Tag: blogging

Looking back on this blog – I realize I should focus a bit more. Liveblogging should probably not go here, but somewhere else, and I can link to it from here.

I could also go back through every post to add tags. Cleaning up my other blogs seems impossible because they’re too huge already, but this one’s not so bad.

Why this blog? I thought it could help me to have a public non-pseudonymous presence. I have these essays on poetics from a few years ago, which I should post here and be done with it. I have feelings that my thoughts and visions about literature and blogging and my approach to the Internet have roots in common. Whatever that unity is, I have not yet found a way to explain it, even thought the feeling’s still strong.

Since my first encounter with computers and even the thought of AI, I have felt that computers in relation to humans are beautiful. Part of the love I feel is twined with feminism; the Cyborg Manifesto expresses this very well. Now, I had not read the Cyborg Manifesto when I was 10 and pounding away on the keys of my neighbors Apple II or Kaypro to make it write poetry. And yet felt so deeply sitting there that I was in love in an science-fiction-loving way, with the future, with a key, a key to liberation or unity of something broken in myself and in society. Before my contact with the net, I loved the idea of it. In front of the fuzzy glowing green letters on the black screen my mind was taking off to imagine infinite things; my own robotic arms extending into space in a mining colony, or the beautiful moment when the computer talked back. When you meet a tool like that, that is not quite a tool, that is an artistic medium but more than that, it’s an important moment. While all machines have beauty to me, I don’t feel the same about a xerox machine or even a typewriter, though maybe about certain architecture or performances or cities. Complexity, constructedness, potential and space – space as in room; an organic work of art that invites participation in its own construction. It makes the human imagination bigger. Some vast imaginariness collective unconscious reservoir of potential opens up!

This is nonsense and mysticism, but I still want to talk about it.

There’s a panel on November 14, Blogging Feminism: (Web)Sites of Resistance, at Barnard:

Of the internet’s viability as a tool for political change, we ask, is there a better example than the blog? Young and youthfully minded feminists have learned that blogging allows them to carve out personal and political spaces where their lives, their issues, their analyses of the world can come into sharp focus. Outside the confines of mainstream media, where women are addressed (usually exclusively) as consumers, feminist bloggers have become the cultural producers blazing some of the most radical and rousing paths toward revolutionary social change.

In celebration of the publication of this fall’s issue of The Scholar & Feminist Online, guest editors Gwendolyn Beetham and Jessica Valenti come together with select contributors to discuss how feminists are fulfilling the promise of creating a cybercommunity dedicated to securing a more just and peaceful world. Panelists include Lauren Spees and Michelle Riblett, BC ’05 (Hollaback), Liza Sabater (Culture Kitchen), among others. Join us for a spirited discussion of feminism in the 21st century.

Good! We need more discussions like this. We need to be documenting our feminism, compiling references, making solid, lasting interconnections. The Scholar and Feminist Online seems like a good step.

We’ve had one feminist think tank discussion in chat since the Wiscon “Feminist think tank” panel, and other projects spawned from it, like the stuff at feministsf.net – a group blog, a wiki, a carnival of feminism in SF, and more.

I still think that Wikipedia’s dearth of information on feminism needs to be addressed and fixed, but we also need new tools.

BarCamp Stanford – Sunday Aug. 27, 2006

It’s nice to be in the English building at Stanford. I think of all the times I’ve been here for literary readings (or job interviews). Now… how odd to be here for a computer conference.

*** first session ***
Guy talking about mashups. He’s from the stanford hci group.

henry ford museum. toy thing. little houses, magnetic. close circuit on a map. you can move them around. and it hooks up to google earth for a flythrough.

[Horribly… my first thought is that it has a direct military application as you could make your little models of the war front especially urban, flyable in simulator]

he has a slideshow. Their whiteboard has its own flickr account. big red staples “easy” button, camera in ithe ceiling takes a photo of the whiteboard, sent to python scripts, then you can safely erase the whiteboard.

other guy – can you actually read it?

mashup guy – yes.

Adina – do you have a recipe for it?

speaker – yes , here it is (shows diagram)

mashup guy – shows how they made it a sketch/animated thing.

example #4 – color field cam. like the flickr color picker mashup. but in the real world. point at a color, and you get flickr images that match the avg colo

question – how offten are you updating

mashup guy – not that fast… ilt is cached…

mashpits… start witout a

hci human computer interface. venn diagrams.

– things that live online (green
– live in interface physical space (red
things that live on computer. (blue

the intersections need the glue! most mashups are in the green section of “things that live online”. what goes in the other areas of the venn diagram?

….
liza loop: kids, younger?

mashup guy – lego mindstorms, other ones.

[i’m thinking of nintendogs and tamagochi ]

Back to glue.
green + blue = flickr, python api
red + green – shared phidgets, sensor nets?
red + blue: d.tools

Hotglue. a surface adhesive. duct tape. (screen scrape, poke)
dovetail joints – precise fitting, beautiful, parts know about each other. deep integration (public api)

http://mashup-tools wiki. password is design

easiest ways is not thru keyboard interface
but to arcade controller people… they are these 20 dollar boards…

Kent brewster – new developer network. was a hobbyist.
showing spiffy!search.

myweb at yahoo. tagging stuff.
picocricket….

brewster’s field guide to web 2.666 — kentbrewster.com/spiffysearch

okay, that’s spiffy. search that come s up with popup menu style list of stuff and you click on the side doohickey to get a popup window for you to tag it. works with delicious

Hell yeah, this looks handy. Then I could import it straight onto my blog with rss. my tags I wonder what it will look like using delicious. (is this link going to work… i think not. fix it later.)

Chris Messina – doing tech and flow.

sunday sessions. ID 2.0
tech a nd policy.
Online problem solving, politics and conflict res
Astronomy sim
co-working
mashups lighting talks @ lunch

****

me and a dude from microsoft… Nima… wearing laughing squid tshirt. I demo kent brewster’s thing… he tries it…

I whine that flock has not given me a pony yet. their search yahoo toolbar thing does not have a function for me. kent’s thing is better.

me and tantek talk abut information absorbtion speed and reading and habits. it needs to be fast like a video game. that is what we grew up with. keystrokes. I can play nethack or use vi without thinking. I want to browse, search, and read blogs that way, with fast muscle memory ingrained. tantek says the myweb thing is nifty but like many such tools it assumes way too slow an information stream and that you will maybe look at 10, 20 things… not 300- 500 a day. we need batch tagging.

I need to turn on a bunch of tags so that everything i do in a space is tagged with something.. like if everything i noted today till 5pm was tagged barcamp stanford techie, that would be useful for me & then I could toggle it off again . (again i am thinking of nethack or emacs or something. screw clicking.

****
tech and policy discussion

john pete nima todd tim adina tracy silona christine (mit limewire) tantek liz

Adina – 1) tech policy 2) partisan electoral politics 3) Deliberative. figuring out consensus building etc.

