Pen-Elayne on the Web

Conned Bloggers

Remember back on August 7 where I talked about Dave Winer's mass e-mail inviting bloggers to a convention at Harvard in October for a "mere $500?" And it turned out he sent some people free passes anyway, claiming that they'd won some sort of contest to get in for nothing? Yuh-huh. Well, anyway, Winer's BloggerCon was held this past weekend, and there are some interesting comments about it from Oliver Willis, Lis Riba, Betsy Devine and Elaine Frankonis. From reading Oliver and Lis, my initial impression of Winer and his project doesn't seem to have changed much. Lots of mostly white, mostly male bloggers (loved Lis' comment about the restrooms, as the same thing used to happen at most comic conventions!) with a heaping dose of myopia talking about how they're the vanguard that's going to change the world. Glad I didn't bother going, not that I could afford the "mere $500" anyway (and Winer never sent me a freebie so I guess my initial response to him was enough to lose the "contest"). It's like this, folks - blogging is a tool, like anything else. It's got great potential, it can be used to make friends, to organize events, to initiate activism, to tell stories, to otherwise communicate - but let's get real, until the digital divide closes a bit we're such a tiny, insulated community compared to Real Life that it's going to be a long time before what we do amounts to a hill of beans in the "outside world." Meantime, I'll take my "blogger conventions" locally and, were it my choice, in the form of informal get-togethers at bars or restaurants, not friggin' Harvard Law School classroom sessions.