I made it to the Triangle Bloggers Conference today, and had a great time. The proceedings were interesting (although I couldn’t get called on when I wanted to make an incredibly salient point about the fixation on media criticism among bloggers), and I got to meet a bunch of new people and see a few people I hadn’t seen in awhile. I finally got to meet Dave Winer, whose work on Scripting News was the inspiration for this Web site, way back when, and I got to thank him for motivating me to do something that has become a huge, permanent fixture in my life. I also got to thank Eric Muller and thank him for adding his powerful criticisms of Michelle Malkin’s arguments in favor of internment and Thomas Woods’ faux history to the body of human knowledge.

I didn’t get to personally thank Anton Zuiker or Paul Jones for organizing the conference, so I’ll mention them here. The directions were great, the conference began and ended on time, and the discussions were stimulating.

There was a lot of talk at the conference about regional weblogging, which was interesting to me, even if it wasn’t directly up my alley. Heck, it was years before even mentioned where I lived at rc3.org, so needless to say, I’m not really focused on local issues. At the end of the day, I kind of felt ashamed of that.

I definitely felt my passion for working on this site rekindled. I haven’t lost any of my passion for writing entries here, but there are a lot of other features that I could add to this site that I just haven’t gotten around to. For one thing, I was one of three people out of a few dozen who does not have a comment facility at all, so I’m definitely thinking about adding one. I have my own ideas about how to do it so that I can avoid spam and build a community of readers. We’ll see what happens.

I think the quote of the conference came after someone said that comments are binary, either enabled or disabled. Dan Gillmor said that they’re binary in the sense of being crappy or not. If I do come up with a commenting system here, you won’t have to worry about reading crappy comments.