***

bill in congress right now passed house july 26 410-15 vote. DOPA now anything with social network is illegal in libraries and schools.

liz – all libraries or just kids room

pete – just kids room i think

pete – is lookign it up. if you have contact info on it… then it’s too much. blogger comments might be illegal.

adina – it’s not law yet. it’s passed the house it’s in the senate commerce committee. The next step here is to contact the members of the senate commerce committee. senator boxer from CA is on the committee. Contact her office. let’s look for creative ways to get web 2.0 people to communicate with the people on that committee.

nima – a lot of big companies like google, microsoft, yahoo, are affected

pete reads to us from wikipedia entry for dopa. forum, chat room, im, email…

liza – thats like outlawing cell phones
pete – it’s like outlawing http.

adina – they are going on parents who are worried… socially conservative suburban family votes, going into election season.

Adina talks about the stuff they did in Texas. It worked – they affected policy.
there was a billin the tX state legislature favored by the telecom industry , make it illegal for cities and towns to provide wifi and broadband service for that city.

Adina talks about that groups’ specific strategies. blog, mailing list, private wiki. collaboratively wrote the documents and position papers. this was all basically free, using ffree tech and our existing skills.

***
kid break.
Rod (5 years old) is drawing on a white board in a room for Milo & Galen. He made an outline and a diagram and was lecturing them!

***

another kid break – i go up and down 6 flights of stairs several times – they are in the basement on the couches under the stairwell. there is a dungeon.

***

best practices – no unified place..
liza suggests doing a lot of tagging…
silona – yah tagging
liz – but then we’ll just be talking to each other, learning curve for tagging, practice of it… mobilizing mommybloggers
adina – constituency building
liz – cause widget. have easy widgets, meme thingies, with political issues, with un-dopa…
adina – events. time senstivive
todd- freepress.org
liz – countdown. upcoming.org events, a checklist
sliona – a feed
adina – email isn’t useful for us anymore we need rss
liz – a todo list or a checklist sort of approach so on upcoming i do the action
tracy- there coudl be a way to add new suggested actions to the countdown/political action need
liz – and i do the action and i check it off and it’s visible that i’ve done it , a declaration, so you see “3000 other people have done this…”
adina- a calendar/action widget

lack of structure and formal hierarchy. freaks out washington. they like to pick the most famous person in the room nad pick them to give a speech from a very high podium.

todd – it is a west coast east c
oast thing.

adina – this is a good fodder for the hacking mashup doit session. before that do we want a … upstream

tim – is there a microformat use case for activism, issues, etc.

tantek – the closest thing is you could use todo vocabulary from icalendar. todo items that don’t have a defined person who’s supposed to do them.

liz – a social todo list. collective todo list. important to track how many people ahve done it

pete – or how many intend to do it. 100,000 people have noted to themselves to vote you out of office.

tantek – markup… cut and paste in blog post – integrated tools that m ake it trivial for someone to integrate into blog post – in wordpress, moveable type.

43 things site – public todo lists – existing human behavior – so why not put this on your own blog.

liz – repeats what pete said about 100K people vote you out of office

adina – would be interesting for a codeblue tool….

pete – can you subscribe tot he feed of people who subscribe to skydiving…

tantek – hmmm the list of people who have “vote” on their todo.

oooo!

pete – digg thing of a flash visual of what’s being paid attention to. on 43things they are doing something similar but it’s todo items.

liz – imagine the realtime poll thingie in newspapers tracking what people are paying attention to

todd – site called ….? dopa… campaigns wikia

tantek – i’s on wikipedia

tim – voter information guide, getting past partisan yelling, there’s a growing community on that. get a page up on there on DOPA.

silona – he just put a polling piece on there.

adina – the eff page is a good resource for it.

Adina – so, campaigns is different from neutral point of view.

Tim –
Adina – I have no interest in a neutral point of view on DOPA.

Adina – discussion of wikipedia article – it lacks a description of the unintended effects. Let’s flesh that out.

Todd – CPSR, Leage of Technical Voters, EFF – that’s the place for it but Wikipedia isn’t necessarily.

Adina – once you’re up to the point of doing pro and con that means the issue has been framed for you already.

tantek: if the battle ground has been defined you might have already lost.

adina – exactly. for or against is too late in a way, there is rethinking needed of what are you trying to.

todd – talks about campaigns wikia

pete – we could use dopa as the test case for these ideas
***

tim – a wiki edit is hard. we need something that will be like digg-ing.

who is editing. some low number of people, 1700, make 75% of edits…

tim – getting past the yelling…

Adina – taking off my nonpartisan hat. this will ruin your day. here is a map of saudi oil production. this number has been flat. the plateau starts. number of oil rigs. they start to order rig after rig trying to get more oil out of the ground. there are a # of potential explanations. they can’t make any more and they are desp. trying to put in new wells in the ground. timeframe for slope. the panic drilling starts in spring 04. and then jumps up in 05. continues to accelerate now. their producction has been flat. this is peak oil.

tantek – read up on peak oil

adina – theoildrum.com

liz – that coudl be investment banks overoptimistic about investing in exploration and drilling.

tracy -o and keeping prodution flat on purpose …

tantek- a big problem

adina – this could have a huge impact on civilization
tantek – oh it’s so much worse than that. you cant even pick it apart. it’s not even partisan… swap out political party

[I agree with Tantek]

adina – i disagree with you …and i’ll explain why over lunch

tantek – peak oil, read up on it

pete – gigantic value web

tantek – the layout of towns. roads, infrastructure
pete – the way food is grown and distributed

***

lunch

talking about activism
truthiness, wikipedia politics, la times attempt to talk about israel/lebanon, best practices for wiki discussions etc., todd talks about juan cole/al franken – talk page (on wikipedia) – see also timeline 2006 israel-lebanon conflict
todd – they say inaccuracies are corrected quickly but… this one is not
pete – the word “provocation ” – contentious –

history & diff
tracking turbulence on wikipedia
making movie of changes to wikipedia articles.
then you could tag up segments of the movie and note “here is the meta analysis of what was happening”

more intense disc. with adina and silona about social software apps for political action memes. msg to your cell phone or todo list, your five friends all voted on x issue.. you should too… (i.e. blog-based/political dodgeball) using xfn . what if your technorati favorites (or however you tag your blog feeds) had xfn and you used that for your action todo list.

*****
Starting up again.

Adina – what about having a barcamp-style political/tech meeting.
Liz – What about the cpsr conference as a forum for that? a track to the conference?
… is it election week?
Tim – every weekend there’s something going on
Silona – oct. 13 is the code-a-thon
Adina – technopolitics – hey chris, is it possible to call it a barcamp? is there a rule?
Chris: huh? oh… Are you going to charge?
Adina : no. does it matter?
chris: no.
liz : hey chris, are there any rules?
chris: No.
liz: not that i care if there are. hahaah.

