irc woes
Okay,… i’m no tech dummy and I used to hang out on IRC all the time in like 1990 and pick up gay truckers. But I can’t figure out how to connect to the bloggercon IRC with colloquy or Fire.
someone come and show me?
Month: June 2006
emotional life discussion at bloggercon iv
Lisa Williams starts witha story and a question. the blogosphere is my home…in a way i feel more at home there than in real life, but that’s not how i started out. i went to blogs to be alone. girl with real gold-tone diary with a little lock… my blog was born out of a privacy crisis. when you have comments in your locked diary that sucks.
her coming out story…
desert island blogging. peopel do cooler stuff when they don’t know we’re watching. ssshhhhh, we’re watching.
the bottle floating into your desert island with a message to you!
community with interesting conversation. now, i’m here… i’m here to find out why you blog.
hwat’s the most personal and serious thing you blog. what’s the thing when you push publish, it makes you really scared?
***
jesus… the room really cleared out for this. i cant believe that people stayed for the kind of boring rss thing… that seemed to go nowhere… and left for this! ooo scary! girl cooties! emotions!
***
terry heaton.. i found my wife dead on the floor… And I blogged it a few hours later. i knew of nothing else to do except to write about it. what happned in the hours and days following was really stunning. i received so many condolances. emalis and comments. the community held me up. mainstream media misses that it’s a community. it’s a social phenomenon. i can’t thank everybody enough. I believe in sharing experiences because that’s the way we learn. My writing about Allie has not gone over well with certain members of the family. grieving… her brother doesn’t understand… he’s not a writer. he thinks i’m violating her privacy. that’s somethng i have to deal with .
***
Lisa – finding body… my own post about that… my family’s reaction… blogging gives us all the hidden information. most poeple have no idea what to do. they have no idea how other people react, how they’ll react. it’s tremendously helpful to let that information out.
***
chris… i’ve led a v ery public life for a while online. i had a very bloggerish spirit… (he talks about starting relationship with ponzi, when he’s a v. public person – it exposes her to being public figure as well)
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What you blog and don’t blog. don’t blog what you don’t own. friendly stranger… if i would tell a friendly stranger at a bus stop this, dont’ blog it. (without asking). living up to trust i have with my family and friends. i dont want them to feel that everythign we say gets blogged.
Niall… i’ve had this conv wiht my family and their tolerance level. i have a brother in iraq… and they have captured people and tortured them…. and used info off the web. so i took all info about him off my web site. (er… shoudl i be blogging this? i guess, without his bro’s name it’s okay, plus this is getting podcast.)
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more stuff…
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I talk about will’s point about exposure (the guy who was so unfairly spun as “broke up with his girlfriend on youtube”) the more that happens to all of us, the less important it will be… people will be suspicious of that kind of spin and will give people some slack. it will be okay to have a human dimension and vulnerabilities. and companies won’t be scared to hire a person with a blog because they reveal their human side… they’ll be scared to hired a person whose human side they don’t know.
lisa: yah.. hope so… and…
liz: also… the fuzzy line of “dont blog what you don’t own” human relationships you can’t cut those lines , too complicated, must negotiate it new all the time… very hard…
lisa: i dont blog about my husband
liz: do you feel that as a loss? did you used to when you were on the desesrt island?
lisa: no… and yes…
Lisa: i use my blog to de-bullshittify myself. am i full of crap? or not?
cool.
Lisa: and it’s cool about cutting tthrough the small talk…
Kristie wells: i never had a paper diary… before my blog… it’s my first experience with expressing myself in writing…
***
this is very interesting!!! i can’t wait to read the whole transcript! it’s very hard to liveblog it and i’ve got the chat window up, and also listen fully, eventho i’m a kick ass multitasker…
***
lawsuit discussion. interessting!
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a dude is nervously realizing as he talks , that he’s in a room full of bloggers who are bloggging what he says. yup.
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jory: blog helps me clean up my relationships… i will never embarrass someone more than i will embarrass myself… cleaned up my life… my family not communicative… till i started blogging… dialogues have started going on in my family… my mom’s blog now, th is is how i know what’s going on with her now! she won’t talk to me, but she will blog about it! and I can read it!
wow fascinating!
