After day two, Michael Feldman tries to ponder how this whole idea of the ubiquity of weblogs. Every person with a weblog, every person with a voice. In this post, he wonders about the medical uses of weblogs.#

The standard care at most major hospitals dictates that there exists a "primary" physician for each case, but in reality this individual is rarely the professional most closely involved in the treatment, which often involves three or four medical specialties, physical and other therapies, and sometimes sessions with non-medical care givers. Given non-synchronous scheduling, over-scheduling and normal organizational confusion, this "team" rarely if ever actually meet, and communication is haphazard. This lack of communication is responsible for thousands of deaths every year in the US from inadvertent drug overdoses, drug antagonisms, treatment incompatibilities and just plain mix-ups in planning and carrying out a coherent treatment plan.

What a perfect position for a blog to fill! What if a hospital opened a sort of medical blog for each patient, and each doctor, nurse and therapist would make an entry each time they saw the patient. After all, what is the medical chart hanging on the bedpost but an old-fashioned blog, inefficiently organized and difficult to decipher?

Enoch responds to Michael Feldman.

[I]'ve blogged about how I do this via our EMR (Electronic Medical Record) in the outpatient arena, which parallels what could happen in the inpatient locale but hasn't yet. I did a series of blog entries about how this works: overview of a clinic visit, reviewing the record before i go in,making orders in the exam room, printed instructions to take home, and access to your own online record .

Halley is clear that the one thing she learned from every blogger was passion,#

Meeting all the bloggers at BloggerCon was truly a treat. It got me thinking about the most basic quality of blogs -- whether they be technical or journal-like or warblogs or whatever type, the best have a passion about their subject that is undeniable. And the bloggers themselves are a passionate bunch. Just an honor to be in the same room with them. Thanks Dave for making it happen.

Via Dave Winer is Oliver Willis "Deflating the Blog Bubble."#

Blogs are great. They're wonderful, and they will Change Things. But we need to step back outside of the blog-to-blog echo chamber and look at how important this movement really is.

What seems to have happened is that the fundraising success of the Howard Dean campaign has become the blog equivalent of the Netscape IPO. That public offering opened the floodgates to thousands of unprofitable companies and created the stock market bubble that was great for some, but probably set the web industry back a few years after people realized it was not The Answer to all their problems. That cycle appears to be happening with blogs now. During the BloggerCon conference it would be easy to go home thinking that any problem of note in the world could be remedied by a simple addition of "blog" to it.

Roland Tanglao responds, and supports.

Oliver nails it. Blogs are just a tool, like the telephone, and you can do wonderful things that will "change the world" (TM) with this tool. Unfortunately not too many people outside of bloggers know about blogs and it's not evenly distributed. We must continue to promote blogs to everybody. Only by getting everybody to use it like everybody uses email today will we profoundly and truly change the world.

Jeff Jarvis joins to the pool of people appreciating Dave Winer and the Berkman Center for making this possible.#

Dann Sheridan has some thoughts about what could be done better and what we should take out of this.#

Different tracks and specialty focuses are needed. Tracks for technology and business were blatantly missing and are key to attracting a larger audience.

The blogosphere needs to get beyond itself if blogging is going to have a future.

Mark Bernstein seems to have left feeling filled with a lot of energy from the weblog community.#

The weblog world is also a great believer that it will muddle through whatever the world throws at it, and Bloggercon really, deeply, assumes that if you just trust all the people, good things will happen. Lies spread quickly, but the truth, they say, catches up even faster. I worry about what the blogosphere would have been like, if they'd all had weblogs in 1938; Leni Riefenstahl would have made a great chief blogger, and Nikita Kruschev's war journal could have generated amazing flow. But this concern gets no traction; people figure it will work out, and that the new world will be better. Nor are people very worried about power law distributions of audience.

Same story with money. Bloggercon-ers agree that the weblog world has lousy economics now. People agree that the economy is more complex than it seems, and probably that "it's even worse than it looks". But there's lots of economic energy in the room. There's Esther! There's Amy Wohl! And, if Greenspun (who is not hurting for lunch money) wryly notes that, for all his traffic, his site earns about $400 in Google ads, everyone smiles and assumes that we'll work this out, too.

