Friday, October 31, 2003

'Tis the Season to Be... AWOL XVI


Television-Impaired XVI


Thursday, October 30, 2003

Event-O-Dex LXXXI


Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Rest in Peace III


Library Silence


Read But Dead XX


Monday, October 27, 2003

The Movie I Watched Last Night LXXXI

The Fall of the House of Usher

Clip-Art Comics V


Happy Birthday to Media Dieticians XIX


From the In Box: From the Reading Pile XXII


From the In Box: The Movie I Watched Last Night LXXX


Pieces, Particles XII






Once Dunkin' staple, labor-intensive cruller out

Highways and History


Friday, October 24, 2003

From the Reading Pile XXII

Bries Catalog 2003

Gabagool! #2-3 (June and September 2002)

Gabagool! #1 Special Edition (February 2003)

House of Cards

In a Rut

The Patron

Sketchbook 2

The Movie I Watched Last Night LXXX

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest

Event-O-Dex LXXX


Mention Me! XLVII


  • Tom Peters, The Circle of Innovation
  • Leonard Berry, Discovering the Soul of Service
  • Christine Piotrowski, Professional Practice for Interior Designers
  • William Upski Wimsatt, No More Prisons
  • John Hagel III and Arthur Armstrong, Net Gain
  • Cynthia Froggatt, Work Naked
  • Drew Banks and Kim Daus, Customer.Community
  • Hesselbein, Leading Beyond the Walls
  • Robert Reich, The Future of Success


    Wednesday, October 22, 2003

    The Movie I Watched Last Night LXXIX

    Cat People

    Mention Me! XLVI





    Tuesday, October 21, 2003

    Corollary: Games People Play XIII

    Brad reports on our Funspot excursion last weekend.

    Technofetishism XLVI



    Monday, October 20, 2003

    From the In Box: Games People Play XIII




    The Movie I Watched Last Night LXXVIII

    How to Make a Monster

    Games People Play XIII



  • The Mount Washington Cog Railway
  • The Hobo Railroad and Winnipesaukee Scenic Railroad
  • The Conway Scenic Railroad
  • The Hartmann Model Railroad and Toy Museum

    You can access a guide to New Hampshire's scenic railroads online.


    Ah. At home, I'm a tourist.
  • Weather Report XIV


    Friday, October 17, 2003

    Books Worth a Look XVIII


    Reigning Cats and Cats

    Forget Dog Island. I'm moving to Cat Town.

    Thursday, October 16, 2003

    Corollary: Technofetishism XLV




    Wednesday, October 15, 2003

    Read But Dead XIX


    Event-O-Dex LXXIX





    Hiking History XIV





    Tuesday, October 14, 2003

    Music to My Eyes XXI

    Ah, Spike Jonze. How he makes me happy.

    Friday, October 10, 2003

    Mention Me! XLV


    Virtual Book Tour 2 VI




    'Tis the Season to Be... AWOL XV



    Thursday, October 09, 2003

    Virtual Book Tour 2 V


    Wednesday, October 08, 2003

    Virtual Book Tour 2 IV


    The Restaurant I Ate at Last Night XXIV




    Event-O-Dex LXXVIII


    Tuesday, October 07, 2003

    Virtual Book Tour 2 III



    The Restaurant I Ate at Last Night XXIII


    Event-O-Dex LXXVII


    Monday, October 06, 2003

    Virtual Book Tour 2: Newsletters of Note


    Virtual Book Tour 2: The Movie I Watched Last Night


    Virtual Book Tour 2: Event-O-Dex



    Virtual Book Tour 2: Magazine Me


    Virtual Book Tour 2: Products I Love





    Virtual Book Tour 2 II


    Virtual Book Tour 2: Music to My Ears




    Virtual Book Tour 2: Books Worth a Look







    Sunday, October 05, 2003

    BloggerCon 2003 IX

    Managing a Community: Joi Ito














































    BloggerCon 2003: Interlude III


    BloggerCon 2003 VIII

    Spirituality: AKM Adam











    Griff Wigley: Have you done that?












