Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

Posted by j, 2/24/05 at 6:59:02 PM.

02/24/2005 Meeting Notes

These notes are a best effort.

Blog your corrections and commentary.

Attendees:

• j: j Baumgart
• SR: Shimon Rura
• JS: Jennifer Stoner
• JA: Josh Ain
• LW: Lisa Williams
• JD: Jared Dunn
• SG: Steve Garfield
• Ann
• RM: Rebecca MacKinnon
• AW: Amanda Watlington
• SG: Steve Garfield
• RM: Rebecca MacKinnon
• DW: David Weinberger
• MW: Mike Walsh
• LS
• PS: Pito Salas
• BI: Bill Ives
• William Adams from Newsweek’s Boston bureau
• v
• MF: Michael Feldman
• Mary
• PRW: Peter R. Wood (via IRC)

There will be no Webcast.

Agenda

Notes:

• Will Mike Walsh return? Or has he already disappeared again?
  • Yes, he’s here!
• Aggregators
  • JA: we haven’t talked about this in a while. Who’s using what?
  • LW: stopped using Mac aggregators, uses FeedDemon
    
  • several people said Bloglines

  • LW: likes something with categories
  • BI: tries to get people to use FeedBurner, likes an aggregator that dumps into an e-mail client
  • Ads in feeds are a growing trend. Some third party services insert adds in the feeds.
  • RM: uses SharpReader, likes the pop-up announcing new blog posts and being able to share subscriptions/an aggregator with others
  • DW: I use BlogBridge, which PS developed
  • JA: what’s your sales pitch?
  • PS: gave sales pitch, mentioned communal tracking and other features
  • j: sounds like Frassle’s aggregator
  • MF: what about video aggregators?
    • SG: Ant is good
      • DW: anti snot tv
    • SG: Ant comes with some pre-stocked feeds
    • LW: what about space on your hard drive? doesn’t it fill up?
    • SG: with Ant, once I watch something, it goes away I only subscribe to about 30 feeds, but not all vloggers post daily Rocketboom is a must-watch, as is Ryanne’s Video Blog
      • Shoegasm
• DW: people who blog about their cats suck eggs
  • except for the Gates of Somerville
• LW: The great thing about blogs is that education can happen. It’s easy to teach someone something via a blog.
• Blogging 101
  • The Blogging 101 weeeeeeeeeki
  • MF: let’s meet next Thursday at 6:30 pm
  • LW: Thanks Phil Wolff for all the help with the wiki!!!!! (dittoed by several in the room)
  • MF: wants to use previous tutorials as starting points
  • MF: recommends chunking up the project to make it more manageable
  • PRW: intro to blogging for Mac users
  • RM: anyone know anything about the blogging for dummies book that might come out?
    • SR: Great! We need more dummies blogging!
  • j: should we also write brief reviews of the platforms we work on? it seems like everyone is looking for that kind of info and among us we use so many different platforms …
• Envisioning the future of weblog software, take 2
  • LW: we need to revisit this list, check to see what’s been implemented since we dreamed it up
  • j nudges Shimon re: Frassle
• Blog conference in the late spring/early summer?
• Other proselytizing?
• Blogumentary
  • LW: where can we get a theatre?
  • SG: The guy wants to come here
  • several suggested inviting him, we just need a space
  • Coolidge Corner, Somerville Theatre, Harvard Film Archive?
  • RM: Maybe the Berkman folks can assist on this
  • Can we show SG’s films for previews or while the theatre is filling up instead of ads?
• Are there grants the blog group could apply for?
• Blogging best practices, policies
  • BI: I added a policy statement to my about page. I’ll write about it soon. I recommend that other bloggers write policy statements.
  • LW: I feel nervous teaching bloggers “best practices” shouldn’t we come up with best practices first?
  • BI: writing it down could make it explicit, I emphasized that it’s me, my policy
  • LW: you’ll strike bedrock
• Frassle alpha 9a demo?
  • Using Frassle’s content studio to build custom aggregators and RSS feeds
• Dim sum on Sunday, Feb. 27, 11 am, Chau Chow City, Chinatown more details Comment below or bug j to RSVP.
• Boston Weblogger Meetup, Monday, Feb. 28, 7 pm, Christopher’s in Porter Square
• Blogging Thursday’s Planet Aid concert, 8 pm, Harvard Square
• The art exhibit we need to blog
• What else?
• Eat
  

  • Nightline very graciously covered dinner at Smile Thai last week. Thank you!