Robert Scoble is the keynote. His first point is that a blog is just a tool, like a drill.
Dave Winer used Weblogs.com to keep up with blog traffic in the early days and looking for what is hot. 9/11 brought Dave and Scoble and about 30 other people together on IM to see how the blog world was reacting. Weblogs.com was the centerpiece for watching the news happen.
Basically, a blog is a website that has posts in reverse chronological order. These are some of the things that differentiate blogs...
1. Ease of Publishing
2. Discovery- Technorati, Pubsub, etc, allowing a site to be discovered in the mix.
3. Referrer pages - Knowing who is linking to you
4. Permalinks - point to a specific page
5. Syndication
The web browser fell apart once you started trying to read 30-40 sites. With publishing being so easy, the amount of information grew past what the browser could handle.
Watched Howard Dean and these really smart and passionate converged around these blogs. Because of Google, the blogs are building concetrations of passionate people. Blogs are building these concentrations of people around subject matters. The journalists are noticing this now and watching the blogs and comments. When something interesting happens in the blogs, the reporters can go out and push it into the mainstream.
The passionate people concentrated around specific subjects are the engine that creates the buzz and the press. See Engadget.
He gets more traffic and people reading him than some of the major media outlets and for millions less in investment.
Uses Technorati as a way to quantify his success. He can see how many new links he gets over time.
Read 50 blogs for two weeks if you want to get started. If you're interested in quilting, go to Technorati and search for "quilting" and you'll see hundreds of sites. Nascar, Wines, etc. You have to listen to the market via blogs.
If you're a plumber and put your knowledge out there, people will find you and contact you just because you shared your knowledge online.
2 things that make a good blog: passion and authority. You have to get out there and learn and go to the events, make the connections. You can't be an authority from home.
Linking to your competitors is interesting. He learned from working in a camera store in the 80's. He found that if he would be honest about the local camera store market- he would keep the customers. They appreciated the honesty and built trust.
He has to be careful and who he links to (see the "no follow" links). Now he can link to someone who is doing something bad and not give them Google Juice.
The blogosphere has a way of cleaning itself out. There is a constant fact-checking mechanism built into the system so if he links to a hoax site, he learns about it within hours and takes away the links.
To be successful, you need to start a movement. You need to enable multiple people to talk about you and build from there. Let the message travel through connectors.
Apparently you can find naked pictures of Scoble with a "good google image search". As Greg Narain said, that sounds like a bad business search.
Attention overload is the big risk right now. What if I want to watch 3000 feeds?
Break time... Sorry for the half formed sentences- I'm getting used to the real time thing...