Saturday, October 4, 2003

On the blampaign trail

Cam: We (of the Clark campaign) are embracing the best of and the brightest of the blogs out there. Matt Gross of the Dean blog seconded that.

Cam is thereby putting to rest the concerns I had last week about the Clark campaign.

More in the BloggerCon gangblog. Tim Jarrett is all over the proceedings. So is Betsy Devine.

Rollrocking

Jonathan at Hyperbolic Mollusc has ideas for fixing my blogroll (and others too, presumably, who also find theirs to be something of a posterior pain).

I think what I want to do is freeze the current list (sans dead links), in its roughly present state, put it somewhere else on the front page, and replace it with something dynamic, useful, relevant, or whatever. Maybe something like Mark Fletcher of Bloglines suggests here.

In any case, legacy blogrolls like mine were developed before the age of RSS and aggregators and other cool new stuff. And yep, we need to fix them.

Live from East Blogistan

It's a threefer: Dan Gillmor, Glenn Reynolds and Jeff Jarvis, blogging away at BloggerCon in Boston.

At least when the Net's up, which currently it is.

Dan Bricklin is shooting the event beautifully. (I'm sitting behind him, watching him sort his photos.)

Dan and Joi are the most peripatetic phobloggers I know.

[Later...] This is so weird... I'm live on the Net via a wi-fi link provided by Kevin Marks (who has one of the working Ethernet connections here), and watching his live webcast over the very same link. (Checks out elsewhere too.)

That's Kevin, his laptop and his iSight camera above, by the way. Also in the shot: Adam Curry, Jim Moore, Werner Vogels and Charlie Nesson.

Go ahead. Look it up.

Terrific journalism panel this morning. Don't even know where to begin, so I'll second what Ed said Dave said a long time ago: The Web is a writer's medium. The difference from everything that come before, however, is the ecology of the Web itself, where everybody can contribute, and plenty do. Which means we no longer have "audiences." We have readers.

Which makes me think the Web is a reader's medium. Pixels are supposed to suck for that; but print sucks at links, which are enormous aids to readers who want to follow writers to their sources. Which, methinks, makes the Web more like a huge library that only grows.

Think about the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, a base necessity to every library's Reference and Periodicals section. One original idea behind hypertext theory was, essentially, to have the Readers' Guide's purposes and functions built into the system. With the Web we have that, augmented more every day by kickass protocols and formats, and search services such as Google and Technorati.

As a result, readers can do more and more with, and about, what they read. It's actionable — more actionable than what you read in the paper on the train, see on the TV in your hotel room, or hear on the radio in your car.

Unless, of course, you've got a Web connection.

Brings me back to Craig Burton's observation that the Net is a whole new world — a virtual sphere on which all points are zero distance (or one link) apart through the ownerless and agenda-free middle — that we make ourselves.

We're not a world apart. We're a world together, whether we like it or not.

And it's a world that only gets bigger with every link.