TECHPopuli

Berkman Thursday Meeting Notes

Big group tonite. Toward the end of the nite I counted 20+ people. Lots of great discussion.

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A couple of attendees, sorry didn't get names, reported on the Larry Lessig talk in Cambrige earlier in the day. From the description the talk seemed to cover Lessig's usual (and very important) themes of big copyright owners trying to control culture, the existing sitution being a "landgrab", Lessig said he was "not anti-copyright" just that he wants balance.

Jay McCarthy introduced a new notion about how copyright might work. Some thought it was pretty unconventional. Perhaps Jay will write more about it on his blog.

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[Parenthetical aside, not from the meeting: Does one write about something "in" their blog? of "on" their blog?]

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The group talked for awhile about the aggregator "design" project. Four "premises" were presented:

(1) We kinda know what an aggregator is, but,
(2) There are different approaches to what they look like.
(3) We now know more about what all this blog, and blog-related, stuff is.
(4) There are many more sites to aggregate now than before.

So what does all that mean to the design of our next-gen aggregator?

Later in the evening, but related to this project, we started to talk about the two main UIs for aggregators: the three-pane version, like NetNewsWire, [and the one that Lisa Williams uses], vs the style -- which we need to come up with a name for -- which uses a single "pane" to display aggregated syndicated items.

The project wiki has been more or less restored after the attack. We'll continue to post ideas there.

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Dave showed Share Your OPML utility: Show Similar Feeds. We talked for a bit about more sophisticated filters to display similar feeds. Sadly, I didn't write any of them down. Hopefully they will show up in someone's blog.

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In a dramatic, and earth-shaking change, we actually decided on the dinner location before the meeting was over. We were this able to get a rez at the place of our choice -- Cambridge Common -- and set a manageable end-time for the meeting. [OK, I'm being a little tongue in cheek here, but this was a good thing.]

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We discussed possible improvements to the webcast. Notable was a plan to locate a better way to capture the sound: a better mic, and/or more mics and a simple mixer.

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Jay McCarthy reported on his appearence on a college (?) radio program where he talked about blogs "impact" on the presidential campaign.

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jessica reported on a journalism class/seminar she gave where she had a great experience talking to them about blogs and the internet. See her report on that here.

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Dave reported on his just-ended trip to Microsoft. [Aside, is Microsoft now a place that one can travel to?] Actually he went to Seattle, Microsoft was just one of the orgs he visited.

He told us about his new experience of arriving in the Seattle weather from Boston, as opposed to from San Francisco. And how that was a different experience.

He met with the "research people" at MS and learned from them about some things they are exploring: social software, beter ways to manage photos; and he evangelized them a bit about things like RSS and others.

He also met with the IE team, but under non-disclosure, but he did say that he also told them about the value of RSS, etc.

***

Joey Devilla, who would later serenade us at dinner with his accordian, stuck his head in the door and talked a bit about present and past projects. he was once involved with a project called "Open Cola". The name came from thinking about "what is the most proprietary thing in the world? Well it's Coca Cola." So they came up with the notion of Open Cola, which became both a product name, and an open source recipe for making a cola beverage.

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Dinner: Excellent as usual.

Talking with Rebecca McKinnon who is a serious big time journalist for a "major U.S. broadcaster" (quote from her website), but is now on sabbatical and doing some really interesting thinking about journalism and the internet.

Also talking with Lisa Williams, Shimon Rura, and others whose names I don't know (sorry), about the usual raft of fascinating subjects: aggregator philosophy, the ongoing death of old media distribution channels, Lisa's new baby.

A good time was had by all.

Posted by jackhodgson at February 13, 2004 02:32 PM