Blogging event at Ingenuity Festival? Hello?

Honestly, if I were a blogger from anywhere else I wouldn't spend a second thinking about coming to the Ingenuity Festival. We're talking about getting other people to come to CIF but we aren't talking about CIF itself. If we can't be bothered to blog about it then why should we expect someone to miss work, buy plane tickets, reserve a hotel room and disrupt their life for it.

Reviewing the notes from blogger meeting at Great Lakes Brewing Co. only reinforced my concern. Most of the ideas seem like we're trying too hard to be cool. Too hard to be interesting. A collaborative novel? Why? A big video screen with a stream of blog postings? Why? Not because we think it's compelling art but because, well, we're tagging along with an arts and technology festival so quick let's think of some techy art thing. These both feel awfully familiar, by the way. Are any of the people suggesting these ideas artists for the 355 non-Ingenuity days of the year? In either case, I think they should ask themselves if they're stretching for ideas to fill a percieved need for art or whether they actually feel a need to communicate something with art.

It's not clear to me that this blogging meeting ins't the only reason that any NEO bloggers are interested in CIF at all. They certainly don't seem intersted enough to talk about it.

Having just complained that all we're talking about is atracting people to something that we ourselves don't appear to be interested in, I guess I have to admit that this discussion seems to have disappeared, too. I follow BFD faithfully and I just scanned Gloria Ferris' blog. What's happening?

I have one more painful question.

Unless I'm mistaken, if this project is successful the highlight of the event won't be a technological wonder. It will be a discussion. What issues about blogging would you like to talk about? There are lots of people talking about blogging. This discussion is naturally being conducted in blogs but also in articles and books and in conferences. So, which blogs (or blogging scholars) do we read when we're looking for insightful discussion about blogging? If we aren't typing over one another suggesting answers to this question then I wonder if we're really the right group to be organizing a blogger conference in the first place.

Anyway, I've got a couple ideas. That is in addition to the obvious one of selecting a panel of experts. I'll put them in a subsequent post. Is anyone interested?

Tags: ingenuitycleveland, cleveland, blogging