I have been attending Supernova 2005 in SF this week and it’s been, in a word, connected. That’s the theme of the conference, but it’s also amazing for me to see how people are so connected and unconnected simultaneously. For example, at times the audience seems superficially unconnected to what the panelists are saying in their live presentations but extremely connected to what people are saying in the back channel: on instant messaging, the internet relay chat, blogs, etc... in my limited experience, this conference rivals what I saw at CFP’s Panopticon conference in April.
On Monday there was a special workshop at Wharton West which was in my opinion the most productive part of the conference. I especially liked the Microformats presentation and the panel about blogging for business.
Microformats are very cool techy stuff that even a non-techy like me can get her head around. With the launch of Microformat.org, Tantek Celik explained the underlying principles that govern the organization. I liked these principles so much (they could really apply to almost any kind of organization) that I want to memorialize my notes about them here:
Solve a specific problem
Be as simple as possible (evolutionary improvements are the goal; in other words, don’t do R&D for 4 years before launching)
Design for humans first, machines second
Reuse from widely adopted standards
Modularity/embeddability
Decentralized development, content, services (explicitly encouraging ‘spirit of the web’)
Tantek has made his presentation (creative commons’ licensed) available online at this link.
I also enjoyed the business blogging session. Charlene Li of Forrester Research included a summary of best practices for business blogging. My notes are not complete, but here are a few points she made:
Keep the comments section open
Manage bad news quickly and truthfully
Syndicate the blog and market it
Be transparent
Measure what matters
Have a code of conduct for the bloggers
Her report on blogs is available here.