Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Dave Winer:
Blog outlines have a double life. They’re opml when I’m editing them on my computer. When I save it, it turns into an html document with headings, etc. “Rules” (kind of like cascading stylesheets but invented earlier) tell how to use type size, indentation to show different outline levels.
opml, manila on the backend, radio Userland on the front end. You could do this with other softwares.

What about another BloggerCon? Should there be one? Where? (My comment: Andrew Orlowski might host the next one completely free, just to show how his model can work.)

The usual conference model is that you have a bunch of vendors talking down to users. The users end up not getting what they want, so they don’t pay anything for it, and the companies go out of business. How about having vendors let you talk with them 15 minutes to answer technical questions?

Goals for next BloggerCom:

• Steve Gillmor sent an IM to Doc to suggest, IM connectivity so we can all participate in discussions. >
• Henry Copeland, BlogAds: Could we plan the conference using something like a wiki?
  • Dave’s answer: Not a wiki. For example, someone would edit the price of a ticket down to where they thought it should be, and somebody else would throw in that we should accept their niece into Harvard. The problem with a wiki is you get a lot of spam, vandalism.
  • Kevin Marks: Wikis don’t have that much of problem with vandalism, because of the revert change feature.
  • Dave: Yes, but don’t you get flamed when you change someone’s post? I’m willing to try that on a thread, though.
• Blogs in business? Dave: We had two sessions on that today–Halley Suitt did one and Phil Wolff did another. The Cluetrain session yesterday is also business oriented.
• Broader sponsorship?
  • Dave said he didn’t want to sell potential sponsors what they wanted to buy–the opportunity to have their own speakers on panels, without notification that this was a paid advertisement.
  • I (Betsy) said we should have democratic input about how pure users want the next BloggerCon to be–do people want to pay $500 for a vendor-free conference, or would people rather pay $200 for a conference with vendors showing their stuff between session. In between being a virgin sitting on a cake of ice, and being a red-hot mama in bed with 5 guys, there’s a lot of space.
  • Dave said: For this first one, we wanted to be the virgin on the cake of ice.
• Phil Wolff: How about a Day 3 tech track, where developers can talk about technical issues? Dave: Only if you require that all developers go to Day 1 and Day 2. Only if regular users can also go to Day 3. And only if all discussion is held in terms the users can understand. Otherwise, I don’t want to do it.
• Tom Barrett: You’ve got to define your scope so you can set expectations.
• Frank Paynter: I’d like to see some different tracks–a user track, a software development track, a business weblog track.

Dave: I’d like to keep this planning discussion going after the meeting is over. We aren’t the only blogging conference that ever happens. There was a Jupiter conference in June that was really good. And now, here’s Joey the Accordion Guy.

OK, more later, I gotta try to remember the chorus to “Born to Be Wild”…

Discussion leader:
Harold Gilchrist, Audioblog-MobileBlogging News

Timeline of audioblogging content:
August, 2001: Jish creates an audioblog.
August, 2002: Adam Curry does some audioblogging.
July, 2003: Chris Lydon starts to interview members of the blogosphere.

Methods to audioblog:
Audblog, Voice Monkey, PhoneBlogger are phone-based tools. You speak your message into a phone, and they email it to you. Four-minute first post free, then ten a month for about $5.
Homebrewed systems: record audio using $60 SoundBlaster and a $20 microphone. Using a Java applet called Freedom. put audio on html page.

I (Betsy) asked, How does an audio “enclosure” in an RSS file work? Harold showed us onscreen: the RSS “enclosure” gives you a title, description, and the URL of the audio’s mp3. If you want to hear the audio, you click the link to go to the URL. My software saves audio in 3 formats: mp3, Ogg Vorbis, and wav.

Tool called “Enclosure Extractor” lets you look at your RSS fee and mark enclosures you want to download. Then it downloads just the enclosures you checked.

Chris Lydon: In advertising, the trick is to neutralize the eye, and to come in under the radar by using the human voice. We do interviews as mp3s, and if the wind is right the audio is excellent. The next step is to make audio interactive on the web. How?

Harold Gilchrist: It only takes 30 seconds to send an mp3 comment back to my server. If I had been going up to the panelists yesterday I could have been asking them questions and getting answers onto the web in essentially real time. The next step would be streaming audio.

