Black Background — Matt Shobe's Blog

I'm at the Blog Business Summit today. I'm not quite live-blogging this thing (tons of others are, however) but I do plan to write a post summarizing each day's events and my take on them. So far this is yet another ferociously self-documenting event (no surprise there), but there are enough interesting personalities on-hand to help make some meaning out of the noise.

If you're a FeedBurner user or are curious about our services for bloggers and RSS publishers of all stripes, and you're in attendance, please seek me out. I'm the guy with the PowerBook. (The black sweater and nametag might be a bit more of a giveaway, however.)

Labels: LiveBlogging

A session to discuss moblogging or, well, blogging that doesn't have to be tied to the desktop and the buzzing flourscent light overhead, etc.

note: Winer's not here, so "vendors" may be able to fly in the radar. we'll see.


fight developing between traditional photography manufacturers and handset makers -- a struggle to define who owns the digital camera space in the most practical means possible.
photo quality will soon outpace data networks' capacity to carry the data efficiently in the near term. multimegapixel images on T-Mobile GPRS? Ooph.
audience member: "i bet 90% of what people worry about is gov't spying on consumers, but what about consumers spying on other consumers?" the distribution of others' privacy is 'democratized' by devices, carrier networks, and flickr/blogs
is moblogging a distinct activity from "desktop" blogging? for some it is, for others it's simply an alternative mode for input to the same content base. for me, my moblog is my flickr account and it's a continuous visual diary. This blog is a place where I trap and keep things that cross my attention mainly when I have my laptop. Place has a *huge* effect on what I write about -- in fact, whether I write at all. For example I probably won't have a FanBlogs posting today because I couldn't be further from college football being played in real time. Frankly, it's nice to have a break -- Purdue is just bagging it.
good user observation: "we have to embrace [decentralized] surveillance, since we're all under observation anyway."
"i'm a videoblogger -- i think people are missing the storytelling aspect of blogging. i like to take a lot of little clips, put 'em together." how is that different from what good bloggers do? what story does your content tell over time?
GPS is underrated as meta data. Location as another way to subscribe to interesting photos, postings, in 4d -- location and time are part of GPS signal -- might be very very cool. Agreed.
"moblogging captures the spontaneity of life...it's shared with our families and our friends."
russell beattie: "i sense that people believe mobile blogging is not quite legitimate...that we have to make it more like blogging...i say that moblogging is one of the most important things to happen to data services and blogging. ability to broadcast to tens of thousands instantly hasn't been there until now. TypePad/6A working on a carrier-dist'd. moblog solution, Google as well."
i shot a question out to the group: "we've spent much of our time discussing the production of content -- what about mobile consumption? is there something to driving adoption by making it easier to consume these works while on-the-go?"
crickets.
overall i wasn't totally energized by this session -- seemed to wander without getting anywhere. that's as much the audience's fault as it is anyone else's. could've been a collective, post-lunch carb crash.

Labels: LiveBlogging

Scoble leads a discussion on aggregator overload...how we're all getting firehosed by RSS and what we can do about it.