Seth Finkelstein compares the blogger world today to the Internet bubble world of yesterday.#

However, sessions are larded with so much hype that it's almost painful. I lived the blather of the Internet Revolution. And I found out, very personally, how mistaken it was. Now I get to see evangelists and sensation-mongers do it all over again.

It's fine and dandy to be a well-off professional discussing writing about your job, or maybe having writing as your job, and meeting with people like you. Very cool, very fun, great parties. Being in a bubble is delicious.

But this is not going to revolutionize politics, overthrow journalism as we know it, or change the world into cyber-utopia.

If you're David Weinberger then your bubble never burst.

Jenny Levine reflects on the best quotes to come out of the reception.#

Kevin Marks (I think he's the one that said this, correct me if I'm wrong): "The Bible invented permalinks."

Phil Wolff: "I Google my memory now."

Ryan Overbey is feeling fine about BloggerCon.#

Just came back from BloggerCon. If the American Academy of Religion and International Association of Buddhist Studies ran their conferences with wi-fi access and everyone logged in to IRC, it would definitely be an improvement. Nobody was falling asleep, even during the less interesting stuff, because they always had the option of having fun on IRC. It was brilliant.

Joi Ito got stealth-discoed, AccordionGuy played his accordion, and Christopher Lydon broke some tension at just the right moment by heralding the Sox victory. Lesson learned: serious conferences can be dynamic and fun, too.

Maiden Voyage has some closing thoughts.#

Christopher Lydon's elegant and practiced moderating and his notion that blogging is done out of love...."a soul and a heartbeat....that is the promise of the transformation."

The challenge I think is for this group of mostly very smart, mostly very white, mostly very male folks to pool their amazing wisdom and capacity for innovation and think seriously about issues of diversity and lack of access. To ignore these facts and sluff off remarks about lack of diversity as unimportant or an attempt to move away from the positive, diminishes us in our effort to truly effect some kind of transformation.

It was long, full, virtual, digital, analog, p2p, face to face, and more. While I would love to attend the free smaller workshops today, which span the spectrum from spirituality to how to blog, duty calls. Classes to plan, food to prepare, sins to atone for and a fast to begin.

Doug Simpson wonders about this huge free supply we have.#

Though this use of the medium may lack infrastructure barriers to entry, the very volume of "free" supply of writing (good and less good) does itself raise a barrier ... not to entry by the writers, but to selection and absorbtion by the readers. Does the overload of free goods in the commons raise a challenge for consumers? How does one find and distinquish "free crap" (as my 17-year old refers to the remaining unsold stuff dragged to the curb the morning after a tag sale) from the "public service information" goods that are of true value? Will a writer's need to develop reputation and inclusion in a circle of trusted sources impose a new barrier to entry?

When coming to conclusions on BloggerCon deejee comes back to what was expected initially and what path the experience had lead us to.#

I'm not sure what I specifically wanted to get out of BloggerCon. Overall, this was a very interesting conference, and it was an honor to sit among so many luminaries, to debate the impact that weblogs are having on societies around the globe. If anything, thought, I come away with more questions than answers, which isn't at all what I'd hoped for.

The more I delve into weblogs, the more I appreciate that weblogs are just the latest attempt to realize Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a read-write web. While other attempts have failed to take hold, the weblog meme appears to be a brush fire that will soon catch wind and spread wild. Weblogs differ from previous read-write efforts, say WebDAV, in that it defines a meme propagating workflow instead of a document-centric workflow. This, I believe will be key to understanding how to deploy weblogs in the enterprise, tangential to existing document-centric systems.

David Czarnecki thanks Dave Winer.#

This thank you goes out to Dave Winer. BloggerCon was a lot of fun. There were interesting people. There were interesting discussions. Food was good. Harvard (and Boston) was a great place to visit. It was great to put faces to names. Now, we all gotta figure out how to get some cheddy out 'dis biznatch because <puff-daddy>it's all about the benjamins</puff-daddy> baby.