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

Here it comes!

If you have a chance to get to BloggerCon III (Palo Alto, November 6, 2004), you shouldn’t miss it.

I went to BloggerCon I in Cambridge, MA. BloggerCon I, if you recall,
consisted of a $500 day followed by a free day. I planned to go to the
free day only, but at the last minute got comped for the money day
(thanks, Dave!) * The whole thing was awesome.

I went to BloggerCon II in Cambridge, MA.  The IRC opened it up to lots more people (and Hossein Derakshan was one of the occasion’s stars), but being there was absolutely worth it.

Go, BloggerCon!

* BTW, does anybody but me remember all the nasty things that were said
about Dave
Winer’s charging $500 for Day 1 of BloggerCon I? Funny how Dave managed
to create a free day for BloggerCon I, run a totally free BloggerCon
II, and plan a totally free BloggerCon III in the space of a
year–without attracting any apologies from the folks who turned purple
at that original $500 price tag…

Sigh–I’ve turned off comments because spam comments have started pouring in.

It took me ages to delete 20 comments. Damn it, Manila design gurus! It needs to be easier to delete unwanted comments.

Furthermore, Manila design gurus–when somebody leaves more than one comment
a minute that person is probably not posting something the world wants to read.

Furthermore, Manila design gurus–I want the option to delete a (spam) comment up
at the top of the edit message page–not down at the bottom where I
have to scroll down past much less useful options to find it.

Furthermore, Manila design gurus–after I’ve deleted a comment left by sxssxsxs or ddffeddf
(two recent “members” here), I’d love the option to delete even more
comments left by the same member. I appreciate the merciful nature
shown by giving me the option to undelete a just-deleted comment, how
about adding the “delete all his comments” option for the bloodthirsty
among us? How about adding that option when I block or delete a member?

That said, I still love Manila but I think all blog-softwares will have
to evolve to survive the challenges of the spammers. Maybe a reasonable
economic model would be for blogwares to be free and new plug-ins as needed to
cost $5 or so to those who want them?

Inspirational Sunday morning reading: Dooce’s bloglist of How to Annoy Me, going all the way back to May, 2001. A few favorites:

• 09 April 2003 Suggest that we shouldn’t let the dog sip the $39.00 Herradura tequila. You know he’s totally worth it.
• 13 March 2003 Doubt that my mother really is the Avon World Sales Leader. She will totally crush you.
• 08 August 2001Crank up the air conditioner in the office so high that every woman’s chest is its own PowerPoint presentation.

I needed a laugh this morning, so thanks to Liz Lawley aka mamamusings for her “roundup of blog posts that made me laugh this week. ” And in (surprisingly) related news, thanks to Joi Ito for pointing me to Loic LeMur stealth discoing Liz at SuperNova.

• Remember that funny radio show I did about blogging?
• The one where Tony Kahn added full sound-effects to my gladiator striptease by Russell Crowe?
• It finally aired on WGBH in Boston on Morning Stories, and if you have RealAudio, you can listen to it here.

Amazingly, I got paid to have this much fun!

Journalist role models come in many shapes–sleek Katherine Hepburn—sleazy Danny DeVito–and the ones I grew up with, who worked at the Daily Planet:

Young wannabe Jimmy Olsen eagerly eavesdrops, as…. a hot tip comes in for Lois Lane, star reporter, while… editor Perry White feels the weight of his responsibility, and… Clark Kent looks so conscientious. How could anyone guess he’s secretly Superman?

Are bloggers journalists? Real-life investigative reporter
Micah Sifry says
bloggers tend to be editors–Perry, not Lois. We look over the stories
from Lois and Jimmy and Clark, then decide which one of them should be
our front page lead.

From another galaxy (says Betsy), we have the Superman/Clark types–blogging journalists, like Micah or Dan Gillmor. May they always find editors eager to pay for their bandwidth–and a handy phone-booth for switching back and forth.

Micah says a bunch more good stuff, and Britt Blaser does some fine slice-and-dicing of Micah, so you should go over and read them.

No,
Micah and Britt don’t say anything about Perry White and Lois Lane and
phone booths–that’s just me. I’m the wise-cracking, gum-snapping
cartoonist with a tiny messy office down the hallway.

Maybe when I grow up, I’ll be Perry White.

