Friday, January 21, 2005

The weather forecast for Saturday night in Boston. "1 to 2 feet." 

News.Com: "Called Exeem, the software aims to merge the speedy downloads of BitTorrent with the powerful global search capabilities of Kazaa or eDonkey." 

We just heard that Business Week has blogs. The editor says he needs traffic. Your wish is our command.  

Rogers Cadenhead: "Sean Palmer and Christopher Schmidt have created a new XML site syndication format that has a root element, channel, and another element that make it incompatible with all existing formats." 

Dan Gillmor: "This is oddly creepy." 

Dan Bricklin on podcasting. 

Here's the IRC channel for the conference.  

The conference is going really slowly. All these speeches. We should watch some TV. We have a lot of bugs to fix. How about some breakout sessions to create some bug lists. Pros make a bug list for bloggers, bloggers make a list for pros. 

The open session will be on the fifth floor of the Taubman building of the Kennedy School tomorrow at 1:30PM. 

Follow the bloggings of the webcreds. 

Ed Cone is collecting an interesting series of essays for the conference. One mistake I've heard there, and several times on the conference mail list, is an assumption that blogs are all left or right. While, imho, all blogs are political, not all are about politics, and certainly not all about US politics. There are blogs by people from all kinds of places, geographic, intellectual and spiritual. This blog started about scripting (hence its title) and expanded to cover technology, and many other subjects. Yesterday on Zawodny's blog I commented that there is no "the" blogging community. So many people think they grok the wholeness of it, but are only looking at a small part. Blogs go everywhere the Web goes, which is, today, everywhere. 

I think this weekend is about creating some experiences, and perhaps some new bonds. I've always been a proponent of Working Together, but before WT can happening, first must come listening. No doubt there will be a lot of saying at this conference. How much listening? I'm going to try, really hard, to do my part. 

Scott Rosenberg reviews Bush's second inaugural speech. 

Charles Cooper: "Yahoo agreed to control its discussion forums and rig the Chinese version of its search engine to prohibit certain hot-button search terms." 

Kevin Schofield: "Descartes and Heisenberg walk into a bar and order drinks..." 

I've resisted pointing at the young Come Hither Bill, thinking it wasn't appropriate for a dignified weblog such as Scripting News, but this one is too good, I can't resist. 

Four years ago: "The patent hypers have no shortage of stories about lovely little guys with high ideals and strong principles." 

Response to Jay Rosen's piece 

Other than participating in discussions at the Webcred conference later today, I have one responsibility, to respond to Jay Rosen's paper about Blogging vs Journalism, and how it is over. I have between two and three minutes to do so. I have, unfortunately written a one-hour speech. Heh. Obviously there's a lot I want to say, but I can only say one thing. And this is it.

The battle between Journalism and Blogging is over -- but only from Jay Rosen's point of view, one which I am somewhat familiar with. As far as I'm concerned Jay was invented by Jeff Jarvis, who brought him to my first BloggerCon, where he stole the show. I've become an admirer of Jay's and a regular reader of his blog, and I feel I have some understanding of who he is.

In his book On Having No Head, Douglas Harding recounts an experiment with ten children that tells us much about the power of expectation. Arrange a group of ten children in a circle with their feet pointing in, touching, and ask one of the children: How many feet? The child counts, one, two, three, ... twenty. Now ask: How many heads? One, two, three, ... nine. It might be tempting to correct the child, but wait...

It's hard for the blogger, as it is for the reporter, to report that there are nine heads in the circle, but that's the story, and that's why you need a lot of reporters all looking at the story from their own point of view.

Now, for Jay, who is the chairman of the Journalism Department at New York University, a famous school headquartered in the publishing capital of the United States, his focus has to be on the umpteen thousand reporters employed in his hometown. Recently, they seem to have accepted blogs and bloggers, at least to a limited extent. I think that's what Jay is saying. I imagine that from Jay's point of view it not only appears that the animosity is over, but they will figure out everything that's good about blogs, as Jay has -- so the "versus" is now over.

That's what Jay's article says to me.

PS: I wrote about Harding's work in this DaveNet piece, in May 1997.