Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

Dave’s agenda, which I can’t find anywhere else online, is:

• Design a product
  • How to be critical of a product in a productive way
• Politics and the Internet
• Advisory board
• Michael Feldman demos his blog

Proposed agenda:

• Michael Feldman of Dowbrigade plans to demo his Dreamweaver / Manilla blogging
• Do Andrew, Michael, Bob, and/or j want to talk about intermediate blogger classes?
• Talk more about Salons
• What’s the difference between the count on the rankings page and the hourly hits page? One is page reads and the other is … ?
• Is there some way to address the problem that’s caused by RSS feeds without names not appearing in the subscription list?
• Eat
  • Bombay Club last week
  • Border Cafe

Post Notes:

• Recordings
• RealAudio Recording
• Notes
• j wrote notes during the meeting.
• Jack Hodgson also took notes.
• Pursuant to a discussion at the meeting, Rick Heller has set up two wikis for the group:
  one for general group stuff and the other for the discussion about aggregators.

We’ve had a request for someone to donate their IRC transcript(s). Anyone want to make sure we get one after the meetings? We can host it on this blog if you don’t have server space of your own.

Like past and future agendas, if you have an item you’d like on the agenda, comment, get blogging privileges from Jay , or contact him or the other j.

A few of us Thursday night bloggers are considering doing a few workshops for people who would like to know about some of the more advanced features of the blogs on Harvard’s server. We just finished a series of classes at MIT to introduce people to blogging and walk them through setting up their blogs. The proposed course would be a sequel to that. We’d like to get input from people who blog on Harvard’s server to get some ideas about what we should cover in our class. We already plan to cover:

• TrackBack
• How to change colors and themes
• Departments
• Adding navbar navigation/links to the aggregator, stats, departments, etc.
• The built-in aggregator and subscribing to blogs
• Images
• What stories, pictures, and gems are
• Uploading things to the blog
• Editing the HTML templates and style sheets
• Backing it up and how to get it restored
• An introduction to copyright issues
• Libel and slander

If you have any suggestions, please comment below or bug j. We will let people know when the classes are.

Before Jay started this blog, meeting notes appeared in several places on the Web. Here’s a story that attempts to link to those scattered notes, just in case anyone ever wants to read about what we’ve done at previous meetings.

Bug j or Jay or comment in the appropriate place if you have notes you would like to add to this list.

(Once a librarian, always a librarian.)

Notes from Past Meetings …

The Librarians’ Index to the Internet includes The Blogging of the President: 2004 in their New This Week list. Several bloggers who are regulars at the Berkman Center’s Thurday night meetings, including Christopher Lydon and Jay McCarthy, work on this excellent political resource. LII is a project to catalog useful Web sites with a searchable database of their selected sites. They’re known for finding quality resources.

Thanks for the pointer, Garrett.

BOP 04 in LII’s New This Week …

Dave’s agenda is elsewhere.

• Blogging Center
  • MS IE team
    • RSS & Browsers
  • Hosting for Presidential candidates
• Dean & the Internet conference on Saturday at 10 am
• Addendum 1/30: Dave wrote to the mailing list saying the conference is off.
• Come back to Hank Barry
• Michael Feldman will demo his Dreamweaver / Manilla blogging
• Dave Winer talks about inclusion in Channel Z
• Talk more about Salons
• sgarrity's radio show
• Next social outing: Grasshopper in Allston, 1 pm on Sunday, February 1 for vegan Asian food and the Chinese New Year
• Eat
  • Cambridge Common last week
  • Bombay Club tonight

Post Notes:

• Recordings
• RealAudio Recording
• YOUR IRC LOG!
• Notes
• j wrote HTML Notes
• Jack Hodgson posted notes.
• Shimon wrote about doing his demo

Like past and future agendas, if you have an item you’d like on the agenda, comment, get blogging privileges from Jay , or contact him or the other j.

The next social outing for food will be February 1 at 1 pm at an Allston restaurant called Grasshopper (or r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r). The cuisine is vegan Vietnamese and Chinese. The address is 1 Beacon Street. It’s a few blocks from the B Line Green Line and is close to several bus stops, too. Parking might be tricky. Bring your appetite. If I get a headcount in advance, I might try to make a reservation. I’ll add a few extra spots in case anyone who doesn’t RSVP shows up.

Addendum 1/25: The cheesecake really is amazing.

