The second edition of the European conference on weblogs is underway and, as you can imagine, it’s a total social software geekfest. This blog post by Oliver Wrede provides a good entry point. This is clearly not a group tied to one technology - there’s a cocktail of blogs, wiki, TopicExchange, IRC, and even the odd collaboratively annotated map of the host city (courtesy of Mikel Maron and Johannes Gruber).

Comparing what’s happening online now to what it was like just a year ago it seems that there’s been an evolution - not so much in terms of technological innovation but rather evidenced by the degree to which the tools have been culturally assimilated. People seem to be more fluent overall, and the general idea of collaborating with strangers in public doesn’t seem to generate as much awkwardness as it used to.

As Ton Zijlstra has just remarked to me on IRC, last year’s experiments become this year’s prerequisites. It’s fun when things happen quickly like this - though it should be kept in mind that we’re looking at a self-selected group of tech enthusiasts.