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.
Lauren you have definitely brought to light something that was fairly obvious this year, the personal versus corporate aspects of social media. I tend to associate with the people who discuss the personal side and find the corporate speak very limiting.
I wish I would have been at that session to support those ideas that you noted. The quandary with corporate blogging is that a corporation’s existence is based on creating a profit. How else does it exist? Effective blogging for a corporation is to create or augment a strategy to make profits. This certainly is not the same reason as a personal blog and begs greater debate.
Great meeting you.