Tim Jarrett notes a funny.#

I talked briefly with Adam Curry on Saturday, just long enough to plug Esta's blog on Diaries.com—a site that Adam bankrolls. Adam mentioned he got in another new shipment of Xserves to keep the site afloat, and that Diaries is up to about 1000 blogs. I said, "So there are issues of scale?" He said, "Yeah, it doesn't scale at all."

Frank Field links to BloggerCon degrading article by Andrew Orlowski of the Register.#

I once occupied a large shared mixed apartment with a very elegant greyhound, which belonged to the landlord. It was an elusive animal, but once it knew it had an audience (and the audience only had to number one person), the dog would proceed into a very elaborate display where it licked its own testicles - quite theatrically - for two or three minutes. Then it turned to whoever was watching, with a 'how about that?' look.

I think I will dedicate the money I spent at BloggerCon to this flame, and I'll have to figure out some place to donate money for the next flame.

Stephen Forte shares the lessons he learned climbing Mt. Everest.#

Keep it Simple. When I was trekking in the Khumbu valley there were no cars, roads, phones, etc. I now fully appreciate the term "dirt poor." The day of the week doesn't matter much to these people. For the first time in my life I went days not knowing what day of the week it was or the day of the month. The folks in the valley are so poor, yet so happy. But you can see the look of joy on the kids faces living a hard but uncomplicated life. I noticed if you keep life as simple as possible, your life will be good.

Be thankful of what you have. It is impossible to come to Khumbu and not pick up this concept, Once again the people are poor, yet they make do and are very happy. They make the most of what they have, don't complain and live great lives. It may take 2 hours to cook the evening family meal, but it is a social event just preparing it and the family and friends bond while preparing and eating.

Its not about you. This is the most important lesson you can learn from coming here. There is a whole universe out there, don't spend too much time thinking about yourself and your needs. In the Khumbu there is an overwhelming sense of community (to the point that I still feel it here in New York). In the west we live in such a materialistic and selfish society, take it down a notch and see what you can give to the community at large.

Steve MacLaughlin writes about why he blogs.#

I guess this is the part where I explain how my new blog will solve world hunger, start a political revolution to topple governments, and introduce specifications for a better mouse trap. Alright, let's get real. The truth is that I finally figured out what I want to blog about: I am just going to write. No soliloquies on finding some deeper truth or crusades to elect someone president. I will leave that for some other folks.

Ron Davis comments on the enigma and mystique of Britney.#

Ahh Britney Spears. What to say. She is an enigma. On one hand she dresses and performs like a modern day Madonna. On the other hand she claims Christianity and held on to her virginity for a very long time. And even when she lost it, she lost it to a guy she thought she would be with forever.

I even like some of her music. I actually liked her cover of Satisfaction. I'm not really sure why. I own that album. Most of her music though it too teeny-bopper for me.

And now she is growing up. The image is losing some of its sugar and gaining a little sophistication. While Christian Agulara has decided to go with stripper as her grown up persona, Britney has more subtlety. Not a lot mind you. The picture at the right is still very sexual, just not in a "that'll be $20" kind of way.

Ryan Skadberg posts some intense news.#

LOTR

Special Extended Edition Screening Engagement

Tuesday, December 16

One-time-only marathon of both the Extended Edition prints followed by the first screenings of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Here's the theater list

Lisa Williams writes about what's great about America.#

We think that America is about its ideas -- the Constitution, democracy, etc., and it is. But one thing that America is about that you won't find in the Bill of Rights but still makes America distinctly American is the idea of class portability. What do I mean by that? Well, what I mean is that if your Mom and Dad were poor, that doesn't mean that you are fated to poverty. If you are a mason or a plumber, your children do have other options besides plumbing and masonry as professions. Once you split a populace into very rich and very poor, that intergenerational sense of possibility and hope for one's children becomes very dim indeed. The child of a poor person in Africa probably will be poor. In very large measure, that intergenerational stasis is what got so many people to flee Old Europe for the New World, the "land of opportunity."

Wendy didn't find any love at BloggerCon.#

I didn't really expect to find love; conferences are more about getting the lovin' than finding love, and I didn't do that either. Too tired, and too busy.

But really - the search remains on. The quest continues. I continually wonder, where am I not looking? Or is it that I'm not supposed to look? I haven't mused on the lookin' for love topic in awhile. I look to you, the many new people reading my blog after the weekend, as well as my dear regulars, to help me here. Matchmaker matchmaker make me a match? (I refuse to watch that new Alicia Silverstone show.) When I least expect it is a favorite answer to these questions; I should just go about my daily life and *kaboom* the love of my life.