***

kid oakland – bloggers united. local bloggers political bloggers…

***
3:00
dopa timescale? senate commerce – after labor day
what can we do right now

right now today
– EFF action alert
– post to your blog the DOPA widget from : http://bumpontheblog.etowns.net/?p=73

– fix to wikipedia entry. it is missing some information. about the scope of the bill

this week:
– 2-3 phone calls to boxer’s staffer, the guy at Public Knowledge who’s working on this, is there useful in-person stuff to do?
– things we can think of??? building a widget or a badge

action: email or call the ALA
adina : public knowledge and boxer staffer

facebook: give them a variant of the badge?
liz: who wants to edit the wikipedia page on dopa? john? You would be good at that.
John: Oh. Um. Actually I’m doing it now.
Liz: Oh. Of course you are.

***

Here’s the badge, from Bump on a Blog

Tracy’s to-do list on 43things, very cool: stop dopa

I signed up on 43things just to see how it works and it’s nifty.

Barcamp Stanford – August 26 2006

Rah! It’s BarCamp! At Stanford!

Why am I here? People keep asking… rather suspiciously. Next time I will answer that I am a benevolent gazillionaire that loves to give money to Web 2.0 startups and quirky bloggers. Instead of saying I’m a housewife ex-programmer and poet who’s been out of work for 5 years. Lucky for me people talk to me anyway and are not hacker-snobby.

****

“Attention” discussion:

I came in quite late. People are talking about: root.net and Touchstone – an attention management engine. Both sound interesting.

Someone talks about 2 kinds of consumer. The smart direct consumer who knows how to get exactly to the thing they want (the source of the mortg4ge refi). Companies will/should pay for access to their attention. As opposed to the dumb consumer who goes through expensive-to-the-end-company intermediaries, lots of clicks, form filling out, which added up, costs the company 350 bucks. So the smart consumer is saving them 350 bucks. And they should be paying (someone? the smart consumer?) for that attention.

Lifestyle data – trading that private data P2P.

One dude’s friend who is a “star dieter”. She gets paid 30-50 K by Weight Watchers for her story. They sell it for 1.5 million to glossies. (?!!) Then it’s sold again for 4-5 bucks a pop to millions of people. What if that were more p2p. [I think this was James talking, the health/life/something guy)

Ryan: That’s 15-20 years out. Recording automatic data. “Oh, ryan ate an apple. Recorded.”

me: why 15-20 years out!?

James: some of it is near & some far, a lot of it will happen sooner

(Keywords, ads. Some people are taking the stance that “ads are bad”. [or… Ads are so yesterday.] But on the other hand, contextual ads are the proven way to go at the moment)

“word wide” tshirt dude: Gesturebank. Looking to track specific gestures. Sign/signifier question. [I lose what he’s talking about]

Ryan: Keywords are very small info. 1.5 words average in a search. But your clickstream is huge amt of info compared to one search.

[Totally.. have I not been saying this for a zillion years… the ways that people are information! and we have to look at people as data as many ways as possible and open access for them to their own data!]

[I am thinking of the aol data exposed and how it is likely being mined this very minute,…. obviously very valuable!]

[Also, I like the idea of making easy ways to toggle your openness levels. Not just a one-time thing. You know when you’re in your house, you’re private. You know when you go outside that you’re not. Make that difference clear in browsers or other tools. How often I want to use Anonymouse or something like that… just build it in and educate people about what it means.]

More discussion of ads.

word wide guy: invited Adina to continue what she was trying to say before she was interrupted

Adina: Sort of demurs

word wide guy: Pertinent information at that particular moment. It changes. … Say for example a person looking to tell their breast cancer survivor story. And the perosn looking for that story. Aren’t those the same thing? We don’t have to call it an ad or not an ad.

[It’s a connection possibility. But I would add that it’s either monetized by someone or it’s not, and if it is, who is it benefitting? This is an important, important political question.]

Ryan: But to a company it matters. To those people it doesn’t b/c they don’t make a profit… etc

[I flip and say imprudent things probably not responding in proper register/context]

Me: Hey! Content producers also want to and should make money off their story… why treat it like they are free labor for people to make money off!! Why is the model that the breast cancer survivor does not make a cent off it. As a content producer myself I think it is vile.

Ryan: name calling . . . i’m not vile… hey now…

Me: sorry, not you… didn’t mean to call you vile… but… ack. The idea.

Ryan: … (he explains but I kind of missed it from general embarrassment. Lord knows he is probably someone Important and I just was an ass. Did not mean to be rude personally but I stick to the idea. (At least I didn’t say the F-word this time!) Fine, I get it; enough people have told me that The Money is not in “generating content” but rather is in getting a lot of user generated content for free or dirt cheap and you will make a ton of money off it, while implying that if I don’t get on the bandwagon I’m lazy or idealistic or both. Arrrgh. I don’t have to like it.)

Adina from Socialtext: I find it interesting, the phrase “choose to expose”. Someone used that word. Mining someone’s attention seems like it’s free. I was using Last.fm. Broadcasting my music. So, the other day Ihad an earworm for shlocky sentimental music I didn’t want to broadcast to everyone… do I have the opportunity to prune. If I do, how much of an extra overhead does it take for me to prune, in my daily activity. Here’s my browser tabs since just this morning, barcamp. (Laughter. She has a zillion tabs.) Someone mentions a book, a web site, I bring it up. That’s a whole bunch of tabs. Am I going to go back and say which of these things to i want to expose?

word dude: kind of like del.icio.us…..

Adina: Maybe 25% of them I chose to put to delicious. The others are in the log.

word dude: It’s a cost/benefit… you could turn off broadcast… and then turn it back on.

Adina: You wind up with extra filtering tasks you didn’t have before, an extra burden…

James: mash up your tags with … [I missed it]

word dude: You don’t want the world to know when you’re looking at something unsavory… or bad taste…

Adina: Say you’re reading a news article about the London bombing plot with liquid explosives and you go look up liquid explosives, but you’re not at all interested in … Well, I guess someone’s watching you anyway….

word dude: There’s no downside in capturing your own stream for your own uses. So you have a geeky interest in liquid explosives… but that would not be sufficient to tag you as terrorist.

[So says the voice of privilege… As if it isn’t already happening… it’s sufficient if you’re muslim or arab-american. I know what he means though and I want to work for that world and that utopian vision and I am acting as if it is true, even if it isn’t true for me.]

Adina: That’s assuming that intelligence services are intelligent, which….

word dude: But it would become pretty damn obvious this was not the case for you.

[hmm i disagree with that one and again… already happening here and is way more so in some other countries]

Adina: Annoying thing on Amazon. They recommend stuff based on occasional data. I searched for a gift for 2 year old relative. Now my own recommendations have children’s music forevermore…

Me: Opting out of that, there could be a way made easy

Adina: Probably there is a way but not so easy, a 6 step thing…

[I surf a bit. Root.net looks kind of cool!]

word dude: You probably never want to turn you attention recorder off. but you do want to turn off whether it is sent to root.net. Because ultimately I’m looking up those explosives… and my uncle works for the airline industry… and I’m curious… and la
ter on if something is served to me on stumbleupon or delicious… then does THAT get served to someone who might draw the wrong conclusions.

