I'm at the Thursday blog group meeting at Harvard's Berkman Center. I send my thanks to the generous providers of the LOBBY7 open wireless network.

There is an interesting blog comparison chart at: http://www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm

Dave wants there to be a chart like this, only more thorough. I should talk to Lisa about getting BlogTips off the ground. With the pagebuilder and my checklist module, it would be easy to host this on frassle. I'm reluctant to offer that suggestion right now, because I don't want to toot my own horn. But in any case, I want blogtips and the blog feature comparison to go somewhere soon. Maybe it can be a project for this long weekend.

Yahoo! Groups has RSS feeds! Check it out on the rss-users list. This is pretty cool. Is it the counter-effort to Google's groups with Atom feeds? How long will it take for the assinine RSS/Atom rivalry to realize its own banality? I will speculate no more.

I'm still at the meeting, and this post will be updated, but I am going to save it for now.

How about an attendance list? It's 7:43pm and Bob Stepno just walked in. Jack Hodgson is to his left, Vernica Downey (sp?) next, Sarah Horton, Ben Gross, Jessica Baumgart, Garrett Eastman, Bill Ives, Sun, me, and Dave Winer.

Apparently Katie Hafner has an article about how addictive blogs can be in the New York Times. We briefly continue poo-pooing it for being so lame. I hear telephones are addictive too. Bob Stepno has a satire.

Dave asks who has applied for DNC press credentials. Bob and Dave have, and Bill wants to apply. The deadline is tomorrow, according to Jessica. Bob suggests going there and talking to the DNC about the decision process. If the application review process is geared toward small newspapers, what will their process be for individuals?

Dave confirms that spammers can't harvest email addresses off the Harvard blogs. This is by design. My email address is in plaintext on every page of my blog. Do I enjoy spam? I should install some better spam filters.

Cause of much laughter at the meeting: Letterman's top ten things you'll never hear on the Sopranos. Also in text.

Bob asks about New York Times permalinks. The story with those is that if you simply browse to some article on the New York Times homepage, and save a link from your browser's location bar, you will get a link that expires. For a while, you can read from that link, but then the NYT site requires would-be viewers to pay for archive access. However, if you have a link with certain magical extra text on the end of it, you can get a page that serves the full article, for free, forever. A handy tool exists to convert vanilla links into permalinks. Some experimentation during the meeting has revealed that the value of the PARTNER parameter in the URL is irrelevant, you can switch &PARTNER=GOOGLE to &PARTNER=USERLAND or &PARTNER=GOD all you want. I think we should write love letters to the NYT web team this way.

During a lull, I asked about ideas for getting a blogging/KM system bootstrapped for my software development group at work. CRM tools might offer some ideas for me to get a weblog-style KM system running at work.

  • ePeople is one, suggested by Ben.
  • Bill Ives will point me at a case study about Reiter(?), something with an intuitive UI and a campaign to evangelize the system and get people committed to using it.

I guess there are no simple answers, but I'm hoping I can get something started, with not too much effort. I'm still kinda on the fence about whether to build my own thing or install something off the shelf. But really, I just need to get started with something that I can grow over time. I'm writing to Bill Ives for more information because the rest of the group didn't seem too interested.

Dave is showing off his Radio Upstreaming. Whole Wheat Radio? That's two different kinds of Radio, by the way.

Doh, lost wireless connection! Woot, got wireless connection! Thanks, "linksys"! Dinner at the Bombay Club.