Doc Searls is blogging detailed notes from today's conference, and has a list of the people who are tapping away around the room. Some interesting stuff: Jupiter, the conference organisers, showed stats showing that the % of internet users who read personal websites is actually falling, from 18% in 1999 to 8% in 2002. Of course, the overall population of the internet is still rising rapidly, which means the audience for personal websites has grown, but they are not maintaining their market share.
Meanwhile, on the floor, Dave Winer is delivering a curiously unstructured keynote. It comes across as quite random, until he opens things up to the floor, and a quite passionate debate starts up.
Those who know of Winer will not be surprised there's a (good natured) argument breaking out on one of Dave's favourite subjects: is weblogging also journalism? It seems quite a few US journalists feel quite strongly that weblogging is no such thing, with Jeff Jarvis (a former senior print journalist) putting up a quite spirited defence of some kind of distinction.
My view? Journalism's already a pretty big tent, with everyone from reporters to polemicists lurking in its various corners. There's no license needed to join in. So there's space for a few more people in here - readers will vote, with their clicks, for who they want to read, and believe.