I'm hitting myself about not talking to the beautiful girl I saw, but c'est la vie.

David Weinberger reminds us not to confuse the measurement with the thing being measured.#

A CEO insisted that we send out weekly press releases because our competitor did. We achieved that goal, but now the press thought both companies were both bozos.

An accounting deparment spent hundreds of dollars of its employees' time refusing to pay a salesperson's expenses for a meal at which he'd tipped 75% of a business meal's price. The salesperson had been talking with a prospect in a hotel coffee shop for 3 hours and they only had coffee. The tip was $5.00.

Joi Ito writes about the Edge Of Google.#

I was messing around surfing Google, trying to test something Dave Sifry told me about. The theory was that you actually couldn't get to all of the thousands of results Google says it has when you search for something. I searched for stuff and simply paged forward and found that in fact you did reach an end of search results rather quickly. The number varied so I tried it with "repeat search with omitted results." I found that you can get to exactly result number 999 and no results show after that. I felt like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show...

Joi Ito points to the David Barry column about the American Teleservices Association.#

In his column, David Barry of the Miami Herald published the phone number of the American Teleservices Association, a telemarketing company.

It turned out that a lot of you were eager to call up the telemarketing industry. Thousands and thousands of you called the ATA. I found out about this when I saw an article in a direct-marketing newspaper, the DM News, which quoted the executive director of the ATA, Tim Searcy. Here's an excerpt from the article:

"The ATA received no warning about the article from Barry or anyone connected with him," Searcy said. ". . . the Barry column has had harmful consequences for the ATA. An ATA staffer has spent about five hours a day for the past six days monitoring the voice mail and clearing out messages."

That's correct: The ATA received NO WARNING that it was going to get unwanted calls! Not only that, but these unwanted calls were an INCONVENIENCE for the ATA, and WASTED THE ATA'S TIME!

I just hope nobody interrupted the ATA's dinner.

Lance Arthur tells some great stories.#

Willy, who was insane, usually introduced the rest of us to the latest form of entertainment. Including Blind Shopping Cart Races.

Two people occupy the shopping carts. Doesn't matter which two people, or how much they weigh, or if they have an innate sense of balance. Actually, the more awkward and lopsided the body, the better the result. Two people take up position as drivers. That's four people. We had five, as you know. The fifth person is merely the observer, because without the fifth person, no one would know what was happening.

Because what you do next is blindfold all participants, drivers and passengers. Set up the carts at one end of the parking lot. The object is to get to the other end as fast as you possibly can.

Pain was dolled out in equal proportion to all participants. Otherwise, what was the point? As driver, you were running blindly across what appeared, at first glance, to be a wide-open expanse. But, curiously, blindfolded runners will often trip over their own feet, forcing them headlong into the cart, which then becomes a freewheeling projectile without benefit of brakes.

Mark Pilgrim asks a hard question,#

Your spouse, who hasn't had a cigarette or a drink in 12 years, comes home late one night with smoke in their hair and alcohol on their breath. What do you do?

Halley Suitt starts her new series, "How To Ruin A Perfectly Good Salesforce In 10 Easy Steps", starting with the Focus Group.#

Bryce launched into a mildly hysterical white board parody of the speech drawing out a diagram and labeling all the internet boxes "ZXTML" and pronouncing it with a phoney French accent.

"Since you lousy lazy-assed salesmen know nothing about Zee XTML, I shall demonstrate zee way zee French do it. Zee XTML is more fun zan a barrel of Maginot Lines! And zee Marketing guys here in zee headquarters know better than you silly salespeople who actually spend zee time visiting zee customers. We don't need to talk to zee customers! We do not need to talk to zee salesmen! What we need is a good FUC-US GROUP! "

"Bryce, cut it out, " Mary tried to stop him, but had no energy for it.

He went on "Yes, boys and girls, if there's any thing Marketing knows how to do to salespeople, it's how to FUC-US!"

Ted Leung writes about lisp-weeinie-ism.#

Python is attracting a lot of people who like Lisp. There's only one Python, and there's starting to be a body of interesting programs. There's momentum there, quite a bit more than there is around all the various Lisps. I think that the momentum around languages like Python and Ruby is going to open a window of opportunity for Lisp and Smalltalk. The question is will those communities be ready when the window opens? This is something to be thinking about now. I've been excited about Arc, but we're coming up on the third LL conference, and there's no Arc in sight. Seems like a cathedral being built out there somewhere. In the meantime, Arc has sucked up all the oxygen from Lisp and other Lisp like languages like Dylan. In order to be ready for the window to open, we need something to work with. I've been hoping that Arc would be the standard that everyone in the Lisp community could rally around, but I'm starting to wonder if that's a mistake. Paul Graham is giving a talk on Arc at the ILC later this month. Let's hope he actually shows us what Arc looks like so we can decided whether to pile on, or to go find something else. Perl, Python, and Ruby are demonstrating that the combination of non-mainstream language ideas and open source can gain buzz and adoption. Why can't Lisp?

