Tuesday morning was kicked off be Movable Type founders Ben and Mena Trott with a keynote that used a story about Mena's own blogging to illustrate that they see blogs becoming more personal, more private and less concerned with audience than they have been in the past. The implicit assumption here is that they are thinking about the kinds of tools that would be required to achieve this.

The first main panel of the day saw Jane Perrone from Guardian Unlimited in the UK talk intelligently about their work with blogs and bloggers, which reminded us that the level of interest in blogs among the wider press and also to some extent the wider public remains quite low. She sees the future as including more theme-based weblogs and more integration with mainstream news stories, whilst operating as transparently as possible in terms of their norms and rules. They will be switching to a comment-enabled MT system soon, which should have a real impact on the way they do this.

Horst Prillinger, who has achieved God-like status among us wandering blogsheep bumbling our way around Vienna from meal to meal for his superb shepherding skills and knowledge of the local transport system, then presented about the relationship between journalism and blogging. He talked about the not-entirely-serious nature of most blogs and the gossipy content they sometimes contain, arguing that the blogosphere was more similar to a massive oral history project than a journalistic record.

Finally, Peter Praschl riffed about weblogs as collective jam sessions.

After the break, Martin Roell and I spoke about Weblogs as useful tools for online knowledge sharing. Martin's post about his talk is here, and some rather messy collaborative notes based on my slide texts plus some thoughts added in by others during the session. Stephanie very kindly organised this for me (thanks again!) and we will both post later about whether this was a good idea or not.