Thanks for reading my essay about blogging ethics in the 10/22/2006 News & Observer, and welcome to the BlogTogether site. Feel free to leave your feedback and questions by clicking the Comments link at the end of this entry. I encourage you to read our blog posts below for notes and links about our past activities. In the sidebar at right, you’ll find the details of the many events, meetups and other ways to get connected with other individuals in North Carolina who are using blogs to express themselves and communicate about their interests. The next Chapel Hill Bloggers Meetup is Thursday, November 2 and 6 p.m. at Open Eye Cafe. The next Raleigh Bloggers Meetup will be Tuesday, November 7 at 6:30 p.m. at a location to be determined (watch this blog or this wiki for an announcement about the location). Please also consider attending our free Science Blogging Conference on January 20, 2007 in Chapel Hill. If you’d like to contact me directly to discuss blogging, send a message to zuiker@gmail.com. You can learn more about me and why I blog at www.mistersugar.com.

Hunt Willard is confirmed as a keynote speaker at the NC Science Blogging Conference. Dr. Willard is the director of a major genomics science, policy and ethics insitute at Duke University. He will lead a discussion about the opportunities and challenges in communicating science advancements. Woohoo. We’ve got 28 individuals signed up so far — a number of them coming from other states — and a couple of sessions solidified. As always, your suggestions and contributions for making the conference a success are welcome over at the conference wiki.

I snapped just a handful of pictures at ConvergeSouth. See them in the Flickr widget in the sidebar or here.

‘twas a small group that met up in the basement conference room of the Chapel Hill Public Library, but we had a great conversation, much of it centered around newcomer David Kirk and his vast Web experience — he formed a company around Tech-Recipes.com, blogs about medicine (he’s a pulmonary ICU physician in Raleigh) at Carotids and previoulsy created the Moan & Groan page to spur discussion about crappy consumer electronics. Lorrie Cramer brought her new-to-blogging enthusiasm, and suggested that David lead a future meetup discussion about money issues, i.e. advertising, accounting tips and forming a company. Stay tuned on this … Rob Gluck and Josh Staiger and Anton Zuiker rounded out the roundtable chatting. See David’s notes here. Next meetup: Thursday, November 2 at Open Eye Cafe.

A few weeks back, producers for WUNC’s The State of Things show started blogging. Here’s an excellent entry in which Katy Barron explains the effort that goes into producing a 17-minute segment of the show.

The Knight Foundation will award $5 million in grants to the best ideas for showing how news can help people improve their lives and shape their communities. See this page for details. We’ve got a lot of thinkers in the Triangle already trying to improve our communities through better online access to information and news. Let’s get some of the Knight money and do it even better.

Join us for a Chapel Hill Bloggers Mettup tonight at 7 p.m. in the basement conference room of the Chapel Hill Public Library. We’ll share our experiences from the excellent ConvergeSouth conference Saturday, and talk about how we’ve blogged about food and eating. (If you can’t find us, call me on my cell phone, 919.225.0969.)

Scobleizer readers. While you're here, please check out our plans for the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference.]* Just got logged onto the NCA&T network, so can now liveblog the ConvergeSouth conference. The first session was a rambling conversation (read: covered a lot of ground) with Elizabeth Edwards, Ed Cone and others in the crowd, talking about various experiences and observations about online community building. Now, Robert and Maryam Scoble on the "killer blog": Blog cause you want to. Maryam says Robert tried for years to get her blogging, and when she finally did, Robert said, “Stop, you can’t blog about me!” Laughs in the crowd. Read other blogs. “Have you read 50 blogs for two weeks?” By reading other blogs, you find other people you want to talk back to. If not impulse to talk back, then you won’t be a good blogger. You should feel impelled to be part of the conversation. Maryam: “What he said.” Pick a niche you can own (be different). Two types of bloggers: those writing for a few family members, and those who want an audience. “It’s a Google world.” How will people find you? Search. Linking behavior [the more you blog about one thing, the higher you’ll be on search results.”>
• Politics for three-fingered people, for example of owning a niche. I didn’t know another blogging poet [he says about Billy the Blogging Poet]. Maryam: An example is a blog about the London Underground. [Elizabeth Edwards, sitting in the crowd, says her daughter started a blog and found a niche.] Robert: If you do write about a lot of topics, tag them and categorize them so people can subscribe to just the category. Robert: These are guidelines, not rules. Someone in crowd: sometimes the passion will find you, so just hone the skills. Link to other blogs. Maryam: When I first started blogging, I didn’t want him to link to me. But Dave Winer linked the first day I started blogging, and I had 3000 hits. It’s a network. Give ‘em link love, and they’ll link back to you. Robert: I watch my referrer log … you can see who links to me, and I always click when someone new links to me. … Internet will continue to reward those who link to interesting things. Pam Spaulding talks about posting comments on other blogs as a way to draw traffic to her blog. Puts pressure on you: if you’re going to link back to your site, you’ve got to have something to say. Robert shows Techmeme and Memeorandum, which use an algorithm to see which blogs link to which blogs, and most-linked posts float to the top. (There are hundreds of thousands of scrapbooking blogs, but they don’t link to each other.) Admit mistakes. Maryam: Robert is a fast blogger. If you’re doing blogging as fast as he does, you’re apt to get some things wrong, and his readers point out his mistakes. He has tough skin, and admits to his mistakes. Robert: [tells story about blogging that HP chairwoman needed to quit when story came out about HP snooping. He said she was a “cancer on HP and needed to be cut out” but then learned she had cancer, so he apologized.] Write good headlines. Robert: I just switched to Google Reader, by the way. Just doing quick scan of title and text. I noticed that people don’t write catchy headlines that I will be interested in. [Maryam as she runs up steps to hand microphone to someone: I always wanted to play Oprah.] Dave Beckwith refers to stat that 85% of people only read the headline. Ed Cone: I don’t like the aesthetic of headlines over a two-line post, so I didn’t put them on my blog. What changed that was aggregators. I write my titles for the aggregation. People say, that was the prize in the cracker jack box. Billy : You need to become a resource on something. I have the largest resource of local blog aggregators. Use other media. Techcrunch, for example, puts an image on every post. [I snap an under-exposed picture of him pointing to the camera in my hand.] [Mention of Second Life.] Have a voice. If I only have four words to write, how can I say this. Question about using a blog to take on a big corporation. Robert: Be accurate. [Talks about standards of libel and slander, higher for public figures.] Dynamite can help you get gold, but it can also blow your arm off. [Robert tells about pressure against Microsoft support for gay rights bill. News spread. He alerted P.R. office about story. Went from local news item to front page of NYTimes in days, bloggers took the story and spread it around the world.] On Friday, Ballmer wrote a memo to all employees. I asked pr office if I could post that to my blog. Then I wrote that ceo should show leadership, and Ballmer backed off. Bill became law finally after eight years. Get outside the blogosphere. Come to conferences. Talk to people. Get face-to-face time. Market yourself. Figure out how to get people to talk to you. Write well. Expose yourself. Share what’s happening in your life. Help other people blog. Maryam: Share what you know, share what you learn. Engage with commenters. Keep your integrity. Disclose your conflicts of interest.

