January 30, 2004Berkman Thursday NotesBEFORE The evening began, before the official start of the session, with Dave stressin' about the unexpected absence of Thursday-nite tech-meister, Jay McCarthy. Who's gonna set up the webcast?! Jessica saved the day (at least as far as the webcast was concerned) by tracking down Jay on the phone, and they managed to startup the real audio feed. DURING Conversation was a bit free-form tonight. Michael Feldman's planned "how I blog" presentation was postponed to the future due to technical difficulties. Two newcomers tonight prompted Dave to give a quick blogging basics demo. Shimon Rura did an impromptu demo of his experimental blogging system, which he calls "frassle". He is exploring ways to make category organization of a blog's archive richer and more automatic. Mike Walsh says he drove 250 miles from Coos County NH to see Jay. Apparently he was looking to get some techincal questions answered. (Mike if you're reading this, I'm not in Jay's league, but I can find my way around a lot of this tech stuff, and I'd be glad to lend a hand if you want to send me email: weblog at da4 dot com) Michael "Dowbrigade" Feldman proudly brandished his new Macintosh iBook which he just bought that day. Dave wants a quick conference to tell our side of what happened with the Dean campaign and the internet. Lots of discussion about what this would really be about (and whether SuperSunday was the right day to try and do this). This evolved into an open-ended discussion about what the faltering of the Dean Campaign means to weblogs and the internet. Will the perceived importance of the internet to the early success of that campaign, cause blogging to take the rap for Dean's decline. (It's a much more complex issue than that sentence expresses. Dave and others (possibly even me) are going to be writing about this in the next few days to more completely express our view of this thing.) Dean Campaign blog/internet guru Jim Moore seredipidously walked in during this conversation. He gave use some interesting additional perspective on the sea change that is happening in Burlington. I'm not going to try to even paraphrase his remarks here, but much of what he said he has posted here in his blog. I would characterize his attitude as, still a little shocked but cautiously hopeful that Dean's campaign, and the internet elements of it, will continue. AFTER Indian food. I don't really like Indian food, so I let others do the ordering. It was actually pretty good. But like the first time you ate sushi, you don't know what anything was called, so you have no clue how you'd ever repeat the pleasant experience. I got to sit across the table from Dave, and we got into a number of the fundamental issues of blogging and the internet. Obviously Dave and I have different ideas about a lot of this. I think we're gonna have many very interesting discussions at future Thursdays. Dave has thought deeply about this stuff for much longer than I have, so I expect that I'll learn a thing or two. Maybe he'll learn the occasional bit from me too. Posted by jghiii at January 30, 2004 12:26 PMComments
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