Conference for bloggers in March
23 January 2006 – By REUBEN SCHWARZ
Wellington will host New Zealand’s first conference on blogging, Blog Hui, in March.
The link goes to a Digital Living Story – Infotech Weekly in the Dominion Post, from 23 January 2006.
As the conference date gets closer, the rumours about BlogHui’s credibility triggered by David Farrar’s kiwiblog last month seem to have resurfaced. Internet scamming is now so widespread that online networks of contacts rapidly distributing suspicion can be a healthy protective mechanism. Many a scammer has been quickly ‘slurred’ in just the way BlogHui has been. Rather than recourse to lawyers, which might have been the organisers’ first reaction, I think there’s an interesting question about why this bloghui.org blog as a mechanism to announce and promote a conference has not generated sufficient trust in all quarters. Indeed, in my experience, threats of legal action against doubters just reinforce their sense that ‘trust’ is being attempted in an ‘old media’ strong-arm way rather than through the subtler semiotics of integrity that experienced online dwellers have sensitive antennae for.
I’m fascinated in particular by one ‘urban legend’ that’s circulating about bloghui – it’s the supposed chalked ‘advertisements’ on walls at Victoria University. I doubt that they were there (even though a couple of my students here at Univ of Waikato ‘know’ students who’ve seen them at Vic) but what might have been a bit of viral marketing for the event has been turned around anyway and is part of the scam ‘virus’ instead, the implication being that it was an attempt to make a scam look ‘streetsmart’ in some way that today’s students just don’t buy. Interesting too, how the kiwiblog ‘slur’ back in January is still generating a rumour trail, despite the last exchanges on that topic in David Farrar’s blog pretty much deciding that bloghui is for real. Bloggers live or die by the blog (no matter how good their lawyers might be)!
Comment by Dan Fleming — February 24, 2006 @ 9:43 am