Topic
- Weblog Writer's Meeting on 2003/11/20
- Disclaimer
- These notes are a best effort.
- Blog your corrections and commentary.
- Email me for removal of crediting.
- Attendants
- DW: Dave Winer
- LM: Larry Mils
- JM: Jay McCarthy
- SN: Sun
- RH: Rick Heller
- JH: Jeffrey Henning
- RO: Ryan Overbey
- MF: Michael Feldman
- BS: Bob Stepno
- AG: Andrew Grumet
- S: Shimon
- B: Bill
- H: Homer
- A: Al
- Works at the MIT IS department.
- Not doing anything about MIT.
- Everything is underground at MIT.
- JB: Jessica
- JiM: Jim Moore
- LW: Lisa Williams
- Past Attendants
- SJ: Scott Johnson
- CL: Christopher Lydon
- SZ: Sooz
- Topics
- Salons?
- DW: Lots of people want to do it but it requires lots of will.
- A: I'm interested in doing something about this.
- DW: First we need to pick a day and make it work.
- RH: How about January - grab the students on break!
- DW: What days? Weekends are good for space at Harvard and people.
- A: Different audience on Weekend.
- DW: Trying to build a community of bloggers - doesn't matter about what or where they are from.
- MF: Maybe have the salon the Friday before and then a mini-conference the next day.
- DW: There's not much to plan, or opportunity to.
- B: Blogs are Everywhere
- B: I went to BloggerCon and then a week later at a class reunion had two people who mentioned blogs.
- DW: Maybe we could have a few events across space
- AG: BloggerCon was important whether you went or not
- Blogging Courses
- AG: Got one at MIT during IAP
- DW: I want to do one on the new Software
- Dave's Demo of Channel Z
- DW is talking or JM is describing what's going on unless otherwise mentioned
- General Notes
- Don't find bugs, they're obviously there.
- Nothing is there on purpose.
- Everything is in a heavy state of flux
- The Goal is to find a way to present a whole lot of information and links from many people.
- MF: Completely expands my point of view and ideas about data management
- Not a good way to do a group blog! But a way to organize
- Think about Sept. 11th and the Presidential Campaign
- It's a Moon Mission
- Invent a lot of stuff that doesn't necessary have to do with going to the Moon.
- Tech Side
- Built on Radio
- Input to system is XML-RPC
- Inputs and outputs RSS
- Has an aggregator built in
- But it's a different style
- Keying based of the category
- Writing in an outliner
- You write in an outliner, not a web based app.
- Trying to go further then blogging goes
- You've got a window of the day's current posts.
- Uses Radio's controls of HTML formating
- Select something and make a link out of it
- It will automatically generate permalinks for each entry
- Supports Hierarchy in the outline
- Does something different
- Very standard to Scripting News
- The idea is LOTS of links
- As opposed to the standard format
- Come up with a way to blog with many authors (maybe) and definitely many blogs
- H: You only see what's on today?
- Basically like MORE, but for web content
- Everything is an OPML piece.
- Generating RSS
- Multiple categories are attached to each item
- Each category is it's on RSS feed.
- Everywhere there is a place... there is a feed.
- Editing Categories
- Click 'Edit Categories'
- It's an outline! What do you know
- You're outlining the menu
- DW: Different from all other blogging tools, not one level and work slightly different. Remember the goal!
- JiM: Can I grab someone else's categories
- Assigning Categories to Posts
- This where things stop scrolling off and become persistent.
- Just right click and then choose the category.
- You can do this more than once.
- Homilies/Mottos accidentally becomes two categories.
- JiM: What happens if there are items in Cat1/ then you add Cat1/Cat2?
- Folders can have files and folders. No big deal.
- JiM: How to re-categorize posts?
- There's not a way to do it yet.
- There will be a way.
- Not creating information architecture... creating an environment to do it
- How do we match hierarchies and contain them?
- Often times we don't think about things the same
- Tradition that everybody blows everybody up
- In the protocol world, we pick the worst element names so we don't argue about them
- A: The goal is not to create the best taxonomy, but a way to figure out your own taxonomy.
- MF: Can you blog to multiple blogs? (Easily)
- Wait on this... it's like inclusion
- Point to someone else about a given topic
- /Boston/RedSox is delegated to you
- Biggest form of respect
- Make the linking and inclusion not a big jump
- Don't feel like you're leaving my world
- MF: Basic Philosophical Issues... Some people want a particular view associated with themselves
- Who cares what things look like?
