Changelog

Thanks to Ruby for the photo!

Thanks to Anton Zuiker and Paul Jones for putting the Triangle Bloggers Conference together!

I’m keeping notes and cleaning them up as I go.

If you’re blogging the conference: put a link on the wiki!

Trixie Update

So how do you create a baby blog? Well, you can do it the Dooce way, or you can create the Trixie Update. The Trixie Update takes an anthropological view of raising a baby.

In terms of community, laying out clear ground rules helps build the community. A regular schedule (Trixie Picture of the Day) helps people know what kind of content to expect and when to expect it and takes the burden off of the writer. When other things of interest come along, you can post that too. But the natives don’t get restless in the meantime.

Question: Have you thought about what your daughter is going to think in a few years?

The information is really very clinical. Not reall interested in the kind of thing that Dooce is writing about.

Sid Stafford aka BigWig

Blogging is the bleeding edge of vanity publishing. Created the Carnival of the Vanities to hack the blogdex rankings. Basically we wanted to drive traffic to people who didn’t get much attention. Now it exists as this framework for spotlighting new sites. See this as helping the long tail, creating links to the content that fills out the long tail.

Linking builds the ecological strength of the web. “No blog is an island.”

Ed Cone

How do you get traffic? Porn. Partisanship.

Connect with people via email (or your tool of choice), share things of mutual interest. Community comes from that sharing of ideas. Then you hope that the readers will visit, look at me and like what they see. Altruism builds the brand. You don’t have to write about everything, stick to what you like, what you know. You want to build a community that you yourself value.

Discussion

Eric Muller – Had Atrios and InstaPundit both linking on the same day

Dave Winer – Why do you care about traffic? “Share the information which only you know” (paraphrasing Philip Greenspun). Why do you want to be popular?

Sid – I like to be popular! I like to write when I know that people are listening.

Ed Cone – Writing what I want to say and getting the people who are interested to visit me, I could be an ass, or I could write what i want.

What about the types of blogs? Commercial blogs are in the business of building traffic. Are personal blogs more interested in community? Or is that a false dichomoty?

The conversation is the thing – Is it always? What about personal fulfillment?

What does the scale of community change?

How often do people comment? What kind of people comment?

Aggregators and Community

How do you localize (geographically) the blog?

How do you find the people in your community online and bring them in?

Technorati tags (which are stupid btw) helping to link people together across subjects – How do you do the same with community-based blogs?

Aggregators that can help build the community, so can getting bloggers together in real life

Dan Gillmor

Greensboro is playing with a new journalism toy – low cost – not worried about quick payback – owned by Landmark (the owner of landmark was a big investor in RedHat — Bob Young) – editorial project – this came from the independent bloggers, not the editors

Who else besides Greensboro? Lawrence, Kansas – Others?

What roll can the blogging world play in bringing issues ot the attention of the world/media?

Participatory democracy

Ruby – Blogs will not/do not have the same audience numbers – however, the people who matter read them – should be media watchdogs – don’t want to be the firstline journalists – but want to be the thorn in the ass of the media

Dave Winer – I think blogs will be big and will change how we get information

Fiona Morgan (Indy Weekly) – Journalists trying to figure out our relationship with the bloggers – journalists and bloggers have different tasks (should be a big deal when a journalist isn’t accurate)

Bloggers need to be a watchdog and first line of information collection – the media should be feeding off of this and providing the validation (which they aren’t doing yet)

What’s up with the link rot in the “real” news? Blogs become the articles of record because they stick around and believe in permalinks

The editorial page is the place to start building the community outwards – isn’t that what a blog is anyways?

A conversation between the readers and the paper to help guide the content of the paper: transparency

There is huge pressure on the bottom line in the newspaper world – they want to defend the franchise (thanks Sally Greene) and are not sure how to approach all this (and many think bloggers are a joke)

Dave Winer – [Journalists should] stop fighting and embrace it! That’s just the beginning – what about the big media companies?

Sally Greene has better notes from this session

Misc

Moleskine Watch: 3

Links

Flickr Group

Justin’s blogging too

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 12th, 2005 at 10:15 am and is filed under Weblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.