Monday, June 10, 2002

Blogging talk at Inappropriate Tech. "Next up, the Blogging panel. Not the usual suspects: Neil McIntosh, the Deputy Editor of Guardian Online, Ben Hammersely, journo and RSS wonk, and Tom Coates, the blogger behind PlasticBag. Dave of NTK is moderating. Ben: I have four blogs, one for each personality. One of the blogs that I write is about syndication with RSS, which subject I'm writing about for O'Reilly. Regular blogs can be just wanking, but these collaborative blogs are very useful; like email lists with a URL. Using the power of RSS, I read about 20-30 blogs a day. But I don't nead to read more, because blogs like Boing Boing reads all the individual blogs and extract the good stuff. (I've just revealed that I read ~100 blogs and RSS feeds every day, to Dave's astonishment) Dave: The repitition is painful. People all link to the Daypop Top 40. Tom: Some people blog for fun, for self-promotion to pursue a special interest or to stay in touch with a bunch of friends. Dave: Aren't blogs desined to cut down repitition? Tom: No, my tool is designed to connect with with other bloggers with similar interests. You can get 200, 500 opinions on a given subject. (Aside: Ben is blogging live from the stage) Neil: The Guardian blog is only slightly collaborative -- there are only two of us. Ben: Dan Gillmor was talking about cameras built into 3G phones in Japan and said there would come an event where 4,000 people would take pictures with their phones and post them to the Web before the new media noticed. (Aside: the accoustics here suck and it's really hard to tell what the people on stage are saying, sorry for the spottiness of this entry) Dave: How is this different from the DTP revolution, when the Mac made it possible for every idiot to publish bad zines and allowed newspapers to fire all their people in favor of self-taught amateurs? Dave: What about aggregation? Ben: Aggregation is the future. RSS is the future. It's not all sites about kittens. Good blogs are addictive: Boing Boing, Kuro5hin, Metafilter. Tom: There's a need for an editor -- Slwhether it's Slashdot like automation or a human being. My fave: kottke.org. Neil: I like scripting.com because it winds me up every time I visit it." [via BoingBoing] 1:20:47 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Village shops in BlogSpace "They realised that beyond being a convenient facility the shop provided a focal point for the community. A convenient meeting place where villagers could catch up with each other and share gossip. They realised that without this focal point their community would be damaged in ways that were unacceptable to them." "On the web bulletin boards often serve this purpose although the very thing that makes them powerful (removing geography as a barrier to membership) is also, too often, their downfall as they become overcrowded and diluted. However in a democratised publishing environment it is inevitable that there is not going to be a single source on any topic. People are going to disagree, or just want to say it there way. That's as it should be." 8:29:37 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Community Discussion Newcomers to the blogging world are often very, very surprised—it's not just a world, it's a community in the truest sense of the word. It's warm, inviting and friendly, just like an old-fashioned real world community. Community is a word that is tossed around so often that I thought it had lost all meaning -- and my career includes a stint running portal technology for a set of 60+ internet sites with over 300,000 users in total. In my blogging experience, what I have found online is a level of community that hasn’t been seen since the late 1980s before the Internet became a piece of everyday life. A good analogy for the blogging community is the following: Blogging feels like a small rural town. The roads may not always be paved, sometimes the electricity goes on and off but the people are friendly and everyone is happy to help you. When you start blogging, you won't find the fit and finish of a commercial product like Microsoft Word (the road isn't paved), the technical support is, well, interesting (the electricity goes on and off) but what you will find is worth the journey. If you need help with your blog or something that you are writing, post it to your blog and you’ll probably be surprised at the level of help you are offered.  Detailed examples are here: http://www.fuzzygroup.com/go/?blogCommunityExamples 8:25:20 AM  Google It!  comment  []