Blogtalk 2 continued apace this afternoon, with perhaps more presentations than we could reasonably process. That's why the collaborative note-taking that we started this morning was so useful - nobody could really cover all this ground alone.

In the afternoon we moved to a model of note-taking and then the tight-knit team of Suw and Stephanie put the notes up on the conference Wiki, where at some point others with notes can chip in and help clean up our account of the event. This meant I could satisfy my need for a civilised espresso (dopio) and croissant in a nice cafe before re-joining the fray. Neat.

And so, the sessions:

The afternoon keynote by Torill Mortensen covered questions of why people blog and the interesting issue of the way blogs can confuse oral and written communication modes, based on the idea that dialogue is hard-wired into our brains as a basic tool of interaction. Good ideas but hard to follow in 20 minutes.

The second panel covered issues of presence, immediacy and patterns of communication. Elmine's presentation (very good) covered some theoretical perspectives on this, looking at Habermas's ideas and notions of ideal speech conditions that weblogs can create and the perspectives of subjectivity, objectivity and intersubjectivity that are present in this form of discourse. George Por would have liked this....

In the third panel, man-machine hybrid JJ Merelo applied some network analysis to Spanish blogs and tried to develop some predictive tools from identifying the trajectory taken by new blogs entering this space. Brigitte Roemmer-Nossek presented a case study of using blogs for mentoring, and Mikel offered up some thoughts on geo-coding and locative information, using Worldkit, and talked about how he built our trusty collaborative blogtalk map of Vienna.

Finally, in the fourth panel, we heard some useful insights into the development of the German and Austrian blog worlds, and some thoughts on the level of churn in consumer weblog services in these markets.

A good day, but so much to follow. Just tracking other posts about the conference is keeping many of us up at night. Most of us are staying in a rather basic "academic" hotel but with nice broadband and our Rendezvous networking continues beyond bedtime - I just got a friendly nudge via Rendezvous chat to stop blogging and start structuring my own presentation for tomorrow morning and it is almost 01.30! We just can't stop connecting....