Anyway

Another nice Fri­day in Feb­ru­ary for Moose­Camp; some­how the Moose­Camp day man­aged to score nice weather two years in a row. This year’s Moose­Camp was big­ger than pre­vi­ous years, and I think we’re get­ting to the limit of how many people we can take without los­ing some­thing. We also seem to be get­ting a lot more people who are inter­ested more in com­mer­cial aspects of blog­ging and social media than the per­sonal side, so I’m not sure how that’s going to play out in the future either.

I spent much of the morn­ing on the t-shirt and regis­tra­tion desk until things settled down, then went to the mul­ti­lin­gual ses­sion, mostly since I occa­sion­ally won­der whether (I should try blog­ging in Ger­man as well as Eng­lish. There were quite a few people in the room, but it turned out that only two of us were inter­ested in the sub­ject for a per­sonal blog; every­one else was inter­ested in the sub­ject for a cli­ent, or for their com­pany. Which isn’t bad, and I’m sure the other people in the room were glad to know that sev­eral oth­ers were inter­ested in the cor­por­ate aspects of the sub­ject, it was just of less interest to me personally.

Pho­tocamp took the first part of the after­noon; inter­est­ing as always and some decent tips on light­ing, even for the few of us who use little pocket cam­eras (there were some ser­i­ously big cam­eras on show).

I spoke in the last part of the inter­net boot­camp. The talk I’d pre­pared was meant, in good uncon­fer­ence fash­ion, to be reas­on­ably inter­act­ive. James agreed to help out, since he also found the topic inter­est­ing: What Next? The idea was to talk to people who’d been blog­ging for a little while and wanted to take their blog to the next level; I was primed with top­ics such as broad­en­ing the focus versus nar­row­ing it, how the tone and style of blogs tend to develop, what effect incor­por­at­ing work top­ics often has, mul­tiple blogs versus one blog on mul­tiple top­ics. A few minutes in it became really obvi­ous that people weren’t inter­ested in the sub­ject, and when I asked why they were there, almost all were inter­ested in fig­ur­ing out how their com­pany should start blog­ging, or make their com­pany blogs more effect­ive. So in even bet­ter uncon­fer­ence style, I changed the sub­ject and star­ted talk­ing about how Sun had imple­men­ted blog­ging. Most people seemed much hap­pier with that sub­ject, and we dis­cussed a lot of related issues. For­tu­nately it was the last ses­sion of the day so the fact we then went over time didn’t seem to upset too many people.