Blogference - Day 1

Today was the first day of the Blogference, the international conference on blogging at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. The conference is a two-day affair, each day looking at the blogging phenomenon from a different perspective.

Today was the academic day, and was dominated by three panel sessions dealing with the political, psychological, and journalistic aspects of blogging. The psychological panel was quite fascinating. It turns out that there are a number of motivations for blogging in general, beyond the obvious of people who maintain a blog for personal reasons versus people who maintain a blog for professional reasons.

In the former, it turns out that the motivations for starting a blog (a desire to have one's voice heard and a need for exposure and recognition) are different than those for maintaining one (documenting one's life and discovering one's voice). Also, it turns out that a lot of people maintain a number of different online identities, having one blog that they show to people they know and another they write for a large audience of people they don't. And they tend to be more revealing for people they don't know.

The atmosphere here has been nice and relaxed today. Tomorrow's session tackles blogging from the more practical perspective, with the whole day filled up with workshops. As a reminder, I will be hosting a panel on the VC-Startup dialogue through blogs at 15:15.

Other than that, I had the pleasure of meeting Om Malik this morning. A very pleasant guy (He claims that Tel Aviv reminds him of Bombay. But in a good way). As well as the guys from Ask a Ninja and Rocketboom.