    Halley Suitt: Or don't.














    Dave Winer: Are your friends allowed to make friendship conditional?




    Saturday, October 04, 2003

    BloggerCon 2003 VII

    Weblogs in Presidential Politics: Cameron Barrett, Eric Folley, Matt Gross, Joe Jones, and Dave Winer.

    Cameron Barrett works on the Wesley Clark campaign. Eric Folley is a representative of the Democratic National Committee. Mathew Gross is chief blogger for the Howard Dean campaign. Joe Jones volunteers for the Bob Graham campaign. And Dave Winer is a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School.

    Dave Winer: Here are some ideas to start with: Link to everything. Don't just write about your guy or link to positive press. Bring on pied pipers. Bring in people from the outside who have experience with Weblogs. Independent bloggers on the press bus happened in the Dean campaign. It's OK to have PR people on your press bus, but it's not OK to only have PR people on your press bus. Suggest advocacy guidelines before some of your supporters begin flaming your opponents. It hasn't happened yet, but it's inevitable. A very pragmatic thing, publish your schedule on your Weblog. Something that turned out to be very controversial is that people should stay out of software. Let the software developers make the software. Software should be agnostic. Finally, speak about democracy. Talk about how wonderful Weblogs are for talking about democracy. Talk about Jefferson. Let a tear fall. And offer hosting for people. Those are just some ideas from someone who doesn't support any candidate, doesn't support a party, but does support the use of Weblogs for political campaigns.

    Matt Gross: It's absolutely exhausting being the chief blogger for the Dean campaign. I can't emphasize enough how incredible it's been. March 15 we launched the first Dean blog. In June we moved to Moveable Type, and that's when the blog really started to take off. Since June 10, we've had 100,000 comments. Yesterday, we had 2,200 comments. It's really pushed the technology. There's a huge mania that's been built up.

    I'd always thought of a blogger as someone who had a site and posted entries. When we launched the comments, people who posted comments were calling themselves bloggers and saying, "I'm a blogger for Dean." At first I thought they got the definition wrong, but it's the users, and it is the grassroots.

    Winer: Maybe it's not the form. Maybe it's an attitude.

    Joe Jones: I'm 19 first of all. I go to the University of Florida. I was about to come home for the summer, and I learned that Bob Graham was looking for interns. I wrote him and said I could do this and this and this. Then he wrote me back about a month later just before I had to go into for some surgery. When I wrote back, they said they didn't have any more internships, so I went in and asked what I could do. They said I could answer emails.

    They learned I knew some HTML and asked if I wanted to take over the blog. I used to keep a journal on Blogger but didn't really know much about it. I taught myself CSS over night and started to fake it. I started to recruit amateurs who were blogging about Graham. It turned into a groupblog. It's all run by volunteers. I'm a volunteer. They wanted to put me on payroll, but I wanted to go back to school. I didn't want to be a dropout for Graham. But I hope it goes well and goes well into the general election.

    Winer: How did you start your blogs?

    Eric Folley: I've had a blog for a couple of years. Maybe it was something we could put up to get more content out there. The old Web site, as I call it, is mostly news releases, some longer feature pieces. There's a lot of stuff that our people see every day that can't be put out before the public. We were talking about this. After a week of writing HTML and the Perl code for the back end -- we didn't use off-the-shelf software -- we had the initial design and went back to the group. I was expecting us to get the name passed.

    Winer: What is the name?

    Folley: Kicking Ass. We launched it two days later. Our research department has gotten involved. We got the head of our delegate selection process involved. We got more and more people involved. Ironically, our communications team hasn't posted yet. They like it, but it's taken them a little longer to figure out what to do with it.

    We wanted to make it as painless as possible. 18 people have permission to post to the blog. You put something up on a staff blog and people have an hour to get back to you. An hour is a pretty quick turnaround time. One little piece of news that we did break was a story about a group that released a new study about Bush tax cuts and their impact on spending deficits. That's not something we would've done before we got the blog.

