Open The Dialogue

Jay Rosen's Citizen Journalism session - intro here. Doc Searls' notes here

[ed: Just like an educator, Jay's on-screen notes ask, as the session begins, for people to move up to the front of the room]

[10:53] Doc's notes are going to be invaluable here. Marc Glaser made some fantastic comments about how he does his job on a regular basis, and is sourcing things.

[10:58] Doc Searls: "Open your archives" to newspapers.

[11:10] The "citizen journalism"-ness of this discussion seems to be going in and out quite a bit, IMHO.

[11:27] Jeremy Pepper discussing how Wal-mart and much of the right "gets" it with regard to working with bloggers, while some on the left are more about control. I'd have to agree with a lot of that.

[11:43] Buzz makes a fantastic comment about the "real-time" issue that goes on with contribution and the value of what is contributed. People want to see the completed work asap.

Posted by Tom Biro at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

[9:05] Phillip Torrone is talking about using various tools that can be used online to do different things, and he points out that Flickr is, unfortunately, one of the best tools online to show a how-to. He talks about how he used it to show us a few pictures from some how-tos from back-in-the-day.

[9:10] Chris Pirillo discussing how he has made a screencast, Torrone called it "complainware" based on that usage. Lots of discussion about screencasting software, including one package for $300. Interesting to hear a groan about that cost.

[9:20] Some comments about how devices and tools aren't created with the option for teaching people how to use them, they're just to bring people in and get them interested, and then wanting to buy the next product.

[9:28] Great comments about how people who aren't really technical people use the Web, not necessarily through the way those of us in the room use them, but they're all over many of the tools we use, too.

[9:33] Buzz Bruggeman making some great comments about speaking with 800 lawyers (someone said "Sorry!") about using wikis, and that they were saying they didn't use them, as many were scared of losing the information that they held in their heads if they permanently wrote it down and shared it.

[9:38] PT commenting on how especially when podcasts started, it was like AM radio.

[9:42] Chris Pirillo: "wikis are just unusable"

[9:52] Rex Hammock makes us all aware that Doc Searls' notes on the sessions are available here - this one's specifically for the Tools session.

[10:05] Jay Rosen wants an "automatic link embedding device," a comment system that he can do more "movement" within.

Posted by Tom Biro at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

All times Pacific!

[8:18] Dave Winer is opening up BloggerCon IV this morning, and is giving the rundown on how the conferences started, and what it's all about. He had a fun time mentioning previous events, including BlogNashville from 2005, which he mentioned as being unfortunate for him, if you had been there.

[8:22] Niall Kennedy mentioning how blogging has changed in the last 18 months. Interesting note that the people holding the microphones here are "monitors," and that you "don't get to hold the mic.

[ed] Looking for more BloggerCon stuff? Check Technorati for more.

[8:25] Lots of great credits going out from Dave, Jake Luddington, Limelight Networks, Sylvia Paul, Dan Farber, and others.

[8:37] Dave's talking about making sure people aren't commercial, and that he doesn't want to be a "hardass." Thilk notices that his RSS Feed for the Onion Radio News had a great item entitled "Shark Whisperer Missing At Sea." Nice.

Posted by Tom Biro at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hey y'all. Chris Thilk, who recently started working with me at MWW Group, will be liveblogging BloggerCon IV with me from CNET out in San Francisco, so stay tuned.

Posted by Tom Biro at 11:05 AM | Permalink

• Lifehacker leads us to something interesting for people to check out: a short blogging glossary.
• Dave Winer informs that one ISP's customers are having trouble viewing Craigslist if they happen to download a security software utility offered to them. It has sparked multiple comments about a net neutrality concern. And while this doesn't appear to be that exact situation, it shows a "real life example" of how users of a particular network would feel were they unable to reach a site for some random reason germane only to them. Expect Tim Karr to have comments on such a situation, as he's been all over the net neutrality debate.
• While I think that some might take offense to the title a little bit, check out what's up at Socialtext with regard to the World Cup. Then, visit the Soccertext Wiki.
• In case you hadn't heard, Mark Fletcher is leaving Bloglines to do his startup thang once again. I'm definitely curious to see what he's got going next, as I was a big fan of Bloglines when it came about. Mark was one of the first people I ever got to do an interview with over at The Media Drop, and based on some of the things he said way back when, I'd expect nothing less than another project we'll all be hearing about in a short time. Well, not necessarily a Web-time short time, but a short time nonetheless. Good luck, Mark!
• Nick Bradbury is asking anyone using NewsGator RSS products to go take a quick survey

