Whatever else you might say about Tony Perkins...
...you have to admit he has stones.
Takes considerable courage of one's convictions for a guy so widely pilloried and scorned within the blogging community to show up to keynote in front of a room full of A and B-list bloggers, IMHO.
And he was pretty courteous and good-humoured about my "fact-checking his ass". He said, in response to a question from Dave Winer, that he has never described his AlwaysOn Network experiment as a "blog". Well in fact he has, or at least he appears to have done so.
In this Fortune magazine Fast Forward piece, from February of this year, it says:
"He calls the site a "super-blog," comparing it to Slashdot.org, a phenomenally successful site for serious technophiles that now claims over two million members. "While Slashdot is for techie geeks, AlwaysOn is for business geeks," he says. He will impose editorial order by continuing to fine-tune topic areas, recruiting appropriate bloggers, and contributing heavily himself."
When I brought this up in the conference session just now, I'm afraid the ensuing discussion quickly devolved into yet another "what is a blog?" frothfest. I'm still not sure why this question seems to be creating so much energetic debate.
It reminds me of all the wheel spinning over the attempts to define "knowledge management" a few years ago. Wheel-spinning I was sitting at the heart of, as head of marketing for one of the bigger DM/KM companies.
At the time, David Weinberger wrote something in a white paper for the company I was working with, which still seems relevant here:
"KM has to be one of the most over-defined concepts in history. We will not propose a definition here. Even if we put forth the one Right and True definition, no one would know or care. So, pick one you like and let's get on with it."
Replace "KM" with "weblogging" and you'll get how I feel about this question.
And yet I'm also aware that I may be missing something at the heart of this debate. For so many smart, smart people to be so passionate about finding the one right and true answer to this question, I have to believe there's a level on which I'm not getting it...
