Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Spent the afternoon with Dave Sifry and Kevin Marks talking about Technorati and Channel Z. I think it's going to be a very interesting collaboration. Steve Gillmor popped over to join the discussion for about an hour. 

Paolo surveys the different blogging taxonomies popping up. 

Here's how my blogging taxonomy works. I use the RSS 2.0 category element to specify the category, and a popup hierarchic menu to select categories, and an outliner to edit my taxonomy. Paul Boutin, at last night's dinner asked me to write it up whitepaper-style, and I wll do that very soon, probably next week.  

Fortune: Can Google Grow Up? 

It's looking like this is going to be the first Thanksgiving since I started writing on the Web that I won't write a Thanksgiving piece. I am very thankful for many things, I'm just very very busy driving all over the Bay Area, visiting, schmoozing, etc. The place is so beautiful, the air so clear, the temperature so comfortable. I knew it was a nice place when I lived here, but I lacked the perspective to see in what way it was so nice. This morning, driving to a breakfast in Palo Alto at Il Fornaio, I had a flash that this is like San Luis Obispo. A college town, but very compact, clean, and rich. Cambridge isn't like that, Harvard very different from Stanford. There are campuses all over Boston. Stanford is all in one place. Palo Alto has so many fine places to eat, and htere's parking everywhere. Couldn't be more different. 

Larry Lessig is too kind; but we did have fun at Stanford on Monday. At the end of the talk Larry came up with a big grin, I guess his trademark pessimism is fading a little now that he's a new dad, and told me that Stanford is going to be hosting blogs for incoming law students starting next year. This is great news of course. We're going to connect our weblog networks in some really interesting ways, I hope. Along with another big university who's blogging program is just about ready to reveal. At dinner last night I sat next to Xiao Qiang, a fellow at UC-Berkeley's school of journalism, and suggested we do the same with their student weblogs. I would make the same offer to Jay Rosen at NYU. Let's link up our networks of bloggers. I told Xiao this is beginning to sound like the way the Internet itself started. Is a new network booting up, one built on ideas as much as technology? One where users are the architects. It could be that the university environment, with these new bright-eyed leaders, is the perfect petrie dish for new Internet culture.  

Derek Slater, our young hero who took on the high tech company hiding behind the DMCA, who was let off the hook by Harvard, has now, apparently, been completely vindicated, as Diebold has withdrawn its complaint. A hearty bravo to Derek and all who stood with him. It's nice to win one, once in a while.  

Bryan Bell's report on the EdBlogger conference.