Lilia wonders how the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media will contrast with Blogtalk. If I had to guess from looking at the list of organizers and the program committee (a flyer was handed out at WWW '06) it'll be very North American, fairly academic (there's a decent number of industry types involved), and much more formal (probably a straightahead conference format). My guess is that there'll be plenty of iterations on text mining of weblogs, network analysis of blog communities, and dealing with the menace of splogs. Discussion on culture and practice of weblogs will probably be quite minor.
Not that there's anything wrong that!
Paper deadline is December 8th, 2006. Conference dates, March 27th - 28th. Location, Boulder, Colorado, USA.