Day: February 23, 2008

The Blog is Dead! Long live bloggers – Liveblogging Chris Lott

Chris started by asking people what blogs are, and people yelled out definitions. The big question is not the definition, and there are lots of other examples for what they are.

This session is supposed to be a panel discussion, and the panel was seated in the audience, and the discussion about what a blog is and why people use them. The other panel discussants are Alan Levine, Nancy White, D’Arcy Norman, Scott Leslie, Brian Lamb.

There are lots of technologies out there to share our presence. “I feel like to little butter on too little bread,” which is what Chris quoted from the Lord of the Rings.

Somebody discussed how Twitter is a place for following others who “get off” on the same things I am interested in. Interesting.

Twitter is like doodling. Interesting. Use it as an outlet, but always remember that it is being Googled (my comment). D’Arcy and others then discussed how Twitter can be private, so it becomes more of an opportunity to share with a small and more select group of people and colleagues.

We have more ways to have presence, but we also have less people knowing things about us? This is what happens when there are lots of people following us who do not know us.

What is the implication of the disconnect between early adopters to social media and when the mass of people begin using it?

This session seems like a brain dump, and I find it very exciting. I am not sure exactly how to characterize it, but I think that Chris’ comments about his being a post-post-modernist. Like it and find it very valuable. Perhaps this involves reflective practice?

For Chris, the most important things about Northern Voice for Chris is to hear the stories about why people started to and continue doing this.

Excellent! This session is great food for thought. Last year I would have been threatened during this session, but now I have more food for thought.

My conversation with Stewart Mader at the conclusion about the value of reflective practice was very valuable as well.

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Why I slowed down blogging and started drawing on walls – Liveblogging Nancy White

Nancy White is so engaging, even coming in late to her session.

I was interested in attending her session, but thought it was a little intimidating as I sometimes feel a bit threatened making images and then letting other people see them. Interesting what holds us (or at least me) back. But, rather than stay with something that is not useful for me, I took steps to change and have already found value.

I am already seeing value in this session, as it is pushing me to some of my own limits.

She is now speaking about how images can play a role, especially as she started to limit her inner sensor.

Everybody can draw, and “the whole body stuff” can assist. Use crayons and large paper to write on the wall to enhance creativity. She draws icons and has a wiki page set up for them.

Images have a powerful affect on our lives, and the hand-drawn image has a powerful affect on our lives. She has been collecting more material and resources about visual thinking.

I am always amazed at how I can learn anywhere if given some opportunities and an open-mind. I wonder how I can increase these opportunities and try to learn more?

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Bringing Social to Software; Liveblogging Marc Cantor

Marc Cantor is speaking at Northern Voice now about Bringing Social to Software. Kris Krug gave a nice introduction to Marc.

He started by speaking about social features integrated into software.

http://marc.blogs.it

He spoke about giant databases and social networks, which allow people to have hundreds of friends. With those numbers, “friends” no longer matter.

Not finding Marc’s talk very useful; I think I must have missed something while I was trying to get my wireless connection to work better.  Other people seem to be engaged, but that does not mean that it works for everybody (me).

I think I will go to see what Nancy White it doing.

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Matt Mullenweg at Northern Voice

The opening speech at today’s Northern Voice session is Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress.

Matt discussed when he started blogging, before he created WordPress, Automattic, and Akismet. There were a number of blogging applications at the time, and he thought the platforms were already old. He started blogging, but was tired of the software. WordPress was rough in the beginning, and he took other open source software and then built upon it. WordPress is now 5 years old, and there have been 7.226,049 downloads thus far.

He has learned, in that time, what bloggers want. He believes bloggers want:

  1. Expression – the fact that people could change there themes and designs any day and time. The themes allowed people to make their online presence their own. Spammers are digital terrorists. When he discussed Facebook, he talked about how people use the Inbox and photos most.
  2. Public – that people share with people. The most successful platforms are those that publish publicly. Sometimes permission systems inhibit growth. Privacy is important, but things that increase interaction and make it easy to follow and connect can have a
  3. Validation – people check their stats
  4. Form Dictates Writing – he spoke about the Prologue theme and Tumblr, which make it easy for people to interact and add information.

Matt then talked about some of his exhortations:

  1. Exhortation #1 – We need to remove the Friction. We need Invisible Software, such as to be able to easily upgrade the software. There is an enormous amount of content that is being created, and it will increase.  We need to be able to filter things and make things more relevant. 
  2. Exhortation #2 – We have to respect people’s time – if you are doing this, you are creating a lot of value. Adds can be overwhelming, and advertising and our models around here need to evolve.
  3. Exhortation #3 – Kill the Megabrands. Look at how television evolved from the three original main channels. Our websites need to evolve just as Proctor and Gamble have evolved their brands (Tide, Head and Shoulders, etc.). The are successful and then they develop more. Danah Boyd did a great post about this.

The Achilles Heel of Web 2.0 is bad actors. People are moving away from email due to spam. Even Facebook is filled with spam, by having all the additional applications.

First generation social networks is all about making connections. In the Web 2.0 world, people congregate around Social Objects. Example, around photos, slides, videos, links, etc. People gather around common things. But then, once sites get popular, then people want to filter it and only get their own resources.

Open Source. Matt reviewed his previous blog posts, and in the long term things become noise as his tastes change. There are a number of freedoms in the open source movement. There are four freedoms, and I took a photo of them and will upload to Flickr and leave a link in the comment to this post when I have it uploaded.

As liveblogging allows me to write about what I am thinking about things, I am thinking about a comment somebody made yesterday where somebody talked about spoke about updating their liveblog posts by adding comments to their own post. It adds to comments as well as allows the information to still be done with time stamps.

The freedoms in an open source architecture allow us the right to make things different. The transparency and power of open source of some of the online systems would be powerful if added to politics and the political process.

Matt took some questions, and spoke more about the value of the freedom of open source, and then how that would be useful for government.

Matt then shared his contact information – m@mullenweg.com & http://ma.tt.

Boris Mann’s Northern Voice Introduction

Boris is doing the introduction for the session, and he announced that Northern Voice is now an official society in BC now. That received some nice applause.

He recognized the sponsors of the session, and then gave useful information.

The tags for the session is northernvoice and nv08. We figured that out from the handouts from the Moosecamp yesterday.

Very upbeat introduction, full of energy, and lively. Nice job, Boris!

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