Adina: It’s distracting and interrupting sometimes to have the “related things” in your view and you don’t always want it.

*** end of session ***

Open space – a self organizing interlude

Todd Davies heads it up.

There’s stickies on whiteboard with A B C D E F etc. on them and blank ones. 15 spaces plus blank ones. Various places around the room are labelled A B C etc.

Setting up spaces where people can move easily between discussions.

The Four Principles. (freechild.org) Open space discussion principles.

[it is slightly harder to move between discussions with your laptop open]

Bumblebees and butterflies.

– whoever comes is the right people
– whatever happens is all that could have
– whenever it starts is the right time
– when it’s over it’s over.

The law of two feet. If you are no longer interested then you can leave… it’s your responsibility.

People get up pretty much one by one to claim a block of space and declare a topic.

Topics:

Ajax UI – best/worst (Adina)
Social media v.s influence brokers (Vic)
Browsers. why?
Drupal (Neil)
Open educative systems (Liza)
Scaling data on the cheap (Ryan from Google)
Creativity, think outside box in organization
Brain/machine interfaces. Invasive or non-invasive. egtms (?) etc. (guy with glasses and curly hair)

*****

Adina shows me nifty new socialtext version. I get all excited. It might be perfect for the femsf wiki. Or for my last-century women writers wiki.

****

I still want a social network for all of history.

******

I go to “open education” – What if we assume we don’t have schools? What would we build to education people?

[I come in after it’s started b/c i was dealing with M.]

Jonathan Dugan: 15 profs, sharing info. open? or closed?

[I wonder where these miracle profs are…]

Liza Loop. Loopcenter – palo alto. Take a look at the MIT open courseware. Look at that. Also David Wiley’s open courseware conference at the University of Utah.

group membership – open or closed.

Liza:

what are the roles that schools fulfill?

– babysitting. social. custonianship iof the kids. and the vry elderly and handicapped. we call it school but what we’re really doing is social care. one funciton.

– another is sorting and selecting. grading.

– recordkeeping.

– educative experience.

– certification.

What if these functions were done independently and optimized.

We could have kids log in wherever they were. They could stay home and be in their parents’ care.

Jonathan Dugan: There’s problems with that… that assumes someone is home…

Liza: Not necessarily. Kids can be anywhere. Bioidentification…

Liz: They could be at work with a parent. Depending on the work.

James – Schools are factories producing a product with qualifications. Subjective tools to get into another institutionalized game. On the web more people can do stuff.

[Yeah James anarchy 4 evah!!!!]

Tim – (citizen think tank on his name tag.) If you start at an open school and then moving to standard one – that is hard.

Liza: Home schoolers do it and they built ways to do it.

Liz – another function of schools ideally is to shelter public intellectuals from market forces. We’re not doing too well at that. It becomes its own market

James – Plus if you want research money for your lab you get bucks from microsoft …

Tim – Schools decide who goes to university and who doesn’t, early.

Liz – yes, tracking starts early and it’s hard to switch tracks up even if it isnt overt.

Tracy Ruggles – how to judge if soeone is competent at a thing?

Liz – that is [what Liza called] certification and what we need is ways of tracking what people produce. And judgements of it. How to avoid it being a popularity/charm contest. However, the current system doesn’t always work so well either ( so flaws shouldn’t stop us from building it. )

[kid bathroom break so I missed a bunch]

James – more about kids’ autonomy

Tim – scarcity in teachers could be eliminated even worldwide.

Liz – decentralize more. Anarchy is good.

Liza: Anarchy??!

James: Anarchy!

Liz: ANARCHY! RAH!

…

Liz – Track attention streams, as we were talking about in the attention talk just now, and if decentralized then there must be ways to track what people do, pay attention to and learn. People are what they are doing and what they pay attention to, who they talk to…

James – That sounds like the openyear project.

[later after I look it up – HOLY CRAP… James is right… right on, openyear people! I will investigate further. Thanks James! A tear springs to my eye! I love a really juicy manifesto. It opens people’s minds. Says it a different way. Allows a shift of vision. This is a good one…. I have been trying to explain this vision… It is *so* important and ties in with what i have been saying about collaboration, idea transmission, crediting people for ideas. Also! This is exactly the sort of thing I was just talking about with Silona!]

Liz – And how to pay people for their expertise or teaching. Schools also exist to pay people for that. [I say, wishing as so many of us wish, that someone would freaking pay.]

Tim – Wikiversity.

[I think of how cutting and snobby academics in the humanities are right now towards Wikipedia b/c they get papers from their students citing it. Giant arguments about trustable sources and judgement. As if being in a book is magic legitimacy? WhatEVER.]

James – It’s a huge political issue…

Tracy – It’s about creating a culture. Kids are self organizing anyway. They are doing it whether we make it happen or not.

Liz – Yah sure, DIY, then we’ll oppress them more b/c it will be scary… and they will be vulnerable and hijackable by corporations like a cultural revolution controlled by corporate world. Oh wait. I forgot, we’re already in that.

Liza – The classroom model exists and we have to deal with it. We don’t have to destroy it.

A guy: Oh I don’t know. Destruction has a place.

Tracy Ruggles – We need to make Barcamp in high school, junior high context, introduce those concepts. Teach them tools for self-organizing.

[Right on!]

Liza: Generational… age… old people who narrow down and only tell one story…

Tracy – This plays into concepts of age, ossification

Liza – age segregation can also be [undermined] by net and open education

Look at gomilpitas.

NASA – showing interest in serious gaming – they want research to back it up – but they are interested.

homeschooling…

[I bumblebee away.]

**

Drupal – Neal and 2 other people – I have missed it – I don’t ha
ve anything to contribute except “I’m an end user of it at Blogher” and “I’m thinking of poking at it and trying it” (We’ve talked about it for feministsf.net)

[I bumblebee away again.]

***

Influence brokers session

Dude with beard – You! *points* How do YOU get out of the blog ghetto? How do YOU become influential?

Me: Oh blah. Hmmm. Well, by knowing who to talk with. I am more influential if I can talk to the right 2 people and they listen – rather than being popular and 5000 people reading my blog, but not those two.

Scott (wearing high-status-geekitude ancient-looking “The Well” tshirt) – influence is about ideas because you care about them and want them heard

[Yeah!]

Scott – Becoming the ebay of content – is there a scarcity? or not?

Vic – Measuring ROI. Ad in nytimes you can measure. How do we measure influence. The rate sheet for the NY Times. (Vic later gives me a card and his name is “Vic Podcaster”, from Hot From Silicon Valley. Who is this man of mystery? Where is his “about” page? Is he incognito? Why no mask? Wait, why don’t I have a mask? It would solve all my secret identity problems. Or I could just take my glasses on and off.)

