Tag: blogging

brief visit to barcamp

Posted on by Liz

will
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

I hung around barcamp for a little bit and had a nice conversation with Will Pate from Flock. In the nicest possible way he was like “What do women want?” If anyone has an extra day 1 blogher ticket, Will woudl like it. (SJ from I, Asshole also wants one!) So I babbled to him endlessly about what I want from my browser. It should vibrate.

Also! I want a pony! In my browser!

Talked about multiple/flexible identities and work environments. Social networking built into your browser… the difficulties with that. I forget whatall I said, but I thought of more things. For example, why am I ever cutting and pasting stuff, or URLs? Should be able to click on a page – right click it and email it off to someone, so that I can annoy all my family and friends with more “humorous forwards” and glurge. No, really! They want to be annoyed by me! I’m sure they’ve thought of that already though.

How about not just the tagging, which is handy… but a ratings bar for every page i look at? 10 stars… and I have the option to rank a page i’m looking at – very quickly and without waiting for some other window to pop up – just in my toolbar — and then at the end of the day I could see a list of my top ranked sites for that day. That would make browser histories automatically way more useful. As it is, I have a browser history that’s unwieldy and gross and not useful – but if I were to see the subset of pages I bothered to rank, that might be good. Is this different from tagging? … hell yes! Then, with social networking built in, scary! i coudl turn on the option (opt in) to let my friends see what my top ranked pages are and I could go look at their. I could push a button to send the list of links nicely marked up to a designated public blog that was just my top-rated links of the day, or the hour, or whatever. It could be all built in!

Don’t forget the pony…. OMG ponies!



fun idea meltdown

Posted on by Liz

so I’ve had these ideas before but suddenly feel like my head will explode if I don’t blog them and say t hem again.

With the video and vlogging discussion, again, I love that everyone will be making home movies of their kids. – which susan mernit described rightly as “documenting families”. What will make it *different* from other times like when everyone had shoeboxes full of super8 home movies… is the metadata. You don’t know who is going to become interesting or important. Whose home movies of childhood do you wish you could see & why? various reasons, right? fame? relation to you? other reasons?

About social networking, again… I’d love very much to see historical friendster. Like, social networks 1870. Social networks 1926. Step through years, and get a picture of changing relationships & personal & power networks over time. Who knew who? Wouldn’t that be awesome to have? Get the NEH to fund it. And have it be very easy to contribute, be wiki-ish, so that anyone can log in and add people from history and add data and relationships.



Making money session at Bloggercon iv

Posted on by Liz

We’re talking about monetizing blogs. Ads. Localization. How to make it easy for local businesses to get small ads on blogs. Subscription models for blogs. Micropayments. Networks.

So, I’m thinking locally and it seems like every podunk chamber of commerce and downtown business association should be paying a blogger. Many local newspapers are moribund – bought up by big media organizations who don’t actually care about the local scenes. Local blogs should have the chamber of commerce/business connection hooked in, for ads, and should also have political use… man, every town should just have a package of group blog, phpBB-style forum, etc. They’re reluctant to commit to that even in my small silicon valley town because of class, language, etc. barriers, i.e. half the town isn’t online and it’s a big deal to get them on and so if you commit resources to online stuff you are leaving them out. However, it’s not like the xeroxed flyers are reachign very many people EITHER. (duh). So if you built structures where it was *possible* for everyone to participate then people would have a reason to *get* online and say something and read something about local politics….

Um, meanwhile, I’m sure it could be monetized some how… can I go off on a tangent or what?



Oh, how I love to say dumb things on the internet… join me…

Posted on by Liz

lisa williams
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

Multitasking was tougher than usual today. I languished on the floor in the back of the room while trying to type, listen, rest, and do an IRC chat while taking, uploading, and tagging photos. Good thing my mommyblogging homie Mary Tsao was on the job.

During the emotional life discussion I got distracted by Robert Scoble discussing his emotions in the bloggercon chat window. I asked him if his attitude about blogging personal stuff had changed over the lifetime of his blogs… and if Maryam also blogging changed his blog style. He pretty much said yes & that since he knows she’s going to blog something, he might as well say something because it’s not like people aren’t going to know. I had to ask, because Lisa Canter and I and some other people had an intense talk at SXSWi about being the loudmouthed blogging-writing girlfriends of “famous” geeks, and what that was like from our point of view… and from theirs.

Anyway, I wrote a bit about that idea in an article, “Blog It, Sister” that I’ll be reading Tuesday at Intersection for the Arts, a reading with Other magazine and Tachyon Press. In which article I say really embarrassing and silly things about my geeky teenagerhood and how I used to invite this one guy over, and make out with him, so that he’d tell me clues for Zork II and teach me assembly language. The story was to illustrate a point about sexual politics, information exchange, boys’ geek social networks and how women become peripheral to them, and how to fix that. So since Wired has apparently been linking to my dorky post about gay truckers on IRC, I figure I should mention this fun event while you’re all looking, because, well, I’m a total blog tart. Come and hear me and Chris Garcia from othermag, and Peter S. Beagle and Terry Bisson from Tachyon. And you can whisper the hints to old text adventures into my ear…



emotional life discussion at bloggercon iv

Posted on by Liz

Emotional life discussion…

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)

***

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.)

***
more stuff…
***
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!
***

a dude is nervously realizing as he talks , that he’s in a room full of bloggers who are bloggging what he says. yup.

***
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

Posted on by Liz

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…

***

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

Posted on by Liz

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

Posted on by Liz

visible bandaid
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

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.