Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

There will be no Webcast.

Agenda

Notes:

Proposed agenda:

• Please note the new IRC channel: #berkmanbloggroup
• Miss the Redhead
• Report from the ABCD WWW working group meeting, Oct. 13, 3:30-5pm, Lamont Library Forum Room
  • j’s notes
  • j started with the question of whether a blog is better than a discussion group
    • BI talked about a group of doctors considering using a blog instead of a discussion group
    • SR: blogs are often associated with one person, but discussion groups aren’t necessarily considered one person’s property
    • What about feeds? But if people are checking their e-mail and not using an aggregator …
    • MF: equal contributors versus one person doing most of the contributing, which often seems to happen on group blogs
    • MF: easy to link to sources and whatnot on a blog, uploaded files, etc.
    • RM: archive could be important, especially in settings where there’s high staff turnover
    • DW: will people consider the timestamp on something, like a blog written when someone was 18 when she’s 36 now?
• JD: working with groups that need a variety of software tools, like blogs and discussion lists and calendaring and Web sites, etc. In the near future, will these things be more integrated into one system?
  • SR: check out things like Drupal and TikiWiki
  • MF named a number of tools in the education market
  • GR said technology is behind in this area
  • JD maybe I’ll just put together an interface over these different tools
  • SR worked on something similar at Williams College
• A more formal report from OSCOM, if OSCOM participants are present
  • SR: OSCOM was great, there were about 60 people, we partied every night
  • GR: we went to the industrial area to party
  • RM: how was the presentation
  • SR: my laptop crashed, we reduced the Frassle demo time to five minutes, Josh showed off the publisher, of course we showed off the categories
  • RM: did you get a lot of feedback?
  • SR: yes we’re going to use Frassle for the OSCOM aggregator. The idea is to take the subscription list on Planet OSCOM, run it through Frassle to find related feeds, then run it back to Planet OSCOM
  • DW: were people interested in using Frassle for things you didn’t anticipate?
  • SR: sort of
  • BI: do other platforms have sophisticated categories like Frassle?
  • SR: perhaps the latest edition of Movable Type
• GR: Followup to the calendaring talk: Marc Canter is interested in talking to our group, but we’d have to do it long distance: conference call or something.
• Registration for presentations on blogging given by a number of Berkman blog group participants for a local professional association has begun.
• Shimon’s discussion questions
• David Weinberger suggests getting more examples of academic uses of weblogs
  • Maybe we should create a wiki where everyone can list innovative uses of blogs, especially blogs in education, so we can quickly share nifty resources with others.
• What else?
• Eat
  

  • Last week we went to Bombay