There is no question that the O'Reilly Etech crowd is a blogging crowd. Just check out the conference Wiki and you'll see how many folks are blogging the day's events. Despite the blogger culture at the conference, I've heard more than my share of comments to the effect of, "if I have to hear another thing about blogging I'm going to kill myself." As much as blogging is a phenomenon that will have long-lasting social ramifications, I've heard a lot of conference attendees expressing the general frustration that blogging does not involve the kind of technical innovation about which they look forward to hearing at O'Reilly's conferences. It is possible that as folks like Dave Sifry continue to push the ways in which blogged content can be manipulated that very interesting follow-on technologies will emerge. But it appears that blogging is getting a disproportionate amount of air time at the Emerging Technologies Conference, given the nature of the technical innovation involved.