    Winer: Cameron, did you go after them, or did they come after you?

    Cameron Barrett: Until too long ago, I was going to Dean Meetups. I wasn't sold on Dean and started looking around. A former boss of mine whose now the director of technology at the Clark campaign asked me if I wanted to go down to Little Rock. I quit my contract job, and two days later, there I was.

    I've been involved in Weblogs for a long time. Like Matt, I find working on a political campaign extremely tiring but also exhilarating. And I plan to keep on doing it.

    Winer: You guys are recreating our political system. Let's try that out. How many comments did you say?

    Gross: We got 2,200. That doesn't physically bog down, but it's hard to read, so you keep it moving. A month from now, it's going to be even bigger. I've hired two assistants.

    Winer: No human being can read 1,000 responses. How do you spread this thing out?

    Gross: I don't know of any blog that's reaching this level of saturation. I'm a writer. What are some of the tools? When we win the nomination, how does one deal with the fact that you're going to become one of the largest sites in the United States?

    Winer: Let's assume you do become the nominee, what are you trying to accomplish with your blog?

    Gross: It's the same message of the candidate. The only way to defeat George Bush is for everyone to become involved and join the dialogue. It really is a two-way street.

    Winer: Does it pay for itself? How much has the Dean campaign raised online?

    Gross: I don't know the final numbers, but maybe $12 million this year.

    Barrett: The Clark finance numbers aren't public yet, but I can say that two thirds of the money was raised on the Internet.

    Winer: Cam, do you have any advice for your competitors?

    Barrett: We're going to run into the same problem Matt mentioned: Too many comments on a single post. Use the comments to your advantage and get those people to start their own Weblogs.

    Christopher Lydon: Is any candidate bloggable?

    Barrett: They need to have a personality, be able to write well, and have something to say.

    Question: What happens in the back room?

    Barrett: It has to be personal.

    Gross: I'd agree. On the Dean campaign, there is no committee discussing what goes on the Weblog. What attracts me as a writer to the blogosphere was that as an op-ed writer, the blogosphere has a 15-minute news cycle. That's what's exciting. It's constantly moving. When you slow that down, you reduce the other attraction of the blogosphere, which is the uniqueness of the voices that are out there. There may be multiple voices on a team blog?

    Winer: Do you think the DNC blog is a blog?

    Barrett: Yeah. It's a good blog. But when the DNC Research Team posts, I'm not interested because I don't know who they are.

    Folley: We want people to use their names, but Research fought that and wanted to post as a division.

    Gross: The chief blogger is the chief communicator between people who leave comments and the people running the campaign.

    Jones: People don't care about policy. People don't have time to know about policy. This is a way to build community and buzz.

    Gross: If you're a hierarchical campaign with the command at the top, the captains and the lieutenants, and it just goes down, the blog is nothing but window dressing. Blogging is revolutionizing presidential politics, depending on the internal politics, is the commenting. You get real-time feedback, and you know you're talking as though you're in the room in Burlington HQ. And you are. It used to be that maybe you'd send an email. May make a phone call. Now what you have is lateral communication at the national political level. Certain phrases, things, and ideas come up to us.

    Question: I see blogs right now just as buzz. This is the first election in which they're being used, and we haven't seen any results. To be honest, I'm affiliated with another campaign.

    Winer: Which campaign?

    Gross: Be honest.

    Question: Edwards. And if we're only reaching 2% of the population, that's not going to win us a campaign.

    Gross: One of the things that's been interesting about the Dean blog is that 70-80% of the people who have come to our site didn't know what a blog was. At the same time, you need to treat bloggers as opinion makers. They have influence.

    Dan Gillmor: Expand on that a little bit. The Dean campaign has embraced a lot of stuff they're not responsible for. You've been thrilled with the other people out there. The Clark campaign has not, at least reportedly, treated independent bloggers as well as they would have liked.

