Supernova workshops

Congrats to Kevin Werbach on organizing yet another successful Supernova. Having been lucky enough to attend the first two West Coast editions, it's great to see the gathering getting stronger by the year...

Yesterday I was part of the workshops on microformats and business blogging. The microformats session was a great introduction to the value of distributed, structured content, and coincided with the launch of microformats.org. Six Apart has been part of the development of the hReview specification, and yesterday I gave a (very) quick introduction to that spec, and demonstrated how the combination of Movable Type's weblog templating language and support for alternate application templates makes it easy for power users to customize their MT install and turn it into a product review machine.

The business blogging session featured Charlene Li, Suw Charman, the inimitable Robert Scoble and I talking about how businesses are using blogs. Charlene gave a great overview of the latest stats on blog reading and writing in the US (look to Forrester for an upcoming release of her report), and gave an overview of some of the more interesting applications of business blogging she's seen in her travels. Robert talked about the impact that Microsoft's embrace of public blogging (and the launch of Channel 9) has had on their relationship with their customers. Suw and I focused on life behind the firewall, and walked through some examples of how blogs are being used to facilitate collaboration and communication inside organizations.

While I'm sure those panels had their thrilling moments, the award for "most adept crowd control" has to go to Janice Fraser. Her talk "A Whole New Internet?" sparked a very lively conversation about the implications of open source software devleopment practices, distributed content production, open APIs and Ajaxified user interfaces on web-based businesses. The group didn't come to any conclusions, but the debate was certainly worth the price of admission. I haven't had that much fun at a conference in a long time...