11 May 2003

Expertise Logs Starting weblogs at universities. Here's how you get weblogs started at a university like Harvard or Dartmouth. First, know that universities thrive on having their experts visible outside the university. Not just publishing in academic journals, which most alumni don't read, but being called in as experts on radio talk shows, esp NPR. That's how you reach into their wallets, show them why they should be proud of their alma mater. That gets the money flowing. So how do you get your professors on the radar, as acknowledged experts who can communicate to everyday people? With a weblog of course. And then realize that I need experts to turn to just like the radio guys do. So there's lots of value in staking out the still largely virgin territory of expertise flowing through weblogs. This was one of the key epiphanies at the dinner we had last night. But that's not all. Dartmouth is in a special position to flow information to and from the rest of the world about the New Hampshire primary. Student volunteers (aka interns) can train the people to use the software, and read what they write and find the nuggets for the rest of us. At least one big professional news organization, a TV network, has bitten, after my Crimson op-ed. They might trivialize the NH weblogs, maybe they won't -- but we can use a great university "on the ground" at ground zero of the US electoral process early next year. [Scripting News] 1:35:15 PM

20 February 2003

FUSION WESTERNISLES LAUNCH IN LINUX CENTRE, NESS We had a superb inaugural meeting of Fusion Western Isles in the Ness Linux Centre last night. Thanks to Malcolm Macsween, Donnie and Angela for organizing such a great event. And thanks too to Bruce Morrison and our guest speaker David Mackenzie for an absolutely spellbinding trawl through the key technology trends of our times. David is a recently retired director of IBM and he's on a immensely exciting mission to make the Highlands and Islands the new Austin.  Jim Hunter of HIE also talks of the potential of the new Seattle, mostly because the Pacific Northwest is as wet as the Atlantic Northwest! A mission overall that many of us have been pursuing for a wee while and one that now really looks like its got momentum. Technology and mountains! And beaches, cliffs, sailing. And a cinema hopefully!! And a wonderful pub on the UHI Lews Castle Collge campus. You can't have a University or a high-tech sector without a great hangout!! This of course applies to Inverness too - use that big river Ness more effectively people!! Y' need a 6th Street, a Temple Bar. BTW check out Richard Florida on what distinguishes the new technology growth areas worldwide: amentity, diversity and tolerance are absolutely key ... and you need a great university too. 12:19:01 PM

18 February 2003

Everest WiFi High hopes for Everest cybercafe. The world's highest internet facility is planned for Everest base camp, with proceeds going to help clean up after thousands of climbers. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition] 11:13:59 AM     Demo for Chris This is a test post 11:05:10 AM

17 February 2003

Weblogs Are Go Google Deal Ties Company to Weblogs. Google has bought Pyra Labs, the creator of software for publishing Weblogs, which is a form of hyperlinked online journal. By Amy Harmon. [New York Times: Technology] 9:13:26 AM

16 February 2003

Google buys Blogger - Weblogs Go Mainstream These times are starting to feel historic. Yesterday was the day the world turned. To collective intelligence ... "Live from the Blogosphere" instant-replay. (1) Right in the middle of the panel discussion, Ev gets a call on his cellphone and announces live for the first time in public -- in person, and by way of his blog -- that Google bought Blogger (specifically, Pyra Labs, the makers of Blogger). (2) Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. (3) Also for the first time publicly, during the panel discussion Ev and Noah Glass demo Audblog, a new service that allows you to "call in" a post to your weblog via mobile phone. Your speech, or the ambient sounds around you, are recorded and transmitted to your blog by way of your cellphone. Like magic, the demo is delightfully simple and actually works. (4) A couple hundred or so geeks, writers, and webloggers from near and far show up, wearing "Hello My Blog's Name is:" stickers, and blogging throughout the event via hiptops and WiFi-enabled laptops. Lots of bloggers who'd only known each others' work online met each other in person for the first time. This is extremely cool, and really fun to witness. The crowd overflows out of the packed gallery, into Chung King Road; attendees outside who are standing too far away from the gallery doors to hear the panelists clearly just whip out their laptops and crank up the live Shoutcast audio stream. This is insane. And somehow, it works. (4) Doc Searls, Heather Havrilesky, Mark Frauenfelder, Tony Pierce , Susannah Breslin, and Ev roll up their sleeves and deconstruct the blogosphere with the overflow crowd. They disagree on plenty, but agree that this is the year that weblogs will hit the mainstream. For-profit blogs and commercial blogging services start now. How this will transform what we know as egalitarian, anarchic, grassroots blogging culture -- and mainstream media -- remains to be seen. At the end of an historic day when millions of people worldwide took free speech to the streets, it seems particularly fitting to be exploring the power and impact of cheap, instant, easy online publishing. (5) Somehow, SOCALWUG's wireless LAN, the audio stream, and the video stream all work. Archived streams of audio and video will be available soon, and I'll post links here as soon as they are. (6) John Von Seggern from digitalcutuplounge.com delivers a smokin' Asian-fusion DJ set from laptops -- and debuts a new mash-up we'll post here later this week. (7) Everyone rolls down Chung King Road to a smoky, crusty, 61-year-old Chinatown dive bar for real-time streaming beer and live wireless conversation. Life is good. Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 12:39:24 PM

15 February 2003

People Love This Tool Groove 2.5. Team blogging Groove founder Ray Ozzie and his teams have always pretended to build application software. But what they have actually delivered are the operating systems of the future -- years ahead of schedule. The XML business Web is only now achieving the architecture that Lotus Notes laid down 15 years ago: message-oriented exchange of semi-structured documents. As today's operating systems catch up with that paradigm, Ozzie is tackling the next set of challenges in Groove: drop-dead simple secure collaboration, presence management, coordination of user and device identities, and ad-hoc group group formation. [Full story at InfoWorld.com.] The scenario shown in the screenshot uses Tim Knip's Groove interop tool -- a Radio UserLand add-in based on Groove Web Services -- to create a genuinely new experience of team blogging. Until now, team blogging has meant that a group of folks post to a common weblog. This setup does that too, but it also does something I find much more powerful -- it synchronizes the inputs to the collaborative process, as well as the output. In this case, the input is the combined set of RSS feeds subscribed to by the members of the shared space. Everyone knows that everyone else is seeing the same feeds. Discussion can grow around items in those feeds, and can take various forms: replies to the forum that receives the feeds, IM-style text chat, Roger Wilco-style voice chat. ... [Jon's Radio] 4:51:14 PM

© Copyright 2003 Neil Finlayson. Last update: 11/05/2003; 13:36:50.