I'm sitting here at the last session of the day.....and I'm wondering about big conferences like this...

This is my third big conference this year and I'm finding a lot of the information is familiar. And I asked someone if my impression of all of this was correct. He confirmed it.

I have to get used to the fact that I really don't have to doubt my sensibilities all that much anymore.

It seems that really big, costly, media/blog conferences are really there for people who couldn't make the last big media/blog conference (although I can say the podcasting panel was interesting, as podcasting is pretty new--still, I wonder if we were seeing just a group of early adopters who've done well, or if there is really something to what they're doing.)

I'm hearing same kvetches about how "people" are horrid and that interacting with them is difficult. The only impression of "interaction in the blogosphere" (as opposed to interaction in the blogosphere) that most businesspeople and publishers seem to have comes from messageboards and forums.

The problem, as I see it, is that companies and publishers are afraid.

And lots of brains seem to be stuck in the past....

Then again, in the grander scheme of business and publishing (heck, in the grander scheme in the world in general), This Stuff is so very, very new. as was said over and over at Beyond Broadcast, we're in the nanoseconds of new world and its hard to grasp what's going on...

When it's hard to grasp what's going on, the brain tries to interpret it all in a way that it can understand...which doesn't work all that well in This Space.

I did, though, enjoy hearing Richard Edelman, who seems to have a little bit of a clue. I was surprised to hear him say how businesses just have to get out there, stop being afraid of getting slammed, and deal with it when they *do* get slammed. Essentially, getting slammed won't kill a product unless the product is a bad product. R.E. mentioned how a particular product got slammed but by the company confronting the problem, things actually turned around in their favor.

Makes sense to me. Unless a product is *so* *bad* that it's irredeemable.

But this was something I heard before, too...

I guess though, that to reach people, the same thing has to be said in different places to different people.

Which brings me back to interaction. If businesspeople and publishers are merely sitting around and listening to panels of talking heads, and they never get to interact with the talking heads while they are in talking mode on the dias, will anything ever change? They're locked in a physical model of a top-down interaction mode that doesn't work out here among peers (although is still quite prevalent in the way BigShots treat LittleShots who comment on their blogs--another topic for another post....)

Who knows...