Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

If you’ve contacted j during the last few weeks via her profile and have not received a response, please try again. j’s e-mail problems are sending e-mail from that profile into Spamfilterland. If you need to contact the blog group, using the comments could be the best way to do it.

She’s working on resolving those problems, but it may take a while. There doesn’t seem to be a way to edit her profile on this blog to change her e-mail address, which would be the obvious thing to do, and because of a bug with the way membership and e-mail addresses work on these Harvard-hosted blogs, creating a new profile won’t work.

Members of our group are interested in connecting with bloggers who are coming into the area to cover the Democratic National Conventnion (DNC) and are willing to serve as resources for those of you who may have questions or need some assistance while you’re here.

We’d like to do something to gather bloggers together, but without knowing what might suit people’s schedules, it’s difficult to make plans. If you are going to be in the area and would like to try to meet some of us, comment below.

Addendum 7/19: Okay, well, you don’t really *have* to be sexy to meet up with us. It was just a title someone at Thursday’s meeting suggested to get people’s attention. We’ll meet with butt-ugly bloggers, too. We just want to network with other bloggers coming into the area.

It looks like quite a few bloggers affiliated with our group will be doing some citizen journalism at the Democratic National Convention.

• the Dowbrigade, aka Michael Feldman
• Rick Heller
• David Weinberger
• Dave Winer

Vernica pointed out that political science graduate student Nate Paxton of Nate Knows Nada also has credentials. He blogs on Harvard’s server. (Thanks!)

Congratulations, bloggers!

Journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote a long piece about blogging the convention and bloggers getting their credentials.

Cyberjournalist is listing bloggers with credentials.

Dave Winer has set up a community site for blogging the DNC.

Adam Curry has a feed of bloggers covering the DNC.

Jessamyn West of librarian.net has a list of links to resources about Boston during the DNC, like MBTA information and where to find some wireless access on her blog for the DNC.

If anyone coming to the area would like to meet up with us while s/he’s in town, drop us a line. We plan to meet as usual on Thursday, July 29, conflicting with convention activities.

Addendum 7/19: Alex S. Jones of the Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has a negative perspective on bloggers covering the convention. He writes, “But make no mistake, this moment of blogging legitimization — and temporary press credentials — doesn’t turn bloggers into journalists. … bloggers, with few exceptions, don’t add reporting to the personal views they post online, and they see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject. That encourages these common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar. … With the status conferred by convention credentials, blogging has arrived as an engaging, important new player in the information carnival. But should blogging displace traditional reporting and journalism, as some in the blogosphere predict it will, then the steak will have been swapped for the sizzle. It’s better to have both.” He does say some positive things about bloggers covering the convention. He recognizes that many people, journalists included, read blogs and consider them an important news source.

Addendum 7/22: Feedster has a feed for the Democratic National Convention.

Addendum 7/26: Here’s another list of bloggers covering the convention, including delegates who are blogging.

I gave two presentations to the staff of Harvard Business School’s Baker Library on Friday, June 25, about blogging. If anyone’s interested in reading the presentation or more about how it went, I posted notes on j’s scratchpad (directly linked above).

I spent some time talking about blogging at Harvard and the resources available to bloggers at Harvard. A few of the audience members might come to future blog group meetings.

Three things happened that I think are worth talking about at a future meeting. Some people didn’t realize there was a blog server at Harvard available to them. Some also thought they couldn’t register for blogging space with their e-mail accounts since Harvard Business School e-mail addresses don’t end with harvard.edu. (Perhaps rewording the text on the Create a new weblog page could end that confusion.) These thoughts indicate to me that we should figure out how to do some marketing around Harvard. Also, there was a discussion about the rules for blogging, whether there are any guidelines for or restrictions on what people blogging on Harvard’s server can and cannot post, and whether the administration censors blogs.

Presentation to Harvard Business School Librarians about Blogging …

By now perhaps, you’ve already read about Jay McCarthy’s house burning down Sunday morning. The important thing is that he and his family were able to get out safely. He might be posting updates about the situation on his blog, makeoutcity.

Lisa Williams set up a PayPal account to help Jay and his family.

For those of you considering buying him books to help him rebuild his collection, he does have an Amazon Wish List (search under his name to find it).

Perhaps Jay will tell us other ways we can help.

Blogger’s House Burns Down …

Dave Winer has begun updating the BloggerCon blog with information about the free Saturday, April 17th conference. There’s now information about hotels, a tentative schedule, and more. Stay tuned to that blog for more information about conference activities.

Addendum 3/1: Registration for BloggerCon II began today. The list of registrants is available. In order to register, you must first log in or join the blog.

BloggerCon II Update …

Over the weekend, Dave Winer reported on his test site that the Sony microphone he ordered for the Thursday meeting Webcast got lost, so he cancelled it. He’s asking for advice about mics and getting better quality audio for the Webcasts. If you have something to add to the discussion, please comment via his blog post.

Update on the Microphone for the Webcast …

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 …

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) …

I justed created a story to serve as a place to put the various presidential candidate events the Berkmanites have been to.

If you want to add yours feel free, if you want me to, let me know.

Thursday Citizen Journalists

Addendum 1/6 by j: USA Today printed an article about citizen journalism that focuses on bloggers covering politics. It mentions some of our Thursday night friends and their efforts.

Citizen Journalist Blogging Story …