Yeah — but nothing was “beyond blogging” it was kind of blogging 101. I know for many people what they were hearing was revolutionary, but I was definitely hoping for at least blogging 201.

Oh — oops. Had to jet before the second panel got going, but here are my pictures from the first half of the morning. http://www.flickr.com/photos/wiredwitch/sets/72057594139329970/

I find that it’s often the case with blogging panels in this area- DC isn’t exactly a hotbed of early adoption, so any event on blogging spends quite a bit of time catching everyone up. But its valuable for the people getting caught up- with so much emphasis on advocacy messaging here, blogging is a really critical thing to understand.

I am pretty sure it is “Opening Remarks” and not “Opening Remakrs” — I think that Ed Keller is brilliant and gets it — I think the only people who didn’t get it were most of us. I will include myself in that because I was there, but in larger, most of us had slack jaws and glazed eyes.

Oh, and I think there are classes of influencers, too. The 1/10 is a naive number because although 1/10 people in a community might be influencers (or influencials), the ratio is more like 1/1000 and as high as 1/10000 in terms of someone who is indeed an opinion leader or indeed truly influencial.

That 1/10 guy (or girl) is a waste of resources, especially now when the truly influencial — the real opinion leadership — are able now to not touch merely those ten people they see every day (that 1/10 model is antiquated and obsolete) but the penetration and impact is much deeper and also permenant.

I would daresay that since there are 285,000 Americans, give or take, I would say that the truly important cultural influencers are probably under 5,000 people. Maybe 10,000 worldwide.

And most of them are in the databases and rolodexes of the traditional PR firms already.

Shel is right: the blogger communications citizen created media revolution is important and powerful. What will these truly emerging and emergent leaders of tomorrow (who might be young or old or women or men or of color or non-native or undocumented or whatever) look like?

And, will you be smart enough to have these folks in your database and rolodex?

Thanks Chris - I should not be trying to type while kneeling on the floor next to a control panel with 12 people over me - not to say I don’t commit my own share of typos wihtout the adverse conditions…