Congratulations to Ton, Lilia and Sebastian for organising a good get-together of some interesting people today
After last night’s excellent dinner in a stylish restaurant in the Museum Quarter, we continued today with a good chat about whether current blog tools, techniques and etiquette can scale beyond the early adopters to reach a mass audience who don’t necessarily know each other in real life, or whether – as I fear – clinging to simple, open comments and trackback models might begin to drown out fragile conversations in a sea of spam noise
Another theme that people were interested to discuss was the transition from discussion and socialisation to action in blogs. The consensus seemed to be that open, discursive blogs are necessary precursors to action, but that other tools such as Wikis, P2P project tools and so on might be better ways of organising action once the will exists to undertake it
We had a lovely walk around Vienna in the sunshine and got to know each other better, which will make for better blogtalking over the next two days

• JJ had some interesting observations on the application of genetic algorithms to predictive modelling and football matches (he got the result right, but only Anu guessed the score!)
• Suw talked about her friendly chatbot and the growing pressure to ‘focus’ her personal blog on a theme rather than cover various subjects ranging from personal to professional, and was generally charming company throughout, despite blogging my abject fear of flying through turbulence on one of those little airbus toy planes that I hate so much.
• Martin Roell made me feel old, and we discussed his work with the German Trade Unions using blog-based approaches to knowledge sharing
• Barbara Ganley, Therese, Sebastian and several other practitioners talked knowledgeably about various aspects of blogs in education and communicative patterns that emerge in that environment.

The next two days will give us a chance to hear in more detail what other people and organisations are doing with blogs, and I expect a lot of discussion on the use of weblogs in knowledge sharing in particular, which is my main reason for coming here
There are topic exchange pages available for BlogWalk and BlogTalk, plus some photos from today and a live stream of the conference tomorrow.