1. Just as at BloggerCon I, a lot of great ideas came from bloggers I didn’t know.
• I’m promising myself to keep up with what Dick Bell, Henry
  Copeland, Judith Meskill, and Ethan Zuckerman are up to. 
• Also Hoder, who joined us from Toronto, via IRC.
• I’ve bookmarked the list of BloggerCon registrants, which links to blogs and feeds and an OPML file.
2. Integrating IRC chat in the discussion was a huge plus–for people
   inside the room and for those left outside. The IRC was free because
   the non-profit heroes at irc.freenode.net raise money to keep it that
   way. How about a few dollars in their collection box? 
3. IRC was great, but a lot of interaction happened in face to face. So “being there” really adds
   value.  Some amazing people I now know just a little:
• Dan Gillmor (whose book is going to be great!)
• Mary Hodder (when I saw her bar-blogging, I knew I was going to like her)
• Julie Leung (whose blog I enjoyed long before I met her)
• Lenn
  Pryor (who gave me some great advice about working “remote” from headquarters)
• Ross Rader (who let me write nonsense in his moblog)
• Jim Roberts aka JR (another blog friend and a super photographer)
• Jeff Sandquist (whose thoughts on the Echo Chamber, now blogged, were fascinating and a very good omen for Microsoft’s Channel 9.)
4. Let’s all spread the meme of Discussion-Not-Lecture!!!!!  Unconvinced?
• Picture a room with 100 conference-goers.
• What’s the chance
  that one of them could hold you spellbound with an hour lecture?
• What’s the chance that a dozen of them have 5 minutes worth of exciting info to share? 
5. If I ever want to organize something as ambitious as BloggerCon
   II–gee, that’s a scary thought. I hope I’d have people as wonderful as
   Lisa Williams and Jay McCarthy and Wendy Koslow and Susan Kaup (Sooz) to help me. (That’s reverse alphabetical order, just for a change.) Especially when I
   consider how huge a project it was for somebody as energetic and
   experienced and plugged-in as Dave Winer. 

Thanks, Dave, you created
something wonderful.
Again.

Amazingly, I’m not the only person still posting about the stuff I
learned at BloggerCon. Tara Liloia is doing a great job of aggregating
links. Not enough? Check out the Feedpaper for BloggerCon
at http://now.feedster.com/BloggerCon –that pulls from only about 50
feeds of people who attended–or get even more posts with a Feedster search for bloggercon.

1. Jeff Jarvis: “Hoder is
   attending in IRC because he couldn’t get a visa. Hoder is Hossein
   Derakhshan. whose work with Iranian bloggers is a roadmap for how we
   can change the world. There are 100,000 Iranian bloggers. Iranian (aka
   Persian aka Farsi) is the third-most used language on the Web. The Vice
   President of Iran has a blog. And this is the work of Hossein
   Derakshan. Hoder has that roadmap. What was done in Iran can be done in Iraq.”
2. Hoder [IRC, Toronto]:
   ” Iranian experience can be used almost anywhere. We should promote
   Unicode standard among English speaking programmers. Many tools do not
   work well with Unicode and this sucks.  We need tools that index
   popular posts based on languages. And then initiatives to get them
   translated. We can get English teaching institutes to promote blogs
   among their students.
3. Hoder [IRC, Toronto]: “We also need
   blog-to-email services such as Bloglet. Email is very crucial in
   developing countries and it beats censorship. Bloglet-like services
   should be expanded. They send out emails including favorite weblog
   posts everyday using their RSS feeds.”
4. Hoder [IRC, Toronto]:
   “Local celebrities should be dragged to weblogs! The Iranian
   vice-president is blogging. He loves blogs and posts everyday himself.
   His mobile photos
   are amazing. Photoblogs can be very helpful, especially for those who
   can’t write in English very well but are wealthy enough to get a
   digital camera and a big hosting space. We should promote them.”
5. Ethan Zuckerman:
   “Big media neglects poor nations. You can graph coverage versus a
   nation’s GEP. But the US blogosphere talks about the developing world
   even less than the mainstream media does. [For maps and analysis that
   back this up, see Ethan’s April 16 blogpost.]
6. Rebecca MacKinnon (discussion leader) “I don’t think we can assume that because
   blogs exist, that enables truth. You also enable extremism and closed
   goups agreeing about some minority group they hate. To what extent are
   bloggers breaking down barriers if people stick to reading blogs that
   validate their own world view?” (Jim Moore
   says, “That’s a problem of
   the world, and not just the blogosophere.” Fons Tuinstra [IRC,
   Shanghai] replies, “But every problem of the world is a problem of the
   blogosphere.”)
7. Fons Tuinstra [IRC, Shanghai]: “In China being anti-Japanese is
   very popular on the internet. It can become a very nationalistic
   sentiment, but not necessarily in the good direction (or what we think
   is good).”
8. Ejovi Nuwere: “If I go to Nigeria and get a couple of
   hundred people to start blogs, nothing will happen until a US blogger
   starts to point to one of them.”
9. Ethan Zuckerman: ” I’m dragging Joi Ito to Ghana. The other
   bridge I’d like to build is between blogs and talk radio. The
   discussion we hear in blogs, in this country, is going on in talk radio
   in Ghana.”
10. David Weinberger: “Is it good for the blogs?” – 21st century question…

Rebecca MacKinnon, who led the International blogging session, gives an organized summary, as do Jim Moore, Jeff Jarvis, Michael Feldman, and Hoder himself. Other good links: Rebecca MacKinnon’s public blogroll of international blogs, Hoder’s aggregation of Iranians blogging in English, and the IRC transcript.

Long before Tony Kahn was the funny guy on  Says You
(that’s a WGBH quiz show that keeps Boston-ites glued to 89.7 on
Saturday nights), he was my glamorous Harvard-freshman boyfriend. I
was thrilled to hear from him after a lapse of many years, and
learn that he wanted me to come on the air and talk about my blog on
Morning Stories.

