Just got back from the Supernova Conference Bloggers Party at Casablanca in Old Town Alexandria, VA (just outside DC). I had a crummy day, so I wasn’t feeling super social, and, frankly, I nearly copped out and didn’t go. In retrospect, I’m glad I did.
DC Blogger turn out seemed slim. Most of the partygoers seemed to be there to attend Supernova. I did chat with Derek from The Scoop, Tom of Off the Top, Jeff Gates [no relation] of Life Outtacontext, and Bill Kearney, creator of Syndic8. I know I talked with some other locals, but my memory for names sucks big time.
Sadly, I took no photos of the local bloggers. (Dude, what’s up with that?) Being the starstruck fool that I am, I took photos of people like:
Scott Johnson, creator of Feedster, getting jiggy with the belly dancer.
Halley Suitt of Halley’s Comment giving lessons to the belly dancer. Show her how it’s done, Halley! (Halley says she has a plan to muscle those ornery Christians outta my way!)
The Movable Type gang (left to right: Anil Dash, Joi Ito, and MT co-creator Mena Trott) kicking it with yours truly.
Personal
Off to the SuperNova Conference Blogger Party, digital camera in hand (well, more like “in pocket,” but you get the drift).
Pray that it doesn’t rain again, because I have no umbrella with me today.
Personal, Weblogs
Dave Sifry has written a web service for pinging Technorati to let it know you’ve updated your weblog.
Technorati, of course, is a useful service that lets you know what weblogs have linked to each other, as well as other nifty functionality like hottest links in the blogosphere. For example, here is a list of weblogs referring to us here at 10RW. (FYI, that was the “royal us.”)
Of course, right now Technorati says this weblog was last updated 8 hours and 15 minutes ago, because it doesn’t get scanned on posting, but on some other timeframe. Now with the pinger, Technorati can be notified at the time I make a post. Yay!
Weblogs
So I’m watching the conversation go by in the #joiito IRC channel, and Robert Ivanc (Clarity3650) is chatting on IRC from his mobile phone while in a movie theater, waiting for Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle to start. Except when the movie starts, he not only continues to chat but is sending still photos of the moview screen from his phone to his mobile blog.
Mind-boggling!
Weblogs
If Washington, D.C., gets representation in the house, it may turn out that the D.C. vote in Congress is courtesy of the Mormons:
Does the District of Columbia’s Road to Representation lead to Salt Lake City? That’s one way to interpret Virginia Rep. Tom Davis’s tantalizing proposal to give the nation’s capital a full-fledged seat in the House of Representatives. It almost sounds to good to be true: a ranking Republican offering a congressional vote to doggedly Democratic D.C. The Democrats must be salivating at the prospect.
Ah, but this largess comes with a catch: Davis’s proposal entails expanding the size of the House not by one, but by two. Utah, which narrowly missed receiving an extra seat in the 2000 reapportionment, stands next in line. (Another 857 residents, or being able to include overseas Mormon missionaries, would have clinched it.) While there are many good reasons to grant statehood to the District, not the least of which is the “fair and just” right to a vote in Congress, as Davis puts it, I’ll bet few of the city’s advocates have ever linked its fate to that of rugged, reliably Republican Utah.
More info on D.C. rights at letsfreedc.org, including juicy facts like if the District were to become the 51st state, it would be the 50th largest (D.C. population exceeds that of Wyoming by about 80,000 . . . and Vermont’s only about 25,000 people ahead of us).
Politics
The title of this article, “Better Off With or Without Your CMS?” (from Syllabus), is a bit misleading, because the authors (Steve Ehrmann and Steve Gilbert of the TLT Group, both of whom I worked with on an Annenberg grant project back in the mid-90’s) don’t ever raise that question. The questions they do raise are much more valuable: “Do you have any way of knowing how much educational value your college or university currently derives from its use of a CMS? Do you have a strategy for increasing its value in a course or across the curriculum?” They provide a set of five general assessments an institution can undertake to answer those questions.
The assessments and examples that the Steves provide reinforce what has always been my mantra regarding education & technology: It’s not about the technology, it’s about what you do with it. Maybe I picked that up from the Steves years ago. :-)
Every school with a course management system should be conducting regular evaluations on its use, and feeding the results of those evaluation back into faculty development programs.
Education
The weblog world always wondered when the sleeping giants would wake up and take notice. Well, at least one giant has awakened: AOL is rolling out weblogs. Jeff Jarvis writes about “AOL Journals” in BuzzMachine. Jarvis was one of a few A-List bloggers invited to preview AOL Journals (others were Meg Hourihan, Anil Dash, Nick Denton, and Clay Shirky. Highlighted features of the “AOL Journals” include blogging from AIM and support for RSS 2.0. The general consensus: “It doesn’t suck.”
Both Jarvis and Shirky (writing about AOL Journals in Corante’s Many-to-many social software weblog) make note of the challenge that faces AOL: will AOL Journals be a community tool (a la LiveJournal) or a lightweight publishing tool (a la Movable Type). Shirky has a spot-on analysis of this in his post. He says, in part:
Community conversation vs Lightweight publishing platform is not a zero-sum set of choices, but there is a spectrum of offerings, from LiveJournal’s hyper-sociability, to Blogger, which still doesn’t support comments, and the choice of features has a significant effect on patterns of use.
LiveJournal simply isn’t much fun, unless your friends are using it, too. I suspect, as Shirky suggests, that AOL will lean more toward the LiveJournal model than an independent weblog model — AOL’s insularity is part and parcel of its success.
If that turns out to be the case, I expect AOL Journals to have little significant impact on the world of weblogs that I imagine you and I participate in, dear reader. I mean, how many LiveJournal sites do you read regularly?
Update at 9:27am: Oh, and one more thing — how long now before MSN incorporates a weblog tool? :-)
Weblogs
This is a test of the Zempt blog client for Movable Type. The client runs on your local machine and posts directly to MT (I hope — this post is the test of it).
The dandy thing about it for me is that because (a) I use Mozilla and (b) no one has implemented the Mozilla Midas specification for rich-text editing in MT (yet), Zempt gives me a WYSIWYG editing environment in which to write (and edit?) MT posts.
Here goes.. . . we’re trying to post.
Update: Hey, whaddayaknow! It worked!. And it’s gonna make my XHTML a lot more valid, probably.
Movable Type, Weblogs