Dave Winer on Real-time blogs: “In no more than a couple of years, probably a lot less, conferences will seek out people who write weblogs to broaden the reach of their conferences.”
For people who are in some of the emerging markets of the world, weblogs and audio/video broadcasts are bridging the digital divide. While conferences enable great networking and there’s no replacement for the face-to-face interactions, from a knowledge-gathering and mind-broadening point of view, reading the blogs and listening to the talks via the Internet is a great help. Through bloggers, one can get multiple viewpoints of the presentation in near-real-time. This type of feedback mechanism isn’t possible easily even at a conference.
