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Blogging: A Real Conversation?

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By: NMK Created on: July 12th, 2005
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This 28 June event examined the increasing importance and influence of blogs - as sources of trusted opinion and as a barometer of the shifting balance of power in media publishing. Read the report & listen to MP3s...

This 28 June event examined the increasing importance and influence of blogs – as sources of trusted opinion and as a barometer of the shifting balance of power in media publishing...

Report by Deirdre Molloy

MP3 audio & blog coverage
Listen to MP3s of each panel and discussion, and see who else blogged this event here.

PANEL 1 – IS BLOGGING A NEW COMMUNICATIONS PARADIGM?

Sabrina Dent - Blogging versus traditional publishing

Sabrina kicked-off by outlining Mink Media’s blogs, which focus on travel, UK politics, shopping, gadgets and weather, explaining that it was one of the few commercial blog companies in the UK. The she read from Kevin Kelly’s book ‘Out Of Control’, subtitled ‘the new biology of the machines’ (1994). In it he describes bees going on a scouting mission, coming back and dancing for the other bees, and then bringing more bees back with them. The favourite sites get more return trips and therefore garnering more visitors overall. This extract is a great analogy for blogging, she reflected, but using this analogy from nature we can say that it's not a new paradigm.

With blogging, Sabrina elaborated, anyone can be the queen, anyone can build a hive, and be an idiot if they want to, adding that she didn’t mean idiot in a pejorative way. Citing the Manolo blog devoted entirely to shoes, with the aside that she would pay to read this because “I am Manolo’s bitch”, and BoingBoing (as an example of group blogging) she noted how these are not rarified sites, but rather they link broadly, mixing fun and intelligent commentary. When anyone can blog, you get all these different distributed networks of different hives and different dances. There is a hierarchy of links and trackbacks, but within that hierarchy you can see the network working and when a popular blog links out it’s analogous to a swarm of bees dancing at the new destination.

Commercially what’s interesting is the ability of blogs to generate buzz. Marquee (who make communications software) paid a dozen bloggers to blog (transparently) about Marquee once a week, which generated an incredible amount of noise and feedback for Marquee about the product from an intelligent group of consumers and increased sales. The blog Sabrina edits - Wandalust - did a deal with W Hotels and offered a very expensive prize as a marketing effort to position their hotels and clientele. This had a trickle down effect on the web – 27 blogs immediately tracked back to the Wandalust blog post, and the story was picked up by Luxus luxury blog and spread out from there through the blogosphere community.

The flutter effect is also distinct to blogs. There are very effective methodologies within blogs, Sabrina explained, to delivering product information, etc, and increasing sales. But new media buyers don’t understand that blogs connect mainly by trackbacks and RSS and don’t work by impressions and click-through rates, and that banners are not effective advertising on blogs. But it’s hard to get this through to them when they measure success by such stats. They need to be more adventurous in terms of putting themselves in the marketplace to be talked about instead of politely sitting on the side, they need to be willing and brave enough to be the subject of conversation.

Rafael Behr – blogging, journalism and the media landscape

Rafael started by defining himself as “a print journalist who blogs and a blogger who writes for a newspaper”. He outlined the recent “wikitorial” incident at the LA Times. The paper opened their online editorial up with a wiki to invite comment and feedback. Things were going reasonably well, but then the web monitor went to bed, and the abuse and pornographic pictures came pouring in. What were the reasons, Rafael asked. For a start they’d chosen the topic of Iraq for their editorial, and they’d already written a leader, so what exactly was the wiki for?

What papers don’t realize, he continued, is the level of antipathy on the internet to journalists and papers. The mythology of journalism is that journalists like to think of themselves as both objective and as mavericks holding the establishment to account. But from the outside it looks like they are in bed with power and complicit with power, and journalists don’t realise this. The blogosphere see it as their job to keep the journalists in check. The LA Times invited people to play and got a veritable kicking from the fifth estate, who are more maverick than the fourth estate.

