Blogworld Expo

Just spoke at a panel at the BlogWorld Expo NYC. Just writing down some quick thoughts from the conference...

• Tumblr is very popular. The fact that this is happening in NYC only helps. They must be doing some things really right. I hear a lot of nice things about their beautiful templates, ease of content production, and also ease of content re-publishing and re-sharing. The last point is really important, because for many people writing a new post from a blank sheet of paper is a daunting task.
• Many people ask the question: Is blogging dead? The reason why people ask this question when all blogging services report nice growth is perhaps blogging is becoming too mainstream now. No one talks about email any more, and there's "email is dead" meme going on, though email is still huge and growing. Perhaps blogging is becoming like email. 
• There will always be better tools - Tumblr might see another new competitor threatening their "poster child" position that they're enjoying now -- and people will not blink when they change their tools. People don't care about technology or tools, they only care about content. (Though tools do drive usage to a certain point)
• BlogWorld Expo was held as an adjunct to the Book Expo America. The Book Expo was much, much larger than the BlogWorld Expo - the mainstream, print media is obviously still pretty big. And eventually all the print media will come online, and that's the reason why I think there's still a huge chance for social media and blogging. 
• Print media people are in general more nicely dressed than the web people.
• Blogging is such a terrible term to call the tool. Blogging as we know of it now will evolve into something totally different and better. What's not changing is people to express themselves on the internet -- tools change and evolve all the time.
• NYC is beautiful in May and the whole media and ads industry in the city is just huge.