Mike Masnick of the TechDirt weblog says that PR people have caught on to blogs but that they still, for the most part, don’t get it.

It appears my WOW mini-session on RSS, RDF, syndication, and content dissemination is being rescheduled. The new timeslot is Thursday, September 11, from 2:30 – 3:00 pm.
My bad. My session on syndication was not rescheduled. It is still on Tuesday, September 9, from 2:00 to 3:00 pm.
What was rescheduled was a mini “couch” session in the WOW booth on blogging in general. That will be on Thursday, September 11, from 2:30 to 3:00 pm. Drop-ins welcome, so if you’re at the conference and free at that time, come by the WOW booth and say hi.

Next week I’ll be attending the Seybold 2003 conference in San Francisco, all week (from Monday, September 8 to Friday, September 12).
I’m teaching an intensive three-and-a-half hour tutorial seminar on weblogging on Friday (Designing and Building Weblogs), and I’m helping conduct a one-hour WOW session on syndication on Tuesday (Blogging and Beyond: Content Dissemination with RSS and RDF) from 2:00 to 3:00 pm.
Beyond that, I hope to sit in on some other sessions and do some schmoozing. I’ve set aside the whole week for networking. If other bloggers will be in town for the conference (or just happen to live in the Bay Area already), maybe we can put together a dinner one night or some more impromptu lunches during the week.
It was kind of nice taking a break from blogging over the Labor Day weekend! After some initial seizures and delirium tremens, and a strange numbness from the neck down, I looked up and saw the sky and realized there was a world outside of my computer screen. Must write a weblog entry about that sometime….

Ross Mayfield has posted a long, considered rebuttal to the Business 2.0 article on business blogging. In it, he cites Up2Speed‘s take on the same article.
The area of general agreement among all parties is that blogging-about-blogging (metablogging) is “inside baseball” and not indicative of the future of the form.
So why am I still doing this weblog?

David Weinberger questions an assertion in an (inaccessible) Business 2.0 article that top-tier webloggers write too much about themselves. He counters with the conversational nature of most blogging.
As for me… uh, who cares what I think?

Adrian Holovaty says, in a Zlog interview,

I believe in my heart that people should come up with their own publishing methods. Frankly, it’s boring to surf the blogosphere and see so many sites using the same, tired weblogging tools. The same basic templates, the same “post a comment” form, the same URL schemes…. It’s almost as if they’re all small parts of one huge site.

Tom Coates disagrees and defends the one-big-siteness of the blogosphere.
I think I understand Adrian’s point but even when he narrows it I can’t agree:

Of course, I have a deep appreciation for how these tools have enabled hundreds of thousands of non-Web-developers to broadcast their ramblings on the Internet with minimal effort. But I have a much, much deeper appreciation for people who have taken the time to write a system for themselves. And as far as I’m concerned, people who do Web development for a living yet don’t use a custom-built weblogging system shouldn’t be trusted.

I believe in my heart that people should come up with their own transportation methods. Frankly, it’s boring to drive around the Bay Area and see so many vehicles using the same, tired internal combustion engines. The same basic shape, the same “steering wheel” form, the same turn signals…. It’s almost as if they’re all small parts of one huge transportation system.
Of course, I have a deep appreciation for how these cars have enabled hundreds of thousands of non-engineers to travel with minimal effort. But I have a much, much deeper appreciation for people who have taken the time to build their own vehicles. And as far as I’m concerned, people who work on an assembly line in detroit yet don’t drive a custom-built automobile shouldn’t be trusted.