Cafe Bucky

I’ve updated my O’Reilly blog over the last day, with a couple of new entries. There’s Etech a Sketch, Part 2, and Part 3

I would enjoy hearing any feedback.

(comments closed November 2003)

My perspective on blogs and blogging is probably different than that
of many people. I spent so many years (going back 15+ years) in email
and newsgroups, I had a feel for writing for a specific audience.
For whatever reason, I simply didn’t get into blogging until
very recently. The idea of “Chameleon Blog, presentation
based on who’s visiting” appeals to me. I don’t have the answer
of how to go about it though (but let me know your thoughts, just
the same)

When you send email, to a person or a list, you usually have
a good feel for your audience.

When you make a Usenet posting, it is in a focused area, such as
rec.autos.sport.f1.

When you are on IRC, the channel represents some sort of focus.

(psst! buddy, you’ve made your point, let’s move on…)

So… when you blog, who is the audience? Anyone that clicks
your way. Do you know who they are? No. Can a blog become
a chameleon of sorts, featuring topics/categories differently, based
on the context of who is visiting?

Let’s assume for a moment that I am a well-rounded person, and that
I like to write about some serious tech stuff, and light-hearted
things that happen in the course of a day, and add a dash of
political and social musings here and there. I have things
to say about English Premier League Soccer, and Formula One Racing.
I’m chomping at the bit to tell you what I think of certain books, films,
and music.

At any particular moment, I am bound to lose a big chunk of potential
readers, depending on the topics I am currently writing about.

Hmmm, that doesn’t seem good. If I am trying to find a job or a
contract (which I am), I would want to have my more technically
oriented material front and center. If my Mother in law comes to
visit my page, I probably want my political/social posts, along with
some of my light-hearted musings, to be the thing that gets featured.
For other groups, they might be familiar with the high performance
driving school, F1 racing fan side of me. Finally, I want to be able
to write some things here and there that are in the vein of “Comedy,
but not for Kids”.

So that’s a few different audiences, and there can be lots of overlap.
Does one start a few different blogs, and hope to guide some readers
one way, and some another? I’m thinking not.

I thought about having a more “Corporate, we’re damn serious here, we
talk tech, we never smile, we’re hard driving an unwired course into
our fiscal future” blog. You know, something to appeal to hard-boiled
executives that want everything serious - “Scooter! Was that a smile?!
You’re out the door! Guards!”

In real life, you wouldn’t wear a swimsuit to a formal wedding. You wouldn’t go river rafting in a Tux. You are looser around your friends on a Saturday night, than in a Serious Work Discussion. Context context context.

Having separate blogs just seems like a housekeeping headache. Let’s
say I write about GPS position streaming from individual F1 cars
in a real-world race, so that the coordinates can be fed into a realtime
“drive along” game (an idea that a friend and I wrote about a few
years ago: PrixCast). Is it a tech article? Yes. Does it appeal
to my driving friends? Yes. Would Aunt Bessie in Kansas care?
No.

So my conclusion is: I don’t know what to do! I suppose I could
have some checkboxes somewhere on my page - “feature WebTech,
Ideas, and Political, and make me dig for anything else”

In the meantime, I will continue to write about pretty much
the spectrum of things that interest me. I suppose that could
be not so great for those with a “one blog, one subject” mentality.

What do others do? Are there things that you have done in setting up
your blog so that some topics are more prominent for some users,
and not so obvious for others? I’m not interested in hiding anything.
It’s more of a “featuring certain topics, based on context” thought.

I don’t know enough about networking to answer this, so I will ping LazyWeb, and hope someone can clue me in.

At etech, we saw a lot of people making use of Hydra. Is it possible to somehow tunnel ZeroConf from one local net to another? I am guessing it would involve something like:


virtual_me.local <-> tunnel <-> virtual_you.local


In other words, a second .local identity is constructed on both ends of the connection, and then some network magic passes that traffic back and forth.
I suppose another way would be to go to the port level, on a per-application basis. It just seems that creating some sort of “exists to be tunneled” Rendezvous identity (in addition to the local one) would be a nice higher-level approach.

Doable? (apologies if “tunnel” isn’t the correct description)

I have posted some more thoughts/coverage of Emerging Tech on my O’Reilly Weblog.

