From the In Box: Games People Play XIII

According to Media Dietician Adam Gaffin, the Hobo Railroad should be called the Ho-BORING Railroad:

Do not take the Hobo Railroad -- unless you are having severe insomnia problems.

Noted.

The Movie I Watched Last Night LXXVIII

How to Make a Monster
Not to be confused with the 1958 movie by the same name, this made-for-TV mauler is a shallow take on video game development, artificial intelligence, the potential for avarice in the technology business, and virtual reality. Can't get Robert Culp? Steven Culp kind of looks like him and doesn't act any better. Wonder what Carnivale's Clea Duvall has done before? Look no further. The basic gist of the flick is that a video game project is about to go over time and over budget -- and that it's not test marketing well in the scary department at all. So a misfit trio of developers featuring the requisite brute, phiolosopher, and nerd (played by a Rick Moranis lookalike, pretty much) is brought in to up the terror ante. Philosopher Sol does a Net search for "monster" and imports the results into his "million-dollar AI engine." Julie Strain is brought in for some Lara Croft-like motion capture, and the movie goes downhill from there. The monster AI gains sentience during a storm and takes over the telemetry suit used for the motion capture. The suit absorbs body parts of the people it kills -- and continues to play the very game the developers are making as it attempts to kill them. In the end, humanity wins and loses in one fell swoop, as the sole survivor falls prey to the very philosophical and political foibles that got the team into the mess in the first place. That '70s Show star -- and Ashton Kucher's Punk'd patsy -- Danny Masterson co-stars in an uncredited cameo as Duvall's character's physically and emotionally abusive boyfriend. His enthusiastic email exchange with heroine Laura Wheeler is not to be missed.

Games People Play XIII

Saturday morning, after a quick blessing by the Reverend Father Asteroids, Brad and I hit the road to head north to Weirs, New Hampshire, where we spent much of the day at Funspot, the second-largest arcade in the country. Funspot -- "the spot for fun" -- claims the largest collection of classic video games in the world. Between now and Jan. 16, 2004, if you buy $20 worth of tokens -- 80 tokens -- Funspot offers a coupon for 50 free tokens. What a deal! Brad and I went crazy. Here are some snaps:























I'll have to head back. We didn't have much time to poke around Weirs Beach, and there are several functioning tour railroads nearby. Among them:

The Mount Washington Cog Railway

The Hobo Railroad and Winnipesaukee Scenic Railroad

The Conway Scenic Railroad

The Hartmann Model Railroad and Toy Museum

You can access a guide to New Hampshire's scenic railroads online.

Also not so far away is Ruggles Mine and Lost River Gorge and Boulder Caves, which seem cool.

Ah. At home, I'm a tourist.

Weather Report XIV

With a frost advisory issued last night at 9, the Bourne Bridge closing because of ice, and flakes of thin ice on car tops this morning, it's clear that the cold has finally snapped for real and that fall is officially here. High today, 52 degrees. Glad I made my bed with flannel sheets last night!

Books Worth a Look XVIII

Quinn Skylark recently launched his new bookblog, BookWatch. To date, Quinn's posted entries about NaNoWriMo, BookSense, the science of comic books, and the National Book Award. It's only been live five days, but it's clear it's worth reading. Good work, Quinn!

Reigning Cats and Cats

Forget Dog Island. I'm moving to Cat Town.

Corollary: Technofetishism XLV

I don't think our firewall is set yet so I can actually use my iSight camera and iChat AV outside of the office yet, but I was thrilled to find several online resources that help iSight users connect and communicate. After all, if you don't have a lot of friends with iSights, who're you going to iChat with?

iChatters seems to be one of the better tools, offering a number of dedicated thematic chat rooms that members can align with. While the room organization is interesting, iChatters isn't very adept at helping you find people -- much less people online now. iChatFinder is much better, focusing more on the members and their profiles. The profiles are quite robust -- think Friendster with iSights -- and you can browse members based on whether they're currently online. This is what iSight-related services need to do!

Seeser's user interface is slightly difficult to navigate, and it seems that in addition to the ability to search members based on location, the service offers discussion forums in which users can connect. And iChattin does much the same. iChattin's forums are light on member introductions and heavy on chat requests, which seems an odd about face.

Read But Dead XIX

Spenser's Mystery Bookshop on Newbury Street in Boston is closing. At least we'll still have Kate's Mystery Books in Cambridge.

Event-O-Dex LXXIX

Thursday, Oct. 16: Kelly Link, Alex Irvine, Greer Gilman, and Vandana Singh will read from the new anthology Trampoline at Avenue Victor Hugo on Newbury Street in Boston. 7 p.m.

Saturday, Oct. 18: Big Digits gets rigid with Plunge into Death at "Get Your Goth On," an event happening at 61 Montebello Road in Jamaica Plain. Dusk.

Wednesday, Oct. 22: Danielle Miraglia, Jimmy Tingle, Sam Hooper, Sinkcharmer, and others help ring in the 20th year of Somerville Community Access Television at Johnny D's in Somerville. 7 p.m.

Monday, Nov. 10: They Might Be Giants will perform and sign copies of their book Bed, Bed, Bed at the Borders on School Street in Boston. 7 p.m.

Hiking History XIV

Members of the Boston World Explorers Foundation are encouraged to join an expedition this Saturday, Oct. 18. This outing will take the Foundation to Funspot in Weirs, New Hampshire. The second-largest arcade in the country, Funspot -- "the spot for fun" -- claims the largest collection of classic video games in the world.

We'll gather at 9 a.m. Saturday for the drive north -- supposedly 1.5-2 hours -- in the parking lot of the Greek Orthodox Church on Magazine Street in Central Square, Cambridge.

If you want to come, you need to RSVP to me by Friday morning. And if you can drive, please let me know if you're willing to help chauffer -- and how many explorers you can take in your car. We'll be making sure that everyone has a ride if they need one. We'll be returning to the Boston area as members' needs require.

Explorers will be responsible for their own rolls of quarters, dollar bills, and other funding sources for their gameplay. Our grant application fell through, and the Foundation will not be able to subsidize this endeavor. Apologies extended.

Music to My Eyes XXI

Ah, Spike Jonze. How he makes me happy.

Mention Me! XLV

Welcome to everyone checking in from Wired News. I'm about to head out for the weekend, but if you'd like to check out Media Diet's Virtual Book Tour entries, you can start with Dennis' first entry this past Monday. Make with the clicky click and scroll up to catch up.

Virtual Book Tour 2 VI

Dennis Hensley, author of Screening Party, trips on over to the fifth stop of the Virtual Book Tour today.

Over in BradLands, Dennis and Erin Quill, the inspiration for the character Lauren in the book, wax gabby about movie musicals. After dissing Moulin Rouge and Chicago, Erin goes on to list her favorite movie musicals. It's a fun segment, and it's good to see Brad opening BradLands up to other contributors -- and to see Erin join the fray!

Sounds like there will be more material published throughout the day. Cool beans! I'll continue to follow the tour as it progresses.

'Tis the Season to Be... AWOL XV

This afternoon, I hop a train south to Rhode Island to spend the holiday weekend with my parents. While I always hope to update Media Diet while traveling, if I don't, that doesn't mean that Media Diet is dead (long live Media Diet!). It just means that it's resting.

Worst case scenario: Media Diet will be back up and running Oct. 14 or so.

Virtual Book Tour 2 V

Dennis Hensley, author of Screening Party, moves on to the fourth stop of the Virtual Book Tour today. Over at Rogue Librarian, Carrie Bickner shares her personal recollections of the movie Jaws.

Virtual Book Tour 2 IV

Supposedly, Dennis Hensley, author of Screening Party takes the step to the third stop of the Virtual Book Tour today. But checking in at Inkblots Magazine, I can't find Dennis anywhere. Maybe he'll show up later in the day. I'll continue to follow the tour as it progresses.

The Restaurant I Ate at Last Night XXIV

Last night, a friend and I checked out Namaskar, a new Indian restaurant in Davis Square in Somerville. Quite a bit better than Diva in terms of decor, food, and service, Namaskar impressed me quite a bit. Basically, Namaskar is a fancy restaurant hiding behind reasonable prices. The interior design is amazing, and the restaurant is extremely tastefully lit. The partial suspended ceiling really works well. And the food? My friend and I shared an aloo nan, lamb saag, and chicken vindaloo. Neither dish was overly spicy, even though we requested them to be "hot," but everything was extremely good. Even the glass of milk I ordered.

The service was a little intense on the upsell, trying to get us to buy beverages and desserts we didn't want. "Anything to drink, sir?" "I'll have a glass of milk." "Perhaps a coffee? A special coffee?" "No." "OK, how about you ma'am. Anything to drink?" "No." "Coke?" "No." "Sprite?" "No." "Ginger ale?" "No." At the very end, I declined more ice water, and the man with the pitcher said, "Please, sir," and insisted on pouring me half a glass even though we were about to leave. It was hilarious.

