Teblog

Grazr - a great way to view outlines

Over on thinkerlog, I've been playing with displaying outlines using Grazr.

I thought I'd try it here on teblog. It's a neat way of presenting a lot of information in a compact way.

[ Update 19 April: I have removed the Grazr display from here because I wanted to try it out in the sidebar and the Grazr beta only allows one panel per web page at the moment. This will be changed before public release. ]

And it appears to work!

Excellent

[ Background information: The file I used was taken from 'work in progress' about a year ago, on LesBlogs. It was stored in BrainStorm, output as a tabbed outline, converted to OPML by OPML Editor then pointed at by Grazr. Sounds complicated. Took a few minutes. ]

[ Update 19 April: That particular model is still on the thinkerlog blog. On this one, it is shown under 'Stuff I do' in the left sidebar. ]

The value of podcasting II

Sorry about the terseness (okay, it wasn't very terse) of the last post. The fact is that I spent 30 minutes composing it in TypePad then, when I was adding the links, managed to lose it all. The resulting re-post was more like ten minutes' worth.

Dennis told me to get Qumana for composing posts offline. Which I did (but haven't used yet).

I meant to mention the podcast that really tipped me over the edge and forgot.

Marck Pearlstone is my partner in crime at BrainStorm. He got nailed at the European Shareware Conference recently by one Mike Dulin of Shareware Radio. Marck, I should mention, is the propellor-head in BrainStorm whereas I was a long time ago. I'm supposed to be the person who does everything except the programming.

Anyway, the recording of Marck talking first about BrainStorm, then about his life, was quite touching. It was unscripted, unprepared and I had absolutely nothing to do with it, so it was from the heart.

I blogged about it here.

So, add Marck and Mike to the list of credits.

I accept that podcasting has the power to move people. Far more than words on pages or screens. And, before long, if you can stomach the bandwidth and storage requirements, videologging will be upon us.

Six Apart's Loic le Meur was taking movies with his new Nokia phone. Formats present the biggest difficulty at the moment. The usual format wars are taking place but, with a bit of luck, MP4 or Flash will win and then we can all then just get on with it. If the voice of a podcast has power, imagine what video has.

Please don't watch while driving though. At least, in that respect, podcasting still has the edge.

The value of podcasting

Okay, I've been less than complementary about podcasting in the past. Just because it didn't suit me.

Since then I've listened to an interview with IBM's social media supremo, Mike Wing, courtesy of Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz.

Dennis Howlett nailed me and a handful of speakers at LesBlogs last week and the resulting podcast is an interesting mix of views, tightly scripted and linked. I am astonished it's only Dennis' second podcast, it is so good.

Finally, I have spoken to PubSub Concepts' CEO, Salim Ismail, several times over the past couple of weeks. And exchanged emails. Just when I'd finally got my head round what he's doing, along comes Tom Raftery with an excellent podcast interview with Salim, which neatly assembles everything we'd discussed into one tight package. I am in awe.

A few weeks ago I started to screencast messages for users of my software, BrainStorm. They're in the user forum.

As of yesterday, I am the proud owner of some podcasting gear.

Dennis, Tom, Neville and Shel have persuaded me of the error of my ways.

Modern conferencing

Here's the unnerving evidence of what modern conferencing is like:

It is a shot (thanks Loic) from LesBlogs 2.0

Some delegates were tapping away on the IRC backchannel, some were taking notes, some were recording the session and a few naughty ones were soaking up bandwidth by streaming stuff to the outside world. Some, no doubt, were blogging or catching up on email and RSS feeds.

Welcome to the new world of conferencing, where a speaker needs to be relevant and interesting to overcome the lure of the laptop.

Technorati tag: lesblogs

Mena Trott and civility

Mena Trott is president of Six Apart, the company that  hosts this blog.

At the second LesBlogs conference in Paris she begged bloggers to be more civil.

When someone in the audience typed "this is bullshit" and it appeared on the screen behind her, Ms Trott became very uncivil.

To give her some credit, nearly two days later she posted to her blog that she'd "imploded".

Here's a pic I took just afterwards. She doesn't look too imploded.

And here's the full story from me, in The Register.

 

 

Technorati tag: lesblogs

Lemur, Le Meur, easily confused

You may notice that the sidebar sports a couple of events: LesBlogs 2.0 and Online Information. I intend to visit the first, organised by (among others) Loic Le Meur of Six Apart and I am moderating a session at the second. Loic is on my panel.
While adding posts to the Online Information blog, I heard from the organiser that there was some kind of laughing lemur competition. So I entered for it. But I thought she said Le Meur competition.
He thinks I'm weird.
I think he's right.

Print versus online

Following my trip to LesBlogs on April 26, I wrote three articles about it for paper publications. The last of the three appeared exactly a month after the event, on 26 May. By this time, LesBlogs had been written about exhaustively online. Memories were more than distant for anyone who'd been following the conversation. They'd learned the lessons and moved on to the next thing.

(To give credit where it's due, the Guardian published my story in the paper and online on May 12.)

When it comes to news, my priorities (in order) these days are scanning RSS feeds through my aggregator, flicking through daily newspapers and reading most of The Week each Friday. (It's a printed digest of the news, taken directly from the British and international press.) I occasionally, with a heavy heart, look at the BBC news page. (Heavy heart because I sense a lack of balance in certain subject areas.)