"I want the raw you...unfiltered. Filters throw a way "random stuff" that I like to discover."
"I catch a lot of the 'long tail' stuff using filters at Feedster. It's 'purified sugar'"
Bob Wyman, PubSub: "very very dangerous to let aggregators make decisions about what you should read. Even the fact that a story was duplicated in a search or something is possibly useful....."
Winer cuts off Wyman for getting too commercial -- he says "only users should participate." Aren't we all users, Dave? Entire room gets decidedly uncomfortable, bristles at suggestion that vendors aren't users (duh).
Scoble: "I use repetition to help tell me what's important in the blogosphere." Redundancy is data, after all.
Steve Gillmor: brings up attention.xml as a multi-vendor solution to infoglut, metadata management problem. "I have 144,000 unread marks in NetNewsWire. Attention.xml is proposed as a standard that tells you what you've read, in what order, for how long." I think I need to learn more about what's going on that space.
longhaired blogger developer (steve?): "huge privacy issues with sharing attention.xml as it is. i don't think everyone's gonna wanna publish everything they're reading/interacting with."
Scoble has 3700 Bloglines subscribers. He wants to know what people click on/talk about and he doesn't know right now. Surely FeedBurner, among others, have part of the answer already?
"Time famine" -- good term used by commenter up front.
"It becomes incumbent upon producer to see what people are reading, what's getting read...you have to moderate. You can post too much ... self-selection is important." (didn't get his name)
Right now: users are speaking, others are blogging what people are saying (like me), still others are commenting on the big screen via IRC. The problem of "overload" is in evidence in this room right now.
"I want a thumbs-up, thumbs-down on feeds." Ah, the TiVo metaphor, unkillable. (another commenter)
"How do you find the people who are doing the appropriate level of filtering?"
Scoble: Wants many more ways to sort his feed list; alpha ordering is obviously not functional enough. Technorati cosmos, my personal favorites, my most read authors, my *least* read authors, and so on.
General point made by several: the blog as Cory Doctorow's "outboard brain." Many people use their blog as a catch-all for things they themselves want to collect and recall later. Yourself as your reader.
Scoble says he spends just "3 hours per night" reading blogs. I'm sure some days it's more time than that. I'm beginning to wonder if many in this room are entirely too obsessed with the act of information consumption itself -- and how elegantly or efficiently they complete it -- rather than questioning whether this endless quest for "staycurrency" is just another damned El Dorado.
Dave Slusher: "stop feeling pressured to read every little thing out there in the world." It's hard to resist that pressure, however, if you work in this subindustry. For sure.
Something that just occurred to me: nearly all current aggregators spend a lot of energy textualizing importance. Bold text for new items, lists and columns of postings, lots of ASCII used to convey meaning. Where are the visualizations? Even something as simple as what Flickr does with public tags -- text size indicates tag popularity -- packs a lot more meaning without scrolling than any ranked list. Imagine if something like Tufte's efficiency and creativity combined with the data we've already got flying around out there. It would certainly help you become more aware, more quickly.

Labels: LiveBlogging

Adam Curry and the blogorati go back and forth on podcasting and the troubles with consuming so-called new media.

"we started on this about 4 years ago ... using various open technologies that existed"
"people have been putting MP3 files on the for years...problem i always had was locating the files i wanted, organizing what i downloaded. i wanted to have that happen automatically."
"i saw the pieces of what became podcasting lying around in google...and i wrote a terrible applescript to pull them together to create a podcast."
"anyone with a computer and a built-in mic can podcast."
"people want to see how i do a podcast...so i'm gonna demo it"
"you can hear the humanity [in podcasts]"
Dawn & Drew --- podcast pioneers. "Dawn: I get a little burnt out [doing a daily show]. How many times can you say 'fuck' and 'shit' every night?"
"Dave Slusher: Danny Gregory invented the term 'podcast'."
"Dan Gillmor says, we're already at the limit of attention...we need metadata to help tag and filter podcasts...[to Adam] you're the Allan Fried of podcasting."
"Gillmor: Nick Bradbury says FeedDemon will now support Podcasting." Didn't specify upcoming version, patch, what exactly.
"Adam: radio has been my life...you trust the DJs you like as friends"
"we may not be thinking enough of making direct connections with other people [in podcasting]."
just noticed this SSID in my 'available networks' list: "wifi here is like @ WWDC :("
A blogger in the front row has overlaid podcasts into the GTA San Andreas. He listens to "Vegan Talk" while doing driveby shootings.
Curry: "let's not make too many rules in this kind of broadcasting...you don't need to have a fancy intro, all the usual conventions"
iPodder.org has started an open podcast directory; it's not owned by Adam or anyone in particular. Another community effort.
Winer just bonked Dave Sifry for making a "commercial" comment. Dave was just pointing out that Technorati is starting to index podcasts to see what's popular. It was, uhm, a relevant comment. Hank Barry followed up Winer's comment with "Dave Sifry is my hero." Then points out that this thing might be too dependent on Apple -- and Apple could shut down MP3 support on the iPod. A risk against open adoption. Curry strongly disagrees that MP3s are "going away," here comes Lessig.
Lessig: "history of the internet: tech ppl have great ideas, lawyers come in with hatchets and cut it apart. i think we should design this system to avoid [that fate]. . How can we wrap this so that it's impenetrable by the RIAA/21st century lawyer mind. Architecting freedoms in the system...so that the people i train for a living don't stand between you and your work."
Note from Curry on how he podcasts: I do it "on the fly." Pretty much uses manual volume control to fade between tracks in individual QT files. For an old broadcasting pro, he's pretty JV (and readily admits it).
Key takeaway: Podcasting is exciting because its barriers to entry are only conceptual. Clearly though, discovery, usability, reliability (and exposure to ligitation?) are in earliest stages at both publisher and consumer ends.

Labels: LiveBlogging