Right now, the restaurant doesn't have a liquor license, but if and when it secures one, Namaskar will be a classy establishment indeed, especially if they can cut back on the upsell. The place was practically empty. They didn't need to pressure us.

Event-O-Dex LXXVIII

Oct. 9-11, 16-19, and 23-26: The Poets' Theatre stages Dario Fo's "Accidental Death of an Anarchist" at Jimmy Tingle's Off Broadway in Somerville.

Virtual Book Tour 2 III

Extra special thanks to Dennis Hensley, author of Screening Party for hosting Media Diet yesterday. He rocked the casbah. Now, he's continued on his merry way for the second stop of the Virtual Book Tour, dropping into Dave Thomas' Baltimore-based blog Confessions of an Indie Filmmaker.

In an email interview with many of the people featured in Hensley's book, Thomas plumbs the importance of Mad magazine, the new James Bond actor, movies Hensley couldn't include in the book, and whether Dr. Beaverman ever braved a gay bar. It's a catty snarkathon that's in the spirit of the book -- but in addition to. Imagine: They're really like this when they all get together! If only all my friends were so fabulous. (Just kidding, you guys are great.)

The Restaurant I Ate at Last Night XXIII

On the way back from Narrowsburg, New York, where the Fast Company editorial team gathered for a planning retreat late last week, Bill, Rob, Christine, and I stopped Friday night at Rein's Deli-Restaurant in Vernon, Connecticut. If you drive between the soul death that is Boston (harf!) and New York City frequently, you're well advised to check this out as an eating option. Crowded with locals -- including several elderly couples that seemed to be regulars -- and road-weary travelers, the New York-style deli boasts an ample menu. Slightly lacking in service -- "Didn't he take your drink order? Harrumph." and "French fries? I thought you wanted chips." -- the restaurant does provide good food. I had a pastrami reuben, French fries, coffee, and water, and while it wasn't amazing, it was worth returning to if I find myself between the two cities again.

Event-O-Dex LXXVII

Wednesday, Oct. 8: Neal Stephenson reads from Quicksilver, volume one of the Baroque Cycle, at the Harvard Coop. 7 p.m.

Virtual Book Tour 2: Newsletters of Note

The only thing that's newsletter like that I can think of is Written By, which is the magazine that is sent out to Writer's Guild members by the WGA. It always has interesting interviews with film and TV writers. The only problem is, you have to be in the Guild to get it. When I inked a deal to co-write a pilot of my first book Misadventures in the (213) for NBC, I got to be an associate member, but then you have to work again in the next three years, which I failed to do. So I'm no longer an associate WGA member, and I no longer get the great mag Written By. Whenever I see it at a newsstand or somewhere, I think about my failure and floundering career.

Virtual Book Tour 2: The Movie I Watched Last Night

My favorite movies about movies: Cinema Paradiso -- an all-time fave. I always cry when the older director visits his childhood bedroom, and the kissing montage at the end lays me out. I also like Living in Oblivion; it's so dark and funny. I laughed a lot at Bowfinger, too, where Steve Martin tricks Eddie Murphy into being in his movie. When I think of people watching movies in movies, the first image that comes to mind is Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan. There she is again: Madonna Goddess of the Silver Screen. Ugh. It's always interesting in movies where they have a character watching a certain movie, because the choice always tells you a lot about the character, like what is the movie Rosie O'Donnell and Meg Ryan watch in Sleepless in Seattle? I can't remember, but it was some romantic movie. If they'd been watching The Exorcist 2, it would have been a totally different movie.

Virtual Book Tour 2: Event-O-Dex

As far as events go, I'm going to be doing a reading/signing of Screening Party in Seattle on Thursday, Oct. 16, at 7 p.m. at Bailey Coy Books (414 Broadway East), which should be good for a few laughs. I usually have a full cast of folks reading with me. I'm going up there for The Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. I'm hosting an event there called the Home Video Gong Show, which is where people bring videos from home -- whether they made them or just happen to have them -- and we screen them for a panel of celeb judges who either Gong or score them. At the LA version, which I've hosted every July for the last five years, we've discovered such gems as The Dixie Carter Unworkout, excerpts from a TV movie where Kate Jackson broke her arm and had to keep filming -- it's genius the way they tried to hide it -- and a very popular old video of a young girl beiong taught about her period. It's going to be a nutty night.

Some other events that I like are the Last Remaining Seats series. Every June, the LA Conservancy screens old movies at the old movie palaces on Broadway downtown. If you're around LA and love old archeticture and movies, you gotta check it out. They always have celeb guests being interviewed or fashion shows or some such thing. I'm also a big fan of the American Cinematheque series at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. Earlier this year, they did a series of musicals of the '70s and '80s that was heaven. I saw Xanadu, the Apple, which is absolutely nuts, and Fame, which made me cry five times because I felt bad for all the talented kids who would never succeed.

Virtual Book Tour 2: Magazine Me

All right, I confess. I am a magazine junkie. I subscribe to so many magazines, it's ridiculous. Part of how I rationalize this is that I write for many magazines for my living. So it's part of what I need to do for my job, but it's still a little out of control. Some thoughts on magazines: I miss the old mid-90's Movieline with all the fun, edgy interviews. The new Hollywood Life looks good and still has some fun suff, but it also has all that fashion crap like lip gloss etc. We live in an Instyle world. If my Entertainment Weekly doesn't come on Friday, I'm very upset. I need it to kick off my weekend. I enjoy their film reviews by Lisa Schwarzbaum and Owen Gleiberman. I recently co-wrote a film called Testosterone that premiered at the Toronto Film festival, and Lisa S. reportedly saw it but did not write about it in her wrap up of the fest. I don't think she liked it. Although EW did mention the fact that Antonio Sabato, Jr., drops his trousers, which is true. Well, at least it was a positive mention. My pal Dave is the king of the zines, and whenever I'm at his place, I get to read cool zines like Chunklet and Giant Robot and The Believer, which has these excellent long interviews with interesting people. I also like to read screenwriting magazines like Creative Screenwriting. I like to hear how other writers do their thing and what they bitch about. My magazine addiction must at some time be curbed. If I stacked my magazines at my front door, stood on top of them, and leaned forward, I would end up in the Pacific. Oh, and I am constantly amazed at how dumbdumbdumb Us Weekly has become. Although there is a picture in the latest issue of Mariah Carey taking golf lessons in high heels, which is well worth keeping my subscription for a while longer.

Virtual Book Tour 2: Products I Love

When I think of new products that I love, the first thing at comes to mind is Tivo. I've had mine for about two years, and can't imagine life without it. I even wrote a story about it for TV Guide called, "Help I'm Addicted to my Tivo." But the truth is, I don't want any help. You can have my trusty Tivo remote when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. Though Tivo's far from perfect. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, my roommate and I -- while watching the horrifying WTC coverage -- got the following message: "Tivo would like the change the channel and record Mama's Family." Hey, at least it wasn't Caroline in the City.

Speaking of watching TV, my new favorite couch potato snack is the cereal Marshmallow Safari. It's like Lucky Charms, but a little more buttery. Sugar-coated heaven.

My other new favorite product is my duct tape wallet. It's super fun, though everytime I pull out my wallet, my friends make fun of me for carrying so much stuff, like I'm George Costanza from Seinfeld. I just need my retail punchcards where I can find them. Sue me.

My favorite gift that i got recently -- my birthday party was last night -- is the Olivia Newton John Barbie from Grease doll that I got from my pals Doug and John. It rocks, but the face isn't very Olivia; it's like and old-school Barbie face. I'm going to fix her up with my beloved Joey Lawrence doll.

Virtual Book Tour 2 II

As you might have noticed, Media Diet was hosted by Dennis Hensley today. Dennis is participating in the Virtual Book Tour to discuss his book Screening Party. The tour runs through Oct. 13, and you can follow his itinerary as he bops across the country. While I'm heading home for the evening, Dennis is based in LA and I'm hopeful that he'll grace us with more media-related pointers and commentary. Maybe if we squeeze our eyes shut and wish really hard...

Virtual Book Tour 2: Music to My Ears

I tend to buy a lot of CDs and just received an iPod for my birthday so it looks like my music listening is going to go to a whole new level. One of the friends who pitched in on my iPod made me promise that I'd still put together my slightly adolescent mix cassettes with self-designed packaging. I assured him that I would. I'm basically a teenage girl at heart.

My favorite CDs of late include John Mayer, Liz Phair, Gavin Degraw (who kicked my ass live at the House of Blues recently), Trisha Yearwood, Martina Sorbera, Jann Arden, and Robbie Williams. When I'm writing I sometimes listen to movie soundtracks as mood music. My favorites are Gattaca -- so atmospheric and haunting -- and Cinema Paradiso, which moved me so much when I first saw the film that i get moved just listening to the music. I also love song soundtracks from my favorite sort of cheesy favorites, like Xanadu, Centerstage, and Coyote Ugly. Leann Rimes is right; you can't fight the moonlight.