Rafael then considered the attitudes of newspaper editors, proprietors and most traditional journalists to the web in terms of what it can do for them. He pinpointed three views. First, online as “alchemy”, the view that print / old media takes that we can use the internet to turn base metal into gold, save us, make us new, make us cool. Secondly: “great – internet! Now we don’t need a print plant” and people who don’t live near us can read our paper. And thirdly: can we use the internet to reconnect and bond with our readers? But when newspapers realise that they are held in the same esteem as politicians, they get a bit nervous, and the conversation they fear is happening on the internet and in the blogosphere so they tend to recoil from opening up to it.

The alchemy view, Rafael reasoned, often leads to bogus or pseudo-interactivity (eg online polls) which are just patronising to the readers. The problem with number two is revenue. With a printed paper you get rates, and profiles of your readers social groups, etc, but no-one like ads on websites. The advertising model has also proven problematic, and ad pop-up blockers etc, route around such interruptions to the consumer experience. The fact that Sabrina would pay for the Manolo blog is a possible direction for the future, he said. Not a lot of people made a lot of money from good karma, Rafael joked.

The “internet” / “hinternet” dichotomy that was also explored in Ben Hamersley’s 11 June talk at the Reboot conference in Denmark the previous week made sense to Rafael, because the “hinternet” – home of the mass majority of web users who cannot control their online experience and are constantly subject to pop-ups, horrendous amounts of spam, viruses, spyware and a dozen other unpleasantnesses – is bigger than the civilised internet. Because of this persisting division, subscriptions will do well in the future, he surmised, because part of what you’re selling to people is a safe environment.

Speaking of the blog initiative begun since February 2005 at The Observer (Rafael is their blogger-in-chief, supported by occasional contributions from other journalists), he said that it started as a blog about the newspaper but has morphed away from that and has become more of a mechanism for him to become their blogosphere correspondent. When they launched, Rafael reckons he was naïve, he did expect some flack but not the harsh PR-bating he encountered. They didn’t expect people to say “this a is a sham, a PR trick, etcetera”. Disingenuousness is ruthlessly punished in the blogosphere he explained, and when they posted about Mink Media near the beginning they got heaps of scathing feedback.

The cold war between the blogosphere and Mainstream Media is partly down to when blogging has taken off, and the divisive idea that Bush has fostered that to be critical in a time of crisis is to be “non-patriotic”, and bloggers feel that because of this the media are not critical enough of government. This has created an incredibly confrontational climate between bloggers and the media in the US. But the suspicion of journalists is overdone, Rafael argued.

The technology is easy, accessible and democratic, and will become more so, he reckoned. Soon, having a blog will be like having a hotmail account, and it won’t be a story. In France already it is largescale. We’re reaching the end of a cycle where blogging is unusual and cool. Some blogs will get popularity through the swarming effect, others through mainstream media marketing spend. Human aggregators will become increasingly important, he predicted, counter to the RSS model, and the role of editorial judgment and recommendation will remain strong. This is not a new paradigm, he insisted. Like email, blogging changes the idiom and makes everything faster. Old media are not screwed, Rafael added, unless they stick to the alchemy model.

Mike Beeston – Nano-publishing and the social media revival

Mike took a historical perspective on contemporary developments. In 1817 the government was unpopular, the French war had just finished, the majority were very poor, and hardly anyone had the vote. People met and planned to do something on 9th June. But the problem with these cells was the time and distance gap between them. They knew a lot about each other but they couldn’t really co-ordinate themselves to do anything together. Jeremiah Brandreth, the organiser, marched a dwindling group of some 300 many miles to the rendezvous point only to find the expected support wasn’t there (he had been tricked by a government agent provocateur), and he was arrested, hung, drawn and quartered (the implication seeming to be that with today’s tools this would be less likely to happen).

At roughly the same time, printing presses began to publish pamphlets and the pauper press flourished. These were personal missives about what people felt about society, in many ways the blogs of their time. They were great in variety. Some of these pamphlets sold up to 5,000-10,000 copies each, some as many as 30,000. People would meet every night, like blogging communities, and someone who was literate would read them out. But in 1818 the government introduced a tax (in the form of the Newspaper Stamp Duties Act) that at a stroke made publishing too expensive for most and inaugurated the era of the “established” or mainstream media. In 1832 after much agitation an Act was passed that caused change in the voting laws (which resulted in one in seven males being able to vote). The reason it happened was because of the press – briefly, for the first time, anyone could publish and disseminate ideas. For the first time they had a democratic medium, and their opinions were shared. The masthead of one said: Knowledge is power.

