Drink.Blog.Talk 2007
Just a note about Drink.Blog.Talk 2007, the first online conference of drink bloggers.
Back in the summer, it struck me just how many alcoholic drink bloggers there were and just what a wonderfully creative world it was. Going through my netvibes.com rss feeds, it was apparent that there were far more words spilled by bloggers about alcohol every morning than by more traditional media.
Never mind the quantity, what about the quality, I hear you cry? Well, as a journalist who has made his livelihood from newspapers and magazines, I can say that some of these blogs are of a very high standard. Many of the authors have a depth of knowledge and a way with words that is at least a match for more traditional sources. Making a conservative estimate based on my own viewing figures, their combined weekly readership is probably in the tens of thousands and growing fast.
Anyway, I thought it would be good to get all these people together to talk about what we are doing. I shared the idea with Kevin Erskine at Scotchblog.com and Jeffrey Morgenthaler at Jeffreymorgenthaler.com and together we gave it a name and some shape. Drink.Blog.Talk 2007 was held between September 22 and 29 at closed forums at drinkblogtalk.ning.com and was, in my opinion, a real success. Over 150 drink bloggers were invited and 54 people accepted the invitation.
We discussed a whole raft of topics from advertising rates and projects, through link policies, group blogs, digg-style aggregators, blogosphere wide events, blogging technologies, philosophies, motivations, ethics, to what drinks we would take to a desert island. There were many concrete ideas for co-operative ventures shared and I think a number of different people may be running off in different directions to try to bring some of those to fruition.
My own pet project was a modest but I think important one. It is now online at drinkblogcode.blogspot.com and is fairly self explanatory. I hope some drink bloggers will share with that effort. Anyway, whatever happens now, we had a great week and I personally finished it enriched by the different perspectives shared. I hope we will be able to do it again sometime.
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2 comments:
Chris, I thoroughly enjoyed the conference - big thanks for doing so much of the leg-work.
Just one thought, next year we might want to make it a much longer deal, it seemed that there were a lot of people who missed out because of prior engagements.
Just a thought, and thanks again for all of your hard work.
Jeff
Yes, maybe two weeks rather than one. I think the important thing is to maintain the feel of an "event", while giving people the chance to participate. I think if it doesn`t have a clear start and finish or goes on too long then the risk is it just becomes another bulletin board and it is difficult to get the energy and creativity of lots of people all coming to a single event.
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