Kevin Marks: In the audio-video world we have live stream, in real time, basically like IRC. We also have professionally produced stuff that takes a long time to create. What’s missing is the “just-in-time” audio, the equivalent of blogging. Kevin and Adam Curry are working an a gateway called “SyncPod” between RSS feeds and an iPod, so that you can automatically put stuff into an iTunes playlist to listen to on the iPod. This runs in the background while I’m doing other things, so I don’t have to do anything about it.

Bob Doyle: How Chris Lydon does interviews: see it online at http://media.skybuilders.com/lydon/studio.html. We’re building a tool as Skybuilders.com to put the mp3 directly up on his browser. We’re hoping to have a publishing process that lets you listen in your browser without all those popup ads you get from RealPlayers, Quicktime, and other “free” online players.

Bob Doyle: Also, check out Chris Lydon’s brand-new blogradio.org, launched on Friday. We also took the names blogvideo.org and blogaudio.org, and we look forward to working with people in this room and others to get this going.
Harold Gilchrist: If you look at school bandwidth use, they use bandwidth heavily for a block of hours, then basically shut down–just like a business. So you have all this unused bandwidth during the night, and you can use that time to download stuff from the net.

News Readers and Aggregators

Discussion leader: Jon Udell, InfoWorld
Agenda: Quick survey of representative sample of RSS readers, thoughts on what’s next, discussion.

Jon’s remarks: It all boils down to ease of use. A click per item is a non-starter, because that’s too many clicks. It’s partly to help you read and be informed, partly about collaboration. How do you turn it around, to look at something in your feed and use it as a basis of writing, send it back out. Tools talked about:

• Radio: It’s the one I (Jon) use. Lets you choose how many items to view on a page.
• NetNewsWireLite: the free version online, there’s also a pro version.
• Newsgator: Really cool the way it plugs into Outlook, the foldering mechanism. Unfortunately, the search function in Outlook sucks.
• SharpReader: Example of a three-pane aggregator. I don’t find the content panel that useful.

Audience comments:

• Skip Dodson, Ohio Edublogging: I use Radio a lot. I use it as a filing system. I can read down the list, file that stuff by publishing it to my weblog, and look at it later.
• Amy Wohl: I use NewsGator as a filing system.
• Jeremy Peterson, fakebanana.com: I use a Mac tool called Devonthink. It lets you do some automatic sorting of posts.
• Stephen Delaney: Waypath is an interesting tool. It takes the context of an article, searches its database, and returns other articles it thinks might be relevant.
• Betsy Devine: I want an aggregator that works like Tivo. I want it to give me two choices: Here are the pages you said you wanted–here is a much shorter list of pages I think you really want, based on the stories you have clicked in the past. [Jon: Or it could just let you sort the pages based on something like Tivo.]
• Dave Winer: There are still jobs being done by actual human beings. It’s our job as technologists to make it possible for them to do their work well.
• How can I see what other people are reading, even if they’re not writing anything?
• Jon Udell: Should the newsreader pay more attention to what I’m reading and keep track of it? And if so, how widely should it make that information available. My aggregator knows a lot about me, or at least it could.
• Amy Wohl: Don’t confuse expertise and popularity. It’s easy to find out what web pages are popular. If you want to know what experts in a field are reading, that’s more difficult to find out.
• Werner Vogels: These are very hot questions in computer research. The question of what experts are reading is called “reputation systems.”
• Jenny Levine, Shifted Librarian: I’m not concerned with keeping it private what I’m aggregating. That information makes my weblog more useful, and I think that’s a good trade-off for privacy.
• Jeremy Peterson: If you look at Napster, you can see that people are willing to make the tradeoff of privacy in return for more information.
• Chris Jackson: People are talking about newsreader software that makes some decisions for you–that’s the function of the human brain. I’m not sure that function is easy to put into software.
• Amy Wohl: There’s also an economic problem. The aggregator market is not strong enough to generate a lot of feature-rich software.
• Werner Vogels: At this point, it’s a bit crummy. Yes, you can see all those items on a single page–wonderful! But we need different metaphors for the user interface. It’s also going to run into problems as there are more and more blogs to scan, and also more and more newsreaders hitting them every half hour.
• Jeremy Peterson: One thing privacy advocates stress is that it’s more than know who is collecting your information–you care about what they’re doing with that information.
• Dean Landsmann: I use Bloglines, because it’s so simple. I see it not so much as an aggregator as an extra page of Favorites. But on my own blog–I found the rss feed only because some nice person at Userland showed me. You have an orange button saying “XML” and another one with XML and a coffee cup. The instructions for using it are unusable. This is a train wreck!
• Jon Udell: The hugest commercial outlet for newsreader is as an alternative to email. You post a change to your blog and it notifies you by email–how broken is that? Your newsreader is giving you a spam-free, subscription-based, opt-in information channel–use it! Think about getting an RSS update from your refrigerator.
• Dean Landsmann: It’s called SMS–I have a phone that gets that information.
• Amy Wohl: I don’t want to confuse reading my email, which I must act on, with reading my RSS feed, which I do when I have time to think about it. I don’t want my refrigerator’s failure to show up in the RSS feed.
• Werner Vogels: RSS works to fetch “state.” You go to your refrigerator and poll it to see what its state is. Notifying is something different.
• Scott Johnson: Yahoo groups is now RSS-able. There’s also a service in India that lets you get email as RSS. Of course, that is also spam-able.
• Carol Dotson: Mailbucket lets you get email as an RSS feed.