***
Elisa… i dont blog my boyfriend’s name… or where he works… but it’s a large computer company based in seattle… *hahahaha* i dont’ ‘t hink he reads my blog very much… writing things down is diff than talking or telling people things. 9/11 i was in nyc on business… and 3 years later i wrote it down in a day by day way. parts of the story i had never said out loud, the most hard parts, came out. ii still get emotional, i can’t say them out loud, they’re too hard.
it’s easier to share heightened emoltional experiences with a big anonymous audience… than it is to say in personal conversation, i wonder about the dynamics of that.
***
jay rosen talking about thinking politically. hannah arendt. jews thought of themselves as germans in germany, but that didn’t mean enough and wasn’t political thinking, because to non german jews, they weren’t germans. they were jews.
i think that this is applicable to us as women… we think w’er human. but other people see us as not human. and we are extremely vulnerable to losing our human rights.
standards discussion at bloggercon iv
Niall leading the discussion of standards for users – someone is saying “put rss standards up on the screen and let’s spend 5 minutes understanding it, most people in this room could.” “why should I? what is the value to me …” “do you use a cell phone? do you know what its protocols and standards are? no, who cares” “well i would if you said i could understand it in 5 minutes.” “we’re spending 15 minutes debating whether to spend 5 minutes.”
heh.
Where is our fabulous projected transcript? I don’t know who’s talking anymore.
By the way, there is a fabulous cappucino machine in the kitchen in the magma room or whatever it is called. it has peet’s coffee and grinds it and makes you a free mochachino. Right on. The cookies are gross and stale – alas. I should make some good cookies to bring tomorrow and go all den mother on their asses.
Niall has got something up ont he scrren… there is an argument going on… i can’t read the text, it’s too small. I have no idea what they’re talking about… XML… something… Chris ?? is saying she felt freaked out when x happened… dave winer says “now this is a problem… why say you freaked out… do you feel freaked out about other things in your life too?” what the fuck? what the fuckity fuck? Did I just miss something? That was really annoying from my POV, whatever it was. (Muttering from several women in my earshot, making sarcastic comments about dave’s personal “frustration in his life”…)
Niall finally makes Dave W. shut up and takes the discussion back.
Niall talks about RSS. parsing an xml rss file’s markup. okay… you know what, i can understand a markup language… without anyone pointing to it on a big screen. No one has actually explained why I want to know jack about rss markup.
*saving, to be continued in a minute*
come to think of it why not have a “liveblogging” mode for blogger/typepad/whatever, where you autosave LIVE every couple of minutes to the same file instead of my publishing the post, then going back tediously to edit it & make updates in the same post!!! liveblogging mode! did anyone hear that?
***
I’m muttering about why do I want to konw this? a dude turns around and says just roll with it and we’ll know why we want to know about it after we know it. Okay! haha!
Niall is going through more of the markup and the rss feed. guid, docs, generator, managingEditor, various other slots of information that it’s good to have filled in and that in theory you can change or update (globally across a site? or what? ) later. Niall invites Ponzi to talk as she just gave him a “what the” look.
ponzi: a ffew times you’ve said we don’t want to go into that… oh.. never mind… let’s not go into that right now…
niall: okay i won’t dumb it down. going into category? it doesn’t make sense in the form that doc searls has it right now…
doc: well actually..
someone: it’s totlaly esoteric… sometimes stuff is so convoluted… i did not do it this way to confuse you but b/c there was no other way to do it. i would swear in court on a stack of holy bibles you dont’ need to understand this. since i’m the guy to design all this i can say you can eat me.
ponzi? but since you just said that we need to understand it
*laughter… “hear hear”…
what? I’m missing like 90 % of the meaning of this… that’s okay… it’s clearly an rss ongoing conversation… v. intense…
some dude: blah blah i dont have to know whats under the hood of my car
some other dude: can i ask what you do for a living?
Jesus! Dick war city! Weenie war! Here is where my impulse is to get up and get some more coffee…
Niall: this is getting far away from our purpose. *applause*
some dude just took my picture and I mugged for it….
*****
this is not the standard this is a kluge and a hack…
that’s the point.. we have standards but what happens to the storage containers… what do people do with it.
what do we want for standards?
what are some of the things that could make your life easier? online?
– allowing things to be exported out of things to give peole a hope of interchange
– categories not implemented properly… standards are open to interpretation.
– things evolve and change, standards have to change….
