The Wifi system at the Hilton Hotel is up and running on my vaio, so now Im able to blog directly from the conference discussions. Now in the middle of an interesting panel on why journalists and newspapers should blog. People are debating how to manage comments, how personal voices can be, how to become visual. It seems like there is a growing awareness that a good blog is one which actually seeks to engage its readers (ie are not just "reporting", but making dialogue), if the blogger wants to have a) readers and b)quality comments.
Tidbits from the ongoing discussion: "Bloggers are smart people and ask questions you as reporter have forgotten to ask because they are so obvious to you". "Vary the voices you quote". "Make shawowlinks to crawl the google-ranking", "Make blog about local blogs - help create local digital community". "How to self-select your blog-community? - make events where you get people, you'd like to blog, to show up". Is this a breaking news blog or a commentary-blog - make sure which genre you belong to?
The conservative newspaper stance on the journalist's subjective opinion in blog: “would you say this on air in unlimited time?” (- otherwise, don’t blog it!)

One of the panelists suggests that people should always have a rss-feed and think of your blog-title as a "headline" which through the rss-fead can attract readers. This confirms my growing suspicion that the entire rss-fead thing is going to make blogs be much more like "news", in the way we think about them and write them. More on that later.

The book editor: Good blogs are about Sincerity and articulateness. Blogs are "talkradio timeshared in print"

Blogs mentioned in the talk:
Microsoft Watch
Movies and More
Blogger King
Businessweek Blog
Huckleberries Online
CBS online new
# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:12