Posted by Tom Biro at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• I've always found that multi-writer blogs end up grabbing more traffic because they are able to publish more often and become more "relevant" in search results. Raj Dash writes at Performancing about why those blogs tend to be more popular, while pointing out how some single-author sites have snagged a stack of traffic themselves. While the multi-author site might have something for everyone, that doesn't mean that the "larger" traffic is better, if those new readers are only coming to read one writer they enjoy, and skipping the rest. Well, it's good for the advertising sales, but not necessarily good for the growth of the site. You can't be all things to all people. [via]
• Bambi Francisco is discussing Six Apart's latest foray into the world of social behavior on the 'net, Vox. (Hey Bambi, you should link to stuff when you post about it, if only for the fact that the people on that end will find you when doing searches on who's writing about them!)
• Technorati tags are great and all, and this kind of thing always helps, but it's important to note that the category functions in most blogging software - I know it works for the Six Apart tools - also creates tags that function more than properly. Just a thought.
• Jeremy Pepper is talking about Nikolai Volkoff (yeah, you know who I mean) and his thoughts about mainstream media.
• I'm sorry, but 15 minutes online is like a decade.
• Robert Ricci points to some smarts about what to do if you're just not feeling the blog bug at any particular moment.

Posted by Tom Biro at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Over at The Chronicle of Higher Education, David Perlmutter writes about how he has been adding blogs to his stable of sources for information with a political twist, and is asking how these sites will "play in future campaigns and elections." Of course, we got a first glimpse at how blogs and other online media such as forums (still the leader, if you start sourcing where most popular blogs get their information from) have an impact on the political process, but what I think is the more important question, going forward, is how the evolution of blogs and new media tools in the last few years since the 2004 presidential election will herald even more changes in the process.

For those who have been on the scene before that election season, we've been privy to everything from seeing those blogs have much lessened traffic numbers after the election (probably just like any other media) to hearing about how government entities wanted to regulate speech on the Internet as donations. Most of those things are old hat now, so what's going to be exciting is to see what comes next. Will some new tool show up that will make us all wake up - again - or will we be privy to such an amassing of online commentary that it will all become cluttered?

[via reverseswim on del.icio.us]

Posted by Tom Biro at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

WAY back in 2004, Microsoft's Bill Gates stated that spam would "be solved" by 2006. Well, It's 2006, and while my inbox(es) have done a much better job of sorting (it's not perfect by any means) spam from real mail, have we "solved" the spam problem by filtering at the user level? I'd say not.

The screenshot to the right is the left sidebar of my gmail account, which houses a good portion of my blog-related email, and the number next to the "Spam" title is the number of spam threads (note that some of those spams have two, three, four or more messages of the same type from the same sender) that I have received since 12:00am Eastern time Sunday, May 28. Solved? I think not. One executive, Jan Hruska, former CEO of Sophos, told ZDNet Asia's Vivian Yeo a few weeks back that even two years from now we won't see the end of spam, the way things are going.

I don't know about you, but howabout we all cut the pronouncements and come up with something that works? That isn't to say that people are sitting around on their hands, but when statistics by one group are showing 71% of all email sent being spam during the first quarter of 2006, something's not right, is it? Especially when that was up four percentage points from the end of 2006.

Posted by Tom Biro at 05:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Wondering how long folks are staying on the home page of any Web site? Well, according to one designer, it's about 20 words worth of reading. CyberJournalist points to a Leslie Walker column from Thursday's WaPo with much more detail.
• Sometimes I have trouble deciding which blog I write for should land a particular link. This one's definitely relevant elsewhere, but given the "dialogue" theme I like to promote, it's great here. Doug Fisher writes about how today's news is much more a "conversation," and leads us to some great commentary on the subject
• For those of you who wonder how to find new blogs to read, here's a list if you're into politics at all. Most of it is right-leaning, but it's good stuff. [via Daily Pundit]
• Doc Searls called this the quote du jour for Wednesday. I'd have to agree.
• Man, I mean blogging conferences have reached some sort of mainstreamishness, but this is ridiculous!

Posted by Tom Biro at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)