BloggerCon Infrastructure update

The BloggerCon infrastructure session is starting to come together. Among the confirmed attendees are two high-profile infrastructure developers (tease, tease). I’m still waiting to hear from a couple more folks before announcing. Also, I’m still looking for someone who fits the “writer” profile. Need your help!

In the meantime I’ve put together an outline of potential discussion topics. What am I missing?

Very important The outline is an outline of the topics and not how we’re going to run the session. Ticking sequentially through the topics would put everyone to sleep and would impose too much structure.

Instead, I’m thinking to run the discussion the way we did in my high school Great Books class. The format was as follows: a discussion leader prepares a list of leading questions. The questions are carefully crafted to be engaging and have many possible answers. The leader asks the questions, members of the discussion group respond, provide alternative perspectives, debate each other, etc. Then we move on to the next question.

Here are a few example questions:

1. How many weblogs do you read?
2. Do you read weblogs at home? At work? The same ones?
3. Do you write a weblog at home? At work? The same one?
3. How do you find new weblogs to read?
4. What do you weblog?
5. Can you turn a Geocities home page into a weblog?
6. Can you turn a desktop computer into a weblog host?
7. Can you write a weblog without writing?
8. Do you have to write a weblog to really understand weblogs?
9. How can I make some money? What should I charge for and when?
10. Who is reading your weblog? How do you know? How did they find it?
11. Has you weblog ever gone offline? If yes, what did you do when that happened? If no, what would you do?

These are just a few random ideas. Add more in the comments section and we’ll consider them.

One difference from my Great Books class is that we’ll have an Internet- and projector-connected computer for short demonstrations, many discussion leaders instead of just one, and some open Q&A. Let’s learn some great things together.