knock ‘em dead.

I think you should break down into one group of 2, one group of 4, one of 8, one of 16…

Why not talk about the antidote: small world networks?

Just be be kinda old fashioned, why don’t you give your ‘groups of ten’ a pile of index cards?

Let then work up their ideas and then present them at a central terminal, kinda like organizing you thoughts before grabbing the open mike at a presentation.

And no, it’s not obvious at all, based on all the very cruel let-them-eat-cake thinking in the blog A-list.

If people stop telling me I can fight Slashdot with a personal blog, then you can say it’s obvious.