# World Blogging Forum and the Tao of Conferences

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2002-12-16T07:48:37Z


After returning from a week in the US and realizing how important the trip was and how useful Supernova was, I started thinking about next year. I have enough conferences and meetings to fill the whole year with schmoozing. How do I cut this down to a few high quality meetings? If I am in conferences all year, I surely won't get any REAL work done. A healthy balance of networking and real work is essential.

When I was at Supernova, Dave and I talked about the World Economic Forum. He wrote a nice essay on an idea to create a bloggers conference. I think this is a great idea. The trick now is to get enough interesting people to agree to come, but to keep small enough to make it fun.

The best conferences I attended this year were the Fortune Brainstorm in Aspen, the Global Leaders for Tomorrow Annual Meeting in Geneva and Pop!Tech. They were all in the 100-200 people range. I think that 100-200 is the right size. The Trilateral Commission meeting was about 300 or so people and it was interesting too, but the group was less diverse... (Although I would go if they ever invited me again.) The World Economic Forum meeting in New York was a bit too big to be cozy, but Japan related sessions are essential for me... Supernova was great from a "meet everyone interested in this space" perspective, but I think it could use more diversity. The fact that everyone was blogging was cool. It pushed the envelop from the conference blogging perspective and it's great to see friends.

This year, I have committed to going to The WEF meeting in Davos to deliver our Blueprint for Japan 2020  and Mark Anderson's SNS conference.

So, do we start something new, or op-opt someone's conference? Who's going to get it going? It takes a lot of energy and networking juice to get one of these things to happen...





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#### Categories

Blogging about Blogging, Introspective