Blogging

Dick Bell: “there are lines out there that you can’t cross…”

Represenative Mark B. Cohen from PA now speaking as a politician that blogs. Interesting comments – I just dropped his blog up on screen for others to see.

Mark Cohen: “Blogging expands the number of things you can talk about–and you can reach out to more people.”

Maybe we need a site like “followupquestions.com” I just registered it

Britt Blaser, “I think in the primary season, it’s not unrealistic for candidates to blog.”

Steve Gillmor, “Blogging is like taking pictures. If I was president, I wouldn’t have time to take pictures, but I’d have somebody there whose job it was to take pictures.”

Rick Heller, former Clark supporter, “Campaign blog problem. a consensus builds, and then if you can get slapped down by other bloggers if you deviate.”

Tom Regan, CSM, speaking as an independent/undecided voter. “How you spend your time is part of who you are. It would humanize Kerry, for example, if he had a blog.”

more coming

Dan has posted an outline of his Presidential Bloggers session on siliconvalley.com.

Just moved into the Presidential Bloggers section where Critt and I will serve as session monitors for Dan Gillmor’s presentation.

What do users want?

Some discussion already with auto-generating feeds..

Who wants to get rid of HTML? Have it auto-generated? I use movable type – most of my HTML is auto-generated, but I still insert my own tags and such.

If the tools are too complicated? Will people actually bother? Do we want weblog tools as complex as something like Microsoft Word and the like?

Are categories important in a blog? Shimon is speaking now at the front of the room about this. Are categories only important to the author rather than the reader?

My own blog uses categories through movable type – maybe 12-15 categories total. I wonder if anyone really uses the categories. I know I don’t really click on them.

Conversation now.. why do you blog? Asking Steve someone now?

Popfile and drupal have both come up – need to review those as potential tools for other blogging.

Lisa – how would high school have been like if the internet and blogging were around? There was no one like me in my school – I was nerdy – so were many of you!

Anyone having comment issues? Comment spam, behavioral issues, is it free speech? Will you delete a comment? Do you have a comment policy?

Lisa – my blog is an extension of my personal living space… that’s how I police

What tools do you use? Far less movable type users in the room than what everyone else expected. Lots of typepad and wordpress users, comments about pmachine, hasblog, popfile, drupal, and others.

One guy talking now about having created his own weblog software..

Other tools: tinderbox, frazzle…

Tinderbox link.

I’m finding it very difficult to keep up with my blogging and the backchannel at the same time during this. Whee – lots of ideas flying about

Should a comment system work like a threaded forum? We need more robustness in our comments capabilities. we need features like subscribe to a comments feed – to a thread, more threading, color coding by context, and so on.

Dave: “This gets so complicated. Aggregator is always going to read that feed’

How many use pictures in their blog? I do.

How much use audio? I don’t.

Some upload MP3s, use audblogs. Listen to blogs while doing the dishes. That’s wild.

What’s a blog? Format of a blog? What is it? would could it be?

If your weblog is all video and audio is it really a blog?

More coming

Currently at BloggerCon – just setup for the ‘Visions from Users’ session – Lisa Williams presenting shortly.

Dave just finished the kickoff “national anthem” with some accordian playing by Joey.

More to come.

I’ll be attending BloggerCon II this weekend. Unfortunately, last year I missed the original BloggerCon due to a work related emergency that came up. But this year, I’m all set to attend.

I’ll be serving as session monitor for Adam Curry’s session on Personal TV Networks. I grew up in the late 80’s watching Adam on MTV, so this is quite a treat for me.

I’ve got the digital camera and laptop ready to go – should be a fun event.

Life begins tonight at 7:00pm at Durgin Park in downtown Boston!

Trying out Ecto as a weblogging tool for the times that I’m offline – like right now.

Looks pretty good – much improved from the old Kung-Log software.

It’s been a good week for new Mac software, Proteus has been updated with a Beta 4.0 version that is really sweet, and now Ecto. I’ve got some other new goodies in the works as well.