Liz – Monetizing vs influence. different.

Scott – Influence of ideas and opinion! that’s what’s important.

Jonathan Dugan – We need accountability so that bloggers if their view matches reality over time then… you get a plus. if not then you get dinged for your bs or your non expertise

Liz – Yeah! Like whuffie but for accountability. You have an idea market. Your bad ideas take away from your rep. Your good ones persist over time and you get credit for them.

Jonathan: Disgusting examples of erasing history to fit current political spin. The NY times takes a line out of a story and acts like it never was written that way.

Bearded guy: 911 stories that disappeared…

John Kim: How is this diff from a market. How do we make something that is different from a market, from just not trusting the nytimes anymore and not reading it.

Vic – That’s what blogging is.

Liz – no. they can change it. It isn’t.

Vic – persistence

Jonathan – deep tagging

Vic – a wiki

Scott – content structuring

Liz – identity tracking is important for it

Vic – while writing you can backspace. the tool is editable…

Scott – i can page down and find stuff faster than i can listen to it

bearded dude – i have something better than google

liz – what?

bearded dude – relevancy rating…

Liza – you can learn to hear faster than you can talk

Jonathan – you can watch a video in 40 minutes, it’s great… just speeded up

bearded dude: videotape, streaming… with indexing and random access, the user coproduces, they go back over it and snippet it and stuff

liz- they can tag minute 1:32, or whatever, with a tag

john kim – so you’re just saying make it a composed artifact like text then
bearded guy – neurolinguistic programming and studies of it – visual learners – radio tv split – etc if you read it nixon won if you heard on radio then it was a tie, if you watch on tv then kennedy blew him away.

vic – new media has to be difff formats for same content

jonathan – thent he holographic simulation…

*general hullaballoo as some people say text is more important. some say audio/video is. Simulations. Games.*

scott – some things translate well and some dont. the mcneil lehrer report moment of silence while the names scroll down the page

jonathan – depth to which people wthink for them selves -t he more info you provide the more their brains turn off. there will always be a place wehre text trumps these rich media formats. (jonathan dugan) it’s not as easy to consume. you have to have a readership willing to dig in and think . it’s a more arcane system

Liz – Games!

Jonathan – holograph

Liz – The whole universe simulated in a universe-sized simulation! Cool, we just invented God!

No one appreciates my humor…

…
[I bumblebee away, because I see Silona.]

Conv. with silona on legislation, big collaborative papers. I suggest that the best model for it is consumating-like. Also, all literature could be that way. Each bit separatable and taggable and commentable. And you can rank all the bits and your rankings trace back to you. Instead of you ranking the person who had the whole collection of ideas. Everything2 did not do it so well. Consumating has the right idea, is on the right track as is Flickr. Collaboration! It will make everything better, and ideas better, and synergy, and art, and empowerment! Silona gets a shiver and has an aha moment. We talk about big science collaborations, which I got to experience by watching John work at Fermilab and on the Amanda neutrino detection experiment.

I *heart* Silona.

She is doing a time machine project & also brassiere reclamation cantina at burning man.

We talk about the Code-a-thon. I ask if she called it a lock-in because of the church thing. (Yes. It is a southern baptist thing and was meant to be full of irony, but no one who’s not from the south gets it. Silona did week-long camps where they had low protein, low sleep, and high propaganda, including Led Zeppelin played backwards.) The Code-a-thon sounds fabulous! Coding! Drupal! php! Tranquil loungers with vibrating subwoofers as seen at burning man, fabulous wireless speed at huge lan party space, wide range of levels of programming ability, ui stuff, martini rampage. Stickers for the UI experts, “ask me”… they will wander about to help the programmers.

We talk with Adina. Adina rocks… I fade from reality a bit… my sinuses hurt… my laptop runs out of battery… Adina tells Silona to talk to Eugene (eek) about what we were talking about. Adina asks Kevin what the most interesting thing he’s seen in the last month is… It’s a straw that is a water filter and lasts for a year. No one is sure how cheap it is. Clearly beyond camping use, it could save many lives…

***

Met at giant circuit-board egg on University Ave. Dinner at University Cafe (so-so for the expense but at least it wasn’t too noisy. Talked with Tracy (Galen’s dad) about his taggregator idea. Del.icio.us. Tagging. I am a lazy tagger. Anarchy (We maybe used the word anarchy in a way unusual to Liza.) Austin. Sxswi. Poetry scene in SF. Did i lose his card where he wrote the names of 2 bay area poets? How can I lose something between dinner and getting home? Cooper something, language poetry person… [ah – it is Cooper Renner] and another poet in Oakland. I recommended Writers With Drinks and Edinburgh Castle to him. (He just moved here from Austin.) We talked about attentiontrust.org and the other stuff from the attention talk and the education discussion. Rook talked about voip and (the lack of) open source IM and voice over IM and why there is no application for seeing the IM status of friends of friends. SIP. Then I lost the thread of the conversation.)

Milo and another kid (Galen) played with a Transformer and a Bionicles creature, almost the whole afternoon, running around doing hide & seek & writing about aliens on the whiteboards. It was nice. As we left (to meet them at the restaurant) Milo commen
ted quite shyly to me, “I think that kid whose name is Galen? I think he is
a Friend.” (Rare moment.)

Rook is v. curious about Galen counting in Korean for hide & seek.

Milo wrote “Egghead Egghead Egghead Egghead Egghead” mysteriously over on the paper tablecloth, while Galen created a kid vs. adult menu where all the adult options were like “Calimari Salmon Tofu Flakes” and the kid options were hot dogs for way cheaper. Observant! He did not riff off of our suggestions of worms or other nonsense foods and then I realized he was properly suspicious of mocking adult humor and condescension, but we didn’t mean it that way.

Oh yeah – almost forgot – Tracy told me about FeedLounge which sounds like it does everything I have been wanting from a feed reader – but it is 5 bucks a month. I’m considering it since they promise they allow you to export your feeds with tags.

barcampstanford barcamp

Chris – our expertise. share it.

Beth – the best way to be a techie is to know people who know more than you.

other guy – we don’t have any 12 year olds in the room

(laughter)

loretta – i have a background in chemistry. i know how to blow thinggs up. so, i know with tech i’m not going to blow anythin up.
west 120th street in manhattan dug up. colleague – librarian told me i don’t have to come in to the library, i could get a “MODEM”. bought a book and couldn’t understand the instructions for getting online.

