The world of paper and the web converged for me yesterday. I attended the SFU summer workshop on “The Future of Publishing.” It was an interesting panel discussion moderated by Robert Ouimet, the prinipal in At Large Media, and the founder and president of At Large Media Ltd. Emma Payne.
Janet Johnson of Marqui spoke about how Marqui worked with Marc Canter to find 20 A-list bloggers to write about Marqui and the controversay about that. Eric Karjaluoto from smashLAB talked about ways to build dialogue. He also showed off some rainbow creative. The vomit was my favourite. Arieanna Foley talked about being a professional blogger and consultant. She gave a quick demo of Qumana and talked about writing for Corante and on her blog Blogaholics.ca. Kris Krug, co-author of BitTorrent for Dummies with Susie Gardner, talked about Bryght. My favourite line was “we build the internets.” Kris I’d met before at a couple of blogger meetups and I liked his pot stirring techniques in the session. The panel did fall into a bit of a love fest for a while and Kris diligently persisted in pulling them out of group hugs. And Ben Garfinkel from Industrial Brand Creative was there. My favourite line of Ben’s was, “we’re not wired right.” He has a cool flash intro of a hamster in a wheel, but I can’t seem to find it. Ben?
What did they talk about? Blogs mostly. Citizen journalism and the impact of blogs and cellphones on reports of the London bombings, Live8, etc. The Cluetrain Manifesto was invoked and we talked about talk is cheap, silence is fatal, if you’re not part of the conversation it will continue without you.
I learned that Canada.com is relaunching its portal and Brian from CanWest was in the audience asking for feedback on what bloggers would like to see. Other than that it was mostly a lot of talk, we geeked it up. There were questions from the audience.
On the way back to the office, I was walking with my colleague and explaining RSS. Boris from Bryght walked past. It was that kind of day.