BlogOn 2005, NYC

So, it's now 11:45am or so on Monday, and I've just sat through the morning's sessions at BlogOn 2005 here in NYC. So far, I'm underwhelmed. [NOTE: the conference got better as it went; read more below and Day II coverage.]

Attendance is great. The legendary NY night club, the Copacabana, turns out to be a reasonably good venue for a conference (right across from the Javitz Center, ironically). Eyeballing the crowd in the main nightclub auditorium, there have to be 400 or more people here. Lots of business attire and folks in their 30s and 40s, not blogger sterotypes or gristly-bearded old-timers; but that's not surprising, considering attandance for both days cost around $1,500.

Attendance is so big it's actually a problem: I was kicked out of a vendor table where I originally set up when I arrived 15 minutes late and found all the designated audience seats taken. Other folks where standing and sitting in the back of the ballroom.

But aside from turnout, the content has been a disappointment for the first day. I got here halfway into Seth Godin's keynote. Even though he said explicitly near the end it wasn't a sales pitch, "because I'm not selling anything," it was pretty much a sales pitch for his new Squidoo thing, which has a revenue model so of course he's selling. The woman sitting next to me said the same thing, unprompted.

The panel on after Godin, "What You Don't Hear Can Hurt You: Listening to the Blogosphere," was no great shakes. It was interesting to hear the perspective of Randall McAdory, manager of "brand intelligence" at DaimlerChrysler, and Jackie Huba of Church of the Customer is always interesting, but no breakthru insights in general.

Then came, guess what, a product pitch. Like, no ambiguity — it was just a conference sponsor, Cymphony, standing up there pitching from the stage. Then, first thing after a break before noon, another product pitch for another sponsor, Shadows.com.

I go to a lot of conferences, and the first rule is "don't sell from the stage." I would think bloggers would be the worst audience for that kind of blatant hawking, yet BlogOn apparently isn't worried about pandering to the worst fears of the commercialization of the blogosphere.

Gotta go now, finally a decent panel line up: Jeff Jarvis, Bill Schreiner and Peter Friedman.

UPDATE:
I had lunch and am happier now. Food was decent for a conference buffet. At least it wasn't brown bag. Content seems to have gotten somewhat more on track this afternoon. Unfortunately, I missed Steve Wilson, Sr. Dir. of Global Web Communications at McDonald's. Then came more product pitching from Pheedo. Now I'm watching a good panel moderated by the ever-charming Steve Rubel, a PR guru, Shel Israel, co-author with Robert Scoble of the forthcoming book Naked Conversations, Deborah Schultz, marketing eirector and Six Apart and Vicki Warker VP of product marketing and Sprint and the company's "only sanctioned blogger.". Lots of the usual "the market is a conversation" stuff, but the level of conversations to have improved somewhat from this morning. Or maybe it's just because I'm sated from lunch.

ANOTHER UPDATE:
So, I just chatted for 20 minutes or so with Mike Sigal, CEO of Guidwewire Group, the conference company that hosts BlogOn. The same company also hosts DEMO, the years-old conference for showcasing the coolest new companies on the Internet. In light of that (which I suppose I should have understood already), I at least better understand what they're trying to do with these sponsored presentations. I'm still not sure the model has been completely successful at BlogOn, where it's a combination of basic education for those not so exposed to the blogosphere and bloggers, who already know who Pheedo and Feedster are.

Regardless, it's good networking, lots of folks here interested in making this new medium something real, so I'll suspend my morning grouchiness and focus on the value of this event.

(I have to say, it does feel weird to attend an event like this as a fully-paid attendee, as I normally am a speaker at industry events like this and therefore don't spend a lot of time in the sessions. So maybe I'm nitpicking because I'm not used to sitting in the audience all day.)