UPDATE: Gerry Canavan (who is not a narcissist) has posted some more thoughts over on his excellent linkblog.

This is funny.  I've been busy this week and while I've been looking at the web and finding lots of good, linkable bits to blog about, I haven't really found the time to sit down and gather them all in a linkdump.  Well now here I am at work on a Thursday night -- covering for a coworker -- and it's slow and have the web here and I'm all set to post some links for your collective amusement, and I see that Warren Ellis has called for an end to linkblogging.  As Gerry Canavan wrote when he saw Ellis' post, "thanks a lot, y'all, it's been fun."

Yeah, I've got to call good ol' Warren out on this one.  I actually think his assessment of the function and place of linkblogs is basically right, but his conclusions are all wrongity wrong wrong.  Ellis writes...

 

One of the few sane responses to this explosion of production [on the web from 2001-2007] was to assume the role of curator. ... The two most famous examples of same are Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom (est. 1997) — Barger is said to have coined the term "weblog" — and Mark Frauenfelder’s Boing Boing (est. 2000 as a weblog, previously a print magazine est. 1988).... The latter, in particular, has spawned countless imitators, all deeply involved in doing the web-work of 2001-2007 — sorting out all the weird crap that’s out there and re-presenting it in some kind of ordered and aesthetically or politically filtered manner for our consideration.


 

I think this is basically right.  There's so much content out there, it's sometimes hard to know where to begin looking for interesting, worthwhile stuff.  Google, Technorati and other search filters help, but these tools by themselves lack an essential quality for curation -- taste.  Google can help you search by words and phrases and secondarily by popularity, but its not discriminating -- it can't tell you what's "good."  This is where linkbloggers come in.  They're out there on the web looking at lots of stuff and linking to what they think is worth sharing -- what they think is "good."  There are all sorts of different linkblogs.  Some are group blogs (the afore mentioned Boing Boing, Metafilter), some are individuals who comment extensively on what they're linking to (Gerry Canavan, Accordion Guy, Candleblog), and some just post links without any comment at all (Web Zen, Dear S, the late great Gravity Lens ). 

Linkblogs are actually my favorite kind of blog.  They give me what I want from the internet, by which I mean: they give me everything that's interesting.  If the links are presented in an entertaining way, so much the better, but it's the function of curation that is key.  Here's where Ellis goes off track...

 

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could stand up now and say, okay, these are the post-curation years? The world does not need another linkblog. What is required, frankly, is what we’re supposed to call “content” these days. When I were a lad, back in the age of steam, we called this “original material.” Put another way: we like it when Cory and Xeni are the copy/paste editors for the internet, but we like it better when Cory writes a book and Xeni makes an episode of BoingBoingTV.


 

I think Warren may be projecting a bit here.  He is a writer, after all, and a linkblogger himself -- a particularly popular one.  Do you suppose he's beating himself up for "wasting" so much time blogging when he could be, you know, writing?  If so, he should cut himself a little slack.  I know his blog more than his writing, but it certainly seems like he's very prolific.  To address his point, sure, it would be great if all of the writers and filmmakers and artists would procrastinate less and spend more time creating their art, but does Ellis really think the only thing keeping Cory Doctorow from writing twice as many books is Boing Boing?  Speaking as a content creator, I can truthfully say I've used Candleblog as a procrastination tool before -- in fact, one could make the case that I'm doing that very thing right now -- but before I had Candleblog, I found other avenues for my procrastination.  The problem isn't my blog, it's my will to work.

Also, not every linkblogger is a content creator -- many are just smart people with good taste.  What should these folks do to occupy their time that is better than linking to things they think are interesting?

Ellis continues...

 

And, frankly, no-one’s going to do a better job of being the internet’s copy/paste editors than the BB crew anyway. They have the time, they have the money, they have the setup, they have the audience and they have the momentum of nearly a decade in the job. Nobody needs another linkblog like that. There are already thousands of them. The job of curation is being taken care of. Look ahead.

 

I loves me some Boing Boing.  I read it every day.  The Boingers are indeed partially responsible for the form that Candleblog has taken, and some not insignificant fraction of the outgoing links that get posted at Candleblog were found at BB.  Still, Candleblog is not a BB clone.  As interested as I am in copyfight and cool gadgets and steampunk culture, the Boingers' interests and tastes only reflect my own so much.  And as distinct from Boing Boing as Candleblog is, I'm positive there are scads of linkblogs out there that are much more so.  I read about a dozen blogs regularly and at least half of them are linkblogs of one shade or another.  I don't only read BB because BB doesn't cover everything I'm interested in.  There are occasional duplicate links (this is pretty rare, actually), but even these are presented in different ways and often offer more persectives on a given item.

