Blog(ged) Together

It was a dark and stormy night...ooops! Scratch that! Wrong beginning.

It was a bright, yet crisp morning that turned into a beautiful day. And what was I doing? I was mingling with about 150 other North Carolina bloggers at the Triangle Bloggers Conference.

I expected I would know and be known by perhaps three people (Henry Copeland, Bigwig of Silflay Hraka and Anonymoses, since I knew that bloggers like Mungowitz End and DrFrankLives were not coming). I also expected to see some of the famous people, like Ed Cone, Dan Gillmore and Dave Winer. I also expected to sit in the corner and listen quietly, often getting lost in the techno-geek-speak.

Well, I was in for a surprise: quite a decent number of local people have seen my blog before. I got to sit between Winer and Bigwig, and even said something not once, but twice. Furthermore, at the very beginning of the Conference, Bigwig got up to talk about Long Tail and the concept of Blog Carnivals and he pointed at me and called me by my name as a person who keeps up with and links to various spawns of his Carnival of Vanities. I was famous for about three seconds! I love the way that man thinks! He used the archipelagical island biography model as a metaphor for blogosphere: big blogs (head) are the penninsula, the islands are the "long tale" and further out you are from the mainland, less readers you have and less likely you are to give up and let your blog die.

Afterwards we went for pizza and beer to Top of the Hill where I got to mingle with a bunch of cool local bloggers. Some were very gregarious, while others felt uncomfortable detached from their computers, out in the daylight, dragged out of their dark lairs and middens.

Severel bloggers did Live Blogging from the Conference. It felt really geeky, being surrounded by a couple of dozen people with laptops, nervously punding on the keys, live-blogging, switching to e-mail boxes and back to live-blogging.

To make it even more geeky, there were two cameras in the room and whatever one of them was recording was displayed on a huge screen - how recursive! The other huge screen was used for projecting from a computer and, whenever someone stood up to talk, the person's blog would pop up. OK, not everyone - it sometimes did not work, including for me, both times, but that's OK. I was happy to see a projection of "Apophenia" - one of my favourite blogs, as she had a link to an interesting article on.

I will not bore you with the details of the Conference as many others are doing (or will be doing tonight) a much better job of it. So, here is a sample of what local bloggers have commented so far on the Conference:

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Update: There are now pictures posted on the homepage, and one captured me ('Lennon" glasses, no beard, grey streak in black hair, green sweater and navy-blue down jacket) and Anonymoses (wool hat and glasses), and others....
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smerp/4703558/in/pool-triblogcon2005/