Jackie Danicki

We went to the Adam Smith Institute’s Dead Trees & Pyjama Kids blogging event last night. To be totally blunt, most of the people I hear talk about blogging don’t know much about it, which doesn’t stop them from thinking that they do. So I was pretty certain that the speaker last night, Danny Finkelstein from The Times, would say at least a few rotten things that would wind me up.

Amazingly, he didn’t. But he also didn’t say much that struck me as being of note, either. (Like the dork I am, I was the only one in the audience sitting there with a pen and notepad, poised to write down anything particularly erudite or stupid that was said.) All in all, a bit waffly. But I’m immersed in blogging and analysis of social media on a daily basis - it is how I bring home the bacon - so I would never have expected any of Finkelstein’s words to strike me like a lightning bolt of clarity and originality. All in all, the entire conversation struck me as very three years ago - and 2003 is exactly where much of the UK is in terms of blogging awareness and understanding, contrary to Jeff Jarvis’s impression from the other side of the pond. So the quality level of the discussion was about where I’d have expected it to be. (A speaker such as the Guardian’s Simon Waldman would have provided a much more advanced set of points, but Finkelstein is a longtime friend of the ASI and so was a natural choice for the event.)

I was pleased to see my blogging partner, the ASI’s Dr Madsen Pirie, Adriana (who’s always in New York doing her social media work for Johnson & Johnson these days, so we rarely get to see one another), and Clive Davis again after far too long, as well as a non-blogging, media analyst friend from a City financial firm who was compelled to come. And I quite liked what Tim Worstall had to say - or, rather, I liked the way he said what he had to say. Whereas I got the impression that Danny Finkelstein thought he was doing a bit of a mini-lecture and giving the assembled crowd some new viewpoints they’d never considered, Tim was very matter of fact and came across extremely well. Definitely the kind of guy you’d want to have a few beers with any day of the week.

Filed under: Life