– editors of icalendar etc talking… never got it right… calendaring standards that work… users and developers come at issues with their specific needs… they arre inherently in conflict. different perceptions of reality. you solve one and break another. calendars and schedules are different.
***
space out for a bit… reading email… ergh… must lie down…
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Talking about feeds getting your programs and devices to talk to each other, getting info across. Yes… that would be lovely. just being able to ssee your bookmarks info in text format, or your addressbook. (YEAH!)
Car metaphor for the millionth time. The car metaphor is not very productive and i find it annoyingly anti-intellectual. “you don’t need to know how your car works” “we don’t ahve to know how your car works.” “we just want to get in the car and drive” erm, okay whatever. However, we want to be able to take our carseats out of the car and install them into another car without breaking a sweat or reading a user manual. That is the point of standards! duh!
identity standards. users taking matters into their own hands. (I want to hear more about that!)
guy saying that he wants printers to be more standards, should be able to print wherever to whatever. also, whatever pdf was supposed to do, it’s not doing it.
RSS and aggregators gave birth to the entire echo system a lot of people made money off of that. everyone’s free to exploit the lack of copyright. more standards means we make more money. (who was that? was that marc canter? i cant see… sounded like him…)
my name’s scott and i’ve been trying to share calendars with my wife for many years… *laughter*
“i want my software to quit tryihng to phone home….”
this is an extension of the user bitch session!
******
putting stuff on flickr… getting it out again.
marc canter just said something v. hysterical. you suck you spit, what goes in goes out… standards and api should go both ways. (yeah!!!)
eric and moblogging and textamerica horror story. tacit agreement, i’m giving you my content to keep, i hope you’re keeping it for me… then you find out they’re not.
It has been interesting to see Marc Canter in his natural habitat rather than at WoolfCamp.
***
we move on to talk about moving blogs. getting yoru data out.
elisa camahort says: how about an app that will crawl all my blogs every night and back them all up and keep them organized.!
YEEAH!!!!!! hear hear! I could use that! I’d pay for software to do that. I’m massively multiblogular, like Elisa is.
the inbound link to your data breaks… ! good point.
more from bloggercon's user bitch panel
I like what Jesse just said about how users don’t need to talk to support people, who don’t care about what you want… support people want to train users to do what they’re supposed to be doing with the software. but users need to be talking to developers about what they actually WANT.
Jay rosen talks about tabs. “you jerks! you could have done it years ago!” hahah!
I stood up to say, “I dig flickr and flock and they do a lot of things right as far as transparency and integration with blogging/tagging… And then, I’m taking your picture, right now, with my cameraphone. and it’s going to take me 7 or 8 clicks and 60 seconds to email this photo to my flickr account. and it should be one button. customizable, common things you might want to to, customizable, with one button, like a script or a macro, but not so in depth.” someone said that HIS phone does that already … well… fine… good… but they all should, and a lot of software should work that way. You should be able to make your own “commonly done thing” happen.
chris heuer is talking about embedding odeo … contact info into software… feedback button built into software.
microsoft has a thing called “send a smile” and you click on a smiley or frowny face, and type in why you liked it or you hated it. it’s like instant gratification.
Actually that sounds kind of cool.
What I think is… what you need is the smiley, the frowny, and the DATA… so users can see what other users are saying, see the smiileys and the frownies of other people!! for collectivity.
Bloggercon so far: lunch, users in charge
I’m at the users in charge discussion sitting against the back wall on the floor, my favorite place to be in discussions. I can fidget, lie down, lean on the wall, whatever, while being relatively non-visible. I’m listening with one ear… the conversation was just brought back to “let’s hear from users not developers”. “let developers do support for their own product. ” (for a while?) fitting data types to people’s needs – not trying to put people into your preconcieved data types.
Mostly, I’m digesting my lunch. Mary Tsao and I walked off and at random had lunch with Kelsey and Matthew, from Seattle & Vancouver. Kelsey owns a manufacturing plant and Matthew develops blog-like tools for the plant’s employees to keep in touch & work collaboratively. Chris Heuer joined us… we were trying to find Kristi at osha, but it was too crowded. so, off to Thirsty Bear. I recommend the pine nut-micro arugula- goat cheese empanadas with red pepper sauce. DAMN that was good.
Back to this session. It’s really nice to have the transcript going up on the projection screens overhead.