Morning Stories runs Tuesday mornings at 7:50 a.m. I love listening to its
10-minute locally-colorful stories from real people’s lives.

If you tune in to hear my blogging story, you will discover:

• Blogs are epidemic in Cambridge, MA
• What happened when Russell Crowe fans discovered my blog
• Sound effects you need for a gladiator striptease
• Sound effects for Halley’s Boston Blogger Beach Party last spring
• How, thanks to that party, I got a job working at Feedster
• How, thanks to that party, I ended up in the hospital

Due to time limitations, Tony warned me, you may not hear my
excerpts from Boston bloggers other than Halley and Scott Johnson–not even my demo of the difference between Dave Winer and David Weinberger.

On the other hand, if you miss it (or if for some reason you don’t live
in Boston), the audio will be posted after the show on the Morning
Stories page.

During the last session, I played with my Mac to capture a bunch of screenshots from the video, some of which came out pretty well…  (Clicking that link gets you action shots of Andrew Grumet, Dave Winer, Dean Landsman, Jim Moore,
Jay Rosen, Jessica Baumgart, Joey deVilla and Shimon Rura in the same shot, and
John Perry Barlow.)

Sooz took a bunch of fine photos of the dinner and the conference.
The sliver of photo above (which shows Mary Hodder, Micah Sifry, me in
red vest looking away from the camera, my Berkman and IRC pal Jack
Hodgson, and Steve Garfield) is one of Sooz’s.

My favorite of all Sooz’s photos is her lovely evocative picture of Dean blogger Matt Gross.

JR (Duly Noded) took some great pictures of our Friday night dinner at Durgin Parks. If he ever gets tired of doing geeky software stuff, he could have a fine career taking flattering photos.

Tara Liloia has some fine photos as well as the absolute best collection I’ve seen of links to
Bloggercon blogging. (And thanks to Tara and others for plugging the
Feedster search for bloggercon.)

The multi-talented Werner Vogels also took some interesting shots, including one of me talking to the Kerry team’s Dick Bell.

Dan Bricklin has a generous pageful of high-quality crowd shots and other photos.
And, poetic justice at last, Dan shows up as a subject in one of my
favorite photos, taken by Amy Langfield with her Treo, of  David Weinberger and Dan Bricklin laughing together.

Discussion of blogging in presidential campaigns led by Dan Gillmor:

1. Zephyr Teachout, Dean blogger: “There were 3 audiences [for the
   Dean blogs]. One was the press. One was the activist audience. One was
   the audience of the campaign itself.”
2. Cameron Barrett: “The
   Clark campaign scratched the whole concept of the single blog–because
   that wasn’t going to scale. We wanted a community of blogs instead of 1
   blog with 100,000 comments. We wanted an architecture that would let
   people have structured conversations.”
3. Dick
   Bell, Kerry blogger: “We needed a front-end that could cope with an
   adversarial environment–we built it ourselves, because we had to deal
   with a lot of trolls.”
4. Jim Moore: “A lot of people are still not on the web. When
   the service employees union endorsed Dean, we thought we were going to
   get lots of email addresses. They have 1.1 million members, but only
   10,000 email addresses.”
5. Dave Winer: “In the end, it wasn’t Dean’s opponents that
   beat you, it was CNN that beat you. If the Dean campaign had had a
   rival network to get out their image of that speech, they might have
   won, and we all might have won.”
6.  Matt Gross, Dean blogger: “We pushed
   staffers to blog. When people pushed for Dean to blog, the reality was
   that if posts had been signed by Dean they would have been written by
   Matt Gross. Kate O’Connor’s posts on deanforamerica
   were like the Lifetime section of your newspaper. Zephyr’s were the
   organizing section. Matt Gross was the Walter Cronkite.” [laughter and
   applause]
7. Dick Bell: “Political consultants always tend to be
   looking in the rearview mirror. Whatever the big thing was last time,
   you see a whole lot more of that next time.”
8. Dave Winer: “None of you guys get it. We are not voters. We are
   taxpayers. We go to work. We die in those wars. We are not eyeballs. We
   are not at the bottom and you are not at the top. Example, Channel 9 at
   Microsoft. By giving engineers inside Microsoft a chance to be seen by
   people outside, it changes the engineers’ “world.”Blogs are changing the world.”
9. Oliver
   Willis: “Citizens want to be marketed to. What campaign blogs look
   like: ‘Here are some pictures, the other guy sucks, vote for me.’ “
10. Hossein Derakhshan (aka Hoder), Iranian blogger [in IRC]: “Blog is words and TV is images. As an
    outsider, I see that many people in America can more easily be driven
    by images than words, like most other people in the modern world. Dean
    didn’t have an image, he had lots of words. This is exactly why
    Al-Jazeera is really frightening: it’s using image against image.”

For more: Bryan Strawser, Jeff Sandquist, and Lenn Pryor all blogged this session, with intriguingly different points of view.