Fast forward through 160 years of centralised media control, and along comes a man called Tim Berners-Lee. Periodically, Mike noted, there had been flurries of democratic communication that rose up, like pirate radio, but they were always pushed back down and incorporated by the mainstream. But now we have blogs and links that are made instantly, and all the way around the world. The shift is not in blogging or personal publishing, but in the links, and how the linkage system works, Mike reasoned, which is why RSS has taken off. Journalism isn’t going away but blogging is a disruptive system to the mainstream… when we have the time to consume it. The problem is that people can’t deal with it. The demands put on people today are too much, and they’re often NOT getting a conversation out of it.

He distinguished between three types of communication space: public, semi-public and private. We group all conversations into one or more of these categories. Taking the Nokia Lifeblog initiative that Fjord are involved in, Mike stressed that the semi-public areas are the really interesting are is where we are sharing real conversation with small groups. These semi-public conversations also offer the scope and possibility of significant change, as with Mexico’s Zapatistas (Editor's note: Manuel Castells calls the current Zapatistas “the first informational guerrilla movement”, while another terms such movements “global distributed hactivism”), and the role of the mobile phone in the Philippines political upheaval in 2002.

The resurgence of personal or nano-publications (like blog diaries) is upon us, and links combine these publications together to create a very powerful system. This also stands true for brands – brands have to be wary of carrying on the way they have because if something bad happens and they’re not integrated with the system it could be very disruptive for them. They’ve got to be listening and taking part, and so blogging presents opportunities for marketers to improve their systems.

Panel & audience discussion:

Jackie Danicki of Latitude (and formerly The Big Blog Company) said that nowadays it’s frustrating to come to an event and not to have first seen all of the speakers’ blogs, because through their blogs you meet their minds before you meet them in person. Steve Bowbrick asked the panel how they felt about this concept of “pre-knowledge”. Rafael responded that the opposite is often true – anonymity makes people do strange things. Sabrina said that when she started blogging on a personal basis (before she worked on a blog) she preferred to write for strangers, but when she realised that people she knew, knew more about her than she did about them, then it became a problem and too uncomfortable for.

Mike Beeston said that our centre and sense of identity that we project is going to be centred on the mobile phone, and the question of etiquette, or social rules, regarding this is very important. Picking up on this Rafael said that The Observer had had phone ideas pitched to them and noted that under 30’s wont walk away from a group when they answer the phone now – in fact they often include the caller in the conversation of group they are with.

Alistair Shrimpton of blog software vendors Six Apart explained that new level of mass-blogging is about to come through with the MSN and Yahoo lightweight blogging services that they have integrated with their overall suite of communications tools (IM, email, web-to-mobile texting, etc). The largest group using the LiveJournal platform owned by SixApart is the 17-22 age group, while universities are signing up at a rate of knots for students and staff to have a blogging experience of some sort.

Sabrina Dent raised the interesting prospect of a new generation of people coming into the workplace and into corporate settings who will be expecting to apply the personal blogging model to work communications and email. James Cherkoff of Collaborate Marketing remarked that spelling badly in a corporate context is a laugh rather than dangerous. Rafael said that we mustn’t overstate the power of geek kudos - their knowledge doesn’t give geeks onging power to sit in judgment on this phenomenon because they don’t own it.

Robin Grant of politics blog Perfect and digital agency Proximity said the new MSN mass youth market of bloggers, commercial blogs, agitating/political blogs are all very different in what they do. Replying to the downplaying of the phenomenon, Steve Bowbrick said something of great significance is happening, and it will be seen in the result of exposing our institutions to a massively increased amount of debate and feedback. Mike commented that people now want to express themselves in a more vocal and expressive way.

Sabrina responded that people bitching won’t always change things, like it hasn’t changed Microsoft’s market share. But Johnnie Moore countered that Microsoft has had to change its anti-gay policies and Jackie Danicki added that MSN’s new RSS tool is under the Creative Commons licence, proof that Microsoft has responded to the criticisms leveled at it, and that complaining does have an effect. Robin Grant noted that there is an emergent conversation coming from the network facilitated by blogs that no-one is directing.