Ellis goes on to make the (correct) point that it's easier than ever for content creators to publish their works (using pre-fab tools like tumblr) and it's also very easy to get your content linked to (precisely because there are so many effing linkblogs) so, one infers, we should all stop wasting our time linking to stuff and start creating some content. 

In his last paragraph Ellis admits that these ideas are "not fully baked," probably realizing there's a problem in the logic above: i.e., if we content creators all stop linkblogging and start creating original content because it's so easy to get said content linked to, what with all the linkbloggers, there would then be fewer linkbloggers (because they will have all stopped blogging and started creating) and it would be harder to get your work linked to.  Or something.

Anyway, following his call to end linkblogs, Ellis promptly posted a selection of links -- more evidence that he doesn't really believe the things he writes. 

I'm shooting a piece for Technology Review Magazine tomorrow in Hanover and one of the subjects of the piece is "reality mining," which is my new favorite digital culture term.  Here's a description from an April Technology Review piece on the subject...

Reality mining, [MIT professor of media arts and sciences, Sandy Pentland] says, "is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help [with] things like setting privacy patterns, sharing things with people, notifying people--basically, to help you live your life."

Researchers have been mining data from the physical world for years, says Alex Kass, a researcher who leads reality-mining projects at Accenture, a consulting and technology services firm. Sensors in manufacturing plants tell operators when equipment is faulty, and cameras on highways monitor traffic flow. But now, he says, "­reality mining is getting personal."

Within the next few years, Pentland predicts, reality mining will become more common, thanks in part to the proliferation and increasing sophistication of cell phones. Many handheld devices now have the processing power of low-end desktop computers, and they can also collect more varied data, thanks to devices such as GPS chips that track location. And researchers such as Pentland are getting better at making sense of all that information.

So our handheld devices will not only be able to tell us when people in our personal networks are nearby, they will be able to predict when we will likely cross paths with them.  Our phones may even help in studying and predicting the spread of diseases or in diagnosing early stages of ailments like depression and Parkinson's disease.  That's pretty cool. 

Of course any technology that literally tracks our movements and behaviors is going to have some significant privacy issues to consider, but much of this data is already being collected and just not used for anything interesting.

I suspect I'll know a lot more about this tomorrow after the shoot.  I'll post a link when the video goes up. 

Minnesota video blogger extraordinaire Chuck Olsen is in the Minneapolis Xcel Center getting ready to cover tonight's huge Obama rally (which happens to be in the very spot John McCain will accept his party's nomination in September) for The UpTake, a citizen video journalism site based in Minneapolis.  They managed to secure a hard-wired internet connection (most others will make do with wireless) and they will be live video blogging from the floor of the convention center.


Chuck earlier today setting up at the Xcel Center

So while you're watching Matthews and Olberman on MSNBC, crack your laptop and check out some unfiltered citizen journalism awesomeness.

One of the coolest things the UpTake folks do is use Nokia N95 phones in conjunction with a web app called qik to do live video blogging. 

Other attendees of yesterday's e-state symposium have been busy little bloggers.  Here's a few...

• Cathy Resmer wraps up her coverage.
• Champlain prof (and fellow break-out session member) Elaine Young does a post-mortem.
• CCTV's fearless leader, Lauren-Glenn Davitian, posted a few notes as well.

 

Chuck Olsen Twittered today that the Journalism That Matters conference he'll be attending has the longest name and the worst web site.  But I will not be outdone!  It's time for a battle of the blisteringly long conference names!  I will pit my conference, The Snelling Center for Government Symposium, Fulfilling Vermont's E-State Potential: Building Community in a Connected Age, against Chuck's conference, A Passion for Place New Pamphleteers/New Reporters: Convening Entrepreneurs Who Combine Journalism, Democracy, Place and Blogs.

My conference: 16 words, 102 characters.

Chuck's conference: 17 words, 111 characters.

Drat!  You win this round, Olsen.  I'd have won too, if it wasn't for the word "entrepreneurs."  Stupid French.
 