In working on my book Screening Party, I bought the soundtracks to most of the movies I feature in the book -- for inspiration and also to play at the release party for atmosphere. I thought for sure I'd be able to get the Glitter soundtrack cheap or used, but the joke was on me. I absolutely needed it for my party and the only copy I was able to find was full-priced retail: $18.99. I think it was Mariah's revenge for all the jabs I poke at her in the Glitter chapter. She was having the last laugh as she so often does.

Virtual Book Tour 2: Books Worth a Look

In working on my book Screening Party, there were a few books that I used as references.

One was the Jaws Log, which is a record of all the crazy shennanigans that happened on the set of the original Jaws; all about how the shark wouldn't work right and so forth. I actually discovered it after I had sort of finished the chapter on Jaws, so I didn't pull too much from it, but it was interesting reading.

Another book I found particulalry inspiring is John Travolta's Staying Fit, a workout book from the early '80s, his post Staying Alive buff phase. I refer to it with a mixture of affection and ridicule in the Saturday Night Fever chapter of Screening Party. I've decided recently that I want to be a collector of celebrity workout paraphernelia, like the way some people collect lunch boxes or cat stuff. My favorite item of late in this department is Dixie Carter's Unworkout, in which she makes a lot of insane faces and inspires the viewer to think of themselves as a cougar.

But back to books, the truth is I didn't use too many in working on the book. Between all my mouthy friends and whatever nuggets of trivia I could get from the DVDs of the movies, I had more than enough material. In fact, I was surprised at how long the chapters ended up being. As far a reference books go, I do find myself referring a lot to Leonard Maltin's 1997 Movie and Video Guide from 1997. I flip it open a lot when I'm doing articles. Perhaps I should update it at some point. Apparently, there have been a number of films released since 1997.

As for film critics, I always enjoy reading them but I seldom let them keep me away from films I want to see. Some people don't like when critics get really personal in their reviews but that's what I enjoy reading the most. I do like Pauline Kael's reviews because you never quite know where she's going to go. I also enjoy Manohla Dargis' writing in the L.A. Times. She's surprising and brings a welcome jolt of youth to the paper. My favorite online critic was Dave White on Ifilm, but I think they got rid of him. His reviews were so blunt and hilarious. He wasn't above using such terms as "sucks", "blows," and "bites it."

Where Screening Party fits into the world of film-related books, I don't know. I think I'd rather have people look at it as an entertainment rather than a reference type book about movies and get into the more novel-esque aspects of the book. It's funny; in bookstores, I've seen it stocked in every section from fiction to humor to film to gay books. I think I like it best in fiction for some reason, even though much of it is fact.

BloggerCon 2003 IX

Managing a Community: Joi Ito

Joi Ito is the founder and CEO of Neoteny, a venture capital firm focused on personal communications and enabling technologies. Here is a rough transcript of his talk:

This session is on community, and I wanted to start off the discussion by getting everyone involved. A lot of the other sessions have been about the content of blogs and the technology. To me, blogs are a really interesting tool for connecting people, but there are a lot of other tools that can bring people together. I use IRC and Wiki as community tools, too. I'm going to talk about the different kinds of communities, some of the issues, and how we can alleviate some of the problems that come up in communities.

This is an IRC channel. Originally, it was a place for people who hang out at my blog to hang out. I don't control it in any way. It's kind of an odd thing when your name becomes a place. I have a lot of experience with communities. I started a mailing list in the late '90s, and people forget that it's your living room and think it's a public place. The IRC channel and Wiki support blogging a lot. When you blog aggressively and get flamed aggressively, you need emotional support and technical support.

Blogs are pretty temporal. Wikis are more structured. And the IRC channel is really temporal. If I blog something and get flamed, I can go to IRC for support. If I blog something, I can mention it in IRC, and people can rip it apart for me to edit it. There are also bots in the channel. Joibot does a lot of handy things in the channel. It keeps track of who people are. When you enter the room, you're heralded. Since Joibot are an open-source project, a lot of participants can contribute functions.

At conferences like this, there are a dozen people right now who have something to contribute. In IRC, it doesn't get cluttered. You can share links. You can provide feedback on the back channel. During the power outage in New York, a lot of people came to hang out and help people.

Wikis are also really useful. They really are about community. Once it develops a critical mass, a lot of people hang out there. Then it's a Wikisphere. Some people just fix punctuation. Some people insert strange comments. There are a couple dozen contributors to the Wiki, but there's a great deal of traffic. As a result of having a great deal of Google juice, people put themselves in the Wiki.

Both Wikis and IRC, which are relatively old technologies, benefit from blogging. Your reputation becomes collateral, and you tend to behave more. A funny thing we did at a conference in Aspen: I was streaming in iSight, and Kevin was talking in an IRC channel. There's a distributed way to conference bash.

Kevin Marks: The heralding and chat bots are the interesting things here. One member added a dictionary to Joibot. After awhile, someone else started keeping track of the people in the room. Because anyone can add a definition to something, you can find out who someone is. That makes for some interesting times. There's also a feature in several of these bots that will post to blogs.

Joibot actually has a blog, which is broken right now. Chumpbot is also a common form of bots. People who operate IRC channels are basically in financial disaster. They're maintaining a sustenance level. Now that all of us bloggers are getting into IRC, it's rejuvenating IRC developers. How can we bridge protocols and mix all these things up. A lot of uses won't survive, but we'll come up with other uses. There are generally 60-80 people in this channel at any given time. Maybe a dozen focus on the screen.

Kevin Marks: Microsoft abandoned all of their IRC not long ago. A lot of people are now going to be looking for other ways to chat.

One of the things that's interesting is that blogs have a certain kind of tempo. In IRC, there's another kind of tension. If you connect them well, say, you have a problem on the blog and take it to IRC… [Loses track of thought while Kevin tinkers] One of the problems is that IRC brings on ADD.

Halley Suitt: The brevity of it takes some getting used to it. It goes so fast. And people you don't know come and go. It's so ghostlike.

It's like having some flatmates. I get up in the morning and go into IRC. People will say, did you know so-and-so came by. Did you see this blog post. It's kind of strange when you get into it. One member is really tough on regulars but nice to newcomers. That's something that only women can do, I think. AKMA is really important because when the potty mouths come out, he says, "Cough!"

This is one other modality. The Wiki and Wikisphere are another modality.

Dave Winer: I just started using IRC because we got a channel for BloggerCon, and it reminds me a lot of the computers of the '70s. Whatever happened to the graphic computer revolution? Why does it look so bad?

The problem is that people have forgotten about IRC and it hasn't been worked on for 20 years.

Kevin Marks: Microsoft about six years ago did graphic chat with people talking out of speech bubbles. It was amusing, but then it got irritating.

The interface has a lot of work. The people making Java apps that do what IRC does are building proprietary things. IRC is built into Mozilla. With just a little bit of support, IRC could be brought into the blogging and software community. There's an interesting alchemy happening.

Dave Winer: The biggest this session could make is to define what community is at BloggerCon. The word just comes up in conversation. You're not an audience. You're not an eyeball. What should community be like?

Question: I'd like to see the Emergent Democracy Web site. The Dean scene needs to start working together. Maybe a Wiki could help them do that.

A lot of the people who participate in this are much more knowledgeable about democracy than me. If a page gets too long, someone can move it somewhere else. For example, in the section "Does Direct Democracy Scale," you can create links to people and concepts by putting their name or the phrase in camel case. It's like a little mini Who's Who. The difference between this and a blog is that it's one document where people can add things in between. If you have a lot of people moving stuff around, it can emerge into a really readable document. The structure's not always clean.

Wikis are also really useful for group linkrolls. This is more centralized than blogging. It can also get messed up if people don't feel ownership for the space. It's more like gardening than your living room.

Different personalities are attracted to different tools. There's one guy in the channel who's great at one liners, but he's not very good at paragraphs. So he's good at IRC. I prefer paragraphs. There are also people who don't really care about ego or getting credit, so they'll contribute to a group project rather than a blog. Some people prefer commenting on my blog.

Not that we have people using the different tools, maybe we can get people using IRC, Wiki, and blogs can learn from each other. Bloggers seem to care more about how things look.

Dave Winer: Let's do a directory that's more Wiki style. The problem with Yahoo and DMOZ is that there's one person organizing the directories. Wouldn't it be nice if I could just go to Yahoo and add a link where it belongs?

That would be very cool. One of the keys to successful Wikis is that the project needs to be just interesting enough to attract a lot of people, but not interesting enough to attract the trolls. Wikis are used in verticals as information repositories. Most people use Wikis like this and have decent page ranking because they make pages for themselves. Camel case your name.

That's the bright side. The dark side is that every single tool, you get a different kind of troll. Someone came on my Wiki the other day and erased everything. The good thing is that one command, and it's back. It's about Google, too. People have been getting comment spammed. It's the same with the IRC channel. You'll get people who don't know about blogging wander in and start flaming people.

How do you deal with the person who comes to destroy the party? There's a book written for elementary teachers to learn how to deal with bad children. It's been used in community because there are a lot of tools you can use to deal with people.

People impersonate people and leave comments. Usually it's just one or two people, but they'll post as a bunch of different people so it looks like they're getting attacked.