Jessica posts some notes on the Weblogs and Medicine discussion.#

Audience is another factor. When doctors know that they are writing for doctors and other members of the medical community, they might have slightly more freedom and can write more specifically for their audience. If members of the general public read their blog, they might be able to help them with certain medical issues, but the bloggers have to be wary about giving medical advice over the Web. One blogger said he has a disclaimer on his site cautioning people about using material on his site.

Alex Halavais responds to Oliver Willis on the hype of the blogosphere.#

First, thank goodness someone is trying to keep people from having their heads explode. Blogs are neat, but they are not a panacea.

However, the Saturday he is talking about is the BloggerCon get-together, hosted at Harvard. The chances that the group assembled there represented the mainstream blogger was very near to zero. The group assembled was very much the elite of the community. As such, it is disappointing that Mr. Willis was the only black man in sight, but I don't know that this is representative of everyone who blogs. So the real question might be "why does the elite of the blogging world look so much like the elite in other social groupings?" In other words, I don't know that this is as much a condemnation of the blogosphere as a recognition that it tends to reinscribe an existing social order, perhaps with a sidecar of white-male geekiness thrown strangely toward the top.

Lisa Williams points to Shannon Okey and her BloggerCon review.#

Esther Dyson really amazed me with her comments during the panels. My general impression was that the women at the conference (less than 20% of the total -- see Lisa Williams' stats; for a funnier perspective, see Wendy Koslow) were more concerned with extending the technology of blogging and all it can do to a larger, non-"traditional" audience. (Can we use that word in this context yet?)

[...]

Not to say that the other 80% were un-concerned about expanding blog-reach... just more likely to veer off onto meandering paths about topics insignificant to the overall context of the conference. (L'affaire Plame, for example). I wasn't the only one thinking this: the Bloggercon IRC channel on Day 1 engaged in quite a bit of venting, at one point taking a vote on who should be the recipient of a Geraldo Rivera-style chair-throwing. On Day 2, the IRC channel was broadcast on a screen behind the panelists, with the disadvantage of significantly less snarky humor.

Betsy Devine's story about post BloggerCon is perfect.#

Once upon a time there were three friends who came home from BloggerCon.

The first friend posted, "That was so amazing--I can hardly wait to do more stuff with my weblog! Weblogs are going to promote collaboration and creativity in schools, in politics, in journalism, in business--and some of us will make barrels and barrels of money."

The second friend posted, "Who falls for that hype? I mean, hello, does anyone remember hearing all those same promises during the dot-com boom? No thanks, I'm not getting fooled again."

The third friend took a few minutes off from making funny pictures of people at BloggerCon to read her friend's blogs and was dismayed by the idea that she was supposed to believe one or the other, though she had to admit either would be more consistent than what she really believed--both sides at once.

Which is not to claim that the third point of view is better--Einstein knew that light is both a particle and a wave, and that didn't mean he could find the bathroom light switch.

Kevin Marks writes about his live video stream.#

Being able to do a live broadcast to the world on a whim with the contents of my backpack, an ethernet cable and a friendly server in Japan is something I would not have predicted when I started working for the BBC in 1988 - especially as I was also using the same computer to share wireless connectivity with half the room, to chat with people on 3 continents, and to write and debug code in the session.

Something I said a few times at Bloggercon is that video and audio are missing the essence of blogging. You can do live video, or you can use your computer to edit together a professional-looking video presentation, but the equivalent of the 'just-in-time' publishing that blogging provide is not there.

Dave Winer writes his opinion of the Dean blog that he mentioned during BloggerCon.#

Several times, in different contexts at BC, I said that I don't care for the Dean weblog. I explained, when I go there I don't find anything that interests me. I see stuff that probably makes sense to people who support Dean but I'm not one of those people. I think the guy's an actor, and he tweaks a certain kind of person's optimism, but not mine. And get this, even if he did, after what I've seen in politics in my 48 years, and especially this year, I'm not believing anyone without a lot of questions answered in a way that add up for me. I think Dean's supporters, many of whom I admire, are selling out too soon and for too little. Dean is taking their money and giving it to Viacom, Disney, General Electric, Clear Channel, Fox and Time-Warner, just like all the rest. That's who owns him, not you. Now tell me something new on that blog, something honest, or even interesting, and I'll say so. But so far, zzzzz.

