• tagging (Roy wondered if you could add heirarchy to tags)
• Google (and the programming languages they use)
• Google pages (which no one had tried yet)
• StikiPad
• photo galleries (Steve just put his recent cruise photos online along with a travelogue)
• the Firebug plugin for Firefox
• using Yahoo and Wikipedia to learn about medication
• Brian’s quest to regain control of his data
• and more!

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

More fundeamentally, as the world becomes more real-time and connected, the virtual and increasingly the actual configuration of the system is changing. There’s a rich, complex, shared data store in the cloud, and mail is simply the passing of notifications and alerts that tell you to pay attention to/download specific items in the cloud that are new or changed or that someone wants to share with you. this creates huge challenges in version control, updating and permission management.

Mark Hurst, Managing Incoming Email

In other words, clear out incoming e-mails before they pile up too high in the inbox. Delete most of them, file some of them (in mail folders or elsewhere), but most importantly, get them all out of the inbox before they really begin to pile up. Keep the inbox empty.

Esther makes more sense to me that Mark. But I like the idea of having a space where I keep things of immediate importance. I use email flags to do this instead of keeping my inbox empty (Thunderbird’s search function is a nice way to find things in my email, and works best when I keep things together) and use Thunderbird’s views to filter my messages to those I need to see.

I feel like gmail style tagging is the way to go for really making email useful. Thunderbird and other programs have simple versions of this, but most only allow 5 tags. Make it infinite. Let me tag things like I can in del.icio.us. Then let me filter on these tags quickly and easily.

Better yet, do like Esther says (and like Spotlight and Dashboard) and put it all (programs, documents, email, RSS feeds, etc) in a big pile and let me tag it as it passes by. That way I can come back later and filter out the good stuff when I need it.

Like Esther said, this is about attention management. Information passes by me very wuickly. It’s hard to keep up with it all. Let me quickly assign places to things (with tags) without having to establish fancy hierarchies.

I assume that if the date for each item was set correctly, then RSS Bandit would hopefully recognize the item as old (based on the date). Instead, they’re being listed as having been added today instead of the date they were actually posted.

This might be a Blosxom RSS template problem or an RSS Bandit problem. Not sure which yet…

Update

This problem is also happening on a feed from a friend’s b2 blog. The problem appears to be that items in the feed do not have dates. When RSS Bandit reads them ,it gives them the current date, and therefor all the items in the feed that are not in RSS Bandits database are added with todays date. That includes items that are older but still in the feed.

This is what happens when Smart Mobs get into politics.

• Pick a topic, theme, or point-of-view
• Selectively choose news items that conform to #1
• Deride and dismiss any information contrary to #1
• Link extensively to sites of similar bias to show support for #1
• Lather, rinse, repeat…

Why can’t we be unbiased? Is this human brain fundamentally incapable of such a thing? Does the act of ingesting information through our brains inherently change the substance of that information? Irrevocably coloring it with preconceptions?

I just get so tired of reading one-sided diatribes praising the true-believers and deriding the dissenters. Even the “big” news guys do it, though they’re more circumspect about it.

I’m tired of the chest pounding and the smug self-rightousness.