Experimenting with a large group blog

Haven’t posted here yet on yesterday’s Future of Media Summit, as I am now spending more time over on the Future of Media Summit Participant Blog – go check it out. This is kind of an experiment – we’ve set up a blog that every Summit attendee can write posts on. All attendees received a personal login and password, and were given a participant blogging instructions page. We didn’t get a whole lot of blog posts during the event, partly because of WiFi problems in Sydney, but it is now picking up a little as people join the discussion. There has been a lot of discussion globally on the Future of Media Report (more on this later), which is beginning to be reflected in the blog. In addition, there were 14 “audience panels” at the Sydney event, where participants gathered around their chosen theme. (It’s interesting to see the top themes people chose.) The Drivers of Mobile Content and User Generated Content panels have already posted a summary of their discussions on the blog – hopefully some of the other panels will report back too.

So this is what you could call a Large Group Blog. Around 175 people have logins to the blog – everyone who physically attended the Future of Media Summit in either Sydney or San Francisco. While not many have posted yet, more may do so. I’ll invite a few other people who couldn’t make it to the event, to join in if they choose. Starting points for blog discussions are of course the general theme of the future of media, the Future of Media report, the blog discussion around it, an article on the Summit in the Sydney Morning Herald, other media coverage, with more content to come very soon, including a videostream of the event, a video summary, and more articles. So if you have anything to contribute to the discussion, whether or not you were at the event, just email us at fen [AT] futureexploration [DOT] net and we’ll set you up with a blog login. No idea what will happen with this, but I think it’s time to experiment with blogs with large numbers of people around a particular theme. In the past this has been done on forums and discussion boards. Blogs have usually been for one or a few authors. An event seems like a reasonable starting point to get some interesting people to discuss things of common interest, especially since they’ve met before. It’s also an opportunity for people who have never blogged before to try it out, especially when you have not only the die-hard fanatics in the audience. It seems kind of obvious, but I’m not sure anyone’s done it before quite like this. So whatever happens with the blog, be it small or large, it will be very interesting.