Joi Ito thought it was fun,#

Bloggercon was fun. It was great meeting so many of the bloggers I read and finding them just as interesting in person as I could ever have hoped. I'm not going to make a list of people who I met because I'm going to forget to mention someone if I try. If this were Japan, I would have a business card from everyone I met and could easily make a list. I wonder why the business card thing hasn't become more ubiquitous in the West...

After day two, Michael Feldman tries to ponder how this whole idea of the ubiquity of weblogs. Every person with a weblog, every person with a voice. In this post, he wonders about the medical uses of weblogs.#

The standard care at most major hospitals dictates that there exists a "primary" physician for each case, but in reality this individual is rarely the professional most closely involved in the treatment, which often involves three or four medical specialties, physical and other therapies, and sometimes sessions with non-medical care givers. Given non-synchronous scheduling, over-scheduling and normal organizational confusion, this "team" rarely if ever actually meet, and communication is haphazard. This lack of communication is responsible for thousands of deaths every year in the US from inadvertent drug overdoses, drug antagonisms, treatment incompatibilities and just plain mix-ups in planning and carrying out a coherent treatment plan.

What a perfect position for a blog to fill! What if a hospital opened a sort of medical blog for each patient, and each doctor, nurse and therapist would make an entry each time they saw the patient. After all, what is the medical chart hanging on the bedpost but an old-fashioned blog, inefficiently organized and difficult to decipher?

Enoch responds to Michael Feldman.

[I]'ve blogged about how I do this via our EMR (Electronic Medical Record) in the outpatient arena, which parallels what could happen in the inpatient locale but hasn't yet. I did a series of blog entries about how this works: overview of a clinic visit, reviewing the record before i go in,making orders in the exam room, printed instructions to take home, and access to your own online record .

Halley is clear that the one thing she learned from every blogger was passion,#

Meeting all the bloggers at BloggerCon was truly a treat. It got me thinking about the most basic quality of blogs -- whether they be technical or journal-like or warblogs or whatever type, the best have a passion about their subject that is undeniable. And the bloggers themselves are a passionate bunch. Just an honor to be in the same room with them. Thanks Dave for making it happen.

Via Dave Winer is Oliver Willis "Deflating the Blog Bubble."#

Blogs are great. They're wonderful, and they will Change Things. But we need to step back outside of the blog-to-blog echo chamber and look at how important this movement really is.

What seems to have happened is that the fundraising success of the Howard Dean campaign has become the blog equivalent of the Netscape IPO. That public offering opened the floodgates to thousands of unprofitable companies and created the stock market bubble that was great for some, but probably set the web industry back a few years after people realized it was not The Answer to all their problems. That cycle appears to be happening with blogs now. During the BloggerCon conference it would be easy to go home thinking that any problem of note in the world could be remedied by a simple addition of "blog" to it.

Roland Tanglao responds, and supports.

Oliver nails it. Blogs are just a tool, like the telephone, and you can do wonderful things that will "change the world" (TM) with this tool. Unfortunately not too many people outside of bloggers know about blogs and it's not evenly distributed. We must continue to promote blogs to everybody. Only by getting everybody to use it like everybody uses email today will we profoundly and truly change the world.

Jeff Jarvis joins to the pool of people appreciating Dave Winer and the Berkman Center for making this possible.#

Dann Sheridan has some thoughts about what could be done better and what we should take out of this.#

Different tracks and specialty focuses are needed. Tracks for technology and business were blatantly missing and are key to attracting a larger audience.

The blogosphere needs to get beyond itself if blogging is going to have a future.

Mark Bernstein seems to have left feeling filled with a lot of energy from the weblog community.#

The weblog world is also a great believer that it will muddle through whatever the world throws at it, and Bloggercon really, deeply, assumes that if you just trust all the people, good things will happen. Lies spread quickly, but the truth, they say, catches up even faster. I worry about what the blogosphere would have been like, if they'd all had weblogs in 1938; Leni Riefenstahl would have made a great chief blogger, and Nikita Kruschev's war journal could have generated amazing flow. But this concern gets no traction; people figure it will work out, and that the new world will be better. Nor are people very worried about power law distributions of audience.

Same story with money. Bloggercon-ers agree that the weblog world has lousy economics now. People agree that the economy is more complex than it seems, and probably that "it's even worse than it looks". But there's lots of economic energy in the room. There's Esther! There's Amy Wohl! And, if Greenspun (who is not hurting for lunch money) wryly notes that, for all his traffic, his site earns about $400 in Google ads, everyone smiles and assumes that we'll work this out, too.

