Ugh. I am not up to the challenge of real-time conference blogging, particulary not given the competition at this blogfest. In particular, if you really care, Heath Row is miraculously blogging every last word uttered at this conference. I've never seen anything like it. Pleased to say I got the guy a round of applause at the last panel of the day.

That said, following up on yesterday's conference post, here is my round-up of additional observations for today:

• Dave Winer is insufferable. He thinks he's the king of the bloggers and his opinion on the subject of blogs is the only one that counts and no one is entitled to any other point of view. I sincerely hope he's not invited back to another conference on the topic of "business blogging" because, to cite a favorite expression of the Cluetrain ilk, he just doesn't "get it." That is, he's such a hysterical blog fanatic, I didn't get the sense that he would be comfortable with the question of blogs being used in a business context at all, which was, after all, the nominal subject of the conference, and his constant interjections and hijacking the discussion at any mention of anything that didn't fit his hyper-idealistic perception of blogging was just disruptive.
• The whole question of what is a "blog" degenerated into an excrutiating holy war and we never got anywhere near actually settling on an answer that people could agree on. Hugely tiresome and disappointing and not helpful. For example, according to Winer, group blogs don't exist. Therefore, what you're reading is apparently not a blog. Not that I cherish that monicker for our humble little site, but the whole debate went beyond ridiculous.
• Moreover, while I applaud ClickZ for sponsoring this event, I think it was not entirely successful in that it ultimately failed to address the key theme, by and large, of business blogging. John Robb of Userland and Anil Dash of Moveable Type both claimed ot have loads of corporate users of their blog publishing software, but no one really presented any interesting case studies of actual business blogging. Today in particular, I don't think the topic of the business use of blogs was addressed virtually at all. All we heard was opinion bloggers raving about how great blogs are. Very little practical advice for the business application of blogs. (Alright, I take it back, the Law of Blogs panel was actually pretty full of useful (if painfully boring and rather discouraging) advice; I'd refer you again to Row's transcription for details.) In fact, I pity those actual paying attendees (less than half of the 100 or so in the room, as far as I could tell) who came thinking they'd get more useful business advice than holy war rantings the Whiners of the world. This was really a big blog circle jerk, pure and simple.
• Undaunted, ClickZ will be repeating the conference again in six months in San Francisco and again next year in either NY or Boston, I was advised. And well they should. They should just do a better job of keeping the focus on business blogging and limit the representation of the holy warriors. I think they got that message. I said so in person to a few of the decision makers, anyway. I also got kudos for being (allegedly) the only blogger to consistently use the ClickZ brand when referencing the conference. (Don't flame me if you also did so; I'm just repeating what one of the conference organizers told me.) Apparently, there was some snafu at the ClickZ marketing department that left the event with primarily Jupiter Research branding (ClickZ's parent/sister (?) company), despite the fact that ClickZ staff did most of the organizing (along with Kathleen Goodwin of iMakeNews)
• I came in late for Jason Shellen's morning keynote, but I arrived in time to grab one of the last Blogger t-shirts he left out in the lobby, though there were nothing left but Mediums by then.
• A ClickZ staffer was circulating anxiously asking us all to fill out evaluation sheets. Evaluation sheets at a blogger conference. How quaint. Apparently, management still isn't hip to Technorati. To their marketing credit, this has to have been the most blogged about conference in the history of Internet marketing conferences.
• On her panel, Elizabeth Spiers of Gawker had the temerity to propose we all send email to Gawker today complaining that the site seemed to have lost its edge in the past two days, as her boss, Nick Denton, has been covering for her while she had a break for the conference.
• Well, without a doubt, the highlight of the day was the gang rape of Tony Perkins, whose AlwaysOn site came in for such abuse you can't imagine. First, the panel that proceeded him, included the following comments: Jeff Jarvis: "What's that site that calls itself a blog? Oh yeah: AlwaysOn." Elizabeth Spiers then tells a story about how Tony (formerly founder and editor of Red Herring) decided to launch a new blog-like media company and then hired a PR agency to "pitch" it to other bloggers, and then didn't have a sense of humor when bloggers wrote snotty things about him because of it. Lest we still not get the point, Rafat Ali took the microphone at his turn on the panel and said "I have 100% of bloggers in solidarity when I say this: AlwaysOn sucks." All fairly amusing, particularly seeing as Perkins was not in the room at the moment but was due to give the last keynote of the conference after lunch. Why was everyone so peeved at Perkins? Who knows. Mainly because the bloggers in dominance at the conference are a bunch of self-righteous humorless weenies, along with the fact that Perkins had the audacity to be an ex-big media guy trying to cash in on the hippness of blogs without really understanding them or devising his site according to their undefineable requirements. Part of me wanted to join in the roasting, but it got so ugly I definitely ended up siding with him in the end, in spirit, anyway. When Perkins came out for his keynote, he apparently had to be calmed down after he figured out what a den of lions he was about to walk into. Most ironically, his first words were "It's a pleasure to be here," an opinion I'm sure he soon changed. His computer then died and he stood there silently for 10 minutes while his Mac rebooted. An inauspicious start. His presentation was forgetable and off-topic (though hard to fault him there, as most others likewise were), but then the fireworks started with the Q&A, where he was almost literally running and ducking. The only one worth repeating was, after Perkins had claimed that he was happy to attend the conference so he could learn more about blogging, Rafat Ali suggested in that case he might have benefited from actually showing up to any of the prior presentations a day and a half into the event.
• Happily, MarketingFix got lots of props throughout the conference.

Well, there may or may not be more worth saying, but the conference is over now and the tech guy wants to shut off my wifi connection. I may revise this a bit when I get home tonight. Forgive spelling errors, no time for anything but this rough draft. But then, that's what blogging is all about, no?

UPDATE:

Seems I am not along. Jason Butler, of BostonWorks, who also attended the conferce, writes: "I had just posted my own screed, when I saw your notes. I was worried I'd be the only one unimpressed with the business value of the conference…