July 2006

Technorati Tags: blogher, bloghercon, blogher06

Yes, there were some not so great moments at Blogher.  Life is like that, so why should Blogher be any different?  Luckily the things that weren’t so great were pretty unimportant.

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Names of people who signed up (all of these did not join us – if your name is here and you attended, could you leave a comment here please and include your blog url if you have one.  If you joined us and your name is not on the list, again leave a comment w/ your url so I can add you. If your name is misspelled, leave a comment, please.  Some names were difficult to read on the sign in sheet.)

Lianne

Kim

Barbara

Liz

Steve

Barbara

Cynthia

Anne Marie

Laura

Laurie

Judy

Gena

Marisa

Topics mentioned or discussed

-Using blogs to help ESL students maintain their language skills (specifically someone who taught English in China)

-Using blogs in corporate world (GM and their children’s information area)

-Using blogs to bring information and discussion to the generation who has music videos, advertising, tv etc… books aren’t getting the message to this generation

-Connecting blogging at all levels of education – from elementary, to middle school to high school to college. 

-Blogging for learning disabled and special needs kids (and their parents)

-Teaching people who are afraid to use the "back button" on their computer to use blogging tools

-DOPA – extensive discussion about what passing DOPA would mean now, and in the future (breeding a second class group of citizens)

Here are some links

Further contact

I have email addresses and urls for some of you, but not for others.  If you would like to connect with someone from the BoF list, please leave a comment or send me an email at dtanton @ gmail . com  I also have some ideas for a few of you, know people who might have an interest in your topic.  Please contact me and let me know if you’d like to be connected. 

Technorati Tags: blogher, birdsofafeather, edublogging

Blogher Chat is Up and I am in there at the moment.  I’ll probably go in and out all day.  🙂

I love chat.

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Tagging, Tracking, Structured Blogging  Charlene Li and Marnie Webb

What is tagging?  a keyword or a label given to something (photo, link, podcast, blog post) to help organize material online.  Assigned casually, not as a part of a formal taxonomy that you have to rigidly follow.  Adhoc nature of tagging, sort of like your bookmarks – where did I put that link? which folder did I use?  (a bookmark folder is like a tag for organization)

What’s the difference between a category and a tag?  A category is a type of tag.  "Tagging" allows a deeper level of categorization – he tags house, she tags home.  (you can have a recipe category and then tag specific recipes based on what type of recipe you’re focusing on)

Jess (just say jess/chirky) – is it possible to put an invisible tag on your site (keywords in typepad can do)

Video doesn’t have text that can be searched, so if you add tags the video then becomes searchable.

Tag clouds?  Navigation – most popular tags.  ordered alphabetical and then size of words indicates most popular "tags". 

Metadata – if tags categorize one piece of content, metadata is data about data.  Keywords tags together form metadata.  iTunes  has metadata, type of podcast, duration, author, explicit content – structural info about an item.

Delicious = social bookmarking.  Public bookmark folders, sorted by tags or keywords.  Richer way to organize bookmarks.  You end up with 200 tags and you forget how you tag – use mom once and then mother another time.

Are there any conventions about dealing with synonyms.  Different words for the same thing is good – conveys information about the topic.  (Saying coke, pop and soda makes it hard to find content but the fact that there ARE multiple words and phrases for something is important. )  Search engines are beginning to build in synonym toggles.  "Related tags" often helps with this.

Keywords can be tags, tags can be keywords – it depends on how you’re using both.   

Argument about keywords and tags.  Context of tagging is IN and keywords is OUT – keywords is isolation, tagging is socialization.

(Can I just say this is fun?  The whole keyword tagging frustration thing is fascinating.   I think we need Badger in here with her post it notes to teach tagging, because these folks just don’t get it – and adding keywords in is causing more confusion and even mentioning categories is muddling things.)

Amy Gahran has a dream – to see a search engine that pulled together all of the tags on the internet.  Technorati does to a small extent.  Try Tag Fetch.

Here’s the link to the technorati tag bookmarklet

Charlene liks Furl – (I prefer spurl but I also toss my spurls into delicious).  Furl saves a complete copy of the web page which is something spurl does not.   Furl (and spurl) allow you to hide links private – apparently delicious has this too. 

Marnie likes del.icio.us because it is serendipitous – she has fun exploring topics, watching the folksonomy, following hidden pathways.  Not organized search, meandering activity particularly in new topic wanderings.  Use a tag that a her "group" knows – they all ues the tag to share data.  (like nancy white uses communityindicators)

"Structured blogging – microformats" – microformats is the standard used to map content.  structures blogging is the front-end.  How do you create microformats?  Templates offered on sites.  Mashups.  Yahoo local, Judy’s book, Meetup Edegio use microformats.   

hreview creator – paste the code onto your site.  (Charlene doesn’t recommend) Plugins for wordpress and moveable type.  Find them at structuredblogging.org

Technorati Tags: blogher, tagging, bloghercon, blogher06

Lisa posted writing assignments for this panel.  This room has had connection problems so I may not be able to post.  We shall see.

Lynn D Johnson (who I love – and had the pleasure of photographing in the convertible, heh)

Words are power.

Beth – having trouble moving from tech writing to blog writing.  What is blog writing?