Seth Finkelstein compares the blogger world today to the Internet bubble world of yesterday.#

However, sessions are larded with so much hype that it's almost painful. I lived the blather of the Internet Revolution. And I found out, very personally, how mistaken it was. Now I get to see evangelists and sensation-mongers do it all over again.

It's fine and dandy to be a well-off professional discussing writing about your job, or maybe having writing as your job, and meeting with people like you. Very cool, very fun, great parties. Being in a bubble is delicious.

But this is not going to revolutionize politics, overthrow journalism as we know it, or change the world into cyber-utopia.

If you're David Weinberger then your bubble never burst.

Jenny Levine reflects on the best quotes to come out of the reception.#

Kevin Marks (I think he's the one that said this, correct me if I'm wrong): "The Bible invented permalinks."

Phil Wolff: "I Google my memory now."

Ryan Overbey is feeling fine about BloggerCon.#

Just came back from BloggerCon. If the American Academy of Religion and International Association of Buddhist Studies ran their conferences with wi-fi access and everyone logged in to IRC, it would definitely be an improvement. Nobody was falling asleep, even during the less interesting stuff, because they always had the option of having fun on IRC. It was brilliant.

Joi Ito got stealth-discoed, AccordionGuy played his accordion, and Christopher Lydon broke some tension at just the right moment by heralding the Sox victory. Lesson learned: serious conferences can be dynamic and fun, too.

Maiden Voyage has some closing thoughts.#

Christopher Lydon's elegant and practiced moderating and his notion that blogging is done out of love...."a soul and a heartbeat....that is the promise of the transformation."

The challenge I think is for this group of mostly very smart, mostly very white, mostly very male folks to pool their amazing wisdom and capacity for innovation and think seriously about issues of diversity and lack of access. To ignore these facts and sluff off remarks about lack of diversity as unimportant or an attempt to move away from the positive, diminishes us in our effort to truly effect some kind of transformation.

It was long, full, virtual, digital, analog, p2p, face to face, and more. While I would love to attend the free smaller workshops today, which span the spectrum from spirituality to how to blog, duty calls. Classes to plan, food to prepare, sins to atone for and a fast to begin.

Doug Simpson wonders about this huge free supply we have.#

Though this use of the medium may lack infrastructure barriers to entry, the very volume of "free" supply of writing (good and less good) does itself raise a barrier ... not to entry by the writers, but to selection and absorbtion by the readers. Does the overload of free goods in the commons raise a challenge for consumers? How does one find and distinquish "free crap" (as my 17-year old refers to the remaining unsold stuff dragged to the curb the morning after a tag sale) from the "public service information" goods that are of true value? Will a writer's need to develop reputation and inclusion in a circle of trusted sources impose a new barrier to entry?

When coming to conclusions on BloggerCon deejee comes back to what was expected initially and what path the experience had lead us to.#

I'm not sure what I specifically wanted to get out of BloggerCon. Overall, this was a very interesting conference, and it was an honor to sit among so many luminaries, to debate the impact that weblogs are having on societies around the globe. If anything, thought, I come away with more questions than answers, which isn't at all what I'd hoped for.

The more I delve into weblogs, the more I appreciate that weblogs are just the latest attempt to realize Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a read-write web. While other attempts have failed to take hold, the weblog meme appears to be a brush fire that will soon catch wind and spread wild. Weblogs differ from previous read-write efforts, say WebDAV, in that it defines a meme propagating workflow instead of a document-centric workflow. This, I believe will be key to understanding how to deploy weblogs in the enterprise, tangential to existing document-centric systems.

David Czarnecki thanks Dave Winer.#

This thank you goes out to Dave Winer. BloggerCon was a lot of fun. There were interesting people. There were interesting discussions. Food was good. Harvard (and Boston) was a great place to visit. It was great to put faces to names. Now, we all gotta figure out how to get some cheddy out 'dis biznatch because <puff-daddy>it's all about the benjamins</puff-daddy> baby.

Jeff Jarvis, Dan Gillmor, and Ed Cone led a discussion about Weblogs in Presidential Politics.#

David Weinberger posts his synopsis.#

Jeff Jarvis is doing the Phil Donahue thing surprisingly effectively as moderator. He asks: Has Dean's success been due to his blog? Dan Gillmor says it's three things: A candidate who has a message that appeals to people. Second, the campaign's being run by Joe Trippi, a guy who "totally understands techhnology." Third, they had the "amazing insight" inside the campaign that they shouldn't try to control the Web activity they'd engendered.

Jeff asks if we want the candidate to be led by blogs. Room sentiment seems to be that we don't want blogs to be an ad hoc polling system that guides the candidate's policy. Eric Folley, the DNC blogger guy, says that we get from candidates' blogs turns of phrases, ways of putting ideas, etc.

