Month: October 2003

Glenn asks about making this available for other people. What about other countries? Another asks about inclusion vs. exclusion–minorities, inner cities. Jenny suggests libraries, despite disparity in funding, might be the right way to go.

Side note: Cool article about BloggerCon attendee posting habits; thanks Lisa for the link.

Side note #2: If you’re interested, join #bloggercon on irc.freenet.org to get the backchatter in the conference site.

Other thoughts: It’s hard to convince districts that this is a good use of technology. Control issues, tech support issues, etc.

How to make room for blogging in curriculum? Pat: Have teachers teach teachers. But stop busting public schools every time there’s a problem.

Q: What is cooperative weblogging? Does it open new academic and educational frontiers? Brian: It happened because we wanted to share readers and be able to take days off, but has become something else.

Conclusion: Pent-up interest in doing this in schools, radical shift in and from students wrt expectations.

Worlds spill over, says Lance. Education is broad and encompasses a lot. Panelists: Pat Delaney, AKM Adam, Brian Weatherson, Kaye Trammel, Jenny Levine.

Pat: Pitching writing blogs to teachers: busy and don’t do anything that doesn’t make their work better. He calls it “digital paper”: blogs help enable reading, writing, and researching much easier. Is it ease of use or openness?

AKMA: My students are all expecting to become clergy. The openness is a problem; they’re in dread that the bishop will catch them saying something they shouldn’t. I have to work with people to convince them that they’re going to be public speakers.

Brian: It’s not really a problem–bad reasoning is ok because you can go back the best day and flesh it out. The issue is commenting on other people’s writing and having it get back to them.

Kaye: Understanding the standards for blogs vs. for papers is different. The students contribute to a group blog and to a class blog. People will say things even though it’s a class project that they might not say otherwise. Lance: who sets the standards? Kaye: I do, but they need to understand what the standards are and will be.

Pat: We all have to worry about standards: CIPA, COPA, bomb threats; if something happens like writing “fuck you” on a blog server, the admin goes to the superintendent and parents and says this happens; the server gets shut down. We need to understand the legal issues and set expectations. Second: content management: split between personal and public–everyone has this access, some get to promote out content. –Writers earn audiences, they don’t just “get” them–maybe part of the process should be this promotional aspect.

Kaye: Publicness is part of the process. Papers can be written drunk at 3 am and only the professor knows but anyone could be reading a weblog. This is why I did Hooblogs, to link up all the UVA folks and make sure that they knew someone was out there.

Comment from the audience: Now we scale this up and students all over the world are producing all the content! There are classes where students are filling content gaps.

Question: Are weblogs something that everybody should do, or something that like singing that everyone shouldn’t be doing in public? Ken: It’s digital paper. Everyone should know how to use it. Kaye: Everyone should have a voice, and understand how to use their voice to promote their concerns.

Ken: But only schools with money for reliable servers have a voice. What about inner city schools?

Question: supply and demand, power laws–who gets the attention? AKMA: Internal readership grows slowly into a pool of a truly interested audience.

Halley Suitt: Do kids learn useful skills in school? Can blogs help break down the school walls? AKMA: Things like OpenCourseWare break down some of the walls and get learning out of the institution–so that it doesn’t happen only from September through May. “Desegregation of learning.”

Phil Greenspun: How do you use weblogs to teach learning? Ken: iSearch. AKMA: Group critiques of sermons.

Cy: Who cares about hit counts? Given all the Glenn Reynolds’ out there, it’s great that I get hits at all!

I’m going to continue this in another post–I keep screwing up and losing changes.

In the spirit of “everything on the record,” here are some quick discussions from the break:

Phil Wolff is really cool. I think I’m going to have to get with him to crunch some of his data–he’s getting definitive lists of blogs from some of the crawling services. He says Dave Sifry doesn’t want to give up his raw list for intellectual property reasons. I suggested that he could one-way hash the list and then compare the hashes so that we could determine overlap. We’ll see how it goes.

Susan from Boston College: we talked about how blogs might be used in marketing. I suggested that bloggers might be open to being approached by individual marketers to talk about their products as long as (a) they aren’t treated as consumers but as individuals, (b) the individual comes as a real individual rather than as the voice of the company. I need to flesh out that thought more thoroughly later.

Betsy Devine is cool–we talked a bit about her ongoing conversation around the White House leaks.

In a few conversations, I’ve had to repeat my statement from earlier this week. I’m here to listen; I’m an individual blogger, but Microsoft is on my badge and pays my bills. The crowd understands this for the most part; they’ve all been there.