Beth – what is a blog. how many people konw.. who doesn’t. I try to define it.

vanessa – interactive. more interactive

kai – dont want organization to have static feel.that we are givin you information. instead you have an experience.

beth – i started blogging in 2001 and was clueless for about a year and then people started commenting. i then realized other people had blogs and i could read them and we could folllow each others conversations.

heather – it’s how you set them up. personal websites almost not difference. it’s just a piece of software that makes it like 30 seconds to set up.

loretta – very important shifts taking place. everyone in the world could not create their own web site. now with bloggin you can without spendin money to do it

heather – very personal first blogs were very personal.

loretta – voice has shifted.

beth – way to build a community, to have community conversation. styles of conversation. single author blog. my podium, my diary that I’m sharing. then multiple author blog. that’s what the NCDD blog is.

**

Blogrolls. More on blog structure. What is a blog. B/c of the blogroll you know we are looking at you.

Question from Avis. Do bloggers have to worry about hackers and spam?

Beth – yes you do and it has to do with what platform you are on. is there a techie in the room? Andy?

a guy – hacking no not really. comment spam, yes… (he explains a bit)

beth – does anyone moderate comments?

guy – some blogs. the one on workflow. because fortune 500 company people come on there and I don’t want them seeing v111aaaagra ads.

beth – so it can be useful to moderate. For me the comments are the most useful part of my blog. I have made so many connections and learned so many things.

Loretta – we are going to have 400 people at the conference.

Beth – i’ll show how easy it is to comment.

***
[now I am reading my email. and laura is reading our mom’s secret blog and giggling. okay now I’m paying real attention again. sorry, social overload, had to check out.]

Loretta and Beth – explaining more about blogging with demo. Demo of commenting, posting, editing a post. Can fix stuff on the fly. Can go back and add last names. Fix typos. Beth has the cheat sheets for brainjam. cliff notes for every topic. (must change, must not use cliff notes name.) It’s all on the ncdd blog, right here.

magnificent report by Ideaware on decsion making grid.

is there anything you can keep revisions, history of document…

Yes. try wikis, basecamp tools.

Loretta – conversations, starting new posts.

Beth – photos. flickr. incredible photo sharing community. old model was post your photos to the web private and only share them specifically with friends and family. flickrr you share them witih the community of the world. who uses it? (show of hands) khanh?

Khanh – I use it just to look at my friend’s photos. Off his blog.

Beth – more on flickr, demo, tags, comments, surfing, tag clouds.

MJ – clusters. flickr tries to group stuff on similar subjects.
***

[Liveblog cleaned up a bit, with links. Please correct me if I got something wrong.]

Maria Niles: We want to hear everyone’s input. Intros. Then hear from audience.

Dawn Rouse: I’m Doing the Best I Can, True Wife Confessions, and my Club Mom blog, Gimlet Eye. I am the wife of a black man with a PhD from Detroit. *audience: woo! go black man!* I’m starting my Phd at McGill. We just moved to Canada July 1st. I blog about just about everything in my family. I talk about racial issues, gender issues, my depression, finding my way as a woman, feeling angry sometimes. What I don’t do is I don’t represent black America. My role is to be a white ally. And to testify to the things I have seen as. As the wife of a black man in America. Driving across the border… My husband was stopped. And I photodocumented it. The cop was sure my husband was a Guyanese smuggler. I have to be aware. I have to educate my daughter. I need to find her black women, women of color mentors who can help her understand things that I as a white woman never knew. When I walked with my husband into a restaurant for the first time and everyone looked at us… “Oh.”

Karen Walrond – Chookooloonks. Wow. I started writing it about 2 and a half years ago, when me and my husband were matched with the person who was going to become my daughter’s birth mother. It was to keep family members up to date with the adoption process. Prospective adoptive families have a voracious appetite for information about adoption. So it’s become this big blog. My daughter is now with us and it’s less of an adoption blog and more of a mommyblog now. I then got an opportunity to work in my homeland of Trinidad and Tobago. We all packed up and moved south. It’s very text intensive but I also do a lot of photography of our lives on the site. I do talk about the adoption. We are in contact with my daughter’s birth mother but I don’t feel it’s my right to tell her story. She can tell that story if she wants to, or my daughter can, that’s her story. What don’t talk about is, I don’t talk about race. I am in an interracial marriage. I’m Trini, my husband is white and British. So an intercultural marriage too. The photos are there, the stories are there. It’s up to other people to make their own reading. (Karen jokes about her nondescript north-america accent and then bilingually goes into her Trini accent.)

Maria: My name is Maria and I am a caffeine addict. It’s not malt liquor. *audience laughter* I’m here to represent the people who feel that you have no obligation to represent, individually. Collectively, we should support those who do call out and represent! That’s why I support BlogHer. The community is important. But I will point out the fabulous women who represent. I have 2 blogs, I use my real name. I have no picture of myself on there. My sense is my obligation is to the readers to talk about marketing to consumers and that’s it. My other blog, I use a pseudonym. The name is Wag, so it has no gender. I have no pictures. I talk about my dogs, funny stories, cute little chihuahuas. Every once in a while, I talk about race. I am an undercover black woman. I’m a 44 year old black woman. Yes, that is my story. If I told you I was a 44 year old black woman, you would think of Oprah. I am not Oprah. I wouldn’t mind her money… *audience laughter* I don’t want to set those preconceptions. Again, I think it’s incredibly important to respect black women who are out there on the blogophere. Yes both my parents are black. My dad is from the islands. My mom is descended from slaves, we know our family history, it’s a famous story. So I’m not only black, I’m militant black. People think I’m white, so they feel the need to share their feelings about people of color to me and their racist thoughts.

Carmen Van Kerchove. My friend and partner Jen Chao. Blog is Mixed Media Watch.com. The name has become meaningless, we’re going to rename it. It started as a watchdog organization to see how media covers mixed race and interracial marriages and start letter writing campaigns. Now it’s kind of lost the watchdog part. Things have gotten better. Today it’s more about the intersection of race and pop culture. We talk aobut Barbara Walters who keeps reaching out to pet black women’s hair… Angelina Jolie and her baby collecting… anythin and everything to do with race and pop culture. Podcast is called Addicted to Race. Jen and I discussing recent news stories. This is the awesome thing about doing a podcast – you get to connect with people you really admire. Academics, writers, Octavia Butler… We had an interview with her. Jen and I are both women of mixed white and asian parentage. We are very open about that. We don’t necessarily talk a lot about our personal lives. We definitely are very open about who we are. Our racial identity and how people react to us. We used to have a section on the podcast called Racial Spy. Things people say when they don’t know you’re in that ethnic group. No fake stupid celebration of “diversity” … *audience laughter* And be critical but constructive.

Marisa Treviño. I’m a racial spy. From my appearance people don’t know. The latina voice is very underrepresented in the mainstream press. When blogs started I thought, my god, this is my chance to get those stories out into the world. I started my blog, Latina Lista. Lista means smart, ready, intelligent, triple-meanings. I started Latina Lista with stories about Latina women. As the immigration debate has heated up, my boundaries I set for myself had to be broadened. and now a lot of Latinas are reading me and commenting. And I speak from the Latina perspective, from the female perspective. I’m more of a journalist on my site. I’m infusing my opinion into currentt events, but not blogging about my personal life. I don’t post pictures. There are some crazy people out there. With the exception of one person commenting in a negative way, it’s positive on there. Stories don’t get national press. I do talk about race all the time. I do talk about my gender.

