Everything’s peaceful, sweetness, light, rainbows and unicorns over here at Bloggercon. I’m kind of overloaded on social and techie conversations! i keep phasing out and being snarky on the irc channel and then missing what people are talking about.
whoever the punk rock dude in the back row is, it was fun to listen to him.
Cookies, and a nap… mmmm… and yet, barcamp beckons.
Meanwhile, this was obnoxious yet kind of funny… someone linked to it off the irc chat.
I was away from my computer and talking a lot during this… so did not take notes, but I’ll come back later and link to the transcripts and I have plenty to say about it!
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…
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Galeria de la Raza put out a call for submissions for Latino/Latina artists for their Digital Mural Program.
Pass it on!
My network was down and so I headed over to the library to get some work done. It was surprisingly cosy, pleasant, and welcoming out on the sidewalk on Middlefield Road. Free wireless, cafe tables with umbrellas, and really good music on decent speakers… the only thing missing was an espresso cart. About 30 high school kids were there in a nebulous swarm, chatting, and I’d say over half of them texting on their cell phones. Something was being arranged… a lot of them were waiting for some other group which finally showed up and they all went into the library.
I remarked on the niceness of the “internet library cafe” to this guy in the photo and then on impulse was like, “Hey! Can I blog you?” He was slightly taken aback. “Yes.” (unspoken: wtf! why is this little riot nrrd taking my photo? ) He (Bob) seemed like he could handle it just fine. Alas, I looked at the web site on his card and there’s nothing there! But now I’m totally wondering if he’s This guy and we were totally sharing a technological and social infrastructre? Or was he this guy and I could have had a fascinating conversation about the Khmu dialects & linguistics? Or is he the CTO of this company? Maybe he’s ALL OF THEM…. But if so, what’s with the cheap Vistaprint card and broken web site, dude?
Menlo Park… Palo Alto… check… tons of laptops. Redwood City? Not so much. I guess we’re gentrifying. I hope the town doesn’t lose its cool character as it gets richer and more silicon-valley-ish.
I wish some of those teenagers would have given me their myspace addresses.
Work on my thesis was horribly derailed by the lack of network at home – and by my having to pound on fixing it all day long. (After a lot of floundering, labelling everything in our co-housing network closet, 2 calls to comcast, and buying a new router, which helped, it finally was solved by upgrading my airport firmware and a restart/reset.)
The great thing about the library net cafe: I felt like it was really a public space, being used properly. A public square. There were no obnoxious rules, you didn’t have to buy anything, you didn’t have to be there for a particular reason. You could just hang out. No one came to give the teenagers a hard time (I *hate* that when I see it, and always speak up to point out how dumb it is.) We all spoke to each other – kids, guy in suit, and the kind of skeevy looking hairy guy in the painty shorts who was regaling the kids with stories of past drug busts as they tried to control their eye rolling and smirking and kind of failed. Anyway, it’s a really nice public space. And right across from City Hall, too!
