Seybold post mortem
Had a nice time talking at Seybold yesterday to a strangely sparse crowd (was it the bomb threat the day before? was it too late in the day? is Seybold dead? or was it just that the world is a lot less excited about RSS and blogs than we think?). Shared the podium with CNET's John Roberts and Matt May. We agreed that RSS and blogs were highly unlikely to radically transform commercial publishing but that both were valuable, important tools.
I argued that it's silly to talk about blogs "killing" print -- that we keep getting stuck in a loop every time a new news distribution technology comes along, asking, will this "kill" its predecessor? Radio didn't kill print, TV didn't kill radio, the Net didn't kill TV, and blogs won't kill anything. Each new medium forces its predecessors to rethink what they do, and sometimes to revamp their business structures. Blogs are a fantastic way for individuals to enter the global conversation on the Net, to comment on the news and sometimes to break some news themselves. They don't have to become Big Business to be important.
Steve Gillmor and Sam Ruby were there, and Christian Crumlish of RFB, and Steve Rhodes... and probably other bloggers who I didn't recognize by face. It really should have just been a group discussion -- when 25 people are in a hall designed for hundreds and three people are up on a stage it's just not a very comfortable feeling.
The whole conference seemed that way -- the Moscone West facility, which I'd never been in before even though it's just down the street from Salon's office, features vast lofty lobbies that make you feel small and insignificant, and if a conference isn't positively bustling with energy there's a pervading sense of forlornness. In a game effort to use some of the empty floorspace someone with a sense of humor had set up impromptu bocce courts on the industrial carpeting of the second-floor lobby. One guy was even playing, and seemed to know what he was doing.
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