Ted Shelton: "Frankly I felt that BlogOn was a waste of time and money."

I think the BlogOn conference was overproduced. In the name of professionalism the organizing firm turned off potential speakers, oversubscribed sponsors, etc.

I would have liked a debatable topic (aside from *blogging = journalism*. Two people slugging it out. Or a devil's advocate taking challenges from the floor.

I would have liked more hard numbers. Facts. Charts. Diagrams. We have the analytic tools to BS-check them; harder on vague opinions and single-points-of-observation.

I found it disturbing how much money was being commanded (from both attendees and sponsors) for a conference at a university. Maybe it was because it was at Berkeley? Maybe we should have taken over a community college or a Cal State or a DeVry. The facilities costs would have been cheaper at least. I heard an organizer apologize and say the next one would be at a hotel, like that would have been better.

Cost wasn't the whole problem. We're at a stage where early adopters are meeting folks who want to leap the chasm. Huge gaps in knowledge, experience, context, culture, vocabulary. It's the gap.

There are huge ideas to be explored, even in the world of applying blogs to media strategy and the enterprise. And most of the big ideas weren't even on the agenda at BlogOn. Probably because it was catering to those who want to commercialize, fund, and otherwise exploit (excuse me, "get in on") the emerging medium.

Let's fork these conferences so advanced topics on business and technology and culture fit the participants. 

[a klog apart]

Linux distributor Good OS and BIOS vendor Phoenix Technologies each have plans to make netbooks speedier devices, the vendors said at the Netbook World Summit in Paris on Monday.

A new SDN article delves into the related commands.

I have just moved my personal site over to a new Typepad location.  You are all welcome to visit.

The site's archive will remain intact here until I can figure out how to map it to a new location.

Sun has released MySQL Server 5.1.30 GA, "the first 5.1 production version of the popular open source database. MySQL 5.1.30 is recommended for use on production systems." Notable new features in this release include table and index partitioning, row-based and mixed replication a built-in job scheduler, new SQL diagnostic aids and performance utilities, and improved XML handling with XPath support. "ExtractValue() returns the content of a fragment of XML matching a given XPath expression. UpdateXML() replaces the element selected from a fragment of XML by an XPath expression supplied by the user with a second XML fragment (also user-supplied), and returns the modified XML. See Section 11.10, “XML Functions”."