Yet another chat 'play' 

Damn, I'm so frustrated with stuff like GeeSee. There's something wrong with an economy that makes things more complicated than they have to be to raise them to the level of the fundable. To me, that's what makes a bubble -- products without real value. Just air. This cross-blog chat service can be offered for no money with existing open source tools.

You know, not everything needs to be a business. Lots of good things aren't -- on- and offline.

Paste this code in your blog's sidebar and you can have the same chat I have on my blog right now. Just edit the colors in the style tags to suit your taste. Add your own graphics if you want. The iframe part is the guts -- it will go with just that part of the code. You might want to let me know if you're using it so I can notify you if I ever have to take it down.

If you want to see how universal it is, you can even try it as a local html file. I used to think iframe couldn't be relied on -- until a couple years ago when I considered that AdSense uses it, and nobody has any problem sticking that code on their pages.

Maybe crossposting is an answer 

You know, on second thought, you can't expect that bloggers are not going to write on their own blogs about conferences they have attended. How about aggregating all posts about a particular conference across blogs, and try encourage the bloggers to encourage their readers to comment in the central location?

There are a lot of different ways you could automate it, but maybe not a single way that all blogging platforms would support. WordPress is so pervasive now, I suppose it would be smart to start with what it supports. Does it do category feeds?

Tags might work better, or even search feeds. Maybe I'll see what I could do with TagJag's OPML.

Later: After trying a few searches at TagJag, it looks like it doesn't pull all that many more relevant posts than Ice Rocket or BlogPulse alone, for this purpose. Haven't tried del.icio.us; truth is I don't always see what's going on there, but I haven't spent enough time soaking it up to even know if you can do (or make) anything with your results.

Further on after-the-fact discussion 

Talking to Anne Zelenka a little in e-mail this morning, she made a good point about my conundrum about discussion after a conference is over -- that it needs to be encouraged during the conference.

Right. I've heard it mentioned. I'm thinking especially of Dave saying after the Building Bridges (Elisa Camahort) session at BloggerCon that the mailing list would be available for further discussion. Clearly he wanted the conversation to continue, thought it was important.

Discussion didn't happen there. Not surprisingly, since the participants are bloggers, the conversation happened on their blogs. Same thing with BlogHer, which Anne mentioned, but it was all over the place, discoverable through tags and search feeds. Cross-blog talk is a form of conversation but a speechifying sort of conversation, exactly what unconferences are not supposed to encourage. There were blog comments, but again, scattered to the winds.

Doesn't it make more sense to try to gather the after-talk in a single location? I'm a fan of web-based discussion forums, though I know that's partly a religous thing. (For that matter, why not web chat for the live back channel, rather than IRC, what's that about? Surely chat that happens in a browser would be more appropriate for an event like the Office 2.0 conference.)

Also, based on 10 years of making web discussion spaces, I know that encouraging online discussion has to encompass more than a mention that you can talk about it if you want to. If you're committed to making it happen you have to do some work to get people over an initial hump to change their habits. You have to make a comfortable easy place for it to occur, which, these days, curse the spammers, pretty much must require registration to post, making that first barrier a little higher.

You also have to seed the discussion by asking the right questions, you should recruit influencers to post, and you have to assign yourself or somebody else to be a firm friendly host, like a bar owner who wants everybody to have a good time, but has to insist on certain rules.