Rafael distinguished consumer power and political power and Nicky Lewis of Panos London addressed his point, explaining that NGOs were waking up to the power of blogs. They realise that blogs are allowing institutions usually very formal in approach to get their message out in a less formal and faster manner. Chris Jennings wondered what, in terms of weekly papers, the effect of continuous blogs would be, ie. the impact of continual publishing.

PANEL 2 – ARE BLOGS THE NEW VOICES OF AUTHORITY?

Suw Charman – The Myth Of Objectivity Exposed

Suw began by offering some definitions of objectivity as featured in the dictionary, stressing “facts uncoloured by feeling” and she compared this perception of facts as akin to the facts used in the hypotheses of science. We also see it in journalism, she continued, facts presented in a dispassionate manner. And in business – the collective endeavour incorporated in a distinct legal entity separate from the directors, because it’s a brand with a personality – despite the fact that this is all imposed on us.

Objectivity is however fundamentally impossible, she asserted. The dichotomy of giving two sides of a story is not objectivity as it misses out all the shades of grey in between. Factual reporting is not objectivity, but can be biased. Language can be biased, as per terrorist / freedom fighter / revolutionary. We all have passions that consciously or sub-consciously colour what we think and say.

Suw stressed that she wasn’t saying that those who were trying to be objective were lying; she doesn’t make that value judgment. But who are we fooling? Who actually believes that Fox News or the BBC are objective? Dan Gillmor suggests more attainable goals: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and transparency. Be honest about your bias. In the blogosphere no-one expects objectivity. We filter “objective” announcements, eg corporate press releases, because that’s how we all interact, that’s how we filter.

Because of this inherent bias of the blogosphere, markets don’t understand a few important things. One: Personality is very important in the blogosphere. No-one wants to read the Microsoft press release, but they do want to read Scoble and Microsoft have taken a big step in allowing an employee developer to become more trusted than Bill Gates. Two: Being honest about what you don’t know. In regard to this Suw cited the Kryptonite case where a video of how to crack their bicycle lock with a ballpoint pen was posted on the internet and spread through blogs. The marketers didn’t have the strength to immediately step up and say they had made a mistake. And this cost them not only the trust of consumers but a lot of money. Three: you have to accept complexity. It’s an increasingly complex society, and in the blogosphere you don’t have to condense everything down to a 30 second soundbite because there people are more interested in finding out what others think on subjects of common interest. As explored in Steven Johnson’s book ‘Everything Bad Is Good For Us’ Suw concurred that complexity has increased, and she asked us to embrace subjectivity.

Johnnie Moore – Authentic authority

Johnnie showed a powerful clip of Ceausescu’s last speech in public where the crowd stopped obediently listening and started shouting back. Johnnie spoke of the delusion of authority that is easy to sustain, but then what happens... He spoke of the figures of authority who “are the last in the room to realise that no-one is listening to them anymore”. A blog who only 3 or 4 others read is just as important. The part of “authority” that he likes is that the blogger is the “author” of their own experience. If we are overwhelmed by information, he wondered, then why is blogging growing?

Lloyd Davis (Perfect Path) responded that blogging was a way of responding to the question “who am I”? Blogging gives him a forum to work that out and discuss it, sharing others’ experiences and opinions in public. And this collectivising of experience is not dependent on the sanction or approval of some other greater force. Mike Beeston added that the giving out of authority has diminished over the last 30 years. Our businesses have less authority than they had before, and this isn’t just a technological phenomenon. After Monty Python it was a lot harder to take the idea of an army major seriously any more.

Blogging changes me, Johnnie said. Companies should blog not just to change the world or consumers’ behaviour but to change themselves. For example, a post Johnnie made about how easy it was to get drugs planted on you in Indonesia and end up in jail sparked a huge wave of comments on his blog. First it was a very authoritarian bunch of comments and he wondered if he should switch the comments off. But he couldn’t stand the idea of being censorious, and then another wave of comments came in taking them to task and real debate ensued. Where else would you get such conversation? Blogging makes us better people, he concluded.

