BloggerCon

Dave Winer's throwing a little party for bloggers. It's invite-only...and $500.

Winer pioneered easy-to-use weblog software. He claims to have the oldest continuously operating weblog, but I think the Blue's News gaming site beats him (Blue's archives from before July 1996 have been deleted, whereas Winer's got stuff from April 96. However, I think Blue had a Doom news site before it became a Quake site); he also has a penchant for defining "weblog" to exclude sites like Blue's News.

Dave comes from the more technical side of the blogosphere, concerned mostly about talking about how cool blogging is and writing software that does various stuff with XML. I think that explains quite a bit about this conference, like why it costs $500 and why there's no liberals speaking [Kevin Drum corrects me here: Josh Marshall is speaking) and for that matter, why most of people speaking are techies. Dave's out of tune with the political blogosphere, so Instapundit's basically all he knows. A quick glance at the Weblog Ecosystem would show there's more diversity than that -- and that the techies aren't as important as they used to be. So basically, you're going to pay $500 to hear Dave Winer's friends (Glenn Reynolds, Doc Searls, Adam Curry, and Jim Moore, for starters) tell you how cool blogging is.

My only question is, why hasn't Winer responded to any of this criticism? Is he just trying to save face, or is he really that out of touch with the non-technical bloggers?

[This post was adapted from a comment at Kevin's blog.]