03/31/2005 Meeting Notes

Posted by Erica, 3/31/05 at 7:18:14 PM.

03/31/2005 Meeting Notes

These notes are a best effort.

Blog your corrections and commentary.

Attendees:

  • AW: Amanda Watlington
  • AH: Ann House
  • DF: Deborah Elizabeth Finn

  • EG: Erica George
  • JD: Jared Dunn
  • JA2: Jenny Attiyah
  • JW: Jon Winsor
  • LW: Lisa Williams
  • LG: Louis Godena

  • MN: Mary Nykoruk
  • MW: Mike Walsh
  • PRW: Peter R. Wood via IRC
  • RF: Randy Fenstermacher
  • SR: Shimon Rura
  • WK: Wendy Koslow
  • woman in green shirt

Audio!!!!!!

Agenda:

  • Deborah Finn tells us about the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Chicago last week
    • DF: TechSoup
    • All: Eww, it’s ugly, even if it’s also super-useful!
    • DF: NTen Delicious feed
    • MW: What if people spam your feed, tag-spam? Do you get mad?
    • DF: I don’t own that tag
    • WK: People concerned with the privacy or solidity of their tags shouldn’t be using Delicious
    • MW: What about Delirious? (Explicitly Creative Commons)
    • LW: Bookmarking isn’t that hard – you can create a more proprietary Delicious-style feed if you want to. But people put this stuff out there for social bookmarking for a reason.
    • RF: I want people to steal my stuff… how encourage?
    • All: Creative Commons
    • LW: Had some content scraped once and used to get Google ad $.
    • BS: With RSS, anyone can take some time and scrape a feed if they want to.
    • WK: But why? It’s a public service, anyone can contribute. Why do we care if someone scrapes a tag feed? You don’t own the pages you tagged, and a group of contributors is the only possible owner for a tag feed.
    • AW: Spammers scrape tags and put them up, they’re keyword-heavy, generate $ for them through ads, so this is a problem.
    • JA: How is Creative Commons enforced?
    • WK: We’re waiting to see if the courts will enforce it
    • SR: It’s not an alternative to copyright, it’s a license and should be enforced just like any other
    • WK: The courts will view it as alternative copyright, so we don’t know if they’ll accept this as a modification of the way people normally work copyright – Courts don’t “get” Creative Commons.
    • SR: People who license with CC are choosing which parts of their copyright-given rights to enforce. You own the copyright to your work, you can choose how to license it, CC is just a set of licenses that you can choose.
    • AW: Fair Use is so limited on the web
    • (general discussion of fair use and licensing and whatnots)
    • WK: http://www.chillingeffects.org
    • EG: Signal or Noise conference here @ HLS 4/8! On this kind of issue!
    • DF: Everyone at NTen thought something was a sellout. “philosophically repugnant”
    • MW: Rebecca last week talked about Bloggercorps – bloggers interested in helping out local nonprofits. Not for “bloggers who want to travel & have fun.”
    • DF: Boston Technobabes – women who work in nonprofit/tech in Boston area
    • DF: Helping nonprofits blog is a thankless task – very much crossing cultures. Nonprofits can be very ambivalent to new technologies. Don’t do it for the short-term gratification.
    • MW: Fundraising is a door in
    • DF: Challenge: helping organizations to think about tech in terms of how it serves their mission and strategy, not just jumping on a new trend.
    • AH: Blogs would be a great addition to group newsletters – way for readers to interact. Inviting not only donations of money, but actual involvement, building of relationship
  • Other things we’d like to discuss in future meetings, people we’d like to invite, etc.
    • LW: Community news services getting into blogging would be a neat thing to talk about
    • JD: Somerville News is using TypePad now
    • This is now on deck for next week
    • MW: I’d like to see a tagging session
    • WK: Let’s do it when David Weinberger can be involved
    • MW: I want to talk about how tag spam effects functionality. We’re counting on “security by obscurity” now for a lot of projects and it’s not very secure. Ex: Global Voices. Also, sometimes people just dump stuff into Delicious without thinking about how they are revealing a lot about themselves through what they have tagged.
    • DF: Do people actually use the same Delicious account for personal and professional stuff? (MW: Yes!). Is that because of the high (workwise) cost of opening a new account?
    • MW: People don’t think about how they’re putting a lot of private info out there on Delicious, Flickr. Unintended Consequences of Tagging. Has Weinberger got any of his presentations on tagging archived?
    • LW: Finding information is hard, and tagging doesn’t quite get there reliably yet. There’s a wealth of restaurant reviews on blogs, but no real way to use it well. Need more support for structured data.
    • WK: Boston.com‘s restaurant review setup is fun. Can search by multiple categories at once.
    • SR: But it’s produced by Local I, not users, so not quite the same thing. Has very good coverage.
    • WK: (searches for Harvard Square restaurants good for groups)
    • EG: ooh, great segue to where do we eat tonight…
    • RF: Question re whether he automatically has an RSS feed on his HLS Manila blog
    • AW: This brings up: Publicity strategies
    • SR: Just have good content…
    • WK: There’s also http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/berkman/upd…
    • (Ooh, j updated recently! All wave to j, who is being cooked paella. Cheers for j!)
  • What else?
    • Louis Godena is looking for someone to hire to help him set up his HLS server Manila blog. He’s advised to post to the list.
  • Eat – Short agenda = finish sooner & eat earlier! (sorta)

    • Last week: Cambridge Common
    • This week: Bombay Club
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