Dan says that we should have blogs that really drill in on issues, telling us what all the campaigns are saying.

Heath Row has amazing notes.#

In the immortal words of Joey deVilla... "WE HAVE ACHIEVED STEALTH DISCO."#

On the outside people like Alexander Payne are not too impressed by the premise of BloggerCon.#

Just as I was thinking that the people at BloggerCon seemed almost exclusively old and white, Jon points out that they're ugly, too. Harsh but true. And are those assessments just jealous, bitter lashings-out from two young-ish bloggers who float around the second or third strata of the blogosphere? Enh, maybe, but I could really give a rat's ass about the con's lame content.

Normally I'm not nearly so multiculti or pro-young people, but a lack of youth and minorities in a forum on blogging just seems to be totally missing the point. I'd love to see speakers extolling the empowering nature of blogging and online journalism, champion technologies of those without a voice in the "real world," to a bunch of upper-middle class white people. Oh, no, wait, no I wouldn't.

You have to start somewhere right Alex?

Alex gets backlash, but he handles it cool.

Werner Vogels writes about why he went and what he thinks will be a great weblog application.#

Bloggercon is not a technology conference, its focus is on the sociology of blogging.

I have been asked why I, as a hard-core technologist, am here. For me there is a big future of weblogs in the academic research world. The whole cycle of paper writing and reviewing is way too long. Reporting on research while you are doing it is is important. Reporting on success as well as failures. Papers always report success which I think has only limited research value. We need to hear more about process instead of results. It also allows us to validate the results and makes it easier to repeat the work. There is enormous value in that.

Philip Greenspun ponders the purpose of blogs and why we blog.#

Let's go back to the beginning. The commercial publishing world supports basically two lengths of manuscript: the five-page magazine article, serving as filler among the ads; the 200+-page book. If you had a 20-page idea and didn't have access to the handful of "long-copy" magazines in the U.S. (old New Yorker, Atlantic, etc.), you could cut it down to a meaningless 5-page magazine piece or add 180 pages of filler until it reached the minimize size to fit into the book distribution system (cf. any diet book or business bestseller).

Personal Web sites are interesting because they support 20- or 30-page essays beautifully, with search engines directing interested readers to those essays right at the moment that they're curious about that topic.

Blogs are interesting because they support the 2-paragraph idea. It is sort of ridiculous to create a separate .html file for every little aphorism or fleeting thought and it would be a shame to clog search engines with pages that have such a high machinery-to-content ratio. Blogs and the RSS format make it work. Everyone can write like Nietzsche or a Marcus Aurelius, even if few people ever come up with enough clever small ideas to fill a 200-page book.

Oliver Willis writes,#

The conference made me excited about blogging again.

Michael describes the general feel of day 2.#

I'm attending today (don't worry, you're not missing much), I never know how to speak to the pleasant and familiar looking strangers who walk by in the corridors between sessions. The whole fawning celebrity groupie tactic has never been my style and I can't imagine walking up to someone and saying, "Hey, you don't know me from a hole in the wall but I read your weblog."

The common reply is usually something like, "Oh, thanks. That's nice." followed by an awkward pause and a sudden fascination with the fire extinguisher across the room. "Wow, is that a class D?..."

Most of the time people make eye contact for an instant before their eyes dart down to my lapel where I'm wearing a name tag. I now have a slightly better idea what it is like to be a woman.

Just a Gwai Lo and Metafilter comment on BloggerCon.#

JAGL 1 & Reply:

sillygwailo said: "...it looks to me like the age structure is skewed towards late-twenties or early-thirties and older. I thought bloggers nowadays consisted predominantly of those people in their late-teens or early-to-mid-twenties..."

The "has a weblog" demographic and the "will go to a conference at Harvard about weblogs" demographic are clearly distinct.

JAGL 2:

Still, the chances of my forking over $500 would have increased if there was a seminar entitled something like "How the Kids Are Using Blogging As An Unintentionally Self-Imposed Cock Block".

Later, Just a Gwai Lo considers the diversity of BloggerCon, as he was informed of it by a friend. This echoes some of the concerns of the US-centric conversation.#

Before she went, the aforementioned friend of mine wondered who I would want to meet if I were attending, and my list was pretty long. [...] Yeah, relatively few young, non-white, female participants. All categories, individually were underrepresented. It turns out, though, that my friend is young, non-white and female, so she at least bumped up the cumulative average.

