Okay just one quick grump.

I am hopefully going to attend Thinking Digital at the Sage Gateshead. It looks quite interesting.

But why, whenever I come across events that are all a bit web2.0, are their event blogs so awful? Okay, so do they look nice and the writing and content is fine.

But virtually no comments. Isn’t that the whole point of web2.0? I have commented here but, as I write, the day after I posted it, my comment is yet to be moderated. Crap by even the most average blogging standards.

Surely it would be worthwhile for an event like this, that charges several hundred pounds a ticket, to have a full time blogger. They should be getting local bloggers on board and be building a community around this event. If you had done all the work to get these pages up, wouldn’t you be twisting arms to get the interaction happening?

Right now the host is passing out the drinks and things on sticks and none of the guests are saying a word. This place is dead anyway.

Likewise their Flickr page is just going through the motions and ticking boxes. Look, they’ll be saying, we have a Flickr page! I’m not sure why the bothered.

If you’re going to tell us about blogging then, at the very least, can you learn to do it yourselves first. I know these sites are set up by techies and it all looks just lovely. But can’t someone actually just give the whole “conversation” thing a kick start?

Web2.0 is conversation - it isn’t just pretty stuff. If you don’t understand this then what is it you can teach me?

Or put it another way, how come your average one-man-and-a-laptop-blog is nearly always vastly superior to corporate effort? A quick hint - it’s not what it looks like, it’s what you do with it.

Side note: My comment was a quick protest at the advertised Mac Humour of the Fake Steve Jobs who is to appear (he makes jokes about Microsoft..ooh no stop it). Further Mac grumblings here.

Update: I signed up. Hope it’s worth it. In my sign-up email I got the link to the Facebook group. Okay. Good. Ticking all the boxes etc. We got this. We got that. Call me old fashioned though, but if I was the Conference Producer I’m not sure I’d want all potential delegates having access to my holiday photos. Web2.0 can go too far. Think privacy settings people and maybe Flickr for Business and Facebook for Pleasure. You gotta have a system. Make the divide.

Update 2: Unless I am mistaken my stats point to an email being opened and a link being clicked for this post. It was sent to the conference big cheese with the title: “Slightly dodgy comments on blog”. Ah well. I think we made our point.