Jory has a user bitch, it’s like the Ikea problem, you have to go all the way through that frickin store, for a SPOON? It took me an hour to change the number of posts that appear on Typepad… to flip a switch. I don’t want to have to memorize everything on that site to find what i’m looking for. q: is there a product that jumps out in your mind that avoids that? jory: … hmmmm.
I’d say Flickr is quite beautifully intuitive… I’m using it right now. There has to be *something*, a layer of common use, that is amazingly low-entry-cost and intuitive. then, depth you might have to work for.
a bitch about browsers for mac, crashing with more than 10 tabs open. Users care a lot… we arent’ going to join a group though… it sounds like a lot of work.
a guy bitches about irc client… ircle. Oh you’ve got to be kidding… colloquy was good.. it took me one minute to set it up. “most popular” different than “good to use” ircle is a piece of crap and colloquy is great. who has two hours to waste trying to figure out how to set up a damn piece of software?
dude talking about how he and some friends put together suggestions for flickr. and they haven’t answered him yet…
product teams want to know, should we be listening to bloggers? teams, prod dev, iterative process, are bloggers the real voice of the average customer?
someone cracks a joke about the search dog in windows xp… hahahaha
ANYWAY I like the projection of the transcript in realtime! Wow! So much more useful than looking at panelists’ powerpoint slides!!! To know who is saying what in the audience. it’s nice to have their names. The monitors with microphones are amazingly useful. so often in a panel or discussion i can’t hear the questions from audience. here, a committment to infrastructure, i.e. providing working wireless microphones, makes a huge difference to egalitarian ideals for discussion.
Back to our lunch discussion : i talked aobut socialtext to Kelsey and Matthew. They talked about t heir product/supplier workflow, about various studies of Bethlehem Steel (the Hawthorne study), another study that said that low light was NOT the factor in productivity but merely indication fo management interest, being observed, etc.
note: email coworking wiki info to Mary.
Chris H: we talked briefly about being dilettantes and sluts. “slutty nodes”.
When I got here I was going to the citizen journalism discussion but was waylaid by Kristin from wired news… she wanted some quotes about blogher stuff and was like “waaah i have a deadline like 1 hour from now please give me some quotes” and I figured I’m an awesome media whore, so why not. I can read the transcripts later of citizen journalism and it’ll likely be a bunch of weenie wars anyway. (as indeed it sounded like from the reports at lunch… and for a good citizen journalism project, international, I would humbly suggest that I don’t give a rat’s ass about the price of prozac, but how about the price of childcare? now that would be popular… and interesting… and perhaps influential… WORLDWIDE.) Or something to do with healthcare, like vaccinations or a service that a huge # of people need.
Oh – about the photo. I was blathering to K. from Wired about transparency of life, the personal is political, etc. etc. So, I thought I’d take this appalling photo of my belly hanging out, old school riot grrl style, and the batman bandaid over my tubal ligation laparoscopy scar from just a couple of days ago. Yow, how’s that for inappropriate! Squicked much? Want to see my cool incisions? Just be glad there’s a bandaid.
More in a bit. I’m going to quit talking about lunch now.
two little poems, translated two ways
I’m recovering from minor surgery and don’t have a lot of blog juice in me, so here’s a couple of poem translations I did a while back. The poems are from, I think, around 1950, and are by David Rosenmann-Taub, from his book “Cortejo y Epinicio”. The translations are mine.
I love his early poems, and their air of inward-looking fractal secret codedness, the complexity and richness – and I agree with something I remember reading about his work – that each poem is like a game of chess.
XLVII
Sosiego(Viscisitud…) Seduciré la tinta.
Cangiilones, colmaos.
Solace
(Vissicitude…) I’ll vamp Ink itself.
Chamberpots, crap slopping over the top.
– or –
Solace
(Vissicitude…) I’ll vamp Ink itself.
Garbagepails, full to spilling.
IX
JerarquíaGanglios
– líneas –
y puños.
¿Qué más?
Los panoramas.
¿Éstos?
Hierarchy (two ways)
Ganglions
– lines –
and fists.
What else?
Panoramas.
These?
*
Neural nets
powerlines
and grabbing.
What else?
Seeing everything.
This, too?