Maria: I want to comment on what you just said about negative perpectives, trolls. Particularly with some black women in the blogosphere I know they have backed off blogging because of the incredible negative pressure that comes with blogging. Tiffany Brown has stopped blogging at blackfeminism.org. [Hmmm – I just looked, and there’s a post August 1.] Nubian of Blackademic has said she will stop blogging because of this… Tiffany is raising her hand. When we had the post on Blogher, Lisa Stone talked about difficult . . . [I missed this part]

[Ooooo. I see that Nubian also has linked up to the Black Weblog Awards! Everyone go nominate their faves! – Liz]

Tiffany: When you said you were gonna “call me out” last night I didn’t know you meant putting a mic in my face. *audience laughter* I’m really open, maybe too open. People misconstrue what I am because of what I write. I’m college educated, uipper middle class, etc. Issues in context of larger society. I”m okay with that. People seem to project their own beliefs about who I am or who I should be on to what I write and it’s kind of disturbing at times.

Karen Walrond: I was speaking with [Fizzle] earlier today. It’s been interesting to meet people I know through their blogs. I’m not a very open blogger. There are people far more open about their lives than I am. But what you see in front of you is pretty much what you get. I don’t have a differen
t voice online as I do in real life. But some of the people are very different from what I expected from their writing. One person who’s very out there on her blog. An “in your face person” online. And in person is very soft spoken. And the reverse is also true, reserved people online who are then like, “HI!!!”. *audience laughter* I’m trying to steer away from the word “honest.” How much you use your blog to represent what you don’t in your “real life” persona.

Laurie Toby Edison: I’m still on the first question. I’ve been out about this identity, queer, etc. but now it’s age that makes me uncomfortable. I make a point of saying it. I’m 64. People’s faces just change. They shut down. I’m uncomfortable. Because of the way I operate in the world, I try to be really clear about it, on my blog Body Impolitic. But personally I’m very private. But the blog’s been there for about a year and I’m finding myself talking more personally than I expected.

Maria: I want to also throw back in this question, “Are you obligated?” If you’re a particular race, gender, faith, to represent, so that the other people out there know that there’s not just one face.

Lauren – I’m in college, and my parents read my blog. As a Southern woman, well, ask a Southern woman about her mother and wait 3 hours because that’s how long it will take. My mom doesn’t call me. She’ll read it and call my dad and I’ll get a call from him. I get reallly irritated I have to censor myself for my family. And for people in my hometown and who then construe from there what I’m doin. And as a Christian it’s difficult for me to lead an authentic life and then stay accountable. I’ll get really boring. What I usually do, sitting around eating Sunchips and watching TV with my cat. But I run into situations where I have to be accountable to people. It’s the nature of the beast with my age.

Karen Walrond: I think you really hit on something there. My parents read my blog. I find I’m very careful of, … “Why am I doing this, it’s my blog, it’s my space…” but on the other hand thinking of the people who read and visit me. But about adoption. It’s an incredible emotional rollercoaster. It’s not fun. It’s very draining, soul-searching. Especially in open adotpion. You have this person [the genetic/birth mother] who’s always going to be part of your life.

Maria Niles: Obligation? Marisa?

Marisa: I’m really getting the sense at Blogher there are different kinds of blogs. Sometimes the only way to get a conversation going is to challenge the assumptions people make. I do that every day on my blog.

Carmen: I don’t feel an obligation but I choose to do it. I hate it, pet peeve is hearing parents of mixed-race children saying how their child will be a bridge between cultures. that’s kind of horrendous to put that on your kid. … Feedback from a person who listens to the show. I’m assuming a he. “You guys talk a lot on your podcast about negative stereotypes of asian men. But do either of you actuallyk date asian men?” And we ended up on a big rant. People read a lot into your own family, your relationships, the race of your partner becomes a political thing, people assume it’s where your politics lie. I just wanted to bring up the whole “race of your partner” thing.

Christy Keith . Hi my name’s Christy Keith and I dunno, am I the only lesbian in this room?

SCREAMS from audience: NOOOOOOO!!!!! *wild waving hands*

Christy Keith of doggedblog.com: I got into some painful stuff around the time of the election at DailyKos and other boy blogs, the abstract discussion of marriage as if it’s some kind of abstract trading card. do not talk about my life and my civil rights as if they don’t exist… that drove me off those forums. People don’t understand to have people look you in the eye and say to you to shut up, stop pushing stop talking shut up, stop being so fucking uppity because it… I got so angry. So angry and inarticulate. It upsets me too much. That has been one of the most consistent identity issues for me. People assuming heterosexuality unless informed otherwise drives me insane. People assuming it’s a political abstracton when it’s your heart and life. People assuming… My friend whose lover died of AIDS in Italy b/c they couldn’t marry and he couldnt move back home and get the medical care. There is no way to make this a legal issue. It’s a moral issue. That has been my big identity issue. I come out on my blog every week practically. * general laughter* I also write on a music blog. “We don’t write about dance music.” I asked why? i could not get them to say it but it was because dance music is GAY. I sneak some pet shop boys into it… *audience laughter*

*general applause for Christy*

Dawn Rouse: One of the things I write about is invisibility. When you’re white and middle class you don’t even realize you have this privilege. So i say who i am. I need to say. Every day.

Maria: What community do you get out of representing? How has it changed your world?

Dawn: I wanted other white people to know it wasn’t okay to be sneaky racists with me. I want to make it known I am an ally.

Marisa: By putting “Latina” in the title of my blog, I attract readers who aren’t necessarily Latina or Latino but who believe in the cause of giving a voice…

Carmen: Mixed race black man talking to us… this post went up… a professor at Rutgers came across us, and I teach this course on Africana literature. Maybe he would be interested in signing up for this class. That’s a very small example.

Amanda – I’m a researcher and study blogs and also blog pseudonymously on the side. We don’t have just have one identity, we have multiple identities. The audience makes assumptions, we still have to present ourselves one way, we might present differently to our moms, our bosses, our best friends, to people we don’t know. That’s what we’re all butting up against when we feel we can’t say something and yet it’s important to say it.

[*I cheer loudly for the multiple blog identities!!!* And I’m thinking of a response Iria Puyosa made recently to a post of mine… ]

Karen Walrond: The blog allows us to choose to represent in one way. I sort of disagree with this. When Elisa was writing this up for BlogHer she said I don’t feel an obligation to represent. I represent all the time just by being who I am. I do represent the fact that I’m black even though I don’t write about it. (Story of new york blogger writing to her.) We do represent just by being online. I don’t write about race and my interracial marriage on purpose. If you’re a racist and you’re against “miscegenation” then you’re going to click away anyway.

