BlogTogether

In attendance: Jane Peppler, Tim King, Roy Kim, Brian Russell, Rob Zelt, Karen Mishra, Michael O’Connell, Kevin Nesnow, ae, WillR, Adam Vandenberg, Corey Reece, Justing Watt, Brenda and mistersugar. Though the warm evening beckoned us to nearby Weaver Street Market, we met again in the cozy lounge of the Speakeasy. Rob kicked off the conversation with a question about job searches and blogging – whether you should hire someone you haven’t Googled, and whether a blog can help someone get a job. Jane mentioned that her teenage son has two LiveJournal identities, with one a sanitized version suitable for future college applications. I told how my blog has helped me land freelance writing assignments and even my current job. The Schiavo case got mentioned a few times during the evening, with Justin reminding us all that Snopes is always a good place to verify incredible email messages and online stories. Brian announced podcastercon.org – check it out, and use the wiki to help Brian plan this conference. We started talking about linking, authenticity, credibility, skepticism, trust and personal relations. My notes drop off here, since my sinus cold made concentration quite hard for me. I seem to remember the discussion circling around the issue of linking, and I figure we can come back to this topic, since there seems to be lots of ground to explore. A reminder: this week, no Raleigh/Carey or Chapel Hill bloggers meetups, since we’ll be gathering Tuesday evening at my home for the Triangle-wide Bloggers Meetup. Details here.

The schedule for the Nashville bloggercon looks good. Who’s going from NC?

Next weekend, the Association of Health Care Journalists will hold its national conference here in Chapel Hill. I’ll be leading a session on blogging on Saturday. (See my outline for that presentation below.) Want to help? Attend and liveblog this news conference, and let me show my session the possibilities for health reporters who blog: bq. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mark B. McClellan, M.D., Ph.D., will be holding a news conference to make an announcement of broad consumer interest. Dick Davidson, president of the American Hospital Association, and Gerry Shea, AFL-CIO director of governmental affairs, will also speak. The news conference is open to the media. My outline for the Saturday session: * Blogging101 – history and development, blogging parts, how to read and how to write; RSS and newsreaders; podcasting; liveblogging (show posts about McClellan news conference) * Create a blog with “Blogger:http://blogger.com in 5 minutes; discuss other tools such as Typepad, Movable Type, Wordpress and custom systems. * Short panel discussion with Carla Johnson and Bernard Glassman about blogging as part of health beat; Bora Zivkovic to discuss expert blogs and Grand Rounds carnival of bloggers * Group blogging exercise: each participant gets a username and login to medicaljournalism.info, chooses a beat (infectious disease, chronic disease, genomics, mental health, etc.), spends the next hour searching for links, journal articles, events and other notable items, posts them to medicaljournalism.info. * Review of the group’s posts, and discussion.

Don’t forget to submit your posts to the Tar Heel Tavern, hosted next week at the Dirty Greek blog. This week’s Tavern is over at Pirate’s Cove.

See Josh Staiger’s blog for notes on the Raleigh meetup conversation.

Charlotte will host the next state-wide bloggers conference September 17, 2005. Details here (via the ever helpful Ed Cone).

Over at Meetup.com, I’ve posted event details for our first Triangle-wide bloggers meetup Tues, March 29 at 7 p.m. at my home. Please spread the word, and please RSVP.

Next Chapel Hill Bloggers gathering is Wed, March 23 at 6 p.m. at Tyler’s/Seakeasy in Carrboro. Please RSVP.

Yet another location for the meetup, though Tyler’s Tap Room (really, the attached Speakeasy’s back lounge) seems to be a winner – there’s free wifi from tocwireless, good beer on tap (I had a pint of Duck-rabbit milk stout), comfortable sofas and a pull-down screen that’s a perfect showcase for Bernard’s new projector. We’ll be there next week again at 6 p.m. In attendance: Jane Peppler, Bernard Glassman, Cecilia, wife of Tim King (who briefly joined us via Skype), Roy Kim, Brian Russell, Jackson Fox, Rob Zelt, Karen Mishra, Michael O’Connell, Kevin Nesnow and mistersugar. ae couldn’t join us so she sent her greetings: bq. “Hello to the CH Bloggers group from the End of the World, literally. I’m sending this note from the town of El Calafate in Patagonia. This is a beautiful, wondrous place, and I haven’t even made it out to the glacier yet! The ride from the airport was gorgeous enough for one day. Think the wide expanse of the northern California desert + jade green lake + the Andes. Lordy.” Roy finally got a chance to take center stage and give us a tour of his tabulas.com service and community, which many of us suspected of being pretty cool. It didn’t take long for us to see just how talented Roy is, and understand the enormity of his accomplishment. Turned out yesterday was the second birthday of his project, his first software programmng effort. Since then, Roy’s built a tool similar to LiveJournal, initially a way for his friends and him to journal their lives, but now a global community dominated by teenagers and Filipinos. See his community stats (and compare to LiveJournal stats). Those facts led to discussion about cultural and gender adoption of technology. See Roy’s post, in which he picks up on our discussion of Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point and the linchpins of the tabulas community. Roy mentioned his recent trip to South Korea, where each person has a national identity number and an automatic web page (will have to check into the details of this). “But nothing is posted of substance,” said Roy, suggesting the cultural value of privacy keeps people mum about their personal details. Michael asked Roy how he’d been so successful in building his community. “Easy access to me” and guaranteed responses to e-mail messages, he answered. He’s also responded to user suggestions for new tools by quickly implementing them. Such tools include cross-posting (to Blogger and Xanga blogs), WYSIWYG formatting buttons, a style editor, FOAF, image galleries and file uploads, sticky posts, avatars and nested comments, birthday reminders and more. Tabulas is mostly a closed community – friends linking to each other, and new users of the site are almost always referred by other users – and that leads to inherent trust, said Roy, which then gives him the freedom to prototype new features. Roy built tabulas on the LAMP framework. He’s got RSS 2.0, which pleased Brian, since 2.0 has enclosures, the key ingredient for podcasting. (Brian found a few opportunities to inject podcasting into the conversation, and as always was entertaining and enlightening. Look for a demo of podcasting, by Brian natch, at one of our next meetings. And for our first Triangle-wide bloggers meeting, probably a demo of blogads by Henry Copeland.) What did I miss? Post your recollections in the comments. All in all, a great session last night. Thanks to the soft-spoken and humble Roy for the tour. Brian said it best: “You’re a talented [mofo].”