Discussion leader:
Discussion  Susan Mernit

Panelists: Kevin Marks, Epeus epigone
Frank Paynter, Sandhill Trek
Amy Wohl, Amy Wohl
Dan Bricklin, Trellix
Scott Brodeur, Mass-Live.com/weblogs
Scott Johnson, Feedster

• Kevin Marks: I realized that I can read thoughts–but only if people write them down first. Our thoughts are constrained by the way we write them down.
  
  Writing on IRC–tendency to flirtation, chatting–it’s easy for someone to destroy by shoulting abuse. The tendency for a WIki is consensus–debate doesn’t work because stark disgreement makes people go back and forth erasing what the other side wrote. Weblog–spontaneous, personal, but you are motivated to be more coherent that IRC because it’s a little bit permanent.
• Amy Wohl: There are a lot of things I want to do on my weblog–people will say, “Oh yes, you can do that, you just have to do some programming.” If, in order to use your product, the user has to refrain from doing something they want to do, or learn a new programming skill to make it work. For most activities, people do not want to learn a whole new skill.
• Dave Winer: I designed the software that you’re using. People really want it to run inside the web browser. There are huge limitations imposed by that.
• Amy Wohl: Blogs may well be the personal websites of the future. I am planning to take down my website.
• Dan Bricklin: Not a lot of money gets spend on browser software. People like the browser-based model because then they don’t have to install it on all their computers. I use a non-blogging tool to do my weblog and the same tool edits my photos.
• Stephen Delaney: Can you imagine doing long division in Roman numerals? The user interface makes a big difference to what you can do.
• Frank Paynter: I’m a blogging community member, but I’m not some high-tech hotshot. I argued with Kevin Marks a bit online, and friends warned me, “Kevin is a good guy, so you don’t want to offend him–and he’s a genius so you don’t want to argue with him.” [On the IRC feed, JoiIto adds “And Kevin’s got an upper class accent that’s hard to argue with.]
• Scott Brodeur: Would Moses be a blogger? Who knows? But if Moses came down off the mountain today with two stone tablets, a programmer would say, “Let’s throw that into a searchable database.” A designer would say, “Two words: Flash treatment.” I think weblogs are useful because they are low fi and easy to do.
• Rick Heller: My nephew, who just started college, is using his blog to keep in touch with high school friends–it takes the place of letters back and forth.
• Scott Johnson: There are two good ways to protect yourself from losing your posts when you try to post through a browser. The first is something I call the blogger’s condom: before you post, use Control-A, Control-C to select all your text and copy it to the clipboard. The other is to download a program called SquirrelMail, which–if you happen to shut down your browser accidentally–will ask if you want to save the text you were writing.
• Carol Dodson: Three out of eight people have already quit using our weblog because they lost stuff they posted. If there was one thing you could fix, could you please fix that? (Software: Manila)
• Someone in the back row, if you know his name please post a comment: Usability is the number one issue for getting teachers to use weblogs. Teachers need to be able to use blogs without having to know how to do technical support. (Software: Movable Type)
• Stephen West: How much would I pay for good blogging software? $100–provided it let me do free upgrades for a reasonable period, and didn’t require me to buy a totally new software every few years the way Microsoft does.
• Susan Mernit: This is obviously the beginning of a really conversation about what we need in blogware. If you want to add input in the next couple of days, send it to smernit-AT-aol-DOT-com

Project management is a pain–even if you’re lucky enough not to need Microsoft’s software for it.

I bet weblogs, on the model of the Dean weblog, could make big projects work better. How?

• Keep the blog aimed at your target but encourage much wider input
• Make sure suggestions get heard at the top, and heard fast.
• Don’t confuse criticism–which is often valid and always helpful–with obstructive “trollery”
• Keep your team psyched and headed for the target.