    Barrett: I wasn't involved in the rift between the Draft Clark campaigns. But I do know that there was a problem legally between one of the Draft Clark campaigns and the main campaign -- and one journalist decided to make a story out of it.

    Question: When your candidate wins, what happens to the blog?

    Gross: It becomes the White House blog.

    BloggerCon 2003: Interlude II

    Feedster's BloggerCon Buzz might be the best one-stop shop for BloggerCon confblogs.

    Mapping Media

    Ethan Zuckerman, whom I haven't had a chance to say hello to yet today, is working on a project that tracks global media attention. He maps what countries newspapers and media outlets such as the Washington Post are paying attention to, color coding them to indicate how "hot" they are. He's been tracking global media attention since late June. Fascinating!

    Update: Just said hi to Ethan, who's heading to Hungary soon.

    BloggerCon 2003 VI

    Cluetrain 2003, the Second Superpower: Adam Curry, Christopher Lydon, Jim Moore, Doc Searls, and Elizabeth Spiers.

    Adam Curry once hosted MTV's highest-rated program, the Top 20 Countdown. Christopher Lydon founded the Connection show on National Public Radio. Jim Moore is a business and technology strategist who wrote The Death of Competition. Doc Searls is a senior editor for Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Elizabeth Spiers is the editor of Gawker, a Manhattan Weblog.

    Christopher Lydon: This session is kind of theory and practice, only there's no practice, just theory. The question is essentially the word "transformation." On a scale of 1-10, how big a transformation are we talking about? Doc, you're Mr. Cluetrain. You're in the locomotive. Where is the Cluetrain? Where are we going? Give us a number first.

    Doc Searls: Transforming what, exactly?

    Lydon: Reality.

    Searls: Before Cluetrain, I went through my archives and came across something called Reality 2.0. PCs and the Net have the capacity to vastly transform the ways we do things. Radio and television are going to be vastly changed by syndication, which is an old newspaper thing. I say 100%.

    Adam Curry: I view Weblogs a little bit differently. To me, it's just a tool. I see them just as revolutionary as the telephone. How are we going to use this tool? For radio and television, the transformation will be 100% The way your interviews are now distributed, I pick up my iPod, and it has the new Christopher Lydon interview on it. It's reverse Tivo.

    Lydon: Is it bigger than the fax machine? Is it as big as the railroad?

    Curry: Perhaps this is a start of connecting people's brainwaves? We're acting as human routers.

    Elizabeth Spiers: For me, it's kind of hard to say. I have such a granular perspective. I'm a media commentator on my blog. I get paid to navel gaze. The Weblog phenomenon has been unique for me because I'm generally a pessimist. People in the media are thinking about how to take advantage of the medium. To me, it's just a sophisticated extension of the Web.

    Lydon: You've even said that in a few years, having a blog will be just like having email.

    Jim Moore: This transformation is huge. Hotmail and Yahoo, most of their traffic comes from the third world. Go to Ghana, and you'll see 100-200 Internet cafes. Imagine those people blogging. That's a big deal. In Africa, there's a real interest in not letting the digital divide be bridged.

    Lydon: So you're a 10.

    Moore: I'm whatever number you want.

    Lydon: I want to take it beyond 10. Blogging is a fulfillment of the most classic American writer, Emerson, and his world of expressive individualism.

    Searls: I think the first blogs came from Benjamin Franklin.

    Lydon: Thomas Paine. I.F. Stone.

    Searls: Blogs are a form of collective journalism. What we're doing is deconstructing the Matrix. The Matrix is a metaphor for the media. We have received experience. There's a lot more in the blogs. People are bringing up stuff that no one else is talking about.

    Lydon: We're much too modest about what we've discovered in blogworld. Going to public radio or the New York Times is a step down. We've found a shit detector and relevance detector that will change the world. Jim, where's the power of the Second Superpower? They certainly lost the Iraq war.

