Here John talks about some of the preparation they did for Warwick Blogs including the marketing effort and how un-prescriptive they were about what people should use their blogs for.

Here's Adriana Cronin-Lukas from the Big Blog Company summing up the ONE trend that underpins everything we're talking about.

Blogs were the big talking point on the second day of the conference. Blogger accreditation was kindly provided by Nancy Garman of Information Today.

I am 'Furling' links relating to Monitoring and Mining the Blogosphere. If you're interested, pop this into your aggregator (make sure you grab the entire link):

http://www.furl.net/members/tebbo/rss.xml?topic=mining+blogosphere

If you have good links you'd like me to add, please comment and I'll add them.

Look forward to seeing you at the end of the month.

What's this? It's a jar for collecting questions.

If you'd like your own question answered in the "monitoring and mining the blogosphere" forum, please drop it into the jar now.

Of course, you will have to do it metaphorically, by commenting on this post.

PS (23rd November) Probably a good idea to provide your name and affiliation with your question. Wouldn't want competitors to be asking awkward questions of each other. Thanks. [ For the record, there was a question but when I wrote to the author, the email bounced. So I deleted the question. ]

Lloyd Davis runs Perfect Path, a knowledge management consultancy and has stepped in to provide a presentation in the wikis, blogs & rss track of the conference in replacement of Professor Anne Clye from the University of Iceland who sadly died early on this year.  Lloyd is speaking in the evolution of wikis session from 9.30-11.00am.

Lloyd will be talking about Wikis: breaking barriers and building bridges.  His presentation will focus on the changes to organisations and ways of doing business that are made possible by wiki technology, together with some examples of innovative practice.   

I am Adriana Cronin-Lukas, and apart from being a self-style blog guru, I am also an Online Information Conference committee member, assisting with putting together the session on wikis, blogs and RSS. 

Whether you work in a corporate or academic institution, ignoring blogs is missing out on the most dynamic development online these days. As with most new phenomena, blogging can be both confusing and exciting. I believe that there are tremendous benefits and opportunities in applying these new tools to businesses. And this is what we try to convey in the sessions in the Wikis, Blogs and RSS track and why we dedicated the whole day to it. The aim is to get you up to speed with these rapidly evolving tools and technologies as well as understand what all this fuss is about.

The speakers have been selected to cover a wide range of implications of blogging on business and other institutions. They are all practising what they preach and find it very easy to talk about their expertise, which in many cases started as a hobby. They all got swept up in the versatility and empowerment of blogging, wiki and RSS technologies and cannot imagine their professional lives without it.

I’m especially looking forward to the opening session ‘Evolution of Wikis’ where I’m moderating and get to put Jimmy Wales – founder of Wikipedia - under the spotlight!  This is a rare opportunity to hear Jimmy speak in Europe and apart from hearing about Wikipedia, we will hear more about what lies ahead in Social Web and the implications for information professionals. 

Loic Le Meur a French blogger and a representative of Six Apart - the leading blog software platform vendor - moderates the session ‘Wikis and blogs in corporate and academic institutions’. It focuses on interesting case studies such as the student blogs at Warwick University that have been leading the way in academic blogging and Neil McIntosh from The Guardian who has been using blogs to create new relationships with Publishers.

Later on in the day, do not miss the presentation from IBM ‘Using RSS feeds to provide dynamic content’ and Fergus Burns from Nooked will answer your questions about RSS feeds.  The day closes with a panel with experts from Nooked, Six Apart, Yahoo! and PubSub who will debate and discuss the pros and cons of tools available for monitoring and mining the blogosphere.   

Finally, if you have any questions about blogging and the sessions, please do not hesitate to contact me [adriana@bigblog.net] and/or look me up at the conference. I look forward to seeing you there.