Wednesday, August 11, 2004

You can help choose the date for BloggerCon III. 

Wired: We're all journalists now. 

Is there a reviewer's guide for SP2? There are some new features. Notably a new wireless connection tool (I'm using it from San Jose airport, where my flight to NYC is delayed). What else should I be looking for? 

The National Hurricane Center has RSS 2.0 feeds.  

Special NY Times feed for the Olympics. 

BBC: "The US space agency has given the go-ahead for a robotic mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope." 

O'Reilly is doing a Foo Camp in Europe, August 20-22, in Enschede, the Netherlands.  

A blogging conference in Greensboro, North Carolina, August 28. 

Matt Stoller: "Bush didn't serve, Kerry did." 

Here's something I've not seen before. RSS 2.0 feeds for TV networks, like CNBC, CNN, Comedy Central, ESPN, Fox News, MTV, Showtime, VH1. 

BattleTorrent aims to make BitTorrent easy. 

Evening pre-flight notes 

After reading the News.Com roundup of mostly negative blogging hype, I called up Charles Cooper, and arranged to meet with him at 3PM at the CNET offices, which are just two or three blocks from my hotel in the Mission District of San Francisco. Dan Farber, an old friend from PC and Mac days was there too (he works at CNET now). We talked about blogs, I tried to communicate that some people (like myself) take weblogs seriously. If we didn't do a good job, we want to know. But if we did a good job, and people say we didn't, we're like everyone else who takes pride in their work. We don't like being ridiculed, made fun of, or minimized. I told Charles I remembered when the mainframe computer guys sniffed at our "micro" computers. They said our little computers would never match the power of their big ones. It didn't turn out that way. We don't talk about Control Data, Univac, or even DEC anymore, except in a historic sense.

The turn to blogs is very much like previous generations of the computer revolution. Everything computers touch gets disintermediated. The expertise of connections is something that is easily replaced by computers. Human insight, intelligence, innovation, those are things we do. But with the aid of ever more powerful and inexpensive tools, we can do more with less. So it seems the role of bloggers must expand over time, if it didn't that would be to deny Moore's Law. Sure not every blogger is a visionary and willing to work hard to have the honor of being first. But as I told Charles, decisions are made by those who show up. It didn't take that many people to start the personal computer revolution, and even if just a few bloggers do excellent work, the die will be cast, the precedent set, the future clear.

At lunch with Craig Cline, we talked about the next BloggerCon, and as I've discussed with everyone I've met with on this trip about the conference, we talked about The Question. What will we try to figure out at this conference? I like to frame each conference that way. Even if we don't answer the question, we at least have a framework for discussion. After much back and forth, here's what we came up with: What are the different kinds of blogging? By asking this question, we actually make a statement -- that there is more than one kind of blogging. A student's blog is likely to be different from a preacher's. How? A reporter's blog different from a librarian's or a historian's. Never mind listing all the different kinds, what are some of them? These questions don't have finite answers, so it makes sense to have a conference around them, one where everyone can make a contribution.

As with the April conference, the cost to participate will be $0. It will be an un-conference; that means no speakers, no panels, no audience. I have already started to recruit discussion leaders, that will be a continual responsibility of mine, and if experience is a guide, I'll be doing that all the way up to the conference day.

When will it be? Either before the election or after. We'll try not to coincide with major religious and national holidays, and other major events that bloggers are likely to want to participate in. It will be on a weekend.

We will seek sponsorships. We've already had one offer, which we gladly accepted. We will ask people who usually pay to go to conferences to make a financial contribution. But we won't need a lot of money. Stanford Law School has graciously offered the use of its facilities. It's not the same kind of venue as Harvard Law School, but we'll make it work. There will be more tracks, and most of the sessions will be smaller.

I've bought the domain bloggercon.org, that's where the site will be. I plan to move the existing site from the Harvard server to that location, and then start building the grid for the next conference. This trip, which is about to end (I return to NYC early Wednesday morning) was a blazing success. Thanks to the people at Microsoft, especially Robert Scoble and his family, for being such generous hosts. Thanks to Lauren Gelman at Stanford for helping us with the new conference. I had a great trip. The next stop is NY and then after that, points west or south. We'll see!