Sorry for the late notice: meetup tonight at Tyler’s Tap Room/Speakeasy. We’ll take over the side room, I’ll order a few pizzas for the group, Bernard will setup his projector, Roy will demo tabulas.com and all will be merry. 6 p.m. (map)

This Tuesday, I’m giving a brown-bag presentation on blogging, podcasts, newsfeeds and the like at the N.C. State main library, from noon unil 1 p.m. Join me, why don’t you.

Five days late, but a report nonetheless: The Chapel Hill Bloggers Meetup had a new location (Panera Bread), where we hogged a corner of the cafe and tried to ignore the unexpected noise of the place. In attendance: Jane Peppler and her friend Eric, Tom Ciszek, Bernard Glassman, ae, Ruby Sinreich, Tim King, Corey Reece, Justin Watt, Roy Kim, Brian Russell, Jackson Fox, Rob Zelt, Bruce Loebrich and me. We first bantered a bit about how public the meetups are and whether anyone could blog them (if you’re sitting in a public cafe, expect your comments to make it to the web, natch). Bernard talked about how the Internet allows patients in a controlled drug trial find each other and share their experiences with the therapy even before the researchers get the data. “That blows the science,” he said. Ruby proudly shared that she’d had three blog successes that week: Orange Politics contributors and readers liveblogged the Chapel Hill Town Council meeting and its discussion about gay marriage in NC; WCHL interviewed her for a news story about the liveblogging; and she was a guest lecturer at a UNC communication studies class, with her presentation posted here. Ruby also mentioned that both Carrboro and Chapel Hill have e-community committees, and she encouraged bloggers to participate. Bernard, for his part, challenged us to “blog the butt-ugly drug czar site.” Bernard has launched Let Me Close the Door First, a blog inspired by an earlier bloggers meetup. Tim promised to send his wife and fellow blogger, CeCe (spelling?) to the next meeting. We look forward to meeting her. Brian trumpeted his first public service announcement in his podcast, and that led to a discussion about creating a nonprofit effort to host PSAs on a public server. Roy told us a bit more about his tabulas community of bloggers — mainly 17-year-olds, and they’re running up is hosting fees. This week, if my request for use of the Johnston Center classroom gets the nod, we’ll have Roy give us a tour of his creation. Jackson and his wife are watching all the Best Picture films, in order (they’ve skipped only Gone With the Wind). He’s a big fan of the new television series remake of Battlestar Galactica. I showed the Atlantic Monthly’s annotated David Foster Wallace article (see this for a good discourse on hypertextuality of print). (Ruby mentioned 13th Gen, but I can’t remember the connection.) See Roy’s post on hypertext. What else did I miss? On a parting note, let me express my gratitude for all the bloggers who have participated in our weekly Chapel Hill Bloggers Meetups. I’m thoroughly enjoying the company. I’m still searching for a permanent spot for our weekly meetings, a place where we can chat, socialize, demonstrate blogware and have free parking. Any suggestions? EDIT 3/14: Added Roy hypertext post link.

Yet another way for you to keep track of the blogging events in North Carolina: subscribe to the Blog Together calendar at webcal://zuiker.com/ical/public/Blog32Together.ics. If you have an event you’d like me to add, send me a message with the details. If you’re not using a calendar program that accepts .ics files (like Apple’s iCal), consider using Mozilla Sunbird.

Our weekly bloggers meetup in Chapel Hill is this Wednesday, March 9th at 6 p.m. NEW LOCATION: Panera Bread on Franklin Street. There’s free wifi, so we’ll demo one or two blogging systems — I’ll show Textpattern and Roy can tell us about his tabulas. Second half of our discussion will be about content again, since our discussion last week was so fruitful. Let’s talk about voice – the attitude or feeling you put into your blog writing, and how you want your readers to hear your voice as they read your blog.

Anonymoses is working to gel the Charlotte-area bloggers, and is looking ahead to the Charlotte bloggercon: bq. Ideally, each succeeding bloggercon would bring forward all that was learned from each of the preceding ones, then try to improve upon it in good and novel ways. He’s got a good suggestion for traveling bloggers: bq. And when a somewhat seasoned blogger travels to another blog-rich environment, such as Greensboro, Chapel Hill, Asheville…he or she needn’t be a stranger in town. Announce that you’re taking the trip, and arrange to meet the local bloggers over coffee or green tea. His post ends with a list of Charlotte bloggers, a list that will no doubt grow.