First off, Steve Heller started by asking how many people were bloggers, how many people did it often, how many commented on other blogs, and then finally how many people blogged under their own names. And did it more than three hours a day. We were probably one of about four who still had our hands up at that point, but it's nice to know that there are other bloggers in this company. Someone looks like he's taking photos for, probably, a blog.

The SVA MFA program is launching a graduate design blog next week, FYI.

Heller wants to focus on the sociology, psychology, and aesthetics of blogs... the loose network of communities. He's introducing the panelists now.

Jen Bekman: Unbeige 1.0, now Personism. Runs Jen Bekman Gallery
Michael Bierut: Pentagram, one of four principals of Design Observer
Jason Kottke: Running AIGA conference blog. His blog is pioneering, gets a ton of traffic.
Armin Vit: Native of Mexico, co-founder of Speak Up and Under Consideration.

NB: We're writing everything as quickly and accurately as we can but these aren't direct transcriptions -- we're missing a couple chunks here and there of things that either weren't that relevant or we couldn't type fast enough. We love you but not enough to break our little arthritic fingers. Suck it. Also makes us think about journalism and bloggery, which we'll be writing a long thinkpiece on later. For ourselves. On our BLOG. Whoa!

Heller asks everyone to tell the audience what their blog is.

Jen Bekman: I started Unbeige back in January and I decided to start doing it on my own at Personism. Observations about design, architecture, urban issues. It's very personal. It's about what I notice. That's the beauty of the blog to me... engaging in online discourse is really second nature. I have a network of people, it's always linking to each other.

Jason Kottke: I started kottke.org in 1998, in March. I had a website before that, personal publishing, wasn't a blog form. I needed content...so I started producing content so I could design a site to display the content online and then it started to be the focus and now it's almost completely the focus.
SH: What was the generation of the content?
JK: Mostly writing. I had to have words.
SH: Was it a diary?
JK: ...just little design experiments. I needed to write stuff down so I wouldn't forget it.

Armin: Speak Up was started in September of 2002. It was pretty much a reaction to the things that were online about design. A lot of online designers, the eye candy that people were doing and calling it design. Forty-five degree arrows and things exploding and everyone calling it design. There was a lack of traditional designers on the internet.

Michael Bierut: DesignObserver was founded by four people, each of whom I think had slightly different motivations. We wanted one about design, by designers... but the audience is not just designers, it can just be anyone. The appeal for me personally was I liked writing about design but I hated deadlines. The second thing is you finally file the thing with the deadline and then it's a two or three month wait. And then once it is published you have no evidence (or very little) that anyone's ever read it. As you know, in a blog, all three of those things are instantly obliterated.

SH: So it's the instant gratification?

MB: Yeah. And I learn a lot from reading others and our own, from the comments, etc. What's great about blogs is they don't have business plans or goals [um, Corporate?]

SH: Is that true? Jen? do you have a goal?

JB: I was really interested in engaging in online discourse again. The gratification, all of those things make it really addictive [um, Jen? Where can we get some of that?]

We're gonna take a hot second and listen... tbc....