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Saturday, March 4, 2006
S'no job 
| | David answers with stats, and arrives at conclusions: |
| | So, okay, those subscribers could, and do, come and go as they please. However at least the connection has been made. The rest, the future from day X, then does depend on the blog writer - to write what they are interested in - and the new subscriber to make their own mind up if their reading interests line up. |
| | Content may be king, but connection is key. |
| | Seems to me you can blog for any or all of these (and probably other) reasons: |
| | - popularity or celebrity
- traffic
- occupation or preoccupation (with a job, a subject)
- self-expression
money- effect
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| | I don't blog for popularity, traffic, work or money. (That's my job at Linux Journal. Look under "Popular content" in the left margin and you'll see what I do.) |
| | Mostly I blog for effect. Specifically, to start or help move along ideas of one kind or another. Rolling snowballs, I called it, almost a year ago. |
| | I recently did Technorati (and to a much smaller degree myself) the favor of listing my favorite blogs. But my watchlist would be much more revealing. Everything on it is a keyword search. Because I follow subjects much more than blogs. |
| | The only blog I read every day is Dave Winer's. Partly that's because I've been reading Dave since he started me blogging in '99. And partly that's because Dave has news I'm interested in, and his take on things is always interesting and challenging. |
| | After that, there are a lot of blogs I'll read, but not in a routinized way. I've never much liked aggregation in browsers, though I'll hit my watchlists at Technorati and PubSub from time to time. |
| | Mostly I'm into subjects. Saving the Net. Radio (and what succeeds it, such as podcasting). Independent Identity. Linux. Open source. XRI/XDI. RSS. Unconferences. Environmental change. Usefulness vs. Use. (Just added: BarCamp.) Not sure how to do a "most popular" with that, or if it even makes sense. |
| | Mostly I want to put the subject-blogging idea out there, because it's so easy to default our consciousness constantly to the Old Way of looking at media, which puts top priority on popularity, celebrity, traffic and money. Some of us blog for other reasons. |
Jumping the snark
| | MashupCamp took what was a great thing, co-opted it and sold it out. I know, I was there. |
| | On news.com.com.com.com today, there¹s a pretty silly puff piece about the camp, focusing mainly on David Berlind, one of the organizers (who happens to work for the same company as the publication who published the article). |
| | The article talks about the unique nature of MashupCamp, how it was somewhat free-form, where the attendees created the experience as the event unfolded, rather than having it all planned up front. And the article makes it sound as if David Berlind invented the concepts. |
| | Ryan then proceeds to knock David for not following or crediting the successful BarCamp forumula. |
| | The formula¹s been repeated, too, with subsequent BarCamps in other locations - few, fast and cheap works. |
| | So, then comes MashupCamp, which is planned in 'a couple of months,' has corporate sponsors but still asks attendees for donations, has a closed attendee list (not all of which actually show up) and it gets billed as 'the new thing'. Please. This is ridiculous. |
| | So I gotta ask... Why knock David for what an article said about him? Why sarcastically suggest a puffing connection between between David and the article when all the evidence you've got is coincidence? Why knock one camp for not being a clone of another? Why "My camp is better than your camp"? |
| | David Berlind busted his ass to put together something not vendor-controlled that unavoidably involved vendors because vendor APIs were what was being mashed up. |
| | He wanted to get the thing together in a cheap place with wi-fi on short notice and did the best he could, which wasn't bad, considering. Yes, he got sponsors. Yes, he asked people to contribute to cover costs. But did he let sponsors run the show? No. They got to put on parties and give away t-shirts and stuff. BFD. |
| | Did he make money on the thing? No. |
| | Did he — and the rest of us — learn something from the experience? Sure. |
| | Should he (and others involved, like myself) have learned more, going in, from folks like Ryan? Sure. |
| | But why flame the negatives and dismiss the positives? |
| | Ask the developers who came and got to mash stuff up and move stuff forward if Mashup Camp was a Bad Thing, or if it failed because it didn't follow the BarCamp formula. |
| | Here's what's important: The old conference system is broken. We need to try out unconferences of all kinds, borrowing from some, experimenting in new ways. We've done it with BloggerCons, with BarCamp and with other efforts, such as a series of workshops on identity that I've been quietly involved with. |
| | Look, if you want to have the conference equivalent of a kegger, fine.* But if you have to book a venue, provide food, provide connectivity, power everybody's laptop, and otherwise provide an environment where everybody gets to participate and achieve some kind of progress at the event, you've got some organizing to do and some expenses to cover. Especially since most places with connectivity, power, food, space, parking and other conveniences are also in the conference-venue business and used to getting the big bucks that customarily flow through the typical conference mill. Cheaper alternatives involve trade-offs. It takes work to find them and line them up. |
| | BarCamp has a forumula, and that's cool; but will that formula work for every topic, every community, every location? |
| | Unconferences aren't a system. There is no one formula. So shouldn't their organizers give each other some room to try stuff out? For example, I really like the idea Dave Winer drew up recently (which I can't find right now, so maybe he'll jump in with the pointer [he did, and here it is]). Shouldn't we be giving each other helpfull feedback and not just dismissive put-downs? |
| | This is new territory. Pioneering is hard work. We should be helping each other out and maybe even having fun. Not starting range wars over who's got the best ranch. |
| | [Still later...] * The kegger remark was NOT about BarCamp. It was about one end of a spectrum of choices with little labor at one end and a lot at the other. Tara says that's what I meant. My bad... looking back at what I wrote, I can see why she took it that way... hopefully folks can follow the asterisk to here and see the clarification. So, my apologies to the BarCamp (and other 'camp) folks for any offense taken. |
| | [Still later again...] Tara and I exchanged emails and comments and I think things are calmer now. She's updated her post (last link above), just as I'm updating mine. |
| | Ryan responds too, with a point-by-point rejoinder. It's way late and I need some sleep before I get up and take a train to eTech in San Diego. Maybe if I run into some BarCampers there or at SXSW we can talk about it over some beers. (Or BarCamp Austin!) |
| | Alicia calls Ryan's response "pretty awesome", and adds two more points: 1) that MashupCamp was actually a hybrid event. Instead of a pure strain of BarCamp or "big conference" genes, it had a little of both. That¹s not a failure, it¹sŠwell, it¹s a mashup. Not to mention a sign that the camp gene has begun infecting other hosts, and the best way to get links is still talking shit. |
| | Credit: BarCamp has grown from one event to a serious grass roots movement — bigger, frankly, than I had realized — and the folks involved believe there's a lot the rest of us can learn from their experience. Me included. And I agree. |
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