Category Archives: BloggerCon

Dave's new Web CMS?

BloggerCon

Dave is writing about flipping the switch on scripting.com. He also public muses about a web CMS that uses an outliner. Dave, I'll send $40 to you now to get on the beta test list for that one. My advice: give it to the community and watch it grow. It will move faster to acceptance than if you sell it yourself or give it to Userland.

Steve's changes: part one

BloggerCon, Idea, My Hobbies, Radio

I haven't written much lately, and I certainly haven't linked much. For that, I'm sorry. I'm spending more time with a fledgling business wrestling with a thirst for change.

I've watched with interest Dave Winer's changes in Scripting News, his weblog about scripting software and technology. For the last year or two, it's been less about scripting and more about Dave. That's fine with me. Dave makes me think more about the “why's” when I do something than the “how's”. That's why I read it every day.

The header picture changed. That's good too. The other photo was a source of juvenille stress for everyone. Dave's worked through it and has produced a better result: he's relating his life to the Web through his website. It's made me once again question the “why” of my weblog, and not the “how”.

I'll be spending the rest of the month transitioning my weblog to one of two pieces of software: Movable Type or Manila. MT is free for me as a non-commerical users. Manila is $899. Both offer strengths. Opinions?

I have seen the light about my interaction with the blogosphere. I've grown out of the “link to everyone, post everything” phase. There's too much that's good *and* bad to make those kinds of rationalizations with everything I read. I'll spend more time writing introspectively, something I enjoy more than posting news from other sites.

More as it happens…

forclark blog review

BloggerCon

I created a blog on the forclark.com website.

Initial impressions:

slow. Slow when posting forms, login, logout. Tried to post a comment on a post I wrote–denied. Connection resets. I like the concept, but it doesn't seem to work well yet.

Cam, I could only post about my own content when I wasn't logged in.

Gen. Clark in Springfield, MO

BloggerCon

I saw the short blurb in my local paper that General Wesley Clark was making an appearance here in Springfield. Inspired by my meeting with Cam Barrett at BloggerCon in October, I headed down to check out the event.

Like most “made for media” events, this one had all four of the television stations in town, in addition to the only two radio stations that cover news present. Turns out that I knew the reporter from one of the radio stations–I went backstage to the “media Q&A” with her.

The General was running late, so the local Dem party chairperson took the floor and made small talk. Mr. Clark arrived about 1:15PM local time, spoke for 10 or minutes, then spent as much time talking to the crowd of supporters. I'd estimate the crowd at 50-100 people, including one local carrying a pro-Ashcroft sign. Not sure why she made an appearance.

Impressions from the rally speech

  • Made a passing jab at George Bush's non-election to office
  • Said he'll focus on fixing the “wreck” GW has made “in Iraq and in our economy”
  • He's running because of his long history of public service and he thinks GW is “not a leader”.
  • Will go after the No Child Left Behind act and “get it fixed”

I wrote two questions down for Mr. Clark during his speech in preparation for the media session at the end. As I walked into a side area that had been curtained off, I was handed a contact sheet by a campaign volunteer. It's two pages, full of information like web addresses, phone numbers for the HQ and contact people, broken down into state and congressional district levels. Nice. By the way, all but 3 of the contacts had a email address listed; only 2 of the 18 had phone numbers. Interesting how times change. No weblog URLs, though.

Media Q+A:

Personal observations:

  • Know his message, but sometimes stumbles. Seems like he's got this memorized, but isn't comfortable parroting lines on a script.
  • Strong, genuine facial expressions and emotions.

Content:

  • Emphasized veterans going into “Veterans Week”
  • Talking about the helicopter crash (twice, once with press, once with crowd) seemed to make his eyes water and his voice break.
  • Local TV: “Is red tape at VA? (ref–healthcare for veterans) Clark: VA has the “least modern system” of any in healthcare. Fix it with “leadership and put the physicians in charge”
  • Quote: “I don't think there's a strategy in Iraq.”
  • Local Newspaper: Will you take matching funds? Clark: “Still condsidering”, then stumbled into another comment about veterans and was ushered out.