Adriana Cronin-Lukas – Blogs: Ripping Up The Marketing Mix

Adriana started commenting that if blogs had existed before the Ceaucescu overthrow that the cold war wouldn’t have lasted so long. As a "traditional blogger" she looked at traditional sources for a definition of authority. One: “An accepted source of expert information or advice.” A blog helps a blogger to create content and publishing and translate the expert information and advice for the blogging audience. Two: “How to influence or persuade resulting from knowledge or experience”. Again it helps the blogger to build her confidence from the experience of articulating their thoughts, ideas or arguments. Three: “Confidence derived from practice, firm self-assurance”. Again, this comes from the network and the community of other bloggers and readers that the blogger engages. For her blogging captures all three aspects of the definition of authority.

Bias + Transparency = Credibility, Adriana asserted. Transparency or “pseudo-objectivity” on its own is boring. Bias on its own nobody believes, and so the company loses credibility. Personality may be another way of expressing bias, but she’s talking about commercial blogs that aren’t based on a personal agenda. The marketing industry is trying to trick people into paying attention, she continued. It needs to get its message out at any cost, and it’s about economies of scale, about finding the mass channels of communication. But interruptive communications are becoming increasingly harder to do, and more expensive to achieve because people are no longer hoodwinked by such messages. And one of the costs is that loss of credibility if you push things too far. Whereas blogging is engagement, it’s a conversation you can’t fake. Transparency and market and credibility can be generated. In terms of economies, it’s about re-aggregation, targeting the right niches and finding ways through the network to re-aggregate those interests, perhaps in a different dimension.

She concurs with Doc Searls that markets are conversations. Important among the reasons people read blogs is for honesty and transparent bias. For Adriana, blogs are about storytelling, credibility, and about permanence. It is not advertising. She explored how people see content through the metaphor of pipes and channels. Blogs cannot be fitted into this picture. Lots of companies see the internet as just another channel, but she sees the internet as the thing that surrounds the pipes and that is puncturing all the channels. The content is leaking out and online is aggregating things in different places, with the print media pipeline it’s blogs, with radio it’s podcasting, with TV it’s videoblogging, video search and so forth. Therefore it’s not another channel, she emphasised, but is what unites the common phenomenon that is impacting journalism, PR and marketing - a disruption of the process of sending a message or information from “originator” to the “ultimate audience”. From one end of the pipe where all the content is getting shoved in it looks fine, but from the other end you can see that its not all going through but is leaking out everywhere. So all these industries are affected by new tools like blogging.

This is a confusing landscape, Adriana commented. She described online like an underworld, shady and coming up from under the radar of traditional industries. It is a landscape and there are ways to understand and navigate it, she elaborated, although many don’t know this yet. What is different about this world? One of the underlying principles is the many-to-many distribution network that undermines the one-way system. Transparency and speed also changes the dynamics of interaction. Online is also much faster, and shows the bottlenecks in the system and things that were there before but weren’t visible. And it amplifies, sometimes with deafening clarity, things that were not heard before.

Adriana clarified the meaning of transparency – you can amplify the message but no-one today has total control of the message or how it gets heard at the other end. The main challenge is the effect of all the tools on the balance of power between the broadcaster and the audience. It’s a loop wherein you get the individual who is powerful enough to disrupt and change the message of the broadcaster, but then the broadcaster realises that, a phase that we’re at the beginning of now. So bloggers are breaking the marketing toolbox.

Adriana looked at some unfortunate examples of marketing blogs. She spoke of blogs as “multi-tools”, tools that let us create media, software that is history’s cheapest, easiest publishing tool connected to history’s best communication network. If you are interested in something, you go and find it and give your attention to the value you are getting from it.. Within this setting, you have a value-to-value exchange in the attention you give to any blog: you give it your attention and it gives you something for free, but attention is a very valuable commodity. So it’s not free, just differently monetisable. Blogs allow people to have a lot more control of their environment, and so blogging goes back to the individual level and empowers the individual to do something they couldn’t before.