Question: If you want to stay under the radar, that's counter to what you're trying to achieve. It's an inevitability.

Some people just turn comments off. Screw people. Everyone should have a blog. Some people get into blogging because they start commenting.

Dave Winer: When I turned comments off, it really was time for people to start blogs. There weren't a lot of blogs then. Every blog will eventually attract flames. The beauty of it is that flames are not attractive. If you try to stay off their radar, you stay off the radar of lots of people. If you're being Web-like and doing good things for the Web, you shouldn't give into that. Just go through it. In the Dean campaign, if someone comes in and flames, other people come in and make a donation because someone flamed them. Positive energy screws up negative energy. But usually, people just run away. That sucks. 90% of people are good. Stand up to them.

Halley Suitt: People give me a lot of shit about not having comments. My blog's called Halley's Comments. When I write about sexy stuff, I know I'm going to get a lot of comments. I have no time to commit to doing that. People can just email me directly. I love that.

I was talking to Howard Rheingold, who's a community guy. He gave me a lot of advice. There've been some interesting results. Now, Google includes comments as well as blogs. My comments will come up in Google.

Griff Wigley: Can you talk a little bit about conferencing boards? I don't understand the difference between a Wiki and something like the Well.

Even I can edit and contribute to the code of the Wiki. I'm not a script kiddie. It's all open source. Blogging destroyed the whole content management industry. All we're doing is going to destroy the conferencing industry. I'm a newbie blogger. I've only been doing this a year and a half.

Question: You've talked about four different media that have their own tempo and form. They're very loosely coupled. Do you seem them being more tightly coupled or integrated?

If you spend a weekend learning Applescript, you can connect all this stuff.

Question: What about the metatools? What do you use for community discovery?

Some people wonder how to authenticate comments. One way is Technorati, which is a centralized service. There are two ways to authenticate. One is centralized. One is decentralized. With Instant Messenger, you've got buddy lists. Other services, the six-degree services like Friendster and Tribe, are another way to do this. What if you're in Helsinki and you have a list of everyone who's available to go drinking within a kilometer, and if you can't find a friend, you find a friend of a friend.

Blogging has been primarily an American thing. Mobile blogging, like cell phone culture, is much more advanced in Helsinki and Tokyo. Community culture will bring in the synthesis of cell phones. The cell phone problem won't go away until the carriers change.

There's an interesting book called Beyond Culture. M-time is delineated time and space. P-time is polychromatic time and space, like Mediterranean bureaucracy where everyone just shows up. P-time is very content sensitive, while M-time is much more scalable. When I get up, I can see who's online and spend all morning following what people think and develop it. When you can see the presence of hundreds and hundreds of people you know, you don't really need to schedule meetings.

There are kids in Japan who go out without any plan of who they're going to hang out with. You can see who's where and say, "Let's go there!" You can even send maps using Japanese cell phones. In the old days, we didn't even have clocks. I'll meet you in that town in two months.

Dave Winer: That's what this is. This is total M-time.

Mobility really adds to location-based services. PCs are a sucky platform for mobility. But cell phones are great. I want to see blog entries from everyone within a kilometer of here. A lot of cell phones have GPS. So if you take a picture, you can embed GPS data into the JPGs. That's pretty cool. But it's also pretty scary. If I blog that I'm going to Boston, any thief can learn that I'm not home.

BloggerCon 2003: Interlude III

Hello to everyone visiting from Blog for America. This is neater than getting Slashdotted.

BloggerCon 2003 VIII

Spirituality: AKM Adam

AKM Adam is associate professor of the New Testament at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. Here is a rough transcript of the session:

I walked in a little late, when Adam was taking suggested topics of discussion from the audience. Recommended themes included the role of blogs in congregations, blogs as genre of spiritual writing, blogging as spiritual exercise, the spiritual community, the community-building aspects of sermons, the difference between oral and written traditions, and how blogs can help us learn about real-live people. After touching on Real Live Preacher, a semi-anonymous minister in Texas who blogs regularly, as an example, Adam began leading a group discussion.

There are two schools of thought about sermons. One holds that you prepare spiritually, reading, studying, meditating, and then you channel a sermon. No documentation of the actual sermon. Other people don't ever really prepare but still preach extemporaneously. Those are the people you don't want to listen to. Still, we hold ministers responsible for being the real Christians for us.

There are also people who can't read. I don't mean that they can't read but that they have trouble reading from a text. I have trouble reading Bible. They sound like the built-in text reader on your computer. There's a problem with reading in general. That's a more fundamental problem than preaching extemporaneously. It's a problem coping with words, thoughts, and expressions. There's a reason that preachers frequently go to seminary: It's to learn something about what they're doing. Seminary is bad for some preachers.

You can get feedback and input on your work by, say, posting a Weblog. If you put sermons on a Weblog, you're preparing for Google juice and interested people who actually want to see what's going on there. People come to my site and comment on my sermons whom I've never met before. They have no intrinsic motivation to find out more about me. They're doing a Google search for some word and "sermon," and they're stuck in the mire of conversation with me. If a real-live preacher puts the effort into starting those conversations, there's a lot that she can learn. There might be some things that you don't want to say to their face. Maybe she says "obviously" all the time.

Dan Bricklin: What you're saying is more about the Web than about blogs, unless you're following the development of a preacher. When I think about spirituality and blogs, I think about the intertwining of spirituality and other stuff that's going on in the blog. The blog lets you put the two together. In my blog, I will quote scripture, which is somewhat odd in a techy blog. Scripture is great to use as examples because there's so much commentary around scripture.

One of the fundamental things that I try to do is go to congregation groups and look at their Weblogs. Sisters and brothers, there are a lot of bad Web pages in the world, but a disproportionate number of them belong to churches. And they're more resistant to change. If you're not showing anything that someone might not like, you're probably not showing anything that people might like.

The more of the stuff of the congregation that shows up here, the more that anyone who comes to the Web page will recognize the voice of the congregation. Chris Locke says that large corporations and organizations don't have soul. I don't agree. I wouldn't say that corporations have soul, but collective entities have a lot going on.

Question: Is it your experience that the written form of a sermon is more useful before it's preached -- or after?

I have an inflated view of myself of a preacher. People say that when they read my sermons, they can hear me preach. The same is true with my blog. There's a lot of continuity. There's not so much a better or worse, but people like going back to it and remembering. People who weren't there like knowing what people were talking about. With student sermons, they tend to get better after a few whacks at them with comments. Unfortunately, by then they've already been preached. One thing you could do is put some notes up on Monday, ask for some feedback, and then incorporate that into your sermon Sunday.

Griff Wigley: Have you done that?

No. This is my sermon, sir. It comes from preparing it, going over it, maniacal composition and copy editing. I preach it to myself three or four times. My father worked in English composition and specialized in comedy. We would watch movies such as W.C. Fields, and analyze what was funny. W.C. Fields says that you'd go to a city, find the outlying areas that were funny, and incorporate them into what you say. In Pittsburgh, there's McKee's Rocks. Anything you say about that will be funny. I'm from that school, going through everything and seeing what works for me.

Griff Wigley: Would you post your reflections about your struggle going through that sermon?

I do. I did a sermon about El'dad and Me'dad in the camp. Every hour or two, I put up some comments about my struggle. I need two things in a sermon: the introduction and the conclusion. It takes a lot to really wrap a sermon to lodge it in someone's brain. The other thing is a hook. Just like a pop song, I need something that I know is the riff -- not something I'll repeat all the way through -- but something that I'll return to and lean on in critical moments. I couldn't find a hook for that sermon. But people left comments, and I eventually came up with the Dad Bros.: El'dad and Me'dad. I just did that one time. I can't imagine boring people with that process every time I preach.

Some churches aren't open to comments. This isn't business, this is God. I am not one to prescribe one thing, not for anyone, not for preaching, not for anything. That said, a lot of that hesitation and fear is antithetical to what a congregation should be doing. A Trappist monastery Web site without any text on it? That I could get behind. Paul says, "I am not afraid of the Gospel." Put it out there. Take the shots. Take your lumps. For congregations that are inclined to take that step, that's an important part of it.

Dan Bricklin: This is a problem with any community and the Internet. We've got a general mailing list. And we've got a list in which topics are discussed. That can get pretty hot and heavy. We split it because not everyone can put up with the nerve.

Not to put Ross on the spot, but in Blogware, to comment, you need to be registered. That makes me think that you can say, I don't want to see anything from Ross. It's a problem, but it's a problem worth dealing with.

Dan Bricklin: But it's a question of what you put out in the world. Does the preacher decide what's put out there? Do you post the comments that matter? Open deliberation is important. The Talmud sounds like a Weblog. That's a great model for this, as is the revolutionary period and pamphlets. Sermonds are much more closed in their deliberation.

They're not mutually exclusive, though. The Web can counteract and countervail the cultural tendency to short attention span by drawing you into interactive deliberation about things.

