blogNashville

I’m just off the plane sitting in the Courtyard Marriott enjoying free wifi & on my way to the opening party for blogNashville. It’s a gorgeous evening, 70 degrees and blue-green in the twilight.

I’m excited by the breadth of issues to be covered here, lots of topics — military blogging, faith-based blogging — that hasn’t been covered in bluer Bloggercons. The whole thing is shockingly well organized, with much of the weight carried, as far as I can tell by Robert Cox.

With Glenn Reynolds’ encouragement, I’m catalyzing a session tomorrow on blogonomics. Here’s a refresh of what I’ve written before about this 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 $0.10 CPMs!)
—- * passion
—–* networkness
—–* audience loyalty
—–* influentials audience
— what technologies/services currently enable bloggers to efficiently monatize their audiences?
—–* Blogads, Adsense, Pheedo, Pajamas
— are indie bloggers unsafe for advertisers… or safer?
— what is the current/potential role for publishers (traditional or newmedia) versus indies in the economics of blogging?
—–* NYT, Salon, Slate, BusinessWeek
—–* Gawker, MarketingVox, PaidContent, WeblogsInc, Corante, GrassrootsMedia, HuffingtonPost, Pajamas
— what new technologies/services might help indie-bloggers monatize their audiences?
— how many bloggers will earn a living from blogging in 5 years?
— do bloggers compete with each other for ad$?
— 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.