Sunday, October 5, 2003

Dean's listing

Today is the "open" day at BloggerCon, and lots of new people are showing up. The sessions are split between five different rooms. I just walked into Jon Udell's Aggregator session and found Dean Landsman sitting right inside the door. We're talking radioblogging with Bob Doyle of CMS Review. Bob is doing the live webcast from the event.

Now I'm over at the politics room.

Moderator Jeff Jarvis is talking about how one guy educated folks about how to set up blogs and getting farsi to work on blogs — and now there are 20,000 blogs in Iran.

On his blog Jeff said Kevin Marks, who has said the smartest things abstracting this phenom at Bloggercon, said this morning that thanks to blogs, "I can read people's minds." Kevin, indeed, has been (and is) very smart. What he said yesterday about the "asymtotic section" of the power curve, based on his study of something-or-other in Technorati, was a mind blower.

Scott Heiferman, who created and runs Meetup, just quoted David Weinberger (who's in the room): Everyone's famous for fifteen people.

Unrelated: Technorati and Meetup are both Linux hacks.

Nice retrospective on yesterday by Esther Dyson.

The first magic of blogging, of course, is that everyone can self-publish. Everyone has a voice. The tools makes that possible. But the next magic, much harder to achieve, is that everyone wants to be listened to...

In the blogosphere, there’s no shortage of airtime, but there’s still a shortage of attention.

That is, there’s an attention divide: the candidates who get too much and give too little….. and the rest, who even en masse don’t have enough to give to satisfy all the world’s publishers, marketers and would-be stars, and who crave just a little for themselves.

Chris Lydon just asked me a question. Funny to have that happen in the middle of writing about this thing.

Now I'm at Eugene Volokh's session. Jeez, what a smart guy. Right now we're talking about different kinds of law bloggers. Eugene calls himeself a "profblogger," because he's a professor. Denise lists thirteen diffferent kinds of "blawgs" on hers.

Blogs are a useful public service that are hard to make money at. That's why it makes sense for academics to blog, he says.

We're talking about the demystifying of law, which is clearly contains a massively large and arcane body of source materials. Interesting.

"Americans grouse about lawyers and laws, but they sure like to make laws."

Now I'm at the Outlining session. Dean is asking Dave about having vendors hold tech support sessions. Dave responds with the rationale for keeping vendor agendas out of this conference. I like the rationale.

Vendor agendizing is de rigeur at most industry conferences. In fact this is, by intent and setting (we're at Harvard) a highly collegial and academic event. The circular tiered seating also helps. It's much better, and more inviting, for participation, and conversation. It's more bloglike, actually, because it helps move subjects forward.

Here's the outline we're working on.

Lot of talk about whether or not we should have a technical session. Dave wants one in which the techies agree not to talk over the heads of users. "We can't chase the users away."

Chris Lydon:

We're all lying in the orbit of immense intelligence.

Riffing off Emerson. More from Self-reliance:

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment... A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another...

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

AKMA (one of whose ancestors is Ralph himself): I am a firm believer in the socially constituted self.

Arriving from Heath Row

Heath Row (yes, that's his name) does live blogging better than anybody (except maybe Denise, who isn't here). Dig his BloggerCon coverage.

Humpty Net

We talk a lot about "breaking the Net." But what about the parts of the Net that never came together enough to get broken — that never were "the Net" in the first place, and still aren't, even though they employ the Internet Protocol? We'll bust Verisign for "breaking" DNS, but we'll continue to tolerate the complete and utter broken-from-the-start nature of instant messaging, which AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo continue to keep as broken as can be.

That's the point Michael Hall makes, perfectly, with Instant Mangling, in Pudding Time. He concludes,

My current IM outlay includes accounts on three different services (AOL, Yahoo!, and my own Jabber server). AOL's mostly for work contacts, Yahoo!'s for some friends, and Jabber's because if there's another soul who wants to use it, I won't be the one to discourage him.

I don't know what sort of consensus process drives the stereotypical online teen who communicates with all of her friends over IM. Perhaps simple adolescent pecking order hierarchies assert themselves, so if Heather, Heather, and Heather are all using Yahoo!, Veronica and Martha know they'd better as well. As Ed also noted in a chat we had on the matter, adults are harder to sway. He's got AOL and Yahoo friends who are intransigent because they're just set in their ways (and that's fair enough), so if he wants to stay in touch that way, he better have an account on both networks.

The latest irritation happened when Yahoo broke outside access to its network forcing client developers to scramble to figure out how to reconnect. It broke my favorite client for several days.

Personally, I think I've had it. I've got an e-mail address and it works reliably enough: IM is just enough of a hassle that I won't pin any part of my online identity on it.

Commenting Halley

Halley's session this morning is A Blogger in the Midst. She's in front of the class (this is a classroom, after all, at Harvard Law School, no less... I'd show you but I have no fucking camera), talking sex. And since Halley is a babe, well ... you're missing out.

Right now she's talking about her morning blog, which is entirely in UPPER CASE. I like this post:

DIAGNOSTIC COMPLETED

PASSION -- CHECK.
SEX -- CHECK.
ALIVE -- CHECK.
DEAD -- MAYBE SOON, BUT WHO CARES?
LOOP BACK TO PASSION.

Now she's running a terrific class on blogging in the workplace. Everybody's participating. She's provoking the class, teasing smart responses out of pretty much everybody in the room. It's a really good session.

(I'm writing this from way in the back of the room, by the window, where I can get a wi-fi connection to an open access point somewhere outside.)

LessBlogging

No moblogging today. I forgot the camera at the hotel, which sucks.

Another bill bites the air

Washington Post: Anti-Porn Bill Targets File Sharing.

Required listening

In his interview with Chris Lydon, NYU's Jay Rosen gives the best Big-J Journalistic critique of blogging that I've yet heard.

The terms of authority are changing in American journalism... we see a whole different way of establishing authority online... an overturning of the whole system of generating authority that we've seen in journalism for well over a hundred years... The profession of journalism arose on the idea that this was not something people could do for themselves...

Can't wait for the transcription.