James Robertson, a Product Manager for Cincom (a Smalltalk vendor) presented this session on blogging.  James has written his own blogging software and news aggregator (BottomFeeder) in Smalltalk.  He appeared to me to be the Robert Scoble of the Smalltalk blogsphere and did a great job of blogging the conference, which was helpful for me as I forgot my laptop power strip.

This was an incredibly frustrating session.   Instead of starting with audience-focussed questions like What is a blog? How do I read one? How can I create one? James started by talking about the XML structure of an RSS feed and the differences between versions before showing or mentioning a news aggregator or web-page view of a blog.  To me this was like explaining the concept of the world wide web by starting with HTML tags and character encoding. 

I think James had previously given this talk to a group of highly skilled developers, whereas at this session it was only me and Martin Fowler who had blogs or even used news aggregators out of the 20 or so people in the room.

Although James was generally critical of Microsoft ("Microsoft Technology is an oxymoron!") he spent a lot of time to talking about the positive things that Microsoft were doing with blogging.  He mentioned Scoble, Chris Brumme and had even found and enjoyed Roy Osherove's posts.  He mentioned that the Microsoft bloggers helped put a human face on the company, built good community relationships and produced outstanding technical content.

The part I enjoyed most was the reactions of several Sun employees in the group.  They were shocked that Microsoft would allow there developers to write whatever content they liked in their blogs.  "How can you be sure that the material is honest and not edited by corporate marekting?" they asked.  "You can find Microsoft employees questioning or criticising Microsoft products" I responded.   They were deeply sceptical and couldn't see how it could possibly work and seemed deeply sceptical. 

I did enjoy the session's focus on how RSS could be used for many different purposes other than simply blogs.  Martin mentioned how he used a hand-crafted RSS feed for his articles (which I hadn't discovered).