Blogs can be brand activators, she continued. For Sun, blogs are more than traditional brand extensions, they understand that blogs provide a platform on which the community can come together to share and interact with regard to their experience. Jonathan Schwartz’s blog is not personal, but it is a biased insider’s view – he writes about things in the industry that interest him. Nobody expects him to be objective. Blogs have authenticated the Sun Microsystems brand more than a billion dollar ad campaign could have done. She also cited independent blogs from enthusiasts over whom the brand has no control, and in terms of improving the bottom line, she pinpointed the blog for online DVD and video rental outfit Green Cine. Initially they were skeptical about it, but it has doubled their earnings.

Adriana painted a stark picture of two very different trends in advertising and routes they are beginning to go down. One is the “louder” route of using new technologies to make the message louder and harder to escape, which is very distressing, (banner ads, visual, metrics and surveys – pseudo interactivity). This road leads to the “scum of the internet” world of adware and spyware. Based on statistics published by the Internet Advertising Bureau, spyware could represent almost 25% of the entire online advertising industry. Or it could go the way of engagement, which is more difficult and requires far more innovation. It’s about conversation, two-way exchange, generating credibility, personality, online presence, using blogs as our medium, and about understanding the network. It’s a conversation and amplification. You use it to articulate your own message and also you use the network to distribute that message. These are very different roads and it’s up to the marketing industry to decide which one it will take.

Panel & audience discussion:

Mike Butcher asked if bloggers would be co-opted by being hired by agencies to blog or give endorsement to products surreptitiously. Suw Charman said the idea of manufacturing buzz or word-of-mouth is deeply flawed. People won’t accept marketing interruptions in the blogosphere and the shortlived Creative Commons hiring of BzzAgent was salutary in this respect. The Creative Commons community spoke up, saying "we are the grassroots, the people who really care about CC and are spreading the word, and the BzzAgent people are sullying the CC initiative." So rules of etiquette apply.

Why even use agencies for blogging, Adriana commented, get several people or someone in the company to do it. She disliked the “ministry of fun” mindset at work in the traditional approach, the view that thinks “first it was the DJs, now it’s the Bloggers!” Suw concurred that most marketers are stuck on the idea that bloggers can provide them with third party recommendations. Steve Bowbrick reckoned however, that it was possible to do this.

Craig Hill of Digital Outlook countered that most good agencies were more mature, and believed that no money should exchange hands in relationship-building with bloggers and other trusted intermediaries online. He added that most people in buzz marketing agencies have worked it out, and they are also part of the communities of interest they are operating in.

Jackie Danicki of Latitude honed in on the new media press, reckoning that a lot of what we’re presented with is advertorial. If you place a lot of ads, you get a lot of coverage and the sought-after feature interview. The problem is that people sense this, and they know that a lot of the best discussion in new media is online and in the blogosphere. Suw responded to this distinguishing two types of authority: “claimed” (through branding and/or owning your printing press) and “given” (in the blogosphere) and these are very different. As we see the erosion of claimed authority, we can turn to the people online who really know. To this Jackie added that purchased authority is also on the decline.

Rafael said that objective authority is something that you aspire to, even though you may not achieve it. First you had literacy, but now you have widespread media literacy, a type of meta-understanding. Many journalists don’t understand why their paper sales are plummeting, and it’s the same with advertising. Mike Butcher disagreed, noting that young people still buy Nike en masse. But James Cherkoff said that Nike, et al, have moved away from mass marketing techniques. Lloyd Davis raised the issue of a shared social etiquette, and the difficulties of creating this in a global environment. If we encourage subjectivity and freedom of speech, there is the possibility that some people will use this dangerously and violently. However, blogging and self-publishing gives you a chance to re-read and re-view you own positions, he added, and when you meet people with similar interests from different cultures, that changes things.

Suw Charman said she saw blogging rather as a tool to strengthen and rebuild local bonds and communities. Companies could be facilitators in this process. Responding to a question about the political impact of blogging, Suw said that in Iran, the election result wasn’t impacted, but maybe by the time of the next election blogging will have impact. Rafael recounted that he had been in Iran, and all the young people dislike the Mullahs. They all use the internet and Instant Messaging, but all they look at is porn because that is the thing that they can’t see under the current regime. Adriana rejoined that this betokens a desire for a better lifestyle. The internet, she said, sees interruption as damage that it routes around and heals. Rafael added that the impact of bloggers on the French/Dutch no-vote to a European constitution was more of a chicken and egg situation than a case of one-way influence.

