04th May 2004
NYC Bloggers make me think of future
I went to the NYC Bloggers meeting at Apple SoHo last night. It was
packed, lively, 2 hours long, somewhat loose, and they’ll probably
never get invited back to Apple if they keep talking about Skull
F*ing. (nah, it wasn’t that extreme, but you get a lot of earthy
comments out of this bunch - nobody there has really sold out
and gotten all button-up corporate straight-faced. And that’s a great thing.)
Nothing new to learn, except that Movable Type 3.0 will have some
add-on packages that will cost. Jen (of the Gothamist) and Choire (of
Gawker) were especially funny, and their comments are from the heart.
A question that I didn’t ask, because I couldn’t quite formulate,
springs out of these lines of thought (basically, how will different
forms of posting merge?)
* How can blogs present a different face to different visitors? My
classic example would be Usenet News (and I’ve written about this
before). You go into a newsgroup, and you already know the targeted
subject being bantered about. With a blog, each new posting could be
on some subject way astray from what’s come before. Quite Simply:
with Usenet, you always knew who you were targeting. with a Blog,
anyone on the net can drop by at random.
* How can a blog be more like a Wiki? As I write an entry, I want to
easily (and the key word here is “easy”) be able to refer to things
I’ve written before. And here’s where it gets interesting: I may want
to update some of those old entries to point forward - to point at
what I am writing now. Here’s another way of saying it: I want
visitors to be able to hop around the site via links that make sense
(and Wikis make this easy), but I don’t want to get into a link
maintenance headache. (and I don’t mean “categories” as an answer here)
* I think it was Meg Hourihan that touched on something else I want to
see: the need for more granularity, more filtering, of who sees what.
The thing about a Blog is that you never quite know who your audience
is (unlike Usenet), so there could be that temptation to hold back, to
not display an edge in your writing that might be misinterpreted by,
say, an employer, a member of the family or a friend that doesn’t
quite “get” some of the net.cultural references, and so on. There are
times where I want to cut loose, write about something like a cursing,
snarling, opinionated beast. But do I want that accessible for all
time to everyone? No! Short Winded: make it easy to mete out acccess
to different topics, different people via some sort of simple
authentication mechanism. Real Life is great at this (what you say in
public, what you say in private), and online sucks at it.
