Triangle Bloggercon grows

Jan 13, 2005

The word is out: Dave Winer mentioned the conference on his popular Scripting News, our local cable company posted news about the conference on its new local bloggers directory, and Cory Doctorow has even posted to Boing Boing.

We’re up to 50 61 expected participants for the Triangle Bloggers Conference, which means I’ve got to start looking for a backup location knowing we’ll be growing (the j-school’s conference room holds about 60). Looks like we’ve got at least one New Yorker coming, and my buddy John Ettorre will be driving down from Cleveland. (Hope Jack can join him.) Oh, and Dan Gillmor will be here, too.

UPDATE: Paul has arranged for Murphey Hall 116. I’ll post new directions to the conference wiki. Shortcut is mistersugar.com/triblogs.html.

The idea for a bloggercon in Chapel Hill was to give us North Carolina bloggers a physical forum to discuss some of the exciting issues, trends and activities happening on and between our blogs – blogs and journalism, and blogs and politics in Greensboro (read Ed Cone), online communities (Paul Jones teaches an excellent seminar each fall at the UNC-CH j-school), blogs and local governance (Orange Politics), podcasting (Audio Activisim among others), and numerous attempts to aggregate the very active bloggers in our state (see the wiki page for the conference intersession).

I just know that we’re set to have a great dialogue, and the contributions of the out-of-state blogges will be welcome.

As our conference grows, though, I hope the bloggers in South Carolina don’t feel we’re stealing their show. There was talk last fall about a bloggercon in Myrtle Beach. I hope that still goes off, because I think that an ongoing series of regional bloggercons could really help the blogger community – blogosphere, if you will – keep a human face to our cyberspace activities. (And, no, I’m not fishing for a date. I’m happily married to my college sweetheart, who just turned to me and said, “I don’t understand the world of blogging that you inhabit, but those phrases you come up with – wiki, blog, boingboing, bloggercon – are funny.” The terminology, she said, sounds like words from our three-year-old.)

So how about it? After the triangle, a bloggercon in Myrtle Beach. Then one in Tennessee (that’s you, Glenn), and one in St. Paul, and one in Tempe. Then we can all be like Dave and be on one roadtrip after another. (Dave, hope you can join us.)

Anton Zuiker ☄