Saturday, November 13, 2004

Check this out. The BBC has a podcast feed. Bing! 

Arianna Huffington: A Mash Note to the Blogosphere. 

We're getting ready for the 3:30PM keynote. I have a notebook with six items on it. The first thing is the story about the scream speech, what the bloggers were doing at the DNC, podcasting, sources with blogs, local contests. 

I'm at a session about automating news delivery. There's a guy from Yahoo who's talking up RSS, and a guy from Google, talking about Google News, Jay Rosen (the NYU journalism prof, BloggerCon discussion leader).  

Scoble is hosting a geek dinner in Mountain View, CA tonight.  

A Quicktime movie of Wonkette speaking to the ONA lunch. 

A Quicktime movie of Joe Trippi. 

A Quicktime movie of Jay Rosen. 

Listening to Wonkette give the lunch speech, now's a good time to say this. I realized after BloggerCon III that not everyone who does a blog thinks they're as revolutionary as I do. Wonkette surely is one of those people. She is very cynical about blogs, about herself. No matter, she was a random writer at AOL a couple of years ago, and now she's giving a keynote at a respected conference. How did that happen? 

AP: "Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a history of heart trouble, was having tests at a hospital Saturday after experiencing some shortness of breath, a White House spokesman said." 

Julie Leung: "If Billy Joel had been at BloggerCon, I would have asked him if he would sing Just the Way You Are as the theme song for my session. Of course, perhaps Billy Joel himself doesn't own the rights to it." 

I'm demoing my editorial tool for Mark Glaser and Staci Kramer. All I do is enter the text and when I'm ready to publish, I Save, and the CMS kicks in and does all the work for me. 

Staci Kramer: "Journalists who write about blogging need to remember that a single blog or a kind of blog doesn't represent all blogs, just as one journalist or media outlet doesn't represent all journalists." Amen. I just had that argument over coffee at the ONA conf. I am not responsible for all bloggers. I didn't leak the exit polls on Nov 2, I was driving from Seattle to SF. The journos tend to want to view bloggers as flawed versions of themselves. To me, the important bloggers are the sources who got fed up with being misquoted and routed-around. We can still work together, but every year another train leaves the station, we find ways to make-due without support from the pros.  

I used some of my battery juice to reserve a room at LAX for the night. It's a big new chain. The room will be sterile, soundproof, uninspired. I will get a good night's sleep.  

We're in need of some terminology for non-RIAA music, and yesterday I may have come up with one, which I arrived at this way. It's music that's safe to include in a podcast. Safe-to-podcast. Podcast-safe. Podsafe. Podsafe music. Voila? 

I'm in the conference room now, it's a traditional conference, a lot like the one I went to in Prince Edward Island. Lots of pros, some welcoming blogs, my guess is that most don't. We'll find out later. They spent a lot more money than we did at Stanford, the wifi is better, but I don't have a desk and I don't have power, so I won't be able to blog the sessions. My battery will run out in a few minutes. Not much I can do. 

I'm in a session where they're judging websites. I'm very confused, because there's no projector so I can't see what the sites look like. Weirrrrd. 

Hollywood coffee notes 

1. Hello from Hollywood!

2. I hate LA.

3. Always have. Esp today. It's a sucky trashy city, but unlike NY (also sucky and trashy) this place is flat and insincere. I'm sitting outside using some free Wifi, nice, after staying in a hotel with no heat, hookers operating all night out of the room next door, the shower didn't work, reeked of cigarettes, and it's in LA, which makes it all suck all the more. But now I have a Starbuck's venti iced coffee, I'm in the heart of what they call tinsel-town, and it's kind of pretty, even if one in every four people seem like they must be trolling around trying to get discovered. I'm here to talk with Arianna Huffington, one of my heroes, and Joe Trippi, who I've never actually met. And speak with all kinds of Online News Associators.