Brian Russell, organizer of the podcastercon events, posts a good entry about WillR’s foray into vlogging. Kudos to the both of them for their efforts at citizen journalism.

We met up at Open Eye Cafe Thursday, first gathering on the couches and then moving to the back room. (Open Eye is a good location, with parking and free wifi, but it’s loud.) In attendance: Bora Zivkovic, Steve Cory, Calvin Powers, Rob Zelt, Rob Gluck, Christina Whittle, Lorrie Cramer, Roy Kim and Anton Zuiker. Bora brought his children, David and Ruthie, each with a question or two for the group. David’s question about Flash programming met with some shrugs and grunts, since he was clearly more advanced in that department than the rest of us. This was the first Chapel Hill meetup for Calvin, who usually meets with the Raleigh group. He told us about his radio show website, Taprootradio.com, and mentioned he’s trying to understand how he can use Feedburner to broaden his audience. Rob Z, sporting a Samsung mini tablet computer, told us about his vacation to Germany, where he’d write his blog posts and prepare his pictures for upload to Flickr offline in order to minimize his Internet connection fees. Rob G updated us on the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker, saying that there’s a team headed to Cuba next year to search for the elusive bird. Roy talked about working solo, finding time to work on Tabulas, where improvements to the admin tool are forthcoming. Chrissy is having a baby! Woohoo. She’s also interested in the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, and she told us about the recent Community Genetics Forum she attended. Chrissy also got us chatting about ways to separate your personal from your professional, whether in the same blog or in separate blogs. Steve jubilantly reported he now lives in Pittsboro, and he rattled off all his web efforts, including one about preventing teen alcohol use and another about the psychiatry professor Dr. Eric Schopler (Steve’s a Wikipedian, having added to Schopler’s biography). Lorrie again begged for help in setting up a website, so while the meetup progressed, a few of us granted her wish (thanks especially to Roy and Rob Z.) and by the end of the night — and a round of beers at the Speakeasy — Microblogology.com was up and running. Lorrie’s got some good ideas on how she’ll use her blog to engage her students in discussions about current news of viruses, bacteria and other microbes. And I followed up with news about the science blogging conference. (I’ve since posted an entry about an idea for another big blogging event, this one about food blogging.) Next meetup is Monday, October 16th at 7 p.m. at the Chapel Hill Library. If you’ve got ideas for the agenda that night, please add in a comment now.

Help us spread the word about the BlogTogether events in the Triangle region of North Carolina. Download this colorful poster or the low-fi version for printing on a black-&-white printer.

Chapel Hill bloggers meet up tonight at 6 p.m. at Open Eye Cafe, and then move next door to Tyler’s Tap Room (Speakeasy back room) at 7.

The conference has a new logo, thanks to the talented Brian Russell. 2007 NC Science Blogging Conference logo——-
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Just got a message from Neil Caudle, editor of Endeavors magazine and vice-chancellor for research at UNC-CH, pledging cash for the NC Science Blogging Conference. (Watch the conference wiki for details on how we use this donation.) Neil, btw, was an advisor on my masters thesis about HIV in North Carolina. He’s one of the best editors a writer could find — he loves the English language, he literally listens to your writing, and he gives you space to tell a story in your own words. Thank you, Neil. We also got word that Jean-Claude Bradley of Drexel University and the open-source Useful Chemistry is coming to the conference. We’ve signed him up to lead a discussion about open notebook science. See the conference program page for more info on this.

Amanda Congdon interviews Ed Cone. Nice chat between the two, and good exposure for Ed, who’s been a huge help to me through the years. Great quote from Ed: “You need bloggers to get people blogging.”