No More Blogging Conferences - Cool, whats next?

With the fallout from LeWeb3 comes the view that blogging conferences are dead. See here and here for eg.


Bah Humbug........storm in a teacup.

Big picture - blogging is just another little tributary in the great onward flow of the broadband internet, at some point it rejoins the mainstream again. Blogging is a stage in the Conversation....it took over from listservers and bulletin boards as a way of showing time independant conversations, but there no doubt will be another phase in the future, and probably using bigger bandwidth better.

The real point of conferences is to meet great people and have great conversations. Don't care whether its blogging or social media or whatever - its all part of the bigger value chain of the broadband web.

And also.....what is there to say about blogging, really? A blog is just a simplified website profile with a few whizzy bits to allow time linked text to be pasted up easily plus some interactivity, RSS at the end of the day just punts content to Yet Another Media Reading Thingy, and frankly the tools to aggregate RSS are still pretty primitive compared to many email systems.

Next step is just to integrate the good bits of blogs into the overall web experienxce

Blogging has made a few reputations, and allowed a small subgroup of 'net people to feel unique for a while, but by and large its just an iteration in the bigger scheme of things, ie getting interactive information to the community. Is all this hooha more the traditional squawk of the early adopters as the mass market moves in?

In this respect I think Loic Le Meur was spot on...its LeWeb, not Les Blogs that really matters.

So...what comes after blogs then?