The four Demo panelists did a very nice job of explaining their points of view about blogging. They talked about how blogging can fit into one’s personal life, benefit a small business, cope in a major corporation, and streamline the flow of information from blogs to your PC or handheld. Thirty minutes was not nearly enough time to explore all the issues and we wanted to allow some time for audience questions. Not surprisingly, both Bobby Orbach and Amy Wohl asked about how the business model for blogging and how blogging enables money making. Certainly these are fair questions. In fact there are many unanswered questions about blogging just as their were many about the Web ten years ago. Blogging provides new protocols for creating, distributing, publishing syndicating, and reading information. Is there money to be made from protocols? Probably not. Is there money in html or http? Not per se. The money comes from ecosystem; i.e. it comes from content, transactions, and commerce that will be facilitated in new ways using blogging. We are 2% of the way into what blogging has in store for us.
At the Demo lunch there were tent cards on a number of the tables indicating a subject matter from the conference so people could congregate and share. Buzz Bruggerman and Greg Reinacker and I sat at the “blogging” table. Doc Searles was there blogging on his Apple ibook with the 17″ screen and G5 chip. We all engaged Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, to learn about how he is providing real-time searching of blogs. If you have any doubts about how fast blogging is growing, take a look at his site.