The Blog Herald tries, I think, to address the diversity issue in an interesting way...#

Earlier on BloggerCon was criticized as being for an elite few by a self appointed elite few, including by the Blog Herald. Whilst Dave Winer did an excellent job of attracting a diverse field of participants, one must wonder whether BloggerCon would be better known as AppleCon given the image above, and others appearing in the Blogosphere, of the conference. Given that less than 10% of the population uses Macs, and although the statistics is slightly higher for Bloggers, the near dominance of Mac Laptops at the conference is bizarre at best. Some may argue that more intelligent people use Macs, but as a Blog edited on at PC, The Blog Herald asks: "why so many Macs, or are we just stupid?"

John Daley comments on the massive multitasking of BloggerCon participants.#

All those people tapping away on their (mostly) Powerbooks as the real discussions bounced around the room. Video webcasts were feeding the images and words out to the net with accompaniment by bloggers in the room live-blogging detail, opinion and analysis, while they checked what other bloggers sitting a few rows away were saying about the same discussions. And don't forget blog comments and IRC feedback from within the room and around the world adding another take on the topics and creating completely new (usually) related discussions. Whew!

There seemed to be a general happy, loving feeling going around the conference about meeting people we were interested in and appreciated their work. What was nice was that this seemed to be a very circular process as this post by Jeff Jarvis illustrates.#

One of the neat thrills of coming to blog conferences in Boston is seeing Dan Bricklin. I'm in awe of the man. If you don't know why that's a big deal, that's a shame, and here's why: Bricklin really made this revolution happen. He co-created VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, and that is the single thing that made computers useful. Making things useful is, in my mind, a high art. Jobs and Woz made computers cool and accessible. Gates made them, depending on your perspective, rich or evil. But Bricklin made them useful. That is what put computers on every desk in the world. That is what allowed them to be connected, in turn. That is what led to the Internet, after all.

Aaron Schutzengel also feels this way, that human contact is very important for humans.#

Neal Stephenson, for all his wonders-of-technology prophesizing, has often pushed the theme that no machine will ever be able to convincingly reproduce the full emotional depth of a human. They might pass the Turing Test based on content, but when it comes to true subtlety of expression, anything but actual human contact comes up short.

Mark Bernstein emphasizes,#

Part of the beauty of weblogs is that they are without economic foundation, that they are the product of love and passion -- Scott Rosenberg

There was a mini-panel that was kind of a surprise, not being listed on the schedule was held after the second session. It put the focus on the institutional media via the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto and the New York Times' Len Apcar. (Note: I can't remember if this was before or after the Education panel, I've seen three different blogs who order two different ways, meh?)#

Transcript:#

Tim Jarrett (Partly)

Susan Mernit took some notes on this panel.#

At one point, the panelists make a point of what aspect of journalism they're considering weblogging...

Apcar says that the NYTimes would NOT cover any internal proprietary information, such as front page make-up or reporting decisions--internal issues would remain proprietary. Adds Apcar, "You need to remember that there has always been a feed system of local newspapers and trade journals feeding information, but now it is so around us, with 24-hour chat rooms, news, talk radio, etc. that you see the relentless power of the information."

Susan writes out something that she thinks no one is saying:

The odds that institutions like the NYTimes are going to anoint existing bloggers and accredit them by hiring them to write blogs is extremely slim, based on past precedent--the odds are MUCH higher that these organizations will be much more comfortable--and understandably so--when they are using authors who are both edited and who reflect the voice of the institution and are known and trusted by the institution. Prediction: NYTimes gets into blogging, but does it in a way different than what the blogging community might expect. There is GREAT opportunity for them to do wonderful things that fit their model and exploit this new fast and flexible form.

I think she's saying that weblogs have been successful and interesting because webloggers could play with the idea. We should give that same freedom to the mass media to flirt and play with the idea; maybe they'll make something better or greater than could have been achieved by grafting on weblogs as we know them.

Betsy Devine posts some quotes.#

Len Apcar: I don't think we would get into proprietary processes--how we make up the front page, for example, or how a tip becomes a story--on a day by day basis. Do we have visitors come into the page one meeting in New York? Yes. Do we talk about this stuff ad nauseam to journalism classes? Yes. But we're not ready to see it daily in a blog.

John Daley has a concise summary of a prevalent thought:#

The topic became media transparency. Jay Rosen of NYU says that media organizations will tend to open up and become less opaque.

BloggerCon. BloggerCon. Its name will written in the ADD entrenched history of the internet for months to come. It may not have been the first blogger's conference, but it might as well have been. It was the first to do it right.#

The strategy of trying to start the discussion before the conference seemed to succeed.#

For example, Susan Mernit was up Friday night pondering about a Blogger in Chief of a major newspaper.