Bloggercon IV: The Gathering
The feminist CR session that is Bloggercon needs your help! Yes, we’re going to make it a collectible card game *and* an unconference. With tech conference bingo. When I blame the patriarchy or Marc Canter bellows an insult about Apple and the evils of DRM, someone’s sure to yell BINGO. Instead of passing a talking stick, we’ll build roads and settlements on an insane live-action hexmap wiki: Bloggers of Cataan! While knitting our own cat-eared Roomba cozies and figuring out our next moves in the Advanced Squad Leader smackdown! Mary Tsao will teach us her favorite playground drinking games! And the BlogHer triumvirago shall spread their miasma of pain and fear across the airwaves as part of their evil plan of world domination; they may reveal that they’re Laádan-speaking vampires.
As many games as possible, because it’s the playable con!
At some point I’ll whip out the “Gregorian Fervor” card and the podcast listeners will be treated to a round of Discussion Leadership that takes place completely in fake plainsong.
I’ll paint everyone’s fingernails a dainty pink.
Then we’ll all take off our clothes and pose for nakedjen. Yay!
Tags: Bloggercon, geeks, feminism.
More on process and poems
Again relating to Quickmuse. Man, this is the sort of neoformalist stick-up-the-butt work that makes me crazy, even when I also kind of like it. It makes me crazy how same-same it all is. They all sound like each other, and like they’re tallking only to each other in the same melancholy formal register. How can people write like that all the time and not be aware of the profound unoriginality of voice? And consider that the only path to “quality”? Where is the newness? What’s getting broken and remade? (Nothing big, that’s for sure.) It’s like watching someone in a box extend a tiny feeler outside the box and wave it around in an elaborate encoded handsignal. Even if I understand the meannig of the handsignal and its beauty and the history of the tentacle-waving from inside a box art form, I’m so dissatisfied! Yes, there is a place for the muted expression of things… I can’t put my finger on what makes me so FRUSTRATED when I read poems like this. It’s like being a volcano and having someone try to make you sit down and listen to a reasoned argument about how you need to brush your teeth. They are right, and it’s fine for them to expect you to listen quietly, but when their speech is over, you’re still a fucking volcano. I want big poems, and I want to be surprised, and mind-fucked, and taken on a trip, and pleased by something that goes somewhere I don’t expect. I want MORE.
Ideally, I suppose, watching someone else’s process makes one frustrated, and just frustrated enough to run off and write a BETTER poem. Just like retranslation, where you love a work, and respect a translation of it or have special nostalgia for it, but it does not match your own vision and so becomes a constant pebble in your shoe until you do it your own way. Inspiration by way of annoyance. God, people! Get out of the box! Would rather see something, anything that isn’t like everything else, and definitely that isn’t “workshopped” or “polished”.
Maybe the toothbrushing is not quite the right example. They’re like small, perfect, formal gardens. I like them, but I want fucking terraforming — that’s big and vulnerable.
Quickmuse and process
This looks nifty: QuickMuse, a poetry jam site that exposes writing process. You can see the finished poem and then do a playback of the writer compsing the poem, writing and deleting and shuffling things around. The interface, well, I could wish for it to be more like a video where you can slide a bar and speed it up or pause. But I love the idea. Poems on assignment or on a subject have always made me yawn – even assignments I try to give myself. But how interesting it would be to capture the natural process of writing… not always, but occasionally. I have a moment between when i’m rambling and casting about, and then suddenly get in the groove, get my vision, and know what I’m doing. I can stay in that state of mind for hours, then drop out, exhausted emotionally. My paper notebooks have those few first lines and “casting” maybe pages of rambling or clumsy lines that I know aren’t “it”. It seems to me that part of inspiration is knowing what is not it, but knowing you have to go through creating Not-It anyway.
thinking out loud
It’s so alien to me that people think that you have to say something, or write something, and that’s your Position. That’s what you think, that’s the end point, like the happily ever after at the end of a fairy tale of a process of inner reasoning. Then other people can argue with the Position, which represents you-ness at a point in time, but also is out there forever to be argued with. How peculiar to demand that people’s thought should remain static and definite. It seems more normal to me to start conversations as a point of departure and to keep participating in them to evolve thought. Life, and thinking, would be pretty boring if it were all in my head. If I didn’t need conversation to think with, I’d never have to say anything – I’d be an incarnation of the Buddha, and even most Buddhas talked out loud.