I was not able to listen to either one of the talks mentioned at Rebecca MacKinnon's site here, but I was pleased to have talked to Isaac Mao earlier in the month for a story at The Asia Media Journal, which we did not run because of space issues.

However, I will be running the story in an edited and somewhat extended form on this blog later tonight, after all my research projects are done.

In terms of the Mao talk, I wanted to say I liked his idea that, as MacKinnon remembers it, "trusted networks are also very fast in spreading information because people believe information coming from people they trust. (Unlike government-controlled media which is generally not so trusted). Messages spread quickly through flat networks".

The idea of the flat network is something that is gaining currency even in corporate media structures and has been doing so for a long while.

Last night, I was invited to attend a blogger roundtable/dinner with local Hong Kong bloggers and some expatriate bloggers living in the SAR. Phil Gomes who, according to his one-page CV summary, is Edelman's senior counsel for online communications, had done the inviting because he wanted to communicate with some of the "influential" bloggers in the media space in Hong Kong on his first trip through Asia on a training mission.

What stuck out for me at this dinner was Gomes' intense regard for technology and for the kind of factual tidbits that make conversations enjoyable. The evening saw us randomly quoting totally insignificant scenes from Top Gun and wondering whether Kelly McGillis has ended her career after those torrid love scenes with Hollywood's shortest and hottest Scientologist.

Actually, I don't know if Tom Cruise is the shortest Scientologist in Hollywood, or even if he's actually that hot. But I do know a good quote when I hear one. And I can go on about them forever, if you like.

But no. No, sir, or madam. I am going to just type out a few points that I thought made the Hong Kong blogger dinner important:

1. The possibility that corporations will be able to one day use bloggers, or social networkers as feeding tubes, or reporters, giving information to corporations on a daily and constant basis, if not regularly. A few of the Edelman employees and I talked about the possibility of corporations turning to Bloomberg-like "blogger news wires", consisting of a few individuals who scour the Web, are tapped into certain industries and are accurate in their information. I would love to have a job like that. I would be able to transmit news, much like an intelligence agent would, to companies that need real-time and accurate information about very small and hyper-local industries.

I guess you would call that consulto-blogging or consocial-ting. There, I am trying to make up my own meme.

2. All of the Chinese bloggers sat on the left side of the table. All of the white bloggers sat on the right side of the table. Roland Soong, who writes East, South, West, North, referred in popular media as a "bridge blogger", sat, where? IN THE MIDDLE.

I thought that was ironic, but it was partly my doing because I had called him up and asked him to come. I had been sitting in the middle, and decided he should sit next to Gomes and the other Chinese bloggers. Just trying to be nice. :)

3. Lastly, I realized from this "roundtable" event that what bloggers want most is to be heard and to listen. The point of blogging, to me, was that there are things going on in our heads everyday that we do not have mainstream avenues through which we can express them. And because they are not "mainstream views", I am sure some of us wonder if we are unique in our thinking of those things, or if those thoughts themselves are abberant misfirings of our fervid imaginations.

When you put a bunch of those wonderers and bloggers in a room, though, it becomes clear that society is founded on this very premise: Wondering if someone else is thinking the same thing I do.

That's how love begins.

That's how civilizations rise.

 

rion
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