Not for $500, Even If I Did Apply To Speak

I like me some blogging. I don’t mind having a conversation every now again about blogging, blog software, and so forth. I had a great time a couple months back meeting local and international bloggers and talking to some of the Moveable Type crew. But the idea of a our-own-horn-tootin’ conference on blogging is pretty obnoxious. Fittingly enough, it’s been slammed by amusingly obnoxious Register reporter Andrew Orlowski, and the conference itself is organized by the purportedly most obnoxious man in the blogosphere, Dave Winer.
Full disclosure: when Winer put out an open call for speakers for said conference, before it was apparent that even speakers would have to cough up $500 for this weekend o’ bullcrap, I half-seriously talked myself up to him as a potential speaker on the Technology panel. What Winer requested, what got me thinking, was:

“I don’t want “how I did this last summer” narratives, I want sweeping conclusions, “the industry is failing at this,” or “users would pay for this, but no one is supplying it.” Or whatever it is that users have to say about the state of the technology. I want opinionated big-thinkers, who happen not to be vendors."

…and, still pretty buzzed on the Supernova blog dinner, I thought, “I can do that, and Harvard would be a nice weekend trip.” So I wrote Winer on a whim. But now that the rest of the gory financial details on BloggerCon have come out I’m pretty glad I never heard back from him. It would have been neat for BloggerCon to be contrarian in tone, to be the weblog conference that says “weblogs are just a tool, get on with it.” I would’ve liked to say that, but if the Register article has one clear conclusion it’s that most (good) bloggers already feel that way. Better left unrepeated, and certainly not worth $500 for the chance.