Day two, I’m a bit more relaxed today as I presented yesterday.

Mark Bernstien led a very interesting discussion to start off the day on the value of comments. He essentially suggested that comments – which are often either brief or harshly negative or hit and run – are not all they are cracked up to be. He emphasised that commentary and dialogue can occur between weblogs and this is a slower more dispersed dialogue but just as valuable or even more valuable. This proved very contentious.

Other points:

At this moment of blog triumphalism we must begin to think about “saving” the blogsphere…we could wreck the blogsphere by accident by ways we didn’t even know were harmful

Its ok if only your mother reads your weblog…it’s a better way to write home!

Many blogs are in the tail of the graph that shows the spread of blogs against blog readership: a group of A-list bloggers with big readers and then a tailing off to a big group who have few readers.

Keep the tail healthy – the people who are only ready by 5 or six are critical to the health of the blogsphere

The notion of professional journalists versus amateur bloggers rests on a misconception that journalism is a profession. It is a craft/trade. (I’d of course disagree with this!!)

Help bloggers to write better notes and make better links: make it easy to do the right thing. We can’t help the tail by regulation

Things don’t start in order we don’t put them in order because we are changing all the time

Don’t blogroll A-list blogs, cycle your blogroll.

Don’t stop linking to the tail because its easier to link to the NYT. If you link to a weblog that no one has heard of it’s a better service to your reader.

Ten tips for writing the living web

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