Davos Newbies

Way back in 1999, before the 2000 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Dave Winer urged me to provide every participant in Davos with a blog. It was a great idea, but so far ahead of its time that I couldn’t come close to persuading my colleagues at the Forum to do it.

Well, ideas come around. The Forum has taken a laudatory step in the right direction for this year’s Annual Meeting. “Every participant of the Annual Meeting – ranging from business leaders to political leaders, heads of NGOs, religious leaders academics and journalists – will be asked to join the Forum blog. The World Economic Forum was the first international organization to set up a blog at the Annual Meeting in January 2005 and the upcoming Annual Meeting will see a significant development in the experiment. All of the more than 2,000 participants, including presidents and prime ministers, will be asked to provide at least one posting for the blog.”

I think that’s great. It would be even better if every participant had their own blog, rather than be aggregated on the one, central Forum blog. Still, huzzahs all round.