Backroom discussions

In the spirit of “everything on the record,” here are some quick discussions from the break:


Phil Wolff is really cool. I think I’m going to have to get with him to crunch some of his data–he’s getting definitive lists of blogs from some of the crawling services. He says Dave Sifry doesn’t want to give up his raw list for intellectual property reasons. I suggested that he could one-way hash the list and then compare the hashes so that we could determine overlap. We’ll see how it goes.


Susan from Boston College: we talked about how blogs might be used in marketing. I suggested that bloggers might be open to being approached by individual marketers to talk about their products as long as (a) they aren’t treated as consumers but as individuals, (b) the individual comes as a real individual rather than as the voice of the company. I need to flesh out that thought more thoroughly later.


Betsy Devine is cool–we talked a bit about her ongoing conversation around the White House leaks.


In a few conversations, I’ve had to repeat my statement from earlier this week. I’m here to listen; I’m an individual blogger, but Microsoft is on my badge and pays my bills. The crowd understands this for the most part; they’ve all been there.