Dave Winer obliquely responds to the "What's Wrong with Bloggercon" post, I think. Since he doesn't name me or link to the post, I am making a presumption, although as he points out there is an email thread going about this, and I have been in communcation with him about this, so that makes it seem likely.

Dave Winer

[from Scripting News: 11/9/2004]

There's an email thread going on about the Making Money session. This was the second episode, in the first, Jeff Jarvis did an excellent job of leading a chorus of nickel-and-dimers. In other words, how can we turn blogs into mini-magazines, generating enough revenue to make us feel good about what we're doing. (My paraphrase, of course.) This is a hot topic. It was also at hot topic at this Con, but I played a little trick by choosing a DL who I knew would argue with this idea, a person who has written a book on it, a popular one, so there would be some disagreement in the room. When I walked in, mid-session, I could see my little plan hadn't worked, Doc was in front of the room fielding comments from people who really really want to think small. So I asked for a mike, and I argued with two or three people (who seemed to enjoy it). Anyway, now there's some irritation because it seemed we were trying to force our way of thinking on the people. Nothing could be further from the truth. However, we, Doc and I, were disagreeing with them, and that's what makes a conference interesting. And unusual. Usally there's a sameness to discourse at conferences that makes you fall asleep. So even if I agreed that putting Google ads on your blog was the best you could do, I would have looked for a way to incite some disagreement. Now if you think this is wrong, BloggerCon is not the place for you, and probably blogging is not a good thing for you either. You're going to get disagreed with, sometimes even when you're right. And that's a good thing. If you're always surrounded by people who agree with you, you never get a chance to change someone's mind, never get a chance to learn something new, to have your mind changed.

At any rate: I did enjoy the discourse, just as I am enjoying this interchange, and I thought the divergence of opinion at the session was illuminating. I just suggest that the debate should be elevated at a structural level, namely, structure the sessions as debates when there are obvious divisions in opinion.

Again: I am happy to see disagreement surfaced, and controversy openly addressed. Bloggercon may not be, in fact, for all people. I believe that those who want to talk about making money by blogging, as opposed to the philosophical and moral issues surrounding that, will have to go elsewhere. Fine.

But the clear inference to be drawn from Dave's commentary is that those "small minded" people who disagree with his pedagological tactics should stay away. Dave definitely wants to tell us what is good for us, which in small doses is ok. But the frisson between Dave's control of the conference discourse and the desires of the attendees to talk about what is of interest to them came close to boiling over several times. And as Dave pointedly told one attendee, who stated that he would like to loosen certain restrictions that Dave has made on free and open discourse (specifically having to do with the non-commercialism of the event leading to a gag order on nearly anyone employed by a "vendor"): "it isn't your conference." By extension, it isn't our conference either. It is the conference, I guess, for some set of naive users who Dave would like to paternalistically sheild from dangerous ideas of pernicious vendors, like PubSub and Technorati, representatives of which were singled out and censured for trying to state their personal or corporate views on various issues. I hazard that in the future, representatives of media companies (like Corante) will likely find their way into the ranks of the gagged, as well.