Dave: Is there a conflict of interest between the presidential candidate and the media? Yes. Is there visibility? No. How do you draw the line?

Dan: Not a single line. It’s like with any institution. I work for them… For blogging, transparency is more about exposing how I do the blog than exposing the institution. You want me to tell all, but you don’t do that for Harvard, do you?

Dave: The issue that raised this was the Mercury News pulling down Dan’s archive.

Question: What about John Robb?

Dave: I can’t comment on that, I have shareholder responsibility, and there are laws that protect the employee’s rights in California. And that’s all I can say right now. There are lots of things we can’t talk about. But there’s an industry that controls the flow of news, and we don’t see them.

Doc: I think there’s more transparency than there have been. Maybe the boiler rooms aren’t exposed but there are more people on the inside that are blogging so you see what’s going on.

Dave: But is there a conflict with presidential campaigns and the media?

… Dan: I think the media don’t do a good job of covering the media. But I don’t think Jayson Blair would be uncovered by a four page spread in the New York Times, but rather in the Washington Post and everything else.

Dave: xxx, can you comment?

xxx: I think the area of opaque media is coming to an end. The Times used the word transparency and even more incredibly accountability ….

My network connection has been up and down here for a while. I’m going to post my notes now and add links later.

From the Blogs in Journalism panel:

• Ed Cone: to my left, physically, is Glenn Reynolds, the dirk diggler of hit count
• Scott Rosenberg, who has been in this business long enough that he has options that he still thinks will be worth something someday
• josh marshall
• glenn gets “more hits than Adam Curry in Amsterdam coffee houses”
• what can individual blogs do, where can they go that journalists can’t
• when do we get more transparency out of big journalism?
  • answers: legal liabilities
  • we are getting more voices but the institution itself won’t ever institutionally blog
  • josh marshall
    • a lot of people think that scooter livey is the guy
• does most of the big news appear on blogs now?
• do you publish if your source is unknown?
• you can get libel insurance through your homeowners’ insurance as long as you’re not making money
• issue with wilson’s wife
  • it doesn’t make sense to me because it requires people to be so absurdly stupid…
  • josh: “you don’t have the vengeance lobe in your brain”
  • do I have a responsibility to have an opinion?
  • this is crap, i don’t think there’s enough there to be a story
  • is there an obligation to reveal sources?
  • can I moderate for a second?
  • if you call people who question the success of the war a “fifth column”…
• how do institutions work where there are individuals in the institution out blogging?
• comments? diminishes responsibility
  • depends on the community
  • depends on who’s reading
• who speaks? what’s the order?
  • blogging is prisoner’s dilemma
  • responsibility given because of the repeated nature of the game

Sitting in Langdell, there’s been a breakthrough. We’ve all sat here for about an hour working out connectivity issues, but after we disabled someone’s private DHCP server everything is all right.

Dave turns out to be a nice guy, though he says I look completely different from how he pictured me. Roland Tanglao and I just bonded over the reset on his old Pismo; Britt Blaser was smart enough to be networking physically rather than electronically. I see Adam Curry and Phil Greenspun also here.

Lisa and I are going to be taking in some sights today prior to BloggerCon tomorrow, including the MFA, as well as just kind of soaking up the ambience. First stop: Tealuxe.

Dave’s got a post collecting comments and TrackBacks from people heading to BloggerCon so we can all wish them safe travel. Having arrived Tuesday morning for recruiting, I wish everyone a safe and pleasant trip.

Dave says that he and Adam Curry will be sponsoring the pre-BloggerCon party on Friday night, at, um, the Hong Kong in Harvard Square.

Man. The Hong Kong. Site of plenty of late nights, some relatively sane (like the night we went there at 1:00 am when I was an undergrad, after riding a bus up from Charlottesville, and I almost lost a contact on the floor). Some not (like the night after my final exam first semester of grad school, when the acidic fruit in the world famous Scorpion Bowls made me feel like my ulcer was recurring, and I had to leave the party to buy Tums—a harbinger of more troubles later that evening).

Somehow, I can’t see myself dragging Lisa over to that party, even if it means missing out on a chance to share scorpion bowls with the blogerati.

Wish I had run into Adam at last night’s HBS recruiting event. Maybe I’ll get a chance to talk to him at BloggerCon.

I have one more event (out of four in two days) here at Harvard Business School in a few minutes, and then I can relax. It’s been a crazy couple of days, but I should be able to enjoy a little bit more of Boston soon.