Wednesday, April 07, 2004

Session descriptions: Blogging in Business, National Anthem, Librarians. 

Important BloggerCon note. We will have a reception on Saturday, at 6PM, immediately after the last session, lasting through 9PM, and possibly longer. We have a modest budget for snacks and refreshments. There will be WiFi, so if you want to write up a report for your readers while the ideas are still fresh, you'll have a chance to do that. And we'll have time to organize dinners, and finish conversations. So -- Saturday 6PM after the conference, a three-hour schmooze with snacks and WiFi. Bing! 

My good buddy Dowbrigade has arrived in South America and is blogging like a fool! 

Doc Searls likes Channel 9. 

Paul Reubens: "Pee-Wee was healthier than me." 

IDG Poland does RSS 2.0, in Polish. 

Excellent discussion at Scoble's about Media Center.  

I was thinking of going to dinner at Sammy's Rumanian in NYC, so I looked it up on Google to find out if they're open when I want to go, and I have the first and only hit. Oy gevilt. Address 157 Christie St. 212-673-0330. I called, they're open seven nights a week. Don't call before 2PM you'll get the answering machine. What's the black helicopter doing on this post? Sorry, but that's an undocumented feature.  

OhmyNews: "The nation is entering untrodden territory as strict new campaign procedures, a possible voter backlash over the impeachment of President Roh Moo Hyun and a massive voting block of young people that is being mobilized via the Internet come together in a volatile election climate." 

The Burton Group has new support for RSS 2.0. 

A mini-interview with Martin Nisenholtz at NY Times Digital. Interesting and easy to rebut. Give a voice to all the NY Times' sources so if they have something to say that the Times doesn't think is fit to print, it still gets out. This is good for everyone. We need more data. Most people think that Saddam Hussein blew up the World Trade Center. Someday the Times is going to get a big story or a great quote by reading a blog. Maybe it's already happened.  

Matt Goyer: "Just think about what you could do with RSS, BitTorrent and a Media Center." 

Three years ago: "Which is the platform and which is the train?" 

Fons Tuistra is hosting a blogging conference in Shanghai to coincide with BloggerCon in Cambridge. 

Channel 9 

Jeff Sandquist at Microsoft gave me the tour of Channel 9 last night.

Here's the top-level story. Channel 9, on the audio track in airplanes, is the chatter between the pilot, co-pilot and control tower. If you're the kind of passenger who enjoys knowing a bit about what's going on, tune into channel 9. Most users prefer to watch the movies. That metaphor works with computers too. Most users just want to write a letter or email, post to a weblog, or listen to some music. But developers thirst for all the info they can get. And when you're heavily invested in a product, getting to know what the people who develop it think, can be enormously helpful in figuring things out.

Lenn Pryor, who I know from work we did in 1998, is an evangelist at Microsoft. Jeff works for him, as does Robert Scoble. They want to create an easy way for people who pilot and co-pilot various projects inside Microsoft to tell their stories to people in the weblog community, and (more important) to flow ideas back from the people into the products. So Scoble and Jeff go around MS with a video camera and do quick hallway interviews with people who are doing interesting stuff at Microsoft. If this works, they'll Channel 9-ize all product ships in the future. It's a good idea.

Anyway, Channel 9's first official day is today, I'm told -- but it's already an overwhelming success. 10,000 visitors in the last 24 hours. Their marketing budget is $0. Scoble says marketing used to be word of mouth, obviously it still is. Their next interview should be with Matt Goyer (who we know from Napster days and now works at Microsoft on Media Center). Clearly Matt has something to say about the product.

BTW, they're making exemplary use of RSS-with-Enclosures, but there are still a few glitches, so I want to wait until it's all working until I explain how they did it.

Scoble corrects and amplifies.