The table I’m sitting at is packed with great people. Phil Gomes, Evelyn Rodriguez, John Cass, Debbie Weil, Josh Hallett and Philip Young (who’s sitting next to me and writing his thoughts by hand! And in shorthand!).

Listening to Rebecca Blood giving the keynote presentation.

• She started blogging in 1999
• The sixth woman to start a blog
• Put hyku on your blog, she says (Josh, I don’t think she means this hyku)
• As soon as podcasting is as easy as sending email, there will be 28 million podcasters
• Everyone has a story to tell; everyone is passionate about something
• This is the age of participatory culture
• PR is not dead, it’s transforming
• Organizations should leverage the passion and enthusiasm of individuals to achieve the organization’s goals
• Follow customers to wherever they congregate on the web
• Connection [between people] is the most powerful thing the web offers
• A 24×7 online focus group
• All an organization needs to do to start, is listen

Some interesting Q&A. One good one – what to do about your content being ripped off (stolen) via your RSS feed. A hot topic which a number of bloggers have been posting about in recent weeks. A bit of discussion – everyone who commented agrees this is a big issue.

Everyone has nice little name tags, as you’d expect at a conference. So far, though, I’ve not needed to look at a name tag to see who someone is. Nearly everyone I’ve met so far who I hadn’t met before, I kind of knew them from their blogs – and their photos on their blogs. This is such a social medium!

Our name tags have little qtags. What are qtags? A mobile phone text advertising service. Well, that’s a very simple description. From the FAQ:

Basically, a qtag is an icon or “tag” seen or heard on any print, broadcast, outdoor or display advertising that can be used by consumers to learn more about a product.

Very interesting. I don’t think this works outside the US although I haven’t looked into it yet. FYI, my qtag here is nh86.

[Technorati: ncf2006, newcomm forum]