A few days ago I wrote not one, but two posts about the Blog Business Summit scheduled for Chicago in September. One post was on this blog and the other was on the Business and Blogging site.
So, rightly or wrongly, I felt a bit of a goose today when I got the email today alerting me to the post announcing that the Chicago event had been cancelled, for want of takers.
There was more. It was not just that the Chicago event had been cancelled for lack of registrants, but the team behind these events had decided, it appeared, that the time for events on business blogging had passed. At least, that’s how I read the following:
… it’s clear from discussions with local marketers that blogging has normalized and is not the disruptive force it was back in 2004 when we launched the BBS.
As our pal Robert Scoble said in 2006, blogging is rapidly being subsumed under the larger heading of social media and online community/conversation building. For those serious marketers that “get it”, blogging is just one tool in their arsenal that needs to be mastered.
The post goes on to talk about the new Web Community Forum site that the BBS people have set up. The site is promoting an event in December, focused on the use of Facebook.
So is it really bye bye blogging for Blog Business Summits, understood as events about blogging? Not if you read the next day’s post, where Steve Broback writes:
We may have given the wrong impression yesterday that since Chicago didn’t work out this year, and we’re hosting a new Facebook event that we are done with business blogging.
Well, actually, Steve, yes, you did give that impression.
Not so, he says, and they “do anticipate producing more bbs conferences, if there is interest from the community”.
So that’s a definite maybe. Glad we cleared that up 
.
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When we decided to pull the plug on the September Blog Business Summit conference, we had two choices. We could announce the cancellation and not propose any new projects, or we could simultaneously announce the cancellation AND announce our new project. We opted for the latter because we prefer to stay positive.
In business, ventures don’t always work out the way you wanted them to. They key is to learn something, move decisively in the direction you think is best and not lose sight of the big picture.
The impression that Blog Business Summit is gone forever was an unindented, but not entirely unanticipated consequence of our desire to move forward.
It’s true that we haven’t set a date for the next BBS and future events may have some editorial differences from the past ones. But they will happen. Make no mistake about it.
Why? Because blogs are a huge community building tool for organizations. We think that the best is yet to come in the world of business blogging, and we intend to be there when it happens. I’ll be posting about that this afternoon on the Blog Business Summit blog.
Des: I can see why one could think we’re contradictory. I wrote a post that (I think) addresses the points you’ve brought up here.
Teresa
Thanks for your clarification. I’m sure BBS’s many friends in the business blogging space, including me, are looking forward to hearing more about your plans and events. And great to see Steve’s clarifying post. Every good wish for future (continuing) success!