Do we now have the G20 blogging cock-up?
They’ve made provision for 1,000 – just 50 have turned up?
Above is a clip from Tom Watson MP’s blog from the G20 conference centre in East London which raises more questions than it answers.
For apparently, according to Watson who for more than half a decade has been a pioneer in this area, provision has been made for many more bloggers than have actually turned up.
He writes: “I’m sitting in a vast airport hangar style media lounge on a long table marked with “Reserved for G20 Voice”. This is the first summit where bloggers form an integral part of the event. They will distribute their own news, analysis and ideas to their own networks. To be honest, no-one knows whether it will work. Will they start their own global conversation and just add to the acres of copy already written about this event.
There’s only one problem. I can’t see any fellow bloggers. In fact, there must be 1000 seats and network feeds in this room and so far only 50 seats are occupied…”
Given that there has been such a commitment you would have thought that attempts would have been made to promote the facility ahead of the event. Well in terms of page views PB is by far the busiest political blog in the UK yet the first I heard about this was while surfing this morning.
If there are indeed spaces for a 1,000 each with there own network feed then that must have cost a massive amount of money. So what’s happened? And if bloggers had been invited would we have gone anyway? I’m not sure I can see the value.
I might be wrong but this seems to expose, yet again, the government’s complete lack of understanding of the blogsphere. The idea of such a facility might have sounded good in the PR plans for the event but was the concept researched and did anybody ask whether it was required.
Tom Watson’s post was quite early and maybe others have joined him since then – but still it seems mighty odd. As I write at 9.40am nobody has commented on Watson’s post.