(scroll down for MP3s of the event and more…)

----------------

About the speakers:

Chair - Steve Bowbrick - blogger & entrepreneur
Steve Bowbrick is a veteran of twelve years in the Internet business, a one-time academic, van driver and librarian, founder of pioneering web design firm Webmedia and the boom era UK email service another.com. Steve's been blogging for three years at www.bowblog.com.

Sabrina Dent – Managing Editor, Mink Media
Sabrina is the Managing Editor at Mink Media, a commercial blog publisher focused on the emerging UK market. She has been involved in developing online communities since 1995, and was previously Director of Online Services for a UK new media house before leaving to develop websites, blogs and blogging services at Digital Parade. She is also a freelance writer who prefers adventure by cocktail and can be found in hotel bars around the globe. When not traveling, she and her passport reside in London with her husband. She is the editor of wandalust.com Wanda Lust, the UK travel blog.

Rafael Behr - Online Editor, Observer
Rafael is Online Editor at the Observer. He is a regular leader writer and book reviewer for the newspaper and, since early 2005, has also been its blogger-in-chief. Rafael has previously worked as a business reporter for BBC Online, as a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe for the Financial Times and as an editor on FT.com. He fancies himself as a bit of an internet geek, but he doesn't know very much about how computers actually work. He gives thanks for Moveable Type.

Mike Beeston - Managing Director, Fjord
Mike is MD at Fjord, a creative consultancy innovating and bringing to market mobile products and services for clients that include Nokia, Orange and Telia Sonera. Previously he co-founded CHBi one of the UK's first web development companies which, in 1998, was sold to Razorfish for whom Mike continued as UK Managing Director through until 2001. His early career in advertising included 6 years at Saatchi and Saatchi where he was a Media Group Director. In addition to running Fjord, he consults with clients on the ability of mobile to service communities and enable content creation and publishing.

Suw Charman - Blog consultant & journalist
Suw Charman is a blog consultant, researcher and journalist specialising in business blogging, social software and digital rights. She blogs regularly about these and related subjects at Strange Attractor www.corante.com/strange/. She has worked as a consultant in the UK and USA, advising companies on the use of blogs in external and internal contexts. Suw has spoken at the LSE about the effect of blogging on journalism, at the Northern Voice Blogging Conference on how to increase blog traffic, and will be speaking at the Supernova technology conference in June 2005 about business blogging. Her journalism has also been published in The Guardian and design magazine Design In-Flight.

Johnnie Moore - Marketing consultant & facilitator
Johnnie's first job was as speechwriter/researcher to Lord (Alan) Sainsbury before going into advertising - first as a copywriter, later as a strategist. He started his own consultancy in 1988. He now divides his time between marketing advice and facilitation. He has trained in humanistic psychotherapy, NLP and improv - as well as learning to fly. He is co-author of the book 'Beyond Branding' (Kogan Page, 2003) and a founder of the Applied Improvisation Network (www.appliedimprov.net). Johnnie started blogging in 2003 at www.johnniemoore.com and is a collaborator in www.opensaucelive.com He's also co-author of www.173drurylane.com, a blog about Sainsbury's which was once flatteringly described as "a sort of Open Source marketing consultancy".

Adriana Cronin-Lukas - Communications & Blog Consultant, The Big Blog Company
Was released from Balliol into the community in 1996, serving time as a management consultant with a Big Five firm in Central and Eastern Europe - 'management' and 'consultancy' meaning something to businesses in those parts of the world. All this came to an end in 2002 when it became obvious that blogging is much more enjoyable than real work. Since then, blogging has become the main preoccupation and a route to regaining sanity lost somewhere on the fourth floor of a tall, marble-encrusted building in the City. Adriana has applied her analytical powers to the potential of blogging and would like to make sure that companies also understand that markets are conversations. Occasionally she gets accused of problem-solving.

More resources:

See the original EVENT PAGE

Thanks to the efforts of Lloyd Davis of Perfect Path the following resources are also available:

• Listen to MP3s of each panel and discussion, and see who else blogged this event here.

• If you attended or were booked to go to this event, add your blog or URL to this delegate wiki page.

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