Peter Merholz's question in his post on the Strategy Conference held last week,
Why no blogging?
It strikes me as odd that, of all the conferences I go to, this one has almost no coverage in the blogosphere. I don't quite know what to make of that.
struck me. I had attended the conference and I have a blog where I post regularly, or two or three, but it had not even occurred to me to write about it. This point came up in an email conversation with Steve Portigal today and I thought I'd hazard a guess at the answer.
I'm running the list of attendees through my mind and the majority can be sorted into a few general categories : senior management in consumer product companies like Rob Pew, Chairman, Steelcase, Jim Hackett, CEO, Steelcase, Walter Nathan, Chairman, RTC Industries, Jamshyd Godrej, Chairman, Godrej&Boyce, David Nagel, CEO of Palmsource, then VP's and Directors from Red Hat, Office Max, Motorola, Kraft, Philips, IBM, Unilever and the Mayo Clinic. The second group would be consulting firms - design, of course, but also management consultants, research firms, VC firms. Lastly, academia.
I'd be curious to see how many blog, and if they do, those blogs aren't personal? I doubt the first group does, or as Walter said when I asked him if he checked his email, "it's on my secretary's desk". As for the second group, represented by firms such as LAGA, Teague, IDEO, KPMG, Kairos, ECCO, Metadesign, Mayfield etc etc etc may have employees that blog, but I doubt it would even strike them to write about the conference - my question would be, does this necessarily mean that they are behind the times that they have yet to adopt this technology? I'm not going get into a discussion here on blogging and it's usefulness, there are others who are discussing far better than I, I'm pointing out that it's early days yet. My answer to Peter would be, "there's nothing to make of that, for most of the participants, online technology is only one tool of many that they use for their daily work"
And to add my 2 cents to the Conference coverage :P I'm putting up one of Hugh's cartoons:
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