- We care about content and function not form.
- There's nothing wrong with form... but sometimes I don't want it
- Put aside your ego for the sake of the reader
- Switching contexts is a bit confusing
- LM: This is a very social movement and change.
- Did we decide before hand what the Web will be like?
- LM: What I love about the Web is transparency of the origin
- We won't sacrifice it, we just don't know how to show it
- OPML accommodates the author and you'll be required to include it.
- How Categories Show Up
- When you save, nothing really visibly changes
- But you can look through the RSS feed or through the categories
- And get to the posts
- In the RSS
- In the directory
- There's another view of the category system - Blogroll
- Not browsing by hierarchy (Although it's represented)
- Shows when the item came from
- JM & MF: How do you find out what categories an Item is in?
- A: Many blogs have different ways of presenting
- DW: It's hard to find the best UI
- In the OPML, they are hierarchical
- In the RSS, they are rendered to '/'
- It's low tech and thus works where you may not realize it
- RH: I'd like to search for a category in search engine - rather than just the content of the post
- You shouldn't feel like you're navigating a tree when you're browsing
- Archives
- Browsing the Directory
- Created from the categories
- This is Dave's World, you can view other worlds.
- I hope people create other worlds that aren't weblogs
- Weblogs are current
- A slice of a moment in your time
- Directories are permanent
- How do you organize your whole world
- Different Views of the World
- Chronological
- Hierarchical
- Search
- Editing Preferences
- Much like Radio
- Very simple... everything you'd want to know
- Pictures
- Drag a picture to a Radio Upstream and BAM!
- MF: What caused it to right justify?
- Everyone in the Blogosphere: When can you get Channel Z?
- DW: Want to do it like a study group, never done a project like this... play with it and experiment
- Group Blogs as a Philosophical Debate
- DW: Everybody should just go write and supply many ways of viewing
- JM: Grab two people and they are collaborating whether they know it or not.
- DW: Create many Jay McCarthys
- Channel Z Ideas
- A: What about versioning? Do we want it?
- DW: Don't like it, it's rather anal-retentive - This is a flame war.
- A: Want to know if people change things behind our backs? Whether it's on my blog or theirs
- LM: Different type of community where you need automated reading
- DW on AG: Different type of reading... you don't read everything... make an impression
- DW: Doing something different is what's great about the web.
- JH: Do you want icons for categories and click the picture to step back one post in that category.
- DW: I asked Jon Udell if it will work, he doesn't think so - Who knows?
- DW: Even I'm getting tired of doing categorization
- MF: It's all about being easy
- JiM: We need a Technorati-like thing to see where the trees overlap
- A: Need more meta-data. Like RSS Namespaces
- AG: You're looking at the programming level
- A: I don't like the ideal level... how do we get there?
- JiM: Once we're in the meta-space, I want to know who's getting the most links on the nodes
- DW: Who's the authority?
- JiM: I have a critique of the Emergent Democracy thing... nothing emerges because there are no catalysts - This a catalyst!
- DW: If you own something that you're not updating, then someone can take it away from you by doing it better.
- JiM: Inherited page-rank
- DW: You can't get to the ideal state... don't try to get there, we want what's good enough
- A: You don't want to repeat of Atom vs RSS
- DW: This will happen, you can't stop it
- A: You need to think ahead of time about how people will use it... think ahead
- DW: What is it that you think needs to be looked at before we lose forward?
- A: I don't know. I don't have anything.
- DW: What should we learn from it?
- DW: Sam Ruby doesn't want to make software, he wants to make something that people use it. So he'll re-invent anything.
- A: I'm reacting to the "meta-data sucks" argument? I feel like you think you have the final solution
- DW: You're reading too much into
- DW: RSS is a big world, the people who matter are the big Media companies, the big blogs, etc. The people who are making noises are techies who were told they control the world - but they don't.
- A: Not talking about how to change RSS. Talking about how to make a process that is inclusive.
- DW: It's a free country. It isn't about liking or not liking people, that's not what it's about. I don't ask people what I can do.
- DW: We need to kill this argument.
- A: I think this is great. We should move forward.
- Not Discussed but Mentioned
- Next Week Topics
- Talk more about Salons
- Talk about inclusion in Channel Z
- AG's MT onto of Channel Z
- Notes