BlogWalk

All I really wanted to do this morning was sleep, but still I managed to haul my ass out of bed in time for Horst and I to go along to BlogWalk3.0, a smallish meet up for bloggers interesting in talking about networking in the blogosphere and related topic.
It was fab.
Met a whole bunch of cool people, had some great conversations and even had some realisations about how and why I do what I do. For example, take that blogroll on the left there. The people that are starred are people I have met. Some of them I count to be good friends. Some were friends before I started blogging, some are newly acquired. Some are people that I met at a meet up and haven't spoken to since. The unstarred links are people whose blogs I read because they are interesting, online friends I've not met in person, or blogs that I don't read so much anymore but for which I don't want to lose the link. Bit of a mishmash, really.
We had a long conversation about qualifying blogrolls, and to what extent people cateogorize (or not!) their links, and what purpose blogrolls serve – information cache or indication of status? Not sure I can say what the conclusion was, or if there was one, but it made me rethink how I link to people and why I feel it is important for me to use those little stars.
The morning was spent mainly talking in small groups around this idea of blogs as networking tools, then we went and terrorised a local restaurant before walking again around Vienna during the afternoon. Had a whole bunch over excellent chats with people, about DRM, the experience of having your business collapse, the difference between Vienna and London, and a bunch of other stuff. Way cool.
Over on Ad++ Adalbert has posted some photos (including at least one of me) as well as a few more details of the day and a sound file of me spouting off about something. Unusually for me, not only did I talk in the small conversations, I also participated considerably in the large group discussion at the end of the day. I usually keep my mouth shut in those circumstances, and can even be really quite shy in large groups, but I felt very comfortable with the atmosphere within the group and happy to air my thoughts.
Congratulations to Ton, Lilia and Sebastian for organising such a great day, and thanks to everyone else for such enjoyable conversations. More BlogWalk stuff links over at the BlogWalk Topic Exhange page.