    Moore: This isn't just an individual phenomenon. It's really a collective phenomenon. Howard Rheingold talks about smart mobs. What we need are wise mobs. You can't really blow up a society and then have a democracy spring up. We've made it worse for Jordan in terms of democracy by tearing things up. We need to understand our wisdom, accept our role, think of things like Joi Ito's emergent democracy.

    Searls: In 1974, the only outlet people had was to run to the window and yell. I want to see more bloggers in Baghdad. More Chief Wiggles.

    Lydon: What about mobloggers among the troops?

    Searls: Chief Wiggles is one. What we have is Yell TV and Yell Radio. I heard your interview with Paul Krugman. Then I saw him on TV, and he wasn't really allowed to say anything. He was the guy on the left fighting with the guy on the right. It's not that cut and dried.

    Moore: We need a system that allows for deeper and deeper truth finding. I respect diversity in the collective, but at any given moment, you need to assess the wisdom of that collectivity.

    Lydon: Do we want to talk about human nature?

    Question: Human nature argues against the utopian views expressed here. Networked communications has the power to find like-minded people. It's human nature to seek facts that agree with you. I'm optimistic, but I'm not that optimistic.

    BloggerCon 2003: Interlude

    So, I'm conflbogging BloggerCon 2003 today. There are so many people here tippy-tapping during the sessions, that I almost decided not to confblog at all. In the end, I am posting partial real-time transcripts of the talks as they progress. It took awhile for me to get online, but all seems set now.

    My reports are nowhere near as complete as they've been in the past, but you're welcome to check out the blogroll of participants. Or go to Dan Bricklin's photos and Kevin Mark's bootleg video feed from the front row. Plenty of documentation going on as we speak, so to speak.

    BloggerCon 2003 V

    Interview with a Blogger: Len Apcar, Scott Rosenberg, and James Taranto

    Len Apcar is editor in chief of the New York Times's Web site. Scott Rosenberg works for Salon. James Taranto writes the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web column. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:

    Rosenberg: James, do you consider Best of the Web a blog?

    Taranto: I describe it as a column in blog form. Rather than publish it at will as Glenn Reynolds does, I publish it once a day whenever I'm done. It's edgier than the typical newspaper piece, and in many ways, it's very much like a log.

    Rosenberg: It sounds like it's close enough to a blog. Is it edited by anyone?

    Taranto: I write the thing. I have an editorial assistant who helps me out. I post it to the site so it's not visible yet. I call an editor. If there's any institutional sensitivity, my superiors will ask to see a specific item, but in most cases, I make the final call.

    Rosenberg: How do the people you report to feel about the whole thing?

    Taranto: They seem to like it. I know my boss reads it every day.

    Rosenberg: Len, New York Times Weblogs. Is there anything going on like that right now?

    Apcar: I came here to get a sense of how we might go about this, be true to what we do, and still be something different online. We haven't done anything like this, but there are a couple of things I'd like to try online during the campaign. There's this opinion that editors are thought police. That's not true in thoughtful journalism, and it's not true at the Times.

    Rosenberg: There's a feeling that Weblogs are fundamental different from traditional journalism and that it's changing that world. You told us there's already a blog at the New York Times. Nick Kristof is someone who's had a long and distinguished career at the Times. This is someone who clearly is going to be doing work that you don't have to worry about in the same way you might if you gave this tool to someone else.

    Apcar: That being said, people make mistakes. If you read Kristof's blog, Kristof Responds, he corrects things he gets wrong. We're comfortable with that. I'd rather he correct it than ignore it.

    Rosenberg: Is that reflected on the formal corrections page in the Times?

    Apcar: No. Usually, columnists will correct mistakes in their columns. The correction area is the newsroom's. Also, I don't think we're ready to give over a blog to proprietary information about our editorial process and how, say, a headline is written throughout the day. Do we share this with journalism schools and visitors? Sure. But there's not a whole lot of argument debate or quantitative debate going on while choosing five or six headlines for the front page. We're not comfortable discussing internal discussions.