Griff Wigley: The reason I asked about your blogging about struggling with a sermon is that because as a man of the spirit, it's a good way to share your development as a spiritual person. As a dad, I've posted excerpts from my real journal to my blog for my three 20-something sons. You can't say too much about the people you're counseling, but you can blog about your daily experiences as a preacher. This isn't just God and me, this can happen to you, too.

This is a really important topic. There are a lot of congregational leaders whose notion of relating to an unacquainted public is that they have to seem pious and perfect and spiritually powerfully in every way. Or, on the other hand, to say, in effect, I'm not that kind of guy. I don't know what I'm doing. This is all so confusing. The perfect preacher might not be as wonderful as you want him to think. That's the PR notion. Real Live Preacher has a depth that's not available in any other sources. You don't have to be a clergy leader to do that. It's edifying for the world to see there are alternatives to the extremes.

Dan Bricklin: Seminary students can use their blogs as a resume. Congregations might choose to hire only clergy who blog.

Halley Suitt: Or don't.

Dan Bricklin: Exactly. That's different than an established preacher blogging -- or a 17-year-old writing about their date last night.

When I wrote the blurb for this session, people gave me a hard time about saying that bloggers have souls. There's a perceived question about whether I'm speaking to people to whom I'm accountable to. Am I saying that all bloggers need to subscribe to a metaphysics or they don't have a blog. That's not what I said. It's an environment in which people can correct me even if that's what I'm going to say in the end.

Purely hypothetically, not based on any congregation I know about, but something that I can only imagine, say you call an interim minister without knowing anything about them. If it just doesn't work out, wouldn't you like to replay that, look at the person's blog and be able to say the person is a tedious windbag or their far right politically. If you can fake something well enough for two years, you might be close enough, but it takes a lot of energy to fake that much.

Dave Weinberger: Is there an implied metaphysics in truth, if not soul? Let's look at communities. You're open to people of various faiths questioning you. There are all sorts of truth. Others aren't so open to that. Do communities of bloggers have a shared metaphysics about truth, if not faith?

Let's change the subject from faith to politics. You're either going to get a lot of right on's or people actually discussing the topics.

Dave Winer: I want to go back to the example where both of us got flamed simultaneously. Looking around the room, there's the notion that were friends on the Web. I'm not your friend. I'd like to be your friend. But there are some people who assume we're friends. You got push back because you had anything to do with me. Is it OK to make it a condition in a friendship that someone can't be friends with someone else? I say no. That's not OK.

There's not much of a me left if you take away my friends. I am largely constituted by the spiritual hyperlinks.

Dave Winer: I don't believe that. I see you right here.

I wouldn't have been here if two years ago, David hadn't started emailing me and Halley hadn't started emailing me. My presence here is dependent on those relationships.

Dave Winer: My uncle just died. Did he die because his friends stopped supporting him? No. His heart stopped beating. Existence is pretty simple.

I got the impression from your blog that when your uncle died, you were diminished.

Dave Winer: I wasn't in any way diminished. I was enhanced in real ways. His existence is what I'm talking about.

As a reader, for someone who Dave Winer was a three-minute voice on the phone and reading Scripting News, my sense was that it was like you were in a movie, hit in the chest with a shotgun blast. I read that as loss, as something important going out of your life. If you subtract the social hyperlinks, the spiritual hyperlinks, what is left is not AKMA but some kind of body lying there.

Dave Winer: Are your friends allowed to make friendship conditional?

This is a pointed question that gets really deep and uncomfortable. I owe people to whom I have long-standing relationships and respect, and there's some concern that I am endangering the AKMA-ity of AKMA by associating with you. There are folks where it changes the very notion of who they are when you learn something about them.

I want to signal that in that instance, I extended myself to say, look, I've read the controversies. Part of me is that I'm a pastor. I hear what's bothering you and you and you. I'm not here to adjudicate what's bothering you, but to listen, respect, and perhaps interpret what seems to be going on. Sometimes it's best just to listen.

I'm going to go to BloggerCon. Then I'm going to go home.

BloggerCon 2003 VII

Weblogs in Presidential Politics: Cameron Barrett, Eric Folley, Matt Gross, Joe Jones, and Dave Winer.

Cameron Barrett works on the Wesley Clark campaign. Eric Folley is a representative of the Democratic National Committee. Mathew Gross is chief blogger for the Howard Dean campaign. Joe Jones volunteers for the Bob Graham campaign. And Dave Winer is a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School.

Dave Winer: Here are some ideas to start with: Link to everything. Don't just write about your guy or link to positive press. Bring on pied pipers. Bring in people from the outside who have experience with Weblogs. Independent bloggers on the press bus happened in the Dean campaign. It's OK to have PR people on your press bus, but it's not OK to only have PR people on your press bus. Suggest advocacy guidelines before some of your supporters begin flaming your opponents. It hasn't happened yet, but it's inevitable. A very pragmatic thing, publish your schedule on your Weblog. Something that turned out to be very controversial is that people should stay out of software. Let the software developers make the software. Software should be agnostic. Finally, speak about democracy. Talk about how wonderful Weblogs are for talking about democracy. Talk about Jefferson. Let a tear fall. And offer hosting for people. Those are just some ideas from someone who doesn't support any candidate, doesn't support a party, but does support the use of Weblogs for political campaigns.

Matt Gross: It's absolutely exhausting being the chief blogger for the Dean campaign. I can't emphasize enough how incredible it's been. March 15 we launched the first Dean blog. In June we moved to Moveable Type, and that's when the blog really started to take off. Since June 10, we've had 100,000 comments. Yesterday, we had 2,200 comments. It's really pushed the technology. There's a huge mania that's been built up.

I'd always thought of a blogger as someone who had a site and posted entries. When we launched the comments, people who posted comments were calling themselves bloggers and saying, "I'm a blogger for Dean." At first I thought they got the definition wrong, but it's the users, and it is the grassroots.

Winer: Maybe it's not the form. Maybe it's an attitude.

Joe Jones: I'm 19 first of all. I go to the University of Florida. I was about to come home for the summer, and I learned that Bob Graham was looking for interns. I wrote him and said I could do this and this and this. Then he wrote me back about a month later just before I had to go into for some surgery. When I wrote back, they said they didn't have any more internships, so I went in and asked what I could do. They said I could answer emails.

They learned I knew some HTML and asked if I wanted to take over the blog. I used to keep a journal on Blogger but didn't really know much about it. I taught myself CSS over night and started to fake it. I started to recruit amateurs who were blogging about Graham. It turned into a groupblog. It's all run by volunteers. I'm a volunteer. They wanted to put me on payroll, but I wanted to go back to school. I didn't want to be a dropout for Graham. But I hope it goes well and goes well into the general election.

Winer: How did you start your blogs?

Eric Folley: I've had a blog for a couple of years. Maybe it was something we could put up to get more content out there. The old Web site, as I call it, is mostly news releases, some longer feature pieces. There's a lot of stuff that our people see every day that can't be put out before the public. We were talking about this. After a week of writing HTML and the Perl code for the back end -- we didn't use off-the-shelf software -- we had the initial design and went back to the group. I was expecting us to get the name passed.

Winer: What is the name?

Folley: Kicking Ass. We launched it two days later. Our research department has gotten involved. We got the head of our delegate selection process involved. We got more and more people involved. Ironically, our communications team hasn't posted yet. They like it, but it's taken them a little longer to figure out what to do with it.

We wanted to make it as painless as possible. 18 people have permission to post to the blog. You put something up on a staff blog and people have an hour to get back to you. An hour is a pretty quick turnaround time. One little piece of news that we did break was a story about a group that released a new study about Bush tax cuts and their impact on spending deficits. That's not something we would've done before we got the blog.

Winer: Cameron, did you go after them, or did they come after you?

Cameron Barrett: Until too long ago, I was going to Dean Meetups. I wasn't sold on Dean and started looking around. A former boss of mine whose now the director of technology at the Clark campaign asked me if I wanted to go down to Little Rock. I quit my contract job, and two days later, there I was.

I've been involved in Weblogs for a long time. Like Matt, I find working on a political campaign extremely tiring but also exhilarating. And I plan to keep on doing it.

Winer: You guys are recreating our political system. Let's try that out. How many comments did you say?

Gross: We got 2,200. That doesn't physically bog down, but it's hard to read, so you keep it moving. A month from now, it's going to be even bigger. I've hired two assistants.

Winer: No human being can read 1,000 responses. How do you spread this thing out?

Gross: I don't know of any blog that's reaching this level of saturation. I'm a writer. What are some of the tools? When we win the nomination, how does one deal with the fact that you're going to become one of the largest sites in the United States?

Winer: Let's assume you do become the nominee, what are you trying to accomplish with your blog?

Gross: It's the same message of the candidate. The only way to defeat George Bush is for everyone to become involved and join the dialogue. It really is a two-way street.

Winer: Does it pay for itself? How much has the Dean campaign raised online?

Gross: I don't know the final numbers, but maybe $12 million this year.

Barrett: The Clark finance numbers aren't public yet, but I can say that two thirds of the money was raised on the Internet.

