I’ve drafted an unfinished post for the AppGap to pull together threads from Dave Weinberger’s talk at Community 2.0 with a recent post by Shawn Callahan about conversation. Before I finish that, I need to do a quick recap on the Enterprise 2.0 panel that I participated on today, “What blogging brings to business.” Last Friday, Jessica Lipnack, Bill Ives, Doug Cornelius, Cesar Brea and I had a great conversation about what blogging meant to our businesses (all but one of us is a consultant). We decided to recreate that conversation in front of the audience.

The audience turned out to be very large, filling the room. We had just got through two of the questions “Who do you blog for?” and “What value has come to you from blogging.” It occurred to me as we opened the session, which we had planned to make interactive, to apply one of the conversation principles I’ve been integrating lately. That is, that content is in the conversation. In a blog sense, that means that a successful blog is one that generates a full and rich conversation (embodied by a long set of comments). For a panel that has decided on no slides, no pontification, then the important part was to generate conversation.

Jessica facilitated the session wonderfully, and as we drew the audience in we were reminded that some had attended to hear about what blogging brought to business, and were not all that interested in what blogging meant to us talking heads. The conversation shifted wonderfully to enable a set of examples and questions about what it means to bring blogging into a company, so that others could take lessons back to their companies.

Many of the questions offered rich meat for future conversations (or threads, or comments, somewhere):

• When to blog in the light (public, external Web) and when to blog in the dark (inside the firewall)
• Who should be allowed to blog? Should blogging be a privilege afforded only those who have presumably demonstrated that they have worthwhile knowledge and insights to share?
• Has the action — blogs as a source of connectedness — shifted to microblogs (e.g. Twitter)?
• If we take away the word “blog,” and just talk about the need for communication, articulation, knowledge transfer in the company, what then becomes possible?

As the conversation unfolded, the panel becane co-participants, no longer the gurus at the head of the room, just people who are interested in what blogging brings (to business).