The final portion of the day was spent talking about next steps and asking for help moving forward.  The organizers have set up a wiki with some of the output from the day's sessions and they invited us to contribute our own thoughts to it as well.  You can see it here.

I am loaded with opinions about today's 9-hours of brainstorming sessions, talks and panels.  I'll start with what I thought worked and get to my constructive criticisms in a bit...

In general, this is the right idea.  This is a subject that needs to be talked about and these are people that need to come together -- often, if possible.  I'm basically skeptical of the efficacy of deciding on action items by committee, but at the very least I think the people here were able to learn some things from each other and maybe even get a little inspired.  A number of people in my little break-out group mentioned the possibility of Vermont leading the rest of the country in both technology and forward thinking, civic uses of it.  In order for that to happen, I think we need sessions like this coupled with strong leadership and vision and a willingness to think way outside the box.  There were certainly people in attendance today who had this going on, so there's definitely hope.

That said, there were some things that didn't work for me at all, and I mention them here not to whine about my day, but because I would like to see these sessions happen again and maybe we can improve the model a bit.  I know a lot of hard work went in to setting this up and this isn't a criticism of the organizing committee members, I just want to be able to maximize the usefulness of the next symposium, should there be one.

First off, the name is a problem.  All week I was having trouble telling people what I was going to be doing today.  "Yeah, on Thursday I'm going to be live-blogging from Fulfilling Vermont's E-State Potential Building Community in a Connected Age!"  Ugh!  The thing could use a little branding, is all I'm saying.

There was way too much to do in too small a time frame.  This was far an away my biggest problem with the day.  There was easily 2 days worth of content crammed into a single day and zero down-time.  If there's one thing I've learned from attending conferences, it's that the sessions are good, but the down-time is where the real brainstorming and networking happens.  It's telling that the best conversation I had all day was at lunch.  It doesn't mean the sessions were bad -- they weren't -- it's just that unmoderated, free talk amongst smart, engaged people is really, really useful.  A full 1/2 hour between events would have been great -- a longer lunch, and an after party!  We spent all day generating tons of "social capital" (to borrow a concept from the morning's keynote) and there was no place to spend it all afterwards!  It's 8:30 pm and I should be drinking with the people I spent the day with right now and saying this stuff to their faces, not sitting in my living room typing it into my blog.  Time for socializing is critical for this kind of event.

Also, the day is now just a blur in my memory because it was largely characterized by, "okay, we have 10 minutes to discuss these three really huge, society-changing ideas and all of their potential implications, go!"  Followed by, "okay, we have to stop there and vote on what the best ideas were and then we have to rush over to the auditorium for the panel discussion!" The symposium either needed another day or half of the content.

The same goes for the larger presentations.  The keynote was great and 20 minutes more for Q&A would have been better.  The panel was too big.  The presentations were good and on-topic, but it was too much for the single hour scheduled.  There were 5 people on the panel plus the moderator -- they all had to rush and there was only time for a few questions at the end before we were rushed on to lunch.  These are big ideas.  We need time to absorb them.

Finally -- and this is a bit of an abstract point -- I think the brainstorming was too structured.  In the break-out sessions, we'd go through these specific processes of answering pre-determined questions, we'd barely have time to discuss them, and then the answers were on the white board getting voted on.  Often, the resulting output was kind of stale and uninspired, considering the scope of the symposium.  We were allowed five minutes to silently think about a given question and then what limited discussion there was time for was limited exclusively to the output of those five minutes of thinking.  I'm a pretty creative guy and I think about these issues a lot, but if I only get five minutes to consider a question silently in my head, my ideas will be pretty limited compared to what I could come up with in 20 minutes, bouncing ideas off other smart people.

I really don't want this post to sound like a litany of complaints.  I want to be a cheerleader for this sort of event and it really was great to get all those people -- many of whom I'd never met -- all in one place together working on these issues.  I look forward to the next one. 

Imagine you're a visitor to VT and as you enter the state, you see a statue with 5 words inscribed.  What are the 5 words?

my choices:
connected
democratic
participatory
unity
freedom

The group picked:
Innovation
inclusive
connected
community
integrity

(mine were better ;0)

how can VT use communication tools to improve quality of life? (my ideas...)
*The state should connect every address in the state with the fattest pipe possible, publicly-owned.
*the state should become a leader in using new media tools and lead by example -- video blogs, forums, wikis, utter transparency of govt.
gavel to gavel online coverage of the statehouse proceedings

Please note: I'm live-blogging today (5/29/08) from the Snelling Center for Government's day-long symposium: Fulfilling Vermont's E-state Potential: Building Community in a Connected Age.  Please excuse any typos or poorly-worded posts -- I'll fix them later. You can also follow my shenanigans on Twitter.

