Les Blogs – Where Are We Going?

From Lesblogs (yep, that’s lesblogs) in Paris. Notes from a session with Barak Berkowitz, Caterina Fake, Charlie Schick and Meg Hourihan:

• Caterina – Photographs are easy to produce and consume–that’s why we started with them at Flickr.
• Meg – ‘Blog’ is about the democratization of media, including audio and video. A new way of connecting.
• Charlie – The conversational content – the content is the excuse to have a conversation.
• Barak – Bloggers are (according to focus groups) “people with too much time on their hands who think too much of themselves”. Heh. So. A horizontal platform, reaching an audience from 4 to a millioin.
• Caterina – Social networking is changing people’s perception of people something of themselves online.
• Caterina – Will services be aggregated, or modular? See also Yahoo 360. Flickr’s appeal was, in part, an open structure.
• Cool. Hugh is making noise by making dots on a business card two seats down. I expect he was rendering the long tail in this set.
• Charlie – Assembling services for the average user. The alpha nerds can figure out their own choices, but companies want to corral the average human.
• Joi – The open, connected virus is infecting big companies with the acquisitions.
• Barak – Nokia is supporting LiveJournal–announcement du jour.
• Barak – Blogging is asynchronous and persistent. He thinks email isn’t asynchronous. Je disagree. Blogs are communications without obligations.
• Charlie – Metadata is getting more and more important, the more content we generate and must manage.