Monday, January 17, 2005

NY weather: Low of 13. Colder tomorrow. Snow on Wednesday. 

Frank Paynter is vetting the participants in this week's conference. 

Are you running a local BloggerCon? If so, I can point a sub-domain of bloggercon.org to your conference site. You have to be running a non-commercial unconference devoted to blogging. Please this is not a way to make money or promote something other than blogging. Send me an email if you're interested. 

Three years ago today: The credits page for Radio 8. 

No layoffs at O'Reilly Books, says Tim O'Reilly on Chris Pirillo's blog. 

OpenNet Initiative report on control of weblog content in China. 

Today's drive was very weird, short and uneventful. I was cruising along, stopping frequently because of the short distance I had to cover, stopped at a rest area on the NJ Turnpike. I glanced at the state map on my way out and couldn't believe that the You Are Here sign was adjacent to Staten Island. I got out at the next exit, took the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, my last rest stop on the Seattle-Miami-New York marathon was on the Belt Parkway looking out on the Marine Parkway Bridge and Rockaway, across Sheepshead Bay. Naturally I took some photos.  

Photos: Rest stop on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. 

There was a strange little building by the bay in Brooklyn.  

Dowbrigade: "The big boys are looking over their shoulders." 

Still no broadband at Curry Cottage. British Telecom is the problem. 

Driving day 

Today's a driving day, again I've run out of country, and it's kind of sad. I'd like to be driving from Albuquerque to Amarillo, but instead I'm driving from DC to NY. Looking at the map to find an alternative, any alternative to Interstate 95, and there are some. I didn't realize how much the trip is an east-west thing, I always thought of NY as strictly north of DC. I could go north to Pennsylvania then east through northern New Jersey. Or east across the Chesapeake Bay and then north up Delaware to the Jersey shore to the Turnpike to NY.

In the end I'll probably just take 95 and the latest Gillmor Gang and some coffee. Four hours later I'll be singing the Little Feat song I always sing when driving into NYC. And then I'll turn on the radio and maybe Jonathan Schwartz will be there to greet me.

Jones on blogging in the LA Times in 2004 

An op-ed piece that appeared in the LA Times in the heat of the 2004 campaign about bloggers written by Alex Jones, one of the moderators of the Harvard conference on blogging, journalism and credibility.

Having written this one-sided, misleading piece about blogging last year, it seems that Jones should be a presenter, not a moderator at a conference about blogging. Having him moderate is like having the chairman of one of the political parties as editor in chief of a major newsaper. In itself, his role raises issues of credibility. Who is the blogging equivalent of Jones who will moderate this conference? Will this turn out to be a conference controlled by pros, lecturing bloggers on their proper role? What are the chances of understanding coming out of this? Unity?

I strongly recommend that Harvard find someone who is more on the sidelines of the debate to moderate the conference.

BTW, here's how the blogosphere reacted to the Jones piece. It was quite controversial, but as a group we showed a lot more restraint than Jones, again an irony, given that he's the sizzler calling us the sizzle.

Also, we have generally used professional reporters as moderators at BloggerCon, with good results. It's never been our intention to get pros into a room to lecture them, we've always welcomed their participation, as equals.