Bloggercon scraps

Bloggercon was a stimulating as a thermos full of espresso.

A big part of the fun was renewing conversations with Hylton Jolliffe, Jeff Jarvis, Liz Spiers, Josh Marshall, Pressflex/Blogads investor Esther Dyson, Biz Stone (moving to Google!), Glenn Reynolds, Shannon Okey, Phil Wolff and Scott Johnson.

I met Matt Gross, Eric Folley, Oliver Willis, Ed Cone , Doc Searls, Chris Locke, Halley Suitt, Sooz, Scott Rosenberg , Scott Heiferman, Sanford Dickert and Joi Ito.

The intellectual ferment of the weekend is too much for me to try to recall here with all the other work I’ve got to do. Three random anecdotes:

Len Apcar, a editor in chief at NYT.com, told me he’d come to Bloggercon skeptical about whether blogging had a place inside the newspaper… but had become convinced blogging does fit in. Apcar said he’d gotten a chuckle out of my answer on the Bloggercon website to the question, “what’s the first thing NYTimes.com’s blogger in chief should do?” (My answer: short NYT shares. Click “comments.”)

Liz Spiers told me her parents, fundamentalist Southern Baptists, had only very recently learned of her big city blogging exploits at Gawker. Her local newspaper paper published an article on blogging and did a side bar on her. Her mother was shocked and her childhood pastor wrote to say how sad he was that Liz had strayed so far from her moral upbringing. (Update: my mom, herself a child of the South, writes to say “I didn’t realize blogging is immoral!”)

At dinner Saturday night, I brought up Swartzennegger, asking Glenn Reynolds and Jeff Jarvis to help me understand their nonchallance about his verbal and manual assaults on women. Glenn and Jeff, along with Liz Spiers, each said they’d rather have a competent scumbag in office than an incompetent angel. I proffered the “what if this was your daughter/wife/mother/sister?” debating line, to which Glenn responded: there’d be nothing left of Arnie if he tangled with Instawife. I asked if this is because Glenn knows his way around a handgun. “No, it’s my wife who would rip Arnold apart. I’d show up with a broom afterwards to clean up.” Only Hylton seconded my unhappiness with Swartzenegger. He said later that he knows a number of people in Telluride who say AS is notorious there for accosting women during the annual film festival.