    BloggerCon 2003 IV

    Weblogs in Education: AKM Adam, Patrick Delaney, Lance Knobel, Jenny Levine, Kaye Trammell, and Brian Weatherson

    AKM Adam is an associate professor of the New Testament at Seabury-Western. Pat Delaney is a librarian who works with the Bay Area Writing Project. Lance Knobel was responsible for the program of the Davos meeting in January 2000. Jenny Levine is an Internet development specialist for the suburban library System in Burr Ridge, Illinois. Kaye Trammell is a mass communication doctoral student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. Brian Weatherson works in the department of philosophy at Brown University. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:

    Lance Knobel: What interests me about the Weblog world is that it's a number of largely disconnected spheres. There's very little connection between the worlds of people reading about journalism, people reading about economics, and people reading about political philosophy. We're going to discuss a variety of aspects of Weblogs in education, from K-12 education to serious scholarship. That's a tall order, but we have an interesting group.

    Delaney: I'm a high-school librarian and a staff developer for the Bay Area Writing Project. I use Weblogs in about six ways.

    Knobel: Are you doing things and people need to read you or are you encouraging people to use them themselves?

    Delaney: I'm a domain manager for a domain of people who use Weblogs.

    AKM Adam: I'm AKM Adam. I teach, I'm a homeschooling parent, and I'm a manager of an online site for theological researchers. I'm a personal blogger, as well.

    Brian Weatherson: I'm Brian Weatherson. I'm a professor at Brown University. I use blogs for two things. I have an old-fashioned writing notebook. And I have a blog of new philosophy that's been published on the Web in the last 24 hours.

    Kaye Trammell: I'm Kaye Trammell. I teach in the online journalism track at the University of Florida. Go Gators. I'm a doctoral student researching a certain kind of blog. I'm also incorporating blogs into our curriculum so students use blogs. I've also been instrumental in bringing blogs into a variety of curricula at the university for designers and students taking a technology and culture class.

    Jenny Levine: I'm Jenny Levine. And I'm a librarian. I work in the suburban library system in Illinois. I'm trying to get librarians to use blogging. I also do my blog, the Shifted Librarian.

    Knobel: Pat, you're using Weblogs for writing. What do Weblogs offer that other means don't? What's new?

    Delaney: K-12 teachers have very full plates. I call it digital paper. I don't call it Weblogs. What you can do with Weblogs is read, write, and research. As a representative of the Bay Area Writing Project, I don't care what people teach. They should be writing. We're moving from a paper classroom environment to a digital classroom environment.

    Knobel: The Web is a writer's medium.

    Delaney: And a reader's medium. And a researcher's medium.

    Knobel: Is it the ease of use that matters? Does the openness of it matter?

    Delaney: The bigger notion to that is the notion of audience. One of the fundamental problems of a teacher giving an assignment is that if the teacher is the only audience for a project, who gives a crap? With blogs, other people outside of the classroom walls have the potential of paying attention to them. The publishing aspect of traditional writing is embedded in blogging. 13-16 year olds love making their Weblogs look good. In the writing process, you get an idea, you brainstorm, you draft it, you get some feedback, you revise it, and you publish it. Bryan Bell does the same thing with themes. It was an amazing moment to watch seven blograts listen to Bryan talk about the way he does his work. That's how writers do their work.

    Adam: One of the peculiarities of my working environment in a seminary is that almost of my student expect to become clergy. The openness Pat mentions is something my students dread. What if they say something their bishop doesn't like? We need to compel students to express themselves in public. The leverage we've got is that they're all preparing to become public communicators.

    Knobel: This thing about getting caught… When I suggested Brian as one of the panelists, someone asked if he was tenured. If you're not tenured and you're blogging, is that a problem?

    Weatherson: Probably not in the way that you think. A lot of what I've written is faulty. That's OK. When I started, it was for a real micro-audience. But with Google and archiving and so forth, some of it can get back to whom you're writing about.