 

Plenary -- students from Champlain demo online interactive... stuff.

First up: backgammon? hmm.  Joel P. also discusses how he and his friends used a wiki to keep in touch over the summer.

Next, Allison S. talks about Facebook.  Another way she and her friends stayed in touch.  She's talking about clubs and events that she's joined on Facebook. 

And finally, Robert talks about blogging!  Yay!  "He's "moved on to Facebook."  Wha?  He blogged from his Blackberry at the conference.  It's a livejournal blog.  No "wicked close" friends at his last college.  Only sober person at parties -- he'd post "The Adventures of Soberman."  Led to half the college following his blog.  Gave him an opportunity to reach people he wouldn't have otherwise. 

Please note: I'm live-blogging today (5/29/08) from the Snelling Center for Government's day-long symposium: Fulfilling Vermont's E-state Potential: Building Community in a Connected Age.  Please excuse any typos or poorly-worded posts -- I'll fix them later. You can also follow my shenanigans on Twitter.
 

Breakout session #2:

Note: lunch was great - awesome talk with folks.  More later on that.

opening question: What is possible Re: e-state that aren't possible right now?
My initial thoughts:
*Live participation in public events like town meeting -- democratized media
*massive influx of green businesses -- tech businesses.
*a new definition of "history" as more and more of VT's public discourse is recorded as a matter of course.
*remote heath care/farm equipment repair -- distributed expertise

PRIVACY ISSUES!?

We're discussing e-state "scenarios."  There's a list of 9 hypothetical future scenarios that might exist once VT is fully connected.  There is also an opportunity to come up with our own scenarios.  The scenarios that are listed mostly exist now or would with a little more connectivity in place.

How will becoming an e-state benefit communities and the state as a whole?  Opportunities?
*Vt as a model for the country -- fiber to the home all over?
*all of the points made above in the previous question.

Challenges?
*Privacy must be redefined.
*Important distinction between the challenge of maintaining a certain level of privacy and the challenge of learning to live with a new lack of privacy.

Note: Ed Cashman looks like Michael Chickless.

Please note: I'm live-blogging today (5/29/08) from the Snelling Center for Government's day-long symposium: Fulfilling Vermont's E-state Potential: Building Community in a Connected Age.  Please excuse any typos or poorly-worded posts -- I'll fix them later. You can also follow my shenanigans on Twitter.

 

This is a partial-post.  I'm out of juice. 

Couple requests in comments for live ustream coverage.  That's simple to set up.  I wonder why the organizing committee didn't think of it.  I'll have to ask Rob from VCAM -- he's an organizer.  Down to 22% power.  Must. Get. Juice.

I'm taking photos, but I'll post them at the end of the day -- too nuts running around and trying to meet all the deadlines.  I'm starting to think this should have been either a 2-day conference or half as much content.  No down time.  A thing like this HAS to have lots of downtime to work.  It's how the real networking and brainstorming happens.

Panel discussion:
5 panelists plus moderator.

Michael Wood-Lewis gives good talk. 

The woman speaking about VTers with disabilities (from the VT Center for Independent Living) is making a point about tech design needing to be inclusive -- it's a good point to keep in mind but her own use of tech -- a power point presentation -- is itself poorly designed -- she's literally reading the slides to the audience -- which I guess makes sense, it's an accessible presentation for both blind and deaf audience members.  Important to consider the needs of those with disabilities when designing tech systems.

The woman sitting behind me is a commenter... "nice."  "oh, I read that!"  "Yes!." 

examples of tech designed for the deaf, sight disabilities, etc.  "inclusive design benefits everyone." 

Dov Stucker from Edmunds Middle School -- "technology as a bridge" 

Greg W. Middlesex town meeting initiative -- using the net to stream town meeting.  I have to stop taking notes.  Down to 7% power.  More later...


Please note: I'm live-blogging today (5/29/08) from the Snelling Center for Government's day-long symposium: Fulfilling Vermont's E-state Potential: Building Community in a Connected Age.  Please excuse any typos or poorly-worded posts -- I'll fix them later. You can also follow my shenanigans on Twitter.