Winer: Cam, do you have any advice for your competitors?

Barrett: We're going to run into the same problem Matt mentioned: Too many comments on a single post. Use the comments to your advantage and get those people to start their own Weblogs.

Christopher Lydon: Is any candidate bloggable?

Barrett: They need to have a personality, be able to write well, and have something to say.

Question: What happens in the back room?

Barrett: It has to be personal.

Gross: I'd agree. On the Dean campaign, there is no committee discussing what goes on the Weblog. What attracts me as a writer to the blogosphere was that as an op-ed writer, the blogosphere has a 15-minute news cycle. That's what's exciting. It's constantly moving. When you slow that down, you reduce the other attraction of the blogosphere, which is the uniqueness of the voices that are out there. There may be multiple voices on a team blog?

Winer: Do you think the DNC blog is a blog?

Barrett: Yeah. It's a good blog. But when the DNC Research Team posts, I'm not interested because I don't know who they are.

Folley: We want people to use their names, but Research fought that and wanted to post as a division.

Gross: The chief blogger is the chief communicator between people who leave comments and the people running the campaign.

Jones: People don't care about policy. People don't have time to know about policy. This is a way to build community and buzz.

Gross: If you're a hierarchical campaign with the command at the top, the captains and the lieutenants, and it just goes down, the blog is nothing but window dressing. Blogging is revolutionizing presidential politics, depending on the internal politics, is the commenting. You get real-time feedback, and you know you're talking as though you're in the room in Burlington HQ. And you are. It used to be that maybe you'd send an email. May make a phone call. Now what you have is lateral communication at the national political level. Certain phrases, things, and ideas come up to us.

Question: I see blogs right now just as buzz. This is the first election in which they're being used, and we haven't seen any results. To be honest, I'm affiliated with another campaign.

Winer: Which campaign?

Gross: Be honest.

Question: Edwards. And if we're only reaching 2% of the population, that's not going to win us a campaign.

Gross: One of the things that's been interesting about the Dean blog is that 70-80% of the people who have come to our site didn't know what a blog was. At the same time, you need to treat bloggers as opinion makers. They have influence.

Dan Gillmor: Expand on that a little bit. The Dean campaign has embraced a lot of stuff they're not responsible for. You've been thrilled with the other people out there. The Clark campaign has not, at least reportedly, treated independent bloggers as well as they would have liked.

Barrett: I wasn't involved in the rift between the Draft Clark campaigns. But I do know that there was a problem legally between one of the Draft Clark campaigns and the main campaign -- and one journalist decided to make a story out of it.

Question: When your candidate wins, what happens to the blog?

Gross: It becomes the White House blog.

BloggerCon 2003: Interlude II

Feedster's BloggerCon Buzz might be the best one-stop shop for BloggerCon confblogs.

Mapping Media

Ethan Zuckerman, whom I haven't had a chance to say hello to yet today, is working on a project that tracks global media attention. He maps what countries newspapers and media outlets such as the Washington Post are paying attention to, color coding them to indicate how "hot" they are. He's been tracking global media attention since late June. Fascinating!

Update: Just said hi to Ethan, who's heading to Hungary soon.

BloggerCon 2003 VI

Cluetrain 2003, the Second Superpower: Adam Curry, Christopher Lydon, Jim Moore, Doc Searls, and Elizabeth Spiers.

Adam Curry once hosted MTV's highest-rated program, the Top 20 Countdown. Christopher Lydon founded the Connection show on National Public Radio. Jim Moore is a business and technology strategist who wrote The Death of Competition. Doc Searls is a senior editor for Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Elizabeth Spiers is the editor of Gawker, a Manhattan Weblog.

Christopher Lydon: This session is kind of theory and practice, only there's no practice, just theory. The question is essentially the word "transformation." On a scale of 1-10, how big a transformation are we talking about? Doc, you're Mr. Cluetrain. You're in the locomotive. Where is the Cluetrain? Where are we going? Give us a number first.

Doc Searls: Transforming what, exactly?

Lydon: Reality.

Searls: Before Cluetrain, I went through my archives and came across something called Reality 2.0. PCs and the Net have the capacity to vastly transform the ways we do things. Radio and television are going to be vastly changed by syndication, which is an old newspaper thing. I say 100%.

Adam Curry: I view Weblogs a little bit differently. To me, it's just a tool. I see them just as revolutionary as the telephone. How are we going to use this tool? For radio and television, the transformation will be 100% The way your interviews are now distributed, I pick up my iPod, and it has the new Christopher Lydon interview on it. It's reverse Tivo.

Lydon: Is it bigger than the fax machine? Is it as big as the railroad?

Curry: Perhaps this is a start of connecting people's brainwaves? We're acting as human routers.

Elizabeth Spiers: For me, it's kind of hard to say. I have such a granular perspective. I'm a media commentator on my blog. I get paid to navel gaze. The Weblog phenomenon has been unique for me because I'm generally a pessimist. People in the media are thinking about how to take advantage of the medium. To me, it's just a sophisticated extension of the Web.

Lydon: You've even said that in a few years, having a blog will be just like having email.

Jim Moore: This transformation is huge. Hotmail and Yahoo, most of their traffic comes from the third world. Go to Ghana, and you'll see 100-200 Internet cafes. Imagine those people blogging. That's a big deal. In Africa, there's a real interest in not letting the digital divide be bridged.

Lydon: So you're a 10.

Moore: I'm whatever number you want.

Lydon: I want to take it beyond 10. Blogging is a fulfillment of the most classic American writer, Emerson, and his world of expressive individualism.

Searls: I think the first blogs came from Benjamin Franklin.

Lydon: Thomas Paine. I.F. Stone.

Searls: Blogs are a form of collective journalism. What we're doing is deconstructing the Matrix. The Matrix is a metaphor for the media. We have received experience. There's a lot more in the blogs. People are bringing up stuff that no one else is talking about.

Lydon: We're much too modest about what we've discovered in blogworld. Going to public radio or the New York Times is a step down. We've found a shit detector and relevance detector that will change the world. Jim, where's the power of the Second Superpower? They certainly lost the Iraq war.

Moore: This isn't just an individual phenomenon. It's really a collective phenomenon. Howard Rheingold talks about smart mobs. What we need are wise mobs. You can't really blow up a society and then have a democracy spring up. We've made it worse for Jordan in terms of democracy by tearing things up. We need to understand our wisdom, accept our role, think of things like Joi Ito's emergent democracy.

Searls: In 1974, the only outlet people had was to run to the window and yell. I want to see more bloggers in Baghdad. More Chief Wiggles.

Lydon: What about mobloggers among the troops?

Searls: Chief Wiggles is one. What we have is Yell TV and Yell Radio. I heard your interview with Paul Krugman. Then I saw him on TV, and he wasn't really allowed to say anything. He was the guy on the left fighting with the guy on the right. It's not that cut and dried.

Moore: We need a system that allows for deeper and deeper truth finding. I respect diversity in the collective, but at any given moment, you need to assess the wisdom of that collectivity.

Lydon: Do we want to talk about human nature?

Question: Human nature argues against the utopian views expressed here. Networked communications has the power to find like-minded people. It's human nature to seek facts that agree with you. I'm optimistic, but I'm not that optimistic.

BloggerCon 2003: Interlude

So, I'm conflbogging BloggerCon 2003 today. There are so many people here tippy-tapping during the sessions, that I almost decided not to confblog at all. In the end, I am posting partial real-time transcripts of the talks as they progress. It took awhile for me to get online, but all seems set now.

My reports are nowhere near as complete as they've been in the past, but you're welcome to check out the blogroll of participants. Or go to Dan Bricklin's photos and Kevin Mark's bootleg video feed from the front row. Plenty of documentation going on as we speak, so to speak.

BloggerCon 2003 V

Interview with a Blogger: Len Apcar, Scott Rosenberg, and James Taranto

Len Apcar is editor in chief of the New York Times's Web site. Scott Rosenberg works for Salon. James Taranto writes the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web column. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:

Rosenberg: James, do you consider Best of the Web a blog?

Taranto: I describe it as a column in blog form. Rather than publish it at will as Glenn Reynolds does, I publish it once a day whenever I'm done. It's edgier than the typical newspaper piece, and in many ways, it's very much like a log.

Rosenberg: It sounds like it's close enough to a blog. Is it edited by anyone?

Taranto: I write the thing. I have an editorial assistant who helps me out. I post it to the site so it's not visible yet. I call an editor. If there's any institutional sensitivity, my superiors will ask to see a specific item, but in most cases, I make the final call.

Rosenberg: How do the people you report to feel about the whole thing?

Taranto: They seem to like it. I know my boss reads it every day.

Rosenberg: Len, New York Times Weblogs. Is there anything going on like that right now?

Apcar: I came here to get a sense of how we might go about this, be true to what we do, and still be something different online. We haven't done anything like this, but there are a couple of things I'd like to try online during the campaign. There's this opinion that editors are thought police. That's not true in thoughtful journalism, and it's not true at the Times.