Elke (I’m not 100% sure this is who was speaking, I think it was though)- anything you want it to be.  Techy writers, politics, daily writing (it’s her email to everyone, her party chat) no rules, tell as much or as little as you like.

Dina – conversations with dina – it’s about conversations.  I write like I’m talking to people.

Cross Left. Org (progressive Christian Site) … I write because I can because I want to because I must.  Passionate about … change we want to create in the world.  Through words we have the power to create change and inspire people.

Ten Types

Readers

Presentation

Word choice

Conversations

Headlines

Attribution

Link blogging

Essay Blogging

Question and answer

Reviews and how tos

~~

As a publisher, you know what you want your words to "look like" but people are using various types of devices to read you so your words aren’t going to look the way you want them to look. But you want to think about the reader.  The layout and presentation are important.

Writing on the web art or science? Both – words are the identity. 

Readers – how effective are you?  your readers know – ask the readers, ask for feedback, listen to the feedback.  Keep it in perspective.

Word choices — choose your words for clarity, professionalism, voice, punctuation, profanity, buzz.

Do you want to have a conversation, or not.  If you don’t want to let people’s voices be heard, then why have comments?  If you aren’t going to interact, then why have comments?   Colleen Lemasters – legal made her close comments and won’t let them screen and then post.   They worry due to winery, alcohol (Sutters Wine) – 21 or older, but they still worry.   Visitors can email her and she’ll reply via email.   

Annette  (I think this is audio that Professor Kim did with Annette) – Rosie & Star article.  When she visited Rosie’s blog, she wanted to see the comments she got about her comments regarding Star.  Rosie closes comments so she thinks it’s cowardly.   

Verymom – if you’re writing a personal website and you get mean people that say awful things…. when I turn them off, I miss the friendship and interaction. But sometimes it’s just too much so you have to close the comments.  Lisa is talking about people who’ve put up blogs that are anti-Rosie, in response to what she says on her blog.   

Ane Marie – Citizen Mom’s family journal… not a real blog.  No comments.  "Dupont" – people can email her and will sometimes send emailed comments – but it isn’t blogging because there are no bloggers.  She’s totally gotten rid of the childfree people on her personal blogs.

Chris foreman? I think is an author – she wasn’t aware that all blogs need to be a conversation…. does a blog have to be a conversation?  Reading an author’s journal, is that still a blog without comments?  Is that a website or something else.   Lisa says as long as you set reader expecatations, you’re ok.   

Amy Garhran is talking about conversational media now…. organizations, including news organizations, and they are really scared about comments.  They don’t like conversation – it’s we talk, you listen.  You don’t have to have comments to have a blog, but you can open up occasionally or in small situations – ease your way into comments, pick and choose your topics that allow comments.  (this was a big discussion and it was stopped before it really ended, because of time constraints. )

Minnie says curse when it’s appropriate and when it isn’t.  (So when is that?)  Having fuck in your headline is not going to bring people to you for the content you want them to come for, unless you’re blogging about fucking (sorry, no profanity rule broken today).   

Grace Davis says that using fuck, takes mommybloggers and parenting to another level – it breaks boundaries, its’ not about gingham and teddies.  Amy Gahran – listening to the Scoble podcast/Naked Conversations = Shel and Robert had to adjust the language on their blog to deal with the word naked and the comments/traffic it came. 

Someone else (?) -saying the word "shit" made her feel powerful long ago but now it just doesn’t.  Jory says Scoble named it Naked Conversations because he knew it would get traffic.  A music blogger says writers/musicians insist they have to be able to curse.  TW says she was reading a corporate blog and saw the word "ass" and she thought "can he say that????"  if it had been on a mommy blog she wouldn’t have thought twice but on that blog, was it appropriate?

Lisa Stone – how to write – once upon a time… and then one day, an event happens… (you can say as many "and then one days" as you want) and then there’s some resolution. And that’s how you write a story.   Chris Nolan – future of media.  Dana Boyd – columbine, myspace in her future of media.

Now Lisa’s "assignments" – writing headlines. 

Technorati Tags: blogher, blogging, writing, styles

Elise has tons of traffic – Simply Recipes and the Moveable Type Tutorial site .  Three pillars – content, community, technology.

Community brings your site alive.

You need to be useful, entertaining or timely – or all of the above in order to build traffic.  Be "useable".  Build something that has legs.  Value a year from now.  Build an asset or a database.

If you can’t write like Dooce then don’t try that.  Think about the skills you have.

Stay focused – if you want traffic, stick to your focus. 

You don’t have to post daily, just make sure you are compelling or posting quality content.  (101 cookbooks is an example)

Use images and photos.  Visual medium.

Write well – concise (keep your paragraphs short) , spell check, consider headlines (witty or boring SEO ie search engine optimized)

Polls, top 10s, contests, interviews, controversy.

Post what you’re proud of.  Write something you’re passionate about to avoid burn-out.

Link out, link out, link out.  The MOST important thing. 

Leave comments! 

Join online events, carnivals.  Connect with a community. (Kalyn’s Kitchen weekend herb blogging, week 43 – go Kalyn!  Now it’s so popular she only writes every other week but she