    Knobel: Kaye, with your students, is the openness of the Web an advantage?

    Trammell: Their perception is very different than mine. Students have always had very clear expectations about what they should write when they turn in a paper. When you're blogging, you're on their turf. Students know how to use the Internet. They're free to say anything they want, but then you put the constraints of the classroom over them. Students have to contribute to a personal or professional blog, and then they have to contribute to a class blog. In their professional blog, they'll say things they never would have said in their reporting classes. How can we transcend that?

    Knobel: There's an issue of decorum. Are you imposing that, or are they finding a different voice by the medium? I'm not sure what the problem is.

    Trammell: I'm opposing it. I'm the online editor, and I tell students the rules about the content I expect from them. They find a different voice. I encourage them to use that as their own personal commentary column. It's a fine line between what I expect and what they're giving.

    Levine: The public library has a blog on Blogspot for 4-6 graders about book reports.

    Kaye: It's definitely an evolutionary process. Do we give them lots of rules? It depends on what the role of the teacher is.

    Delaney: There are a couple of issues we're dealing with. One is legal. You have to be careful about ID'ing students. In my district, this is all so new that no one's blown the whistle on any major gaffs that have happened. It'd be good for the education to learn about what SIPA and COPA mean for grade schools. School admins are overworked. If something bad happens it's very easy for the admin or a parent to go to a superintendent and shut that blog server down.

    Knobel: Does it diminish the value to put it behind a wall?

    Delaney: We used blogs in a summer writing camp. The first year, we assigned teachers to the Weblogs. They went into the Weblogs and responded to the kids. The next summer, we didn't have as much money and not as many teachers responded. We asked students to comment on each other. People were upset that people in North Dakota weren't reading their poetry or that people in California weren't telling them how cool they were. You have to earn your audience.

    Trammell: That publicness is one of the most important things we have going for us. There's a two-person relationship between a student and a professor when you're writing your paper. The student can allow quality to drop. If it's on a Weblog, it's public. Anyone can read it. I pitch it that everyone is reading it. Potential employers. Your mother. The chair of the department. It makes them think more about the work that they're producing.

    Delaney: Someone on the journalism panel talked about localization. In school, you might not get someone in North Dakota.

    Levine: Then there's what people were saying about critical evaluation of the people that you're reading.

    Question: If students are writing for the public and we scale this up, students around the world are producing a large part of the content for the world. That's extraordinary. Students become authors.

    David Weinberger: Should everyone learn how to blog as a life skill? Or is it like singing, and not everyone should do it public?

    Delaney: I don't call them Weblogs. It's digital paper. I want people to learn how to use digital paper as a writer, a reader, and a researcher.

    Trammell: Should it be a lifestyle? What blogs offer is a voice to every person who wants to have it heard. Little Kaye Trammel from Kansas can have a voice and have her voice heard. How you critically think about what happens in your world make everyone better. I want students to learn how to use the medium in a way that won't get them fired.

    Levine: You're not going to get this without information literacy. When you talk about kids doing research, going out, and finding links, they shouldn't just use Google. There are databases that libraries license.

    Delaney: It's not quite there yet. Yeah, everybody who has a certain amount of money and school districts that have a reliable server admin have access.

    Ethan Zuckerman: One of the major obstacles at Harvard is a pretty aggressive privacy policy. For technical reasons, we've decided to make student blogs only accessible within Harvard. Is this something we need to be aggressive about to make sure these are blogs and not just class reports?

    Weatherson: If you give students the right to use pseudonyms, it gives students the option. People might say it goes against the public nature, but very few students do it.

    At this point, my attention wandered, and I turned to continuing to try to get online.

    Knobel: I don't know if we can make any real conclusions. But there seems to be tremendous belief and pent-up energy about the potential of Weblogs in education. You're going to have a radical shift of expectations from students, from parents, and from teachers.