A mirthful Buzz Bruggeman, founder of ActiveWords, tells the conference that he believes that in the continuing-education world, "podcasts are what's going to happen." Jory Des Jardins of BlogHer holds the mike. View Slideshow 
SAN FRANCISCO – When the blogosphere's leading lights gather for a two-day "unconference" on the art and science of blogs, you're sure to get one thing: lots of blog posts about blogging.
In fact, if you didn't make it onto the signup list for one of the freewheeling discussions at the fourth BloggerCon IV, you could watch a webcast or read all about it online, since participants scrambled Friday to post every salient detail as the event unfolded.
What the web's most influential voices talked about, mostly, was getting the tools of their trade into the hands of even more people.
Mark Glaser, of PBS' MediaShift, praised blogs' democratization of ideas, pointing out that bloggers can catapult concepts into the mainstream media spotlight at lightning speed.
"It's an easy way for one person or a group to share their ideas, supporting and linking to each other," Glaser said. "Even if they're a small blog with 10 readers, they can get linked to" by others and end up cited in The New York Times.
"It would be a lot harder," Glaser said, to get an Op-Ed published in the old gray lady.
Beyond simply sharing unfiltered opinions with the world, Glaser said he'd like to recruit an army of "citizen journalists" to make blogs even more useful.
"I want to do more of this open-source reporting," he said. "I'm interested in including my audience in the process of newsgathering, and by getting their opinions, (for instance) with polls."
Acknowledging that most people in large organizations aren't familiar with the things bloggers use every day, Doc Searls busily listed attendees' favorite blogging tools on his blog. Geek celeb Chris Pirillo mentioned his favorite recording device – a MicroTrack CompactFlash audio recorder from M-Audio – while others discussed tools like GarageBand, Audacity and Photobucket.
During Make magazine editor Phillip Torrone's session on tools, Scott Beale illustrated the ease and immediacy that can make blogs so powerful: He took photos from the front row, edited them in iPhoto and uploaded them to Fickr and his Laughing Squid blog, all while the session was still in progress.
Torrone, who pitched the idea of something along the lines of an informational How-To Tuesday for bloggers to offer tips about what tools they're using and why, said it's important to look at how nontechnical people are using the web. He pointed to sites like Etsy and Craftster.org as places where passionate – but less technical – communities share their knowledge.
Chris Heuer is also interested in sharing blogging technologies and improving media literacy, and his BrainJams conferences are about exactly that.
Blogging is "simple enough for anyone to learn how to do it, even our grandmothers, but we need to have the patience to show them how," he said.
Saturday's loosely structured BloggerCon sessions at CNET's San Francisco office will cover topics like – video blogging (from the organizers of Vloggercon) and how to make money with a blog.
BlogHer's Liz Henry said she was looking forward to an upcoming session about the emotional life of bloggers.
"When I read an article from somebody, I trust them more when they're not pretending to some sort of objectivity," she said.
Henry said she thinks the tell-all teenagers who have made MySpace such a popular – and controversial – site may not encounter as much trouble in the future from their disclosures as some predict.
"They're the ones who are (ultimately) going to be doing the hiring, too," said Henry, adding that by the time the teens hit the job market, "everybody will have said something dumb on the internet."
But despite the 21st-century tools that put awesome publishing power in the hands of total novices, the blogger's ultimate weapon is as old as the first storytellers who sat around prehistoric campfires.
"The key," said contrarian blogger Jeremy Pepper, "is to make sure that you're telling a story."
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