On the cusp of the conference, Michael Feldman wondered what the atmosphere would be like.#

The Meat and Greet last night at the Hong Kong restaurant was high-energy and suitably serious. I hope we don't encounter a surfeit of seriousness during the conference, as Harvard people have a distinct tendency to take themselves SOOO seriously. However, there seem to be precious few Harvard people around, which seems like a Good Thing.

As people arrived in Beantown, the trouble making potential of the populace rose incredibly and irresistibly. The echoes of accordions shattered the solace of serene Boston.#

Look out, Beantown, Trouble Incorporated is about to hold a meeting in your city!

Dan Gillmor writes that it's some amazing company.#

In his comments, ocomik writes the following of the "real-time" textual back-channel of conferences. Something that was very heavily in use at BloggerCon 2003.

Personally for me I prefer to interact without participants while the presentation is "fresh". I'm just wondering if we will eventually get to a point where these "real-time" tools will overshadow the presenters and the message they are trying to convey.

While waiting for the conference to start, Betsy Devine considered the purpose of weblogs and the conference.#

Big room in Harvard law school. Picture on the wall of Rosa Parks integrating that bus.

Forgive me for this comparison, but--we aim at our own small upset of the balance of power here. In a world where web publishing is easy, fast, and widespread--in a world of weblogs--the big guys lose the power to decide which stories get spread around and which get buried.

PragDave has posted his latest Kata. Without saying it, he asks you to write a program to computer the transitive closure of a relation that has been notated in funky form.#

Scoble on money and happiness.#

I don't care because I don't judge my success over how many zeros are in my bank account.

I've met plenty of rich people who are not happy. Money doesn't buy you happiness.

On Thursday night, a bunch of geeks came out for dinner and we had a great time. It didn't matter if you were a millionaire (there was one there) or a guy with not all that much money. We all had a great time and heard some great stories and shared some ideas about technology that were invaluable.

Now, this rich guy's point is that he goes off and sits on a beach in Hawaii for a couple of months a year. That he gets to do whatever he wants. Well, I'd rather do something I love 12 months a year than only two.

Richard points to The Black Saint...#

Some unbridled sarcasm (but deserved sarcasm, since he's critiquing a Craigslist post) from The Black Saint: "Yes, I wish there were more men out there impressing gullible, simple-minded women by giving a few dollars to a recently released drug addict who will take that cash, score some smack, and promptly OD in the street. With any luck, you two will climax during his death throes."

Richard quotes some of his favourite parts of an article on a book by a man giving women advice on how to get married.#

This is a woman who dresses conservatively, who acts supportively and who makes a great first impression, which means no Jägermeister shots or table dancing on the first date. "Men size a woman up very early," Molloy says. "Sometimes they change their mind, but very seldom. If you're seen as a slut, you can't dig your way out with a crane."

Let's repeat that last sentence just so that it gets nice and emphasized: "If you're seen as a slut, you can't dig your way out with a crane."

But even after you've attracted a "marrying kind" of man, women still have to seal the deal. And that involves the classic "If you really love me, you'll marry me ultimatum," with the threat that you'll walk if he won't.

Even though I have no clue how they do it, since it's only happened to me once, I'm interested in how girls express their interest in a guy, or at least force them into a position in which they need to make a move. The only time I can remember this happening—there may have been others, and if so, my brain decided I'm on a need-to-know basis—is when watching a movie with a girl back in high school, and, sitting next to each other on the couch, she made it almost physically impossible for me to put her arm around me. Devious, but I gotta give credit where credit is due.

Richard links to Canada Isn't Utopia...#

I hate to blow the whistle on the seemingly utopian view of the Canadian lifestyle (letter, Sept. 29), but I must. Up here in Canada, it is true that we have life, liberty and happiness, but we are far from pursuing any of these.

On the contrary, in the pathetic attempt not to offend anyone, we fall into our liberal laws, like health care and gay marriage, no matter what the fiscal or moral cost may be.

Mark Bernstein writes about narrative.#

"There must be a story here," we tell ourselves. And there is -- but no sign tells us.

People find narrative. That's what they do. Relax, help if you can, go on about your work.

This matters to blogging. Weblogs are narratives that unfold over time. Everyone writes stories; that's why they call them stories. If you don't want to write tomorrow's fish wrap, you need to masters the narrative before it masters you.

Lilia Efimova is the master of the introductory hook.#

Hairdressers can do magic. They look at you, they find out something that you don't even know about yourself and they work to make it visible. It may be something you always wanted to be or something that you tried to hide from yourself, but after being in good hands for your haircut you always come to know something new about yourself.

Semi-related to BloggerCon. Christopher Lydon interviewed Jay Rosen. He's got a lot of interesting things to say.#

I just got a donated some bills to NetNewsWire as a vote for getting sorting of feeds in the software. It feels nice to give something back.#