Rosenberg: There's a feeling that Weblogs are fundamental different from traditional journalism and that it's changing that world. You told us there's already a blog at the New York Times. Nick Kristof is someone who's had a long and distinguished career at the Times. This is someone who clearly is going to be doing work that you don't have to worry about in the same way you might if you gave this tool to someone else.

Apcar: That being said, people make mistakes. If you read Kristof's blog, Kristof Responds, he corrects things he gets wrong. We're comfortable with that. I'd rather he correct it than ignore it.

Rosenberg: Is that reflected on the formal corrections page in the Times?

Apcar: No. Usually, columnists will correct mistakes in their columns. The correction area is the newsroom's. Also, I don't think we're ready to give over a blog to proprietary information about our editorial process and how, say, a headline is written throughout the day. Do we share this with journalism schools and visitors? Sure. But there's not a whole lot of argument debate or quantitative debate going on while choosing five or six headlines for the front page. We're not comfortable discussing internal discussions.

BloggerCon 2003 IV

Weblogs in Education: AKM Adam, Patrick Delaney, Lance Knobel, Jenny Levine, Kaye Trammell, and Brian Weatherson

AKM Adam is an associate professor of the New Testament at Seabury-Western. Pat Delaney is a librarian who works with the Bay Area Writing Project. Lance Knobel was responsible for the program of the Davos meeting in January 2000. Jenny Levine is an Internet development specialist for the suburban library System in Burr Ridge, Illinois. Kaye Trammell is a mass communication doctoral student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. Brian Weatherson works in the department of philosophy at Brown University. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:

Lance Knobel: What interests me about the Weblog world is that it's a number of largely disconnected spheres. There's very little connection between the worlds of people reading about journalism, people reading about economics, and people reading about political philosophy. We're going to discuss a variety of aspects of Weblogs in education, from K-12 education to serious scholarship. That's a tall order, but we have an interesting group.

Delaney: I'm a high-school librarian and a staff developer for the Bay Area Writing Project. I use Weblogs in about six ways.

Knobel: Are you doing things and people need to read you or are you encouraging people to use them themselves?

Delaney: I'm a domain manager for a domain of people who use Weblogs.

AKM Adam: I'm AKM Adam. I teach, I'm a homeschooling parent, and I'm a manager of an online site for theological researchers. I'm a personal blogger, as well.

Brian Weatherson: I'm Brian Weatherson. I'm a professor at Brown University. I use blogs for two things. I have an old-fashioned writing notebook. And I have a blog of new philosophy that's been published on the Web in the last 24 hours.

Kaye Trammell: I'm Kaye Trammell. I teach in the online journalism track at the University of Florida. Go Gators. I'm a doctoral student researching a certain kind of blog. I'm also incorporating blogs into our curriculum so students use blogs. I've also been instrumental in bringing blogs into a variety of curricula at the university for designers and students taking a technology and culture class.

Jenny Levine: I'm Jenny Levine. And I'm a librarian. I work in the suburban library system in Illinois. I'm trying to get librarians to use blogging. I also do my blog, the Shifted Librarian.

Knobel: Pat, you're using Weblogs for writing. What do Weblogs offer that other means don't? What's new?

Delaney: K-12 teachers have very full plates. I call it digital paper. I don't call it Weblogs. What you can do with Weblogs is read, write, and research. As a representative of the Bay Area Writing Project, I don't care what people teach. They should be writing. We're moving from a paper classroom environment to a digital classroom environment.

Knobel: The Web is a writer's medium.

Delaney: And a reader's medium. And a researcher's medium.

Knobel: Is it the ease of use that matters? Does the openness of it matter?

Delaney: The bigger notion to that is the notion of audience. One of the fundamental problems of a teacher giving an assignment is that if the teacher is the only audience for a project, who gives a crap? With blogs, other people outside of the classroom walls have the potential of paying attention to them. The publishing aspect of traditional writing is embedded in blogging. 13-16 year olds love making their Weblogs look good. In the writing process, you get an idea, you brainstorm, you draft it, you get some feedback, you revise it, and you publish it. Bryan Bell does the same thing with themes. It was an amazing moment to watch seven blograts listen to Bryan talk about the way he does his work. That's how writers do their work.

Adam: One of the peculiarities of my working environment in a seminary is that almost of my student expect to become clergy. The openness Pat mentions is something my students dread. What if they say something their bishop doesn't like? We need to compel students to express themselves in public. The leverage we've got is that they're all preparing to become public communicators.

Knobel: This thing about getting caught… When I suggested Brian as one of the panelists, someone asked if he was tenured. If you're not tenured and you're blogging, is that a problem?

Weatherson: Probably not in the way that you think. A lot of what I've written is faulty. That's OK. When I started, it was for a real micro-audience. But with Google and archiving and so forth, some of it can get back to whom you're writing about.

Knobel: Kaye, with your students, is the openness of the Web an advantage?

Trammell: Their perception is very different than mine. Students have always had very clear expectations about what they should write when they turn in a paper. When you're blogging, you're on their turf. Students know how to use the Internet. They're free to say anything they want, but then you put the constraints of the classroom over them. Students have to contribute to a personal or professional blog, and then they have to contribute to a class blog. In their professional blog, they'll say things they never would have said in their reporting classes. How can we transcend that?

Knobel: There's an issue of decorum. Are you imposing that, or are they finding a different voice by the medium? I'm not sure what the problem is.

Trammell: I'm opposing it. I'm the online editor, and I tell students the rules about the content I expect from them. They find a different voice. I encourage them to use that as their own personal commentary column. It's a fine line between what I expect and what they're giving.

Levine: The public library has a blog on Blogspot for 4-6 graders about book reports.

Kaye: It's definitely an evolutionary process. Do we give them lots of rules? It depends on what the role of the teacher is.

Delaney: There are a couple of issues we're dealing with. One is legal. You have to be careful about ID'ing students. In my district, this is all so new that no one's blown the whistle on any major gaffs that have happened. It'd be good for the education to learn about what SIPA and COPA mean for grade schools. School admins are overworked. If something bad happens it's very easy for the admin or a parent to go to a superintendent and shut that blog server down.

Knobel: Does it diminish the value to put it behind a wall?

Delaney: We used blogs in a summer writing camp. The first year, we assigned teachers to the Weblogs. They went into the Weblogs and responded to the kids. The next summer, we didn't have as much money and not as many teachers responded. We asked students to comment on each other. People were upset that people in North Dakota weren't reading their poetry or that people in California weren't telling them how cool they were. You have to earn your audience.

Trammell: That publicness is one of the most important things we have going for us. There's a two-person relationship between a student and a professor when you're writing your paper. The student can allow quality to drop. If it's on a Weblog, it's public. Anyone can read it. I pitch it that everyone is reading it. Potential employers. Your mother. The chair of the department. It makes them think more about the work that they're producing.

Delaney: Someone on the journalism panel talked about localization. In school, you might not get someone in North Dakota.

Levine: Then there's what people were saying about critical evaluation of the people that you're reading.

Question: If students are writing for the public and we scale this up, students around the world are producing a large part of the content for the world. That's extraordinary. Students become authors.

David Weinberger: Should everyone learn how to blog as a life skill? Or is it like singing, and not everyone should do it public?

Delaney: I don't call them Weblogs. It's digital paper. I want people to learn how to use digital paper as a writer, a reader, and a researcher.

Trammell: Should it be a lifestyle? What blogs offer is a voice to every person who wants to have it heard. Little Kaye Trammel from Kansas can have a voice and have her voice heard. How you critically think about what happens in your world make everyone better. I want students to learn how to use the medium in a way that won't get them fired.

Levine: You're not going to get this without information literacy. When you talk about kids doing research, going out, and finding links, they shouldn't just use Google. There are databases that libraries license.

Delaney: It's not quite there yet. Yeah, everybody who has a certain amount of money and school districts that have a reliable server admin have access.

Ethan Zuckerman: One of the major obstacles at Harvard is a pretty aggressive privacy policy. For technical reasons, we've decided to make student blogs only accessible within Harvard. Is this something we need to be aggressive about to make sure these are blogs and not just class reports?

Weatherson: If you give students the right to use pseudonyms, it gives students the option. People might say it goes against the public nature, but very few students do it.

At this point, my attention wandered, and I turned to continuing to try to get online.

Knobel: I don't know if we can make any real conclusions. But there seems to be tremendous belief and pent-up energy about the potential of Weblogs in education. You're going to have a radical shift of expectations from students, from parents, and from teachers.

BloggerCon 2003 III

Interview with a Blogger: Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, and Dave Winer

Dan Gillmor works as a technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. Doc Searls is a senior editor for Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. And Dave Winer is a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:

Dave Winer: The media industry is extremely important and we need to get more media people blogging. Candidates raise money so they can place ads in the media. Is there any conflict of interest with media covering political campaigns? Yes. Is there any transparency looking into that process? No. Dan, what is your policy about this?

