Blognashville!

Outline for blog$ session:

I hope this session works in extreme socratic mode. Everyone in the room will get called on to contribute both questions and answers. The stuff below is just a foundational list.

I’d like to situate the discussion between two poles. On the one side, Business Week says: “Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere.” Are you looking forward to working for MSM?

On the other side, with MSM clearly collapsing — Tribune Circ rev down 9% in a year! — somebody intelligent BETTER step into the vacuum that will occur when the current media ecosystem finally (soon) collapses.

So, some categories of discussion:
— what are bloggers’ “unique selling propositions” in the info-economy? (Remember, MSNBC.com sells ad space for $0.10 CPMs!)
—- * passion
—–* networkness
—–* audience loyalty
—–* influentials audience
— what technologies/services currently enable bloggers to efficiently monatize their audiences?
—–* Blogads, Adsense, Pheedo
— are indie bloggers unsafe for advertisers… or safer?
— what is the current/potential role for publishers (traditional or newmedia) versus indies in the economics of blogging?
—–* NYT, Salon, Slate, BusinessWeek
—–* Gawker, MarketingVox, PaidContent, WeblogsInc, Corante, GrassrootsMedia, HuffingtonPost
— what new technologies/services might help indie-bloggers monatize their audiences?
— how many bloggers will earn a living from blogging in 5 years?
— do bloggers compete with each other for ad$?
— unless anyone vehemently disagrees, I’m going to leave discussion of “getting hired to do blogging as PR for a company” for another session. Many people will make a good living doing this in coming years, but I think that career path is pretty clear, so would like to focus on murkier/bigger stuff.

Original post: Robert Cox, the gyroscope steering the Media Blogger’s Association has pulled together a great Bloggercon in Nashville May 6-7.

Here’s the schedule, with participants including Glenn Reynolds, Staci Kramer, LaShawn Barber, Mark Glaser, Ed Cone, Rebecca McKinnon and Hossein Derakhshan.

Register here.

My jam session will be modeled on the session Jeff Jarvis orchestrated at Bloggercon II. Though I don’t normally talk as fast as Jeff, I’ll be sure to drink plenty of coffee and get everyone in the room talking and resonating about where things are going.

I’m off this week and will post a draft outline for the session when I’m back. I’m glad there’s a session on making money — self-supporting bloggers are the future of media. (As both historic curiousities and benchmarks, here are posts I wrote about the topic three years ago and two years ago.)