Addendum 1/26: A group of us will meet at 12:30 pm in front of the token machines in the main terminal of the Harvard Square station to ride the 66 bus over. It picks people up from the corner of Eliot Street and JFK Street near the Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center (one block towards the river from the Bombay Club, where our group eats a lot) and stops very close to Grasshopper. A bus leaves Harvard Square around 12:40 and arrives near the restaurant 12:50ish. (The restaurant is near the sharp turn at Union Square on the bus route map.) Let me know if you would be interested in going over to the restaurant together. It’s probably easier to park near Harvard Square than to park near Grasshopper. (Meters are free on Sundays.)

Addendum 1/31: There’s a reservation for 10 people at 1 pm. There’s room for a few extra people.

Addendum 2/1: Seven people came for lunch. We talked about, well, politics and blogging. And no one had vegan chicken feet.

I posted instructions for enabling TrackBack on a Harvard-hosted blog a while ago on my own blog.

Sun suggested that we begin including “how to” and help stuff on the Thursday Meetings blog. Since one of the initial functions of the Thursday night meeting was to provide a forum for people with support questions, it seems like a good idea (as long as we don’t get overwhelmed).

How to Enable TrackBack …

Here are the instructions for people blogging on Harvard or MIT’s blog server or using Manila to share their subscription lists via Share Your OPML.

How Harvard/Manila Bloggers Can Share Their OPML …

RSS Winterfest is a free, Webcast conference this Wednesday and Thursday, January 21 and 22, 2004, about RSS and the future of syndicating Internet content. Speakers include industry experts like our very own Dave Winer, Scott Johnson of the RSS search engine Feedster, Robert Scoble of Microsoft, and Jon Udell of InfoWorld. The schedule indicates events last from about 11:30 am EST until about 3:30 pm each day.

Addendum 1/21: We heard some really interesting things about RSS at the conference this morning. j posted notes about Dave Winer’s talk. There are no plans to host people at Berkman for day 2. If that makes you very sad, bug j to see if she has space for multiple people to tune in.

Addendum 1/22: Links to transcripts and other information about the sessions are on the right side of the RSS Winterfest homepage.

RSS Winterfest, January 21 and 22 (Free Conference) …

Some notes are on Scripting News, including an agenda that is very different than that which is posted below.

• Hank Barry will be at tonight’s meeting

• Attention members of the disbanded Jay McCarthy fan club: Headlining this meeting will be Jay McCarthy as he demonstrates how he blogs. Unlike some of us, he does his blogging by hand and probably has wri tten his own blogging software and stuff. That’s one reason why many of us what to see how he does it. (More of us might want to find out how he reads the 1001+ blogs in his aggregator, but there might not be enough time for that.)
  His demo did not happen on 1/15 as planned.
  • j still wonders if people can talk about how they decide what to blog/where they get inspiration, as well as showing the technical aspects of what they do.
  • j’s notes of Je’s blogging demo
• Perhaps someone will talk about RSS Winterfest, which happens Wednesday and Thursday and features Dave Winer as a guest speaker.
• j wants to talk about her RSS article.
• Blogging Centers
• Michael will demo his Dreamweaver / Manilla blogging
• Dave talks about inclusion in Channel Z
• Talk more about Salons
  
• Where are we going to eat?
  
  
  
  • We ate at the Border Cafe on the 15th.

  • Rumor has it Dave’s in the mood for Indian again.
  • We’re headed to Cambridge Common, if they can accommodate 15 people.

Some reminders about audio for the Webcast: it’s difficult to hear an yone when music is playing (except Dave ’cause he projects his voice well). Actually, it’s difficult to hear m any people because there’s only one mic. There might be a movement afoot to get more mics. If you’re speaking at the meeting, it’ll help peopl e listening to the Webcast if you can project your voice, especially if you’re the kind of person who talks qui etly normally or you’re sitting far from the mic on the t able. I suppose, if you don’t want to be heard over the Internet, speak softly. (No o ne may see the big stick you carry, either, because there’s no video with the Webcast.) And if you’re giving a URL or visiting a Web site, saying the URL slowly will help those elsewhere follow along.

Like past and future agendas, if you have an item you’d like on the agenda, comment, get blogging privileges from Jay , or contact him or the other j.

Post Notes:

• Restaurant: Cambrige Commons
• Recordings
• RealAudio Recording
• MP3 from Jake Savin
• YOUR IRC LOG!
• Notes
• Jay McCarthy‘s notes: OPML Version and HTML Version
• j has notes from Jay’s blogging demo. (As he was not taking notes.)
• Shimon blogged about the meeting.