If I'm researching prior to doing an interview, I hit various news channels online, search engines and often set up a blog watch feed. I rarely watch tv for news - I detest serial feeds of information where someone else has total control over pace, sequence and content. I might flick on the teletext if I'm nowhere near a computer.

But it's easy to forget that millions of people out there use computers because they have to and not because they want to. They are also not as frantic as many of us are to stay completely on the leading edge. (Although, I'll readily confess that this posting is hardly leading edge.) For them, printed publications are an opportunity to catch up in a more leisurely and less timely way.

Editors of these titles are constrained by production lead times and publishing schedules. Within this framework, they do an excellent job of packaging the most interesting stuff up for their target audiences in a convenient, good looking, easy to navigate and easy to read form.

I'll still write for them. Not least because I get paid for words printed on dead trees.

And I'd still rather read a paper on the train than listen to a podcast or open the laptop.

Wiki, Socialtext, Guardian article

Not sure if I should mention this. What's the blog etiquette regarding one's own published articles?

Anyway, since the subject is the way in which the Socialtext Workspace wiki was used to organise LesBlogs, I thought it might be of interest. It's in today's Guardian.

Blogs and trust

The other night, four bloggers and a non-blogger sat down to dinner. The non-blogger felt somewhat at bay because we, the bloggers, were clearly quite keen on trying to communicate the value of blogging. We each did it in our different ways. The cumulative effect provoked a high degree of, hmmm, I was going to say 'hostility', but I think 'defensiveness' would be more accurate.

We reached a point in the conversation where two of us were citing a figure from the LesBlogs conference about South Korea having 100Mbps bandwidth both ways. Here, our friend directly challenged us, claiming that he knew that this wasn't true.

The next bit was pretty exciting because it led into a discussion about trust. We'd been banging on about these chains of trust between bloggers. He was saying "I check everything, even what I read in the FT." Whether this was a heat of the moment claim, or true, I have no idea. It did seem a bit over the top.

But, suddenly we were faced with the possibility that we'd been misled by the speaker at the conference. To say it was a shock would be an understatement. Our chains of trust were broken.

We went our separate ways and further investigation revealed that the specific claim (that at least three conference delegates had recorded) was less a statement of fact and more a statement of intent. The speaker had, apparently, had his speaking time compressed and, while the general impressions given were correct, this particular specific was not.

This episode was enough to remove the rose tint from our blogging spectacles and, probably, move us more in the direction of professional journalism. For which we can only be grateful.

Blogging and Flickr incontinence

Sorry about the radio silence. I've been at the LesBlogs & Social Computing conference in Paris.

Jolly interesting it was too. Delegates and speakers came from all over the world. One of the most astonishing pieces of information is that broadband in Korea is 100Mbits/sec each way! Imagine how that would change your online habits. Update, seems like it's a plan for Korea rather than actuality.

The event was great. Interesting people. Interesting points of view. Lovely location. And extremely good natured, apart from a little tension in the nano-publishing session.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to talk about an aspect of communication which drives me nuts but which might be totally acceptable in your world. I'd be interested to know.

In my world, respect for the audience is paramount. You don't waste their precious time and you don't insult them. I'm sure there are other things but they spring to mind.

In the blogging and Flickr (online photo-sharing) worlds, these 'rules' sometimes appear not to exist. Being first to post seems to be more important than whether what is being posted is what people want to read/look at.

I'll probably get it in the neck from all my blogging friends for these comments. But why should I waste my time reading through yards of semi-verbatim conference proceedings when with some additional effort the writer can deliver some clairty to their audience?

I realise there's a sense of 'being there', but do these bloggers really think the world is sitting at their screens panting for the next paragraph?

Then there's Flickr. I took a lot of photos at LesBlogs and most of them were rubbish, so I didn't upload them. Other people emptied their cameras straight into Flickr. Not only that but they didn't add any useful information beyond the keyword 'lesblogs'. At the last count there were 1479 of them.

How the heck are you supposed to find one of the photogenic Caterina Fake (Flickr founder), for example? Actually, two are tagged. Well done Pierre Metivier and Heiko Hebig.

While I'm here, I may as well whinge about one more thing. The smart people at Six Apart set up a wifi network and enabled Canal Chat so that delegates could chat while the sessions were in progress. Then they decided that since so much discussion was about the current session, they'd back project it behind the speakers.

A brilliant idea, providing you weren't trying to listen to the speakers and take notes. Adding a third responsibility, keeping an eye on the 'back-channel' was too much for my brain. Mainly because a lot of the chat had nothing to do with what was happening on stage.

Imagine being a speaker, saying something dead serious, and suddenly half the audience laughs because of a witty comment in the chat room. Totally unnerving. Some speakers were unnerved anyway, others rose to the occasion and reacted in real time to what was happening.

I moaned about it to Euan Semple. Told him that people should stick to the subject being discussed. He thought I was being pathetic. (He was far more polite than that, I have to say.) Thought I should relax a bit and told me that this is the way things are these days. And he's probably right.

Until someone tells me to behave differently, I'll still try to put my readers' interests first.

I hope that's okay with you.

Technorati tag [lesblogs]