Trevor Smith has an excellent page of links to conference notes

If you are on a Mac, you should definitely grab a copy of Hydra. Hydra uses Rendezvous (ZeroConf) to enable many users on a local network collaborate on the same document, at the same time. A lot of the notes floating around the web from etech were realtime collaborations of a half dozen people sitting in the same room with wireless laptops.

I’ve been prattling on about the Emerging Tech conference. Now
I’m posting some thoughts about it. My first ORN blog entry is at
Etech a Sketch, Part 1

I admire those that have the capability to write coherently in real-time. Some of my notes look like “Thereh ahnre 6-0-0 kmillion peoplke son line right now. What are the imokujcation oof them bveing mobile?” Time for a new laptop
(that’s right, blame the machine!)

Hooray for Apple!

I am glad that they have figured out a way to get music to listeners, and compensate the artist.

I think that among other things, this will appeal to my 9 year old daughter. She may start volunteering to do more chores.

“wash the dishes, put them away, and buy a song!”

This helps to address a concern that Howard Rheingold mentioned
in his talk at etech. I’ll have more to add to that in another blog I will
point to soon.

• Yes, you will need your power cord. I know your laptop has batteries. I know what the manufacturer told you.
  (psst… c’mhere…. they are lying to you! your laptop has a power-strip sensor.. the closer you are to a power strip, the faster the battery will die.
  It’s that simple)

• If you are over, say, 15, don’t drink 3 cups of coffee in the morning, and expect to make it through a couple of back to back sessions. The only part of your body that appreciates coffee is from your tongue on up to the top of your skull. The rest of your body just wants it out, right now.
• Bring a laptop you can actually use on your lap. I hate my laptop. It has one of those “pointing sticks” between the keys. You know.. you just look at it and the cursor goes flying over to your neighbors screen, and you have to sheepishly ask for it back. Touchpads are de rigeur. The keyboard is bouncy, so I’m never sure if I’ll get 0, 1, 2, or 3 characters for each keystroke. Oh, and if it took any longer to boot up, the only sound in the meeting room would be nighttime crickets.
• There is the hopefulness of penciling in every single session you want to go to, and then there’s the reality of meeting overload. The warning sign is a buzzing feeling in one’s head. I call it “conference blur”… the sensation that you’ve been to a session, but you can’t remember if it was on Thursday morning, Wednesday after lunch, Tuesday night, or perhaps it was a long entry you read in a blog somewhere. It could have been a ReallyLongWikiLink, for all you know.
• You want to see three really interesting talks, but they’re all at the same time…
• … and this happens every day of the conference.
• … and this happens at every conference, because if it didn’t, every conference would be a month long.
• You get home, and can’t wait to go to the next one.

So, I wish I was some sort of super journalist, and could dump my
thoughts here every two hours. The Emerging Tech Conference is a whirlwind of input, so I tend to surf to the web
sites I just learned about, and absorb what I have just heard.
I’m still in the “want to take time to edit my entries” phase.

Random Observations

A session just got out, which means that all of the sockets on the power strip
for this table will be taken in the next two minutes…

In the meeting rooms, there are many powerstrips, but they tend to be
clustered — it is hilarious
to see how many of us are unwired, yet still power-tethered. There’s
a funny behavior I am seeing, where most folks flock right to the
power strips before every session.

We need some sort of advance in powering laptops. I don’t
care what it is, so long as:

• it doesn’t make noise
• it doesn’t smell
• it doesn’t scare children or old people
• it’s not a form of kinetic energy that gets stored,
  where I have to pick up the computer and shake it
  every five minutes

• a recharge is good for a day

I remember conference sessions during the 80’s and 90’s,
before there was so much clackity clack competing with
the speaker. I’ve never seen so many unwired folks
in one place/time before — it’s like a wireless
geek nirvana around here.. the sessions sound like
the constant pitter patter of rodent feet on a hardwood floor.

I recognize some bloggers in person, because I have seen
photos of them - it’s wierd, I know some of their online
persona, but they don’t know me - so I leave them alone..
outside of the blogosphere, they are just everyday folks,
right? I am more likely to talk to some of these people in a market,
but in a conference situation, i think they are saturated
as it is.