Anyway

I just got back from the North­ern­Voice organ­iz­ing com­mit­tee’s post-con­fer­ence lunch. The con­fer­ence motto is per­son­al blog­ging and social media but lots of people who attend or speak are inter­ested in the pro­fes­sion­al or cor­por­ate aspect as well. As a res­ult, one of the per­en­ni­al top­ics we talk about is who the con­fer­ence is for, and what do par­ti­cipants want to listen to. I touched on some of this in my Ebbs and Blogs post­ing. Per­son­ally I’m more inter­ested in the per­son­al blog­ging aspects than the com­pany PR aspects (YMMV, of course).

Which raises some inter­est­ing ques­tions — why would per­son­al blog­gers come to a con­fer­ence? I can think of a few reasons:

• to learn more about tech­niques, e.g., how to pod­cast, or how to embed video
• to get ideas for content
• to learn how to write bet­ter, to express ideas better
• to meet up with people with some related interests

I guess there are a lot of people who blog who would nev­er come to a blog­ging con­fer­ence because what and how they blog is enough for them and they don’t see any need to change any­thing. But there are also people who don’t do well in crowds, so one issue I see is how to encour­age people who are less com­fort­able at con­fer­ences (even small ones), how to make them more com­fort­able. I don’t know what the answer is; I’m an intro­vert but it sel­dom stops me going places, so although I sym­path­ize with those for whom it’s a prob­lem, I’m not sure of what to do to help. If, indeed, any­thing can be done at the con­fer­ence organ­iz­ing level to help.