What is the meaning of data? Georg Holzer presents three helpful concepts for the struggle against “closed data”.

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Robert Harm talks about the potential of Open Data. Important point: it’s not enough when data is accessible “somehow” — open data requires structures and data models that make juggling those bits and bytes easy.

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Andrea Vascellari presents his thoughts on the key feature(s) for success in this digital era of ours.

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With almost 200 Bloggers discussing “The Future of Digital Media”, it’s a difficult to impossbile task to define “rules” or even a “bloggers’ codex” — this topic fueled a vivid discussion last year in Romania. During this year’s event in Vienna, we asked our visitors to tweet their key points. For the last two weeks elaborate algorithms, semantic technologies and social graph pivotting where used in the process of sorting and selecting the following ideas… okay, not really — we handpicked these thoughts, so let us know your opinion!

1.) The content in your social network is as interesting/relevant/useful as the people in your network.

2.) Blogging is a passion, not a profession. The business models of old media do not work with blogs. It’s about relevance of content. Not about relevance for the advertising industry.

3.) The new source for interesting stories is data. There will be new career opportunities for people creating stories out of data.

4.) Good information demands to be shared.

5.) Politics is too important to leave to the politicians. Social media are great tools for mobilizing people.

6.) Social media are not valuable in itself. You have to be clear about what you want to achieve. And this has to have an effect on the real world.

7.) Losers are people who never try. Social media is a great enabler of new ideas and of new business.

What will digital Europe look like in ten years? Michael explores a rather grim and dark path — is it already to late to stop the networks of control?

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When Marko talked about the role of blogging in Croatian politics, everybody was listening very carefully — definitely one of our highlights! Enjoy this talk — it’s not only very entertaining but also very inspiring — blog can gain an immense influence — Marko knows why:

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Who is talking to whom in which channel with what effect? We can never be sure, but Matthias does know for a fact which celebrities and politicians tweet their own updates. Enjoy his talk about Twitter diplomacy:

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The first WBF videos are online — look forward to excellent sound and video quality. Thx to apace, you’ve done / you’re doing a great job!

First video: Domen Savic talks about how the Slovenian Ministry of Justice got the journalists by the balls with the help of a little bird:

Domen Savic — Communication breakdown from World Blogging Forum Vienna 2010 on Vimeo.

To continue on the topic from the two previous posts, the blog is definitely not dead. It is changing and evolving, but I see few signs of its demise. Let me give you a short overview of the situation in Sweden. Back in early 2004, when I started blogging, the typical blogger was a man in his mid thirties who would blog about politics, media or tech stuff. Over the years the blogosphere grew rapidly and for the last few years it has grown into several different and somewhat overlapping sub-blogospheres with a complete dominance by young women.

Blogs written by teenage girls and women in their early twenties are attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors per week. In fact, the five most visited blogs in Sweden are all run by young women who blog about fashion and/or daily life experiences. Each one of them have more than a million visits per month and the largest has more than 4 million visits per month. Very few personal blogs in other larger European countries come even near that type of figures.

And the trend is clear, more people write and read blogs. According to the survey “Swedes and the internet” by IIS and WII, 6% of the population write a blog (or 8% of the online population over 12 years), which translates to 500,000 people.

Among young women, blogging has become an integral part of the web. As many as 93% of girls 12–15 years old read blogs.

With more options such as micro blogs and social networks, many of my blog readers have changed behaviour. When I previously could get several bloggers who commented on my content, today most of it is just shared via Facebook, retweeted on Twitter or collected in lists on blog tips on blogs. That’s not necessarily a bad thing since it generates a lot of visitors. So while many old-timers have decreased the frequency of blog posts (I have too),  the ones that are able to continue to produce interesting content, will continue to attract an audience.

But as I mentioned, the blogosphere is not homogenous. There is a big difference between for example blogs about politics, media and fashion. When looking at different lists, you see a distinct pattern. The most visited blogs are about fashion and/or every day life experiences. The most linked to blogs are all about politics. To generalize and summarize I would say that the main differences in behaviour between these two sections of the blogosphere are:

• Fashion/lifestyle/diaries: Readers seldom use RSS, so visits to the actual blog are very high. Large traffic and high volume of comments spreads the traffic across a large number of similar blogs who all benefit from the traffic/commenting spiral.
• Politics: Readers more inclined to link to articles in media and to each others so blogs rank high on blog portals that track which articles are most debated and which blogs are most linked to.

Blogs make a difference

In the latest election in September, one single blog post generated more than 600 blog links and extensive media coverage just a few weeks before the election. And one of the top female bloggers recently revealed she invoiced 20,000 euro for a single month of blog ad revenue. As long as we can see these iconic examples of blogs making a difference, blogs won’t go away. They have become too powerful to just disappear.

dChris and his team are working on the videos, the first 3 photo albums by Pilo Pichler are now online — enjoy!

WBF Session 1 by Pilo Pichler

WBF Session 1 by Pilo Pichler

137 Photos

WBF Session 2 by Pilo Pichler

WBF Session 2 by Pilo Pichler

150 Photos

WBF Party by Pilo Pichler

WBF Party by Pilo Pichler

62 Photos

Friday get-together by Ritchie

47 Photos

Conference pics by Ritchie

72 Photos

Sunday in Klosterneuburg by Ritchie

28 Photos

Important copyleft notice: All pics are courtesy of WBF 2010 — which means: feel free to use as many pictures as you like for your blog, your Twitter and any other social media services you’d like to post them on. There’s only one favor we ask of you: please give credit to the photographer!