Final notes:

My two questions: what about matching funds? (answered) and what about the weblog and technology in the campaign? (not asked). I didn't hear anything that made me want to vote for him. I did see the honesty and emotion that I don't see in other candidates; that alone makes me see him as more of a real person.

Spoke with Chris Lehane, a person with the Clark campaign (he didn't identify himself by title, only name). I asked him if he knew Cameron and he said with enthusiasm, “yeah, he's the father of the blog, the granddaddy”. Told him that I met Cameron at BloggerCon (thanks, Dave and Cameron) and was impressed with the progress. I asked Chris, “Has the weblog technology made a difference?” He said, “It's made a huge difference” and mentioned something about “e-districts”. I didn't find anything about that on the blog. No search function on the site–yuk. Google can't do everything for us, Cameron.

Dave's colo solution

BloggerCon, Radio

Our plans for hosting fell through. We have two great servers that should be ready to deploy this weekend or early next week, and nowhere to put them. We're looking for two U's of rack space in an easy drive from where we are. Cambridge, Somerville, Arlington, Watertown, Newton, Lexington, Waltham. We can afford reasonable monthly bandwidth costs. These boxes will serve weblogs and special-purpose aggregators, and over time new stuff Andrew and I (and others) develop. If you have suggestions, please send an email. Thanks. [Scripting News]

Dave, for you, I'll make you a deal. 2 rack units of space, $100 per rack unit. Includes bandwidth, IPs, colo rent, the works. I am starting a SmallCo ISP for friends and selected customers. You'd have access to a full T-1 of internet and me on call 24-7. What do you think?

BloggerCon meets the Heart of America

BloggerCon, Radio

From Ed Cone:

Dave wants to take a road-show version of BloggerCon to San Francisco and maybe New York. Great idea, but I hate to see the rest of the country left on the other side of a digital divide. There's only one Dave, but there are a lot of us who have learned from him and with him, and we should be doing the same thing wherever we are.

I'd like to do something like BloggerCon here in Springfield, MO. Anyone from the area reading this? Looks like I'll be adding another project to the list and a category to the weblog. I'll need a blogosphere-known speaker that would be willing to come to Springfield for a two day conference. Some or all expenses would be paid through private donations or sponsorships. I'm thinking of doing this in conjunction with a couple of local not-for-profit organizations.

Springfield just built a 150,000 sq. ft. expo center. Wonder if I can get it cheap?

Userland's discussion forums

BloggerCon, Radio

I contributed to a couple of discussions on the “Radio” discussion group and was disappointed. The people that are using Radio have greater expectations of Userland than what Userland can provide. One person vented their frustrations and I defended the product. As a reward, I was ridiculed. I now have a small idea of how Dave feels.

It hurts someone to insult them, especially when you don't know them and haven't met them. This person called Userland (and it's employees) “thieves”; I called him an “ass”. Yuk.

Radio is not a perfect product–very few software products are. It works remarkably well considering it's age and every-changing code base. Radio comment hosting and the xmlStorageSystem servers are average at best. I regularly have problems getting comments pages to load and when I was on the “cloud” I had problems getting posts to upload. I solved that problem by going on my own for hosting and I'm glad I did.

I'd love to care about this more, but there are more things in life than software products. For me, I don't want to chase MT issues integrating modules or using the right version of perl, python, or whatever. I can and am capable. I have set up my share of Linux and Solaris servers to do just that. But for personal publishing, Radio can't be beat. It's easy to use and understand. It supports web standards and can interoperate with open standards like FTP, XML-RPC, SOAP and more. It's the only software that I would give my parents to use. It's the same reason that I own more Macs than I do PCs–my Mac is more satisfying to use and easier to maintain.

Six Apart makes a great product, but it's not for me, yet. Typepad is the best, web-based blogging software *I've* seen, but I can't afford it. To match the same flexibility as a single copy of Radio, you'd have to buy the high end product. No way, thank you.