Tish Grier: I blog at Love, Hope, Sex, and Dreams, Corante, The Constant Observer. I’m extremely militant about being 45 and a short little Italian woman and not wanting to go on Botox. *audience laughter* As I got older I found “myself” represented more and more as a pathetic stereotype. It’s important to bring thse parts out in any way we can. Whether it’s by keeping multiple blogs – because men don’t link to my personal blog. But as I got higher profile I had to stop writing about personal things and my sex life. Because its “unprofessional” and I had to stop being me, to a degree. And it’s interesting not doing that. But the best community are the people who read the personal blog. What they say and how they relate. Especially around weight. It’s important. Pop culture is very limited. Skinny, white, under 34. How many of us in this room is this?

Kety Esquivel: I”m wi
th crossleft.org. I’m a progressive Christian. As a Christian with that identity I have an obligation. It has repercussions throughout the world. It’s the rightist extremists doing significant damage. I’m an activist to reclaim the faith. As a Latina, as a Christian, as a woman. These three identities, if you look at the progressive faith movement, they’re men and theiy’re white and they really don’t want women of color who are young to be involved. It’s a very personal choice whether or not we’re going to represent. Just because we were born… we don’t have to, and yet I think it’s very powerful when we choose to. As a Latina we’re not seeing that many Latina/o voices. At Yearly Kos a lot of white people stepped up to say “Where are you. We want to hear from you” to people of color. That was good.

Woman in back whose name I didn’t hear: We can’t be married to only one identity. That’s what makes wars happen, to say I am only Indian, or I am only Muslim. I write about whatever I want to write about. It’s been an interesting journey… You are you and say “I want to be a business person, etc.” and are interested in being married to that identity but then it’s unhappy. And you find you have to be more than that. So the multiple identities are very important. There are more English speakers in India than there are in the U.S…. What writing does is it makes you honest about yourself. I use my blog to be comfortable with my multiple identities, comfortable with my self. The most interesting travel is in yourself. That journey, using this writing as a tool. You can do whatever you want in there. I like things that are all over the map. You can be just a mother, wife, daughter, they are roles that play. The book is called Identity and Violence, by Amartya Sen, a nobel laureate economomist.

Sarah Dopp: I’m also from New Hampshire… Yeah. You know, I dated the only black man in New Hampshire too. *audience laughter* I’m a web developer and it’s great to just fit in, I’m confident, I’m professional! And then I’ve got a livejournal which is locked up. On there I’m female, I’m bisexual, I have sex. I consider myself overprivileged, I’m flailing around, I’m frustrated, it’s cool to have both. It’s a very guarded identity. My clients don’t see it.

… : I started blogging in 2002. I was active in BBS and usenet groups. I actively hid my race. You could tell my gender from my name. There was one time when I was writing a post, and was about to slip into some black vernacular english. If I say this, everyone’s going to know I’m black. Online, did I want to go that route? And to be authentic, to speak in my own voice, I went down that road. I’m interested in finding out, from the Latinas in the room, do you ever write in Spanglish? Do you write bilingually and interlingually with your other tongue.

*murmur of “yes we do” from audience*

Marisa: I do. I write in Spanglish, or complete posting in Spanish. If I get contributions from Mexico, etc. I do translate, but a lot of U.S. Latinas don’t speak Spanish, they don’t read it.

Melissa Gira: sacredwhore.org, melissagira.org I blog as a sex worker.. and at live journal… My question thinking about these things — who will people think I am if I don’t say? Even if there’s a photo, will people assume I’m white? Queer and bisexual, how much sex do I get to talk about? How much can you talk about it before you become a sex blogger? Genre-ization hurts the relationships between bloggers and readers. What identity am I leading with. How many closets do I have to keep coming out of, all the time?

SJ Alexander: I’m really glad the issues of multiple identities are coming up. I appreciated what Maria said. I intentionally gave my blog a name to warn people there was going to be profanity. My blog is called I, Asshole. I was writing about being a mom and also previous sexual relationships so it’s like I’m this big-ass tramp. I’m a student, I’m a worker, I’m a wife, and let make people make of me what they will. Screw all y’all, you can assume what you want. People started emailing me and saying, “Thank you for being a big ho”. And then thank you for being a super slutty mommyblogger with two different baby daddys. And then other people saying “Hey why don’t you write more about librarianship?” So, keep the emails coming, of who do you think I am. It’s awesome.

[Note: SJ’s writeup of BlogHer, Snakes on a Motherfucking Blogher, is my favorite so far.]

Roo of Roo the Day: Well known study in college, where white students did not identify themselves as white. And I’m a white woman and I don’t think about my race. And if I am do I have a choice about representing and what does it mean – Do you have an obligation to self-identify as white.

Maria: Can you represent being white and not be perceived as a racist?

*General MMMMMMM from room*

Roo: But I have an obligation to represent for/to people who are not part of the power structure. What’s my responsibility as a white woman to the greater world.

[Me, I try to point to, but not represent or speak for. Not always successful in this but it’s a try. – Liz]

Karen Walrond: We all got together to talk about this beforehand online. Blogging Baby… my post on transracial adoption. My family is like the poster family for transracial adoption. Most people think of it as a white couple adopting a non-white child. Mixed-race identity. Commenter who . . . [I missed this]

Maria: [. . .]

Karen: Sister in the U.S. whose daughter looks mixed asian-white, people think she’s the nanny. Her response is, “10 hours of labor says I’m not!

*audience laughter*

Farah ( of Farah’s Sowaleef : I’m a Saudi girl, from Saudi Arabia? People who want me to write about Saudi Arabia all the time! Well I’m a practicing Muslim. And people expect me to be a liberal. And people are like “Wait a minute, aren’t you a liberal? You can’t think that!”

[I think there was more to the panel but I missed it. Plus, my fingers started to hurt! My brain was fried! It was a GREAT panel with a lot of food for thought, and a lot of people speaking up. I thought Maria Niles’ moderation of this panel was exceptional.]

Hey y’all. As if BlogHer and Woolfcamp weren’t enough conferences! I thought I’d throw a small house party to encourage participation in BlogDay.

Here’s the party details, including a map, on upcoming.org. You can get here easily from Caltrain and there’s plenty of parking on the street.

The point of Blogday is to blog internationally. I’ve been doing this on Blogher for blogs in Spanish. For Blogday I’ll pick a language I don’t know, and try to search on Technorati and other services, using automatic translators! So, join me and we’ll all flounder around. Or pick a language you do know — or link to photoblogs, art blogs, music blogs, podcasts, or videoblogs.

The idea is just to look outside of your own culture, language, country, ethnicity, class, or all of those qualities — and pay attention — to link to at least 5 bloggers. I think it would be a good idea to comment on the blogs we come across in the process.

Anyway, this could be super fun to do in a group! My office, living room, kitchen, and yard are all at your disposal. Afterwards we could all walk over to Amelia’s for some Salvadorean food and a beer!