This all seems so obvious that I have to bet lots of other people know it.

Presidential politics and weblogs

Moderator: Dave Winer, Berkman Center for the Internet & Society, Harvard Law School.

Participants:
1. Matthew Gross, Howard Dean campaign.

2. Joe Jones, Bob Graham campaign.

3. Cameron Barrett, Wesley Clark campaign.

4. Eric Folley, Democratic National Committee blog Kicking Ass.

• Matthew Gross: I came to this thinking of a blogger as someone who had a weblog. Then we started the Dean weblog, and people writing in the comments were referring to themselves as bloggers. At first I thought, they’ve got the terminology wrong, and then I realized being a blogger is in how you define yourself.
• Dave Winer: Well, I know I was a blogger long before I started writing in reverse chronological order.
• Eric Folley: There are 18 people able to post on the weblog. To post a story, you circulate it to all 18, and if you get a majority of “yeses”, it gets posted. If Legal says no, the story is breaking the law, it doesn’t get posted. The only other rule is that iCommunications or Resources has to be one of the yeses–they’re our fact checkers. How many stories have been rejected? Zero.
• Cameron Barrett: I see my job as first blogger as a go-between connecting supporters who read the blog with the campaign itself. I read all the comments we get. We gathered comments after Clark’s first speech, what people said he could have done better, andwe sent that information to the speech writers.
• Joe Jones: The average Joe on the street doesn’t care about policy. Graham has the best policy of anyone and he’s at the bottom of the poll.
• Matt Gross: We collect all that information, the comments, whether it’s on policy or “Howard Dean needs to wear a looser collar.” Before weblogs, you could send a comment to a campaign–send an email, or write a letter–and the person who would decide what happened to that suggestion would be the lowest staffer, the one who opened the mail.
• Matt Gross: If you don’t engage in that online idea exchange, all you have is reverse chronological order press releases.
• Eric Folley: We studied carefully what Republicans did on the web in 2000. They didn’t use the web to inform voters, they used it to get people angry. They were sending out regular emails to supporters aimed at getting them angry with Democrats. Our audience is pretty much our base. The most effective audience we can go after is committed Democrats.
• Matt Gross: We don’t delete if a Kerry supporter comes over and argues. That’s democracy. One of the things our supporters did to discourage “trolls”–people who try to be disruptive, post obscenities–was to respond troll posts with $10 donations to Dean. This is not what a troll wants to see, so it does discourage them.
• Matt Gross: DeanForAmerica is not a candidate’s weblog, it’s a campaign weblog. One of the things about blogging is that it really has to be authentic. That’s why Howard Dean doesn’t blog often and he doesn’t blog much–because when he does, that’s really his writing. You know if you get a letter in the mail signed by Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton didn’t really write that letter. If you want a president who has a weblog, you’re going to get a weblog by a ghostwriter.
• Eric Folley: It’s up to these guys to compete in the primary, and it’s up to the DNC to raise as much money as we can. Once we have a nominee, it’s the job of the candidate to get out the message. The job of the party is to get people to the polls.
• Jim Moore: The Democratic model seems to be that government is like a nurturing mother. The Republican model is that government is like a stern father. My position is that I don’t want government to be my parent.
• Josh Marshall: I find myself here defending all the presidential candidates. I hear people asking why the candidates don’t take time to blog every day, to answer individual questions. I don’t think you have any idea how busy a presidential candidate is.
• Phil Wolff: There is a digital divide. I live in Oakland, California and when I go to the Meetups for Kerry or Dean, they’re all white. To reach out across the digital divide, you’re going to need money–traditional campaign tools–people reaching out into the community.*

I love my web-brothers and web-sisters, but face it we’re mostly white and even more mostly middle-class. I want my candidate (Dean, if you don’t know) to reach out to the other 98% of the electorate, to share his excitement and views as broadly as possible. To do that he needs money–and when I donated money over the web I sure didn’t mean for Dean to go plowing the money back into “the web.” I wanted my money to help Dean become president.

End rant, I’m beat, skipping the cocktail party to catch some zzz, then on to have dinner with Halley at Dali’s.

