BoF to the Future

April 22, 2006 in Blogging, Taiwan

After the Taiwan bloggers annual meeting “BoF”(which means Birds of a feather) was over, several bloggers began to plan for the future while some others tried to review the flaws.

For example, BoF’s major player Ching Chiao thinks that BoF shall become a valuable brand and he already has a much bigger plan for next year’s meeting–to hold BoF in the gym at National Taiwan University!

At the same time, schee proposes for more monthly meetings instead of only annual gathering. Through the continuous issue searching and discussion, he believes that BoF will be more fruitful to all Taiwan bloggers.

However, Michael Turton, a non-Taiwanese Taiwan blogger who writes very well and insightful posts on his blog “The view from Taiwan”, said that he was a little bit disappointed while he found that he was not invited and even not told about the meeting. Michael is an diligent contributor of Global Voices Online, and after he read the post about BoF from Rebecca MacKinnon, the speaker of BoF and also the founder of Global Voices Online, he suddenly realize that there is a great divide between Taiwan bloggers and Taiwanese bloggers.

豬小草, an active blogger who also attended BoF, ponders about the cause of “the divide”, and thinks that we could and should do more than holding another and another meeting without reviewing the past and learning lessons through the process. He said in a comment that “maybe we could ask the teachers of Track 3(blog and media) to talk with Rebecca MacKinnon, or let the teachers of Track 2(blog and marketing) to discuss with Gen Kanai from the Mozilla.

There are other debates focusing on the use of IRC  during  the afternoon’s panel sessions. For example, Dearjohn from China Times, one of the sponsors of BoF, is asking:”If the outspoken talks showed on IRC a must or a bother?”  While some other bloggers think the IRC talk was a fantastic idea, there are some other bloggers think the design was somehow unrespectful to the panelists at the stage.  However, charlesc said that this kind of worry is in fact the same kind of worry of those mainstreamers toward bloggers. Fred also thinks that maybe after a few times of training, people will get used to it, and then we will also have a new paradigm–a truly bottom-up model of conversation.