Wednesday, June 14, 2006

The webcast has always been the hardest part of BloggerCon, it's an expensive proposition to do right, we thought we had it covered this time, but I found out late this afternoon that we don't. We need some organization to provide the webcast transmission for us (we will provide the production and engineering), or find $8000 to pay a vendor to do it for us. We're only doing audio, not video. If you want to make a contribution, you can use the Paypal account, or contact me directly. For donations of over $1000, we will find an appropriate way to thank you during the conference. Basically, if we don't raise the money, there won't be a webcast. 

BloggerCon IV: Preliminary Schedule. 

Notes on the upcoming conference, a place to comment. 

Elisa Camahort: Building Bridges.  

Chris Pirillo and Jake Luddington have received a cease-and-desist demand to take down the Vista BitTorrent tracker, and of course they have complied.  

Tom Yager: Why Apple snubs its open source geeks. 

I begged and pleaded with Doc Searls to be part of BloggerCon, and ultimately prevailed. Doc will do a couple of things for us at this con. 1. He will lead the end-of-day discussion on Friday, summing up the day's events and getting ideas from people while they're still fresh in our minds, and 2. He will be the official note-taker for the conference, in outline form, projected in real-time for everyone to see. His notes will be rendered in HTML and OPML and uploaded to the web, also in real-time. (I will provide a specification of where the OPML files will be, if people with OPML tools want to show off their wares.) 

Paolo Valdemarin, who will be traveling from Italy to be at the conference, offers a first impression of the Flock browser. Marc Barrot is coming from London and Richard MacManus from New Zealand. Lots of people coming from Canada and other parts of the US. 

James Vornov is trying an experiment I've been thinking of trying myself, he's put both a Windows and Mac verison of the OPML Editor on an iPod Nano that goes with him everywhere. The software needs some tweaking to make that work really elegantly, but I bet it's not very much.  

Another Sims user is experiencing intense bubbles, this time coming from the butt of one of his characters. I feel your pain, but I never did find a workaround. The character lost the bubbles when she became an elder. 

Marc Barrot: "ActiveRolls are just like regular blogrolls, with a twist, active outline wedges uncover underlying levels of information." 

Amyloo's car roll viewed through Marc Barrot's tool. 

Bob Wyman on the not-bright future of PubSub.  

Mike Arrington: "What a waste." 

It only matters if you come from the last century 

Scott Karp says that Google is killing the economics of content, which is sensationalist, and only important if you care about "content," not so important if you care about accurate transmission of information and points of view.

First a little history. The print publishing industry, and the print-inspired electronic publishing industry, made it possible for information to be transmitted back when the transmission equipment was expensive, but it was always a very lossy transmission, subject to manipulation by the person doing the reporting, and the person doing the editing, the owner of the publication, etc. In the process, a little truth leaked out, but not much; and nothing that that the publishers didn't want out there (and there was no visibility at all into the motivations of the publishers).

If you had an idea you wanted people to hear you either had to convince a reporter to write about it or pay the publisher to let your idea hitch a ride on his transmission, and even then they might refuse to carry it. What a horrible system!

So if your point of view is of someone who isn't a publisher, like the vast majority of us in the 20th century, and almost nobody in the 21st, then something was lost. But if, instead of living in the past, you live in the present, it's much ado about not very much.

Understatement 

Four years ago today: "Lots of non-Internet stuff going on."