Cluetrain 2003

Moderator: Christopher Lydon, Berkman Center

Panelists:
Elizabeth Spiers, NY Magazine–formerly Gawker but now TheKicker
Doc Searls, Linux Journal
Jim Moore, Berkman Center
Adam Curry, United Resources of Jamby

• Adam Curry: When you talk about what people are doing with the web now, think about the way the telephone was used when it was new–to call ahead and tell you that a telegram is on the way.
• Elizabeth Spiers: People talk about “the web”, “the weblogs”–from my point of view, the web is incredibly granular.
• Adam Curry: I wake up in the morning and the latest Chris Lydon interview in on my iPod. I didn’t have to do anything, I didn’t have to understand how it got there. I call it a kind of reverse Tivo.
• Chris Lydon: I’ve drunk so much of Dave Winer’s weblog Koolaid now, I get dizzy.
• Jim Moore: What we need is not so much Smart Mobs as wise mobs. The collective wisdom of the second superpower gives us that possibility.
• Doc Searls: The only recourse people had in 1974 (in the movie Network) was to go to the window and yell, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”–but they were yelling in complete impotence.
• Esther Dyson: What happens when blogging becomes genuinely democratic? What happens when not just the people in this room are blogging, but people outside this room–all kinds of people?
• Elizabeth Spiers: As the blogosphere increases, you have the problems of figuring out who’s good. And there’s a technical problem of how you find good new sources.
• Kevin Marks: Bloggers tend to correct their mistakes a lot faster than newspapers do. It’s kind of an asymptotic approach to the truth.
• David Weinberger: Weblogs have finally killed the myth of objectivity. We’ve known for a long time that objectivity is impossible–it would be like the art of seeing the world as if nobody is looking at it. Truth is a property of the net itself.
• Ted Henderson: People have compared weblogs to the telephone. I don’t know many people, except maybe teenagers, who pick up the telephone and dial random numbers to get their message out.
• Henry Copeland, blogads.com: People here talk about how great it is for weblogs to kill the gatekeeper. A lot of people think the gatekeeper is liberal, and a lot of weblogs are conservative. So I don’t think you should
• Adam Curry: The discussion today has been very US-centric. We talk about big media as big US media–we talk about Iraq, and Washington politics. That’s not what blogs in Europe are talking about.
• Kevin Marks: The net is too big for us to see all of it. It’s like Caliban’s mirror, because you see what you’re loooking for. If you look for dark things you’ll see dark things.
• Kevin Marks: The net changes the power law of the media curve. If you look at relative popularity on the web, using something like Technorati, you get a power curve that goes all the way down gradually, to the bottom where you see pages that got just a single click. If you look at popularity in the “real” world–best-selling books, or top music–the power curve drops like a stone from a very high level. That’s because in order to get a book published, or a piece of music recorded, you have to convince somebody that you’re going to sell a million copies. You end up in a zero-sum game, where people pour enormous resources into being number one, because number two is only half as good. The promise of the net is that the power of all those little links can outweigh the power of the top ten.
• Jay Rosen: There are no masses, there are just ways of seeing people as masses.

• Len Apcar, NYT editor: Nick Kristof’s work for the New York Times is essentially like a weblog.
• 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.
• James Taranto, WSJ Opinion Journal editor: The Trent Lott story, which Josh Marshall was instrumental in bringing out, really got rolling in the weblogs. But I don’t think the story would have gone as far as it did unless the big media got the story and started digging into it.
• James Taranto: What happened in the Raines situation was not that bloggers like Andrew Sullivan forced the hand of the New York Times. It was that people inside the NYT started using Romanesko’s page as a bulletin board to post their frustrations.

• Dave Weinberger, JOHO: Is it the opinion of the panel that weblogging is a life skill, and everyone should learn it? Or is it like singing, that not everybody should do it in public?
• Pat Delaney, Homo Ludens: Yes, there is universal access to the internet for students who live in districts with good web connections and capable tech support. That shuts out many, many kids in urban districts.
• AKMA Disseminary: MIT’s open courseware is not a blog–but it’s a way of dismantling the institutional structure of education. For example, it breaks the structure that says you can only learn between September and June, you can only learn in a classroom watching a teacher.
• Britt Blaser: Blogging is new. I think we need to celebrate the advances rather than complaining that we aren’t there yet.
• Pat Delaney: I think there’s someplace where we can be strident–and that’s the question of equity. We can do it if people push for the commons to support it.
• Kevin Marks, Epeus Epigone: Blogging is not selective by race, it’s selective by electricity. Also, you can’t really blog if you haven’t mastered the basic skills of reading and writing.
• Pat Delaney: Blogging has worked well for my school, but we have an unusual situation. Usually, system admins, designers, and teachers do not like to talk to each other.