Anyone who’s been following the whole “Web 2.0″ thing for any length of time knows that blogging and all the other tools for interactivity that go along with that – the “conversation” we are all a part of – has profound implications for the media, for marketers, for businesses (both startups and established companies) and for society as a whole. My fellow tech blogger Mark Evans, lawyer/blogger Rob Hyndman, entrepreneur/blogger Mike McDerment and marketing wunderkind Stuart MacDonald and I have been talking about these kinds of things for awhile, and lamenting the fact that while there are lots of great conferences about these issues in France (Les Blogs), in Geneva (LIFT06) and in Vancouver (Northern Voice) there hasn’t really been a good one in Toronto.
So we decided to organize one. Essentially, we want to get some of the smartest and most interesting people in the Web 2.0 movement (if I can call it that) into a room together and talk about how some of these issues are changing the way we live our lives, whether we’re journalists, marketers, entrepreneurs or just people in general. As Mark and Rob and Mike have already mentioned on their blogs, some of the details have yet to be worked out – such as the exact date and location – but we’re looking at early May sometime, and we wanted to throw the idea out to the blog community and see what some of you would like to get out of a conference like that.
We’re going to have some blockbuster keynotes, and we’re planning to have some panel discussions, but we also want to have some smaller, workshop-style discussions for people to really get into the meat of some of the things we’re talking about. Should bloggers be considered journalists? How can the “old” media deal with Web 2.0? How are blogs changing the way companies do business? How have they affected the political process or society in general, either positively or negatively? If you have any ideas, we’d be happy to hear them.