Dan Gillmor: It's not a single line. It's like any institution. I work for them. I do not think it is my role to expose to the world the workings of the organizations I work for. The blogging part, the exposing to the world, is more about making the world transparent as a journalist, not making my organization transparent. You want me to tell all.

Winer: I don't want you to tell all. I want to understand what I'm reading. The Mercury News deleted all of Dan's archived. I'd been linking to his archives. Links break because they break, but removing archives is an editorial decision. In the matter of a John Robb, it's a very delicate issue. I have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders of the company. I also need to follow the laws of California. Employment agreements are very clear. There's an industry out there that we have no visibility into because they control the news.

Doc Searls: There's more transparency in the media industry than there've ever been before. I have the sense that the Greensboro paper is more transparent because Ed's out there talking about it. It may not be that the boiler rooms of decision making are fully exposed all the time, but there are people blogging and participating on the outside.

Winer: Are there any scandals about campaigns and the media that we're not aware of?

Searls: I'm sure there is.

Dan Bricklin: If you're an insider, what's your responsibility as an insider?

Winer: The Cluetrain Manifesto gives a clue to that: You're supposed to tell the truth.

Searls: You're supposed to talk.

Winer: People have to expect to be told what's going on.

Gillmor: You have the view that the media has a responsibility to be more transparent than other industries.

Winer: No. I don't think the media is as transparent as other industries.

Gillmor: The media needs to be more relentless about covering other media.

Winer: Bloggers need to be more relentless. Would you take on the New York Times?

Gillmor: If I had something particularly juicy, I like to think that I'd be able to.

BloggerCon 2003 II

Weblogs and Journalism: Ed Cone, Joshua Marshall, Glenn Reynolds, and Scott Rosenberg

Ed Cone is a senior writer for Baseline, a business and technology magazine published by Ziff Davis Media, and an opinion columnist for the News & Record, the monopoly daily newspaper in Greensboro, North Carolina. Joshua Marshall is a columnist for The Hill and contributing writer for Washington Monthly. Glenn Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. Scott Rosenberg works for Salon. Here is a rough transcript of their panel discussion:

Ed Cone: Josh, you got an interview with Wesley Clark. Why did you put it on your Weblog? Why was he willing to let you put it on your Weblog rather than in a more traditional venue?

Joshua Marshall: The whole point was for it to be on the Weblog. It seemed obvious to me that they're just getting into the campaign. The Dean campaign is one of their things. This was their attempt to leapfrog and get into the game. They're Internet savvy. For my part, I'm much more invested in my Web site than any of the places that pay me money to write for them. That's my thing. That's what I'm associated with.

I've been doing the site for three years now. When I first started it and the hit count was so low, there was the question that if I got a big interview, would I use it on the site or take it somewhere else? There's the professional question and the money question. Over time, I had the money question less and less. I do things on the site because I can control how it comes out.

As the site got more hits, there was no question for me. It benefits me personally.

Cone: Glenn, how do you build the biggest media brand in independent media, how do you build hit count? Was it 911?

Glenn Reynolds: That was part of it. I teach Internet law. I thought having a blog would be kind of cool. Traffic took off pretty fast. The only thing I did that you could call marketing is that when I wrote a story, I would email it to a reporter or a pundit. It grew faster, even before 911, than I expected. Other sites link to me more. It's a viral thing. Every time someone links to you, your hits go up.

The only thing I've done is that I link to a lot of people. There is a school of thought that if you link to people, people might like them better. This whole "Keep people on your site" theory reminds me of Glen Baxter-style journalism. People come to me because I'm not really that interesting a guy, but I seem to find the interesting people.

Cone: You can get 100,000 page views a day just by writing the word "Indeed," after something someone else said. Scott, you work for an organization. How is that different than what these people are doing?

Rosenberg: The question on people's minds is that we have this thing called blogging, which is very individualistic. Then we have these large, hierarchical media organizations looking at blogging. People are very afraid. At Salon, I'm lucky. I wear several hats. I'm an editor. I'm a writer. As managing editor, I'm able to do a blog. And the organization is concerned with me saying something that will disrupt the organization because I'm a key part of it. We don't have a concern with writers holding the mic.

A lot of writers, particularly people who are used to doing professional journalism, actually want to be edited. Some writers prefer to work that way. The editing question isn't black and white: Let the individual voice free. Don't edit me.

Cone: That sort of new frontier is interesting. One of the most tired questions is positing that blogging is either/or -- that it's either a blog or journalism. What are some of the places that blogs are going to take journalism that are currently closed to journalism?

Marshall: It will allow journalists to do a little more Hunter S. Thompson tagging along with campaigns. There's the issue of what's on the record and what's not. There are contexts in which you can repeat what people say. And there are contexts in which you can't.

Reynolds: I remember Irving Goffman writing about the importance of the back stage. That's not just psychologically important, because a lot of things need to be said not in public. But the backstage is disappearing. The whole idea of closing things to the press is meaningless.

This guy who does NineDwarfs.com was trying to get his picture taken with every candidate. And the Kerry campaign was trying to keep him away. Kerry's campaign got blogging more than they've gotten anything else. You used to worry about Hunter S. Thompson catching you, or some famous journalist. Now you're worried about some guy who's name I don't even remember whose had a blog for three weeks.

Rosenberg: Then there's the backstage of journalism itself. Look at Jim Romenesko's site. Just by having one place where the entire spectrum of the coverage of media and adding a letters page, that simple little opening of a window an inch has had made a huge difference. Now we have an entire blogosphere of people writing about what's happening inside their newspapers and magazines.

I agree a little more with Doc. I'm dedicated to reading my New York Times as it is. I want it to be what it is. I don't want it to become a blog. But the impact of blogs is that an institution like the New York Times needs to open itself up a little more. It already has. Just recently, there was an item about how they select letters. They never would have done that before.

At this point, the conversation largely devolved, fracturing into Q&A and unproductive targeting of Reynolds. Some people did comment on several interesting concepts: your personal reputation as the institution you represent, the challenge of not short-changing other media outlets by blogging stories first, how people decide what stories go where, and the ethics of amateur journalism.

Marshall: If I worked for a large institution, there'd be pressure for me to ask more and different questions. My interest is much more, can they talk at length. You can't stay on message if you're talking at length. Here it is. If you think it's too long, don't read it. It's not a take it or leave it, but I think that people who read the site are willing to read longer stuff.

Question: We're getting to the Fox News-ification of blogs. Be up front with your bias. Say where you stand. Blogs are basically doing what's the worst of traditional journalism does.

Question: That's a particularly American view. The thinking that people should declare their biases is talking down.

Cone: What I think he's saying is that people need to stop smoke-screening their biases.

Dave Winer: Let's talk about the future. What's the vision for what you want to do?

Reynolds: The writing is easy. The hard part is that you have to pay attention to the news. There are all sorts of studies that prove the more you pay attention to the news, the more depressed you're going to be.

Question: We all tend to edit our opinions about each other. If I read in 15 places that I consider reputable that Glenn's statements are facts, I will tend to believe what he says. Whatever's written is something that I should evaluate. Weblogs have allowed you to do your own fact checking.

Cone: We'd all like to get paid to do our dream jobs. I would love to do nothing but blog all day. Where are you guys going to be? Josh, you're cited by Paul Krugman as the guy he reads. What happens when the New York Times comes to you?

Reynolds: They ought to give him a blog.

Marshall: I haven't considered that for a lot of reasons. It's difficult to consider any job opportunity that would make me give up the blog.

Cone: Would you consider putting your blog under a logo?

Marshall: No.

Winer: Why not? You're sitting next to a guy who puts a logo on his blog.

Rosenberg: Salon is an exception. It was started by a bunch of people from the San Francisco Examiner who were upset by how a strike had turned out. My hope for the future is that in a year or two years, we're no longer asking this question. I've spent the last eight years to turn a Web magazine into a successful business. We're not even close to making money. My advice in terms of blogging to make money is: Don't even try.

Cone: Then there's the idea of the local Weblog. When I think of my audience, a lot of times, with something like Rush Limbaugh, I don't even care what I think about Rush Limbaugh. In North Carolina, there were all sorts of local issues that weren't being covered, so I started writing for a local audience. I target my stuff to journalists, political readers, and a local audience.

Reynolds: SK Bubba has become a factor in local politics. A lot of stuff doesn't get covered. He's made a difference. That's a huge marketing opportunity.

Question: Journalists cannot afford to cover every issue or every meeting. Bloggers bring out more information.

Cone: Weblogs and links create more Weblogs and links.

The discussion devolved again, but Jay Rosen, chair of the journalism program at New York University brought up an interesting point about every reader being a writer. Doc Searls then said that it was moot to even think about audience or readers when blogging. That dovetailed interestingly with the fact that Reynolds, Winer, and others don't allow comments on their posts because they're afraid of the troll factor or comment spam. If you don't allow comments, you're missing part of the point of blogging. If you're not open to feedback -- and replying to that feedback publicly -- you're not participating in a conversation. One audience member suggested that blogging facilitates parallel conversations. Another said, "People who are used to writing monologues need to be open to a dialogue." I'm with her.