Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

All Your Thursdays Are Belong To Us

Update 7/7: The updated and current schedule is at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/thursdaymeetings/stories/storyReader$328.

The Berkman Bloggers’ Group hosts a series of discussions on blogging each Thursday night, 7PM, at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society in Cambridge, MA. Join us this summer for discussions on a wide array of topics including the Blogging 101 Film Festival, tagging, how blogging interacts with social networking services, podcasting, foodblogs, Blogging for nonprofits, Wikis, and more.

The summer seminar schedule has already hosted talks and discussions on the Livejournal community, Tagging, approaches to information quality on the net. The series continues this week with a look at Wikis and a special teach-in for participants of iLaw, hosted by Wiki maven Sam Klein and blogger and Berkman fellow Rebecca MacKinnon.

June 23: Wiki Wonderland/Blog Teach-In

Moderator: Sam Klein (Weblog: SJ’s Longest Now)

Sam Klein, Wikipedia maven, will try to give us a flavor of the world of Wikis — the collaborative, cathedral-like information structures of the web. Sam will also cover access control and antispam techniques for Wikis that keep these cathedrals from turning into an info-landfill. Sam has a weblog, SJ’s Longest Now, but you can get a feel for the variety and quickness of his intellect by visiting his page on Wikipedia. Blogger and Berkman Fellow Rebecca MacKinnon will be on hand with participants of iLaw, the Berkman Center’s annual conference on internet legal issues, to give iLaw participants a look at blogging from the inside. Berkman Blog Group meetings are free and open to the public, so if you are interested in blogging and would like to learn more about how to get started or boost your weblog skills, this would be an excellent meeting to begin with.

June 30 Foodblogs

Moderator: Bill Ives (Weblog: Portals and KM)

The daily nature of food and cooking and the daily nature of blogs seem to go naturally together. Moderator Bill Ives will take us on a culinary tour of the blogosphere.

July 7 Boston Area Nonprofit Bloggers

Guests: Beth Kanter, Ben DiMaggio, Brian Reich, and Deborah Elizabeth Finn

503land: it’s foreign territory to many of us. But a large number of people in the Boston area and throughout the world are spending their lives trying to change the world for the better. And they’re starting to blog about it. As a lightweight, inexpensive, and simple way to get the message out and engage a community around a movement, blogs may end up being more important to nonprofits than for-profits.

July 14: How To Have A Nice Little Traffic Jam: Understanding How Search Engines Read Your Blog

Moderator: Amanda Watlington

Blogs and search engines have a symbiotic relationship: the world’s most popular search engine, Google, gives preferential ranking to content that appears in blogs, and also owns one of the biggest blog services (Blogger/Blogspot). Understanding how search engines read your blog is an important step towards getting the information you want out to the world (or avoiding that, if that’s your bag). Our moderator, Amanda Watlington, is an expert on search engines and search optimization.

July 21 Podcasting, Gigadial, and Satellite Radio

Guests: CC Chapman of Accident Hash and Manager, Podshow Podsafe Music Network and Andrew Grumet, coauthor of iPodder, and creator of Gigadial.

Podcasting has exploded, growing dramatically over the last year. At its inception, podcasting was a form of audioblogging — homemmade radio programs covering everything from politics to underground music, distributed via RSS. Now major media outlets are getting into podcasting, pumping out prebroadcast radio programs over the net and even providing just-in-time audio commentaries for TV shows. There’s even a radio station, KYOU, that broadcasts nothing but podcasts, and satellite radio is also starting to get into podcast programming. Soundseeing tours — volunteer audio tours distributed as a podcast — cover everything from Miami Beach to MoMA. Our guests will be CC Chapman and Andrew Grumet. CC Chapman’s popular podcast Accident Hash features the independent New England area music he has a passion for, and Andrew Grumet, co-author of iPodder and creator of Gigadial, a service that lets you become a “feed-j” by putting together RSS-based streams of your favorite podcasts.

Details about this seminar series:

Warning: Series organized by bloggers. Enormous changes at the last minute not only possible but likely.
Cost: $0! We often go for dinner afterward which is Dutch Treat.
Best source of late-breaking news and advice to the blog-lorn: Berkman Thursday Email List
Directions: Berkman Thursday Meeting Info
Berkman blog group weblog with meeting notes and info: Berkman Blog Group Meetings
Participate remotely? Yes!
To listen: http://rura.org:8000/stream.m3u (only during meeting).
To ask questions: Meeting IRC chatroom. Directions: Berkman Thursday Weblog Meeting IRC chat
Audio archives: We attempt to archive audio of most meetings so you can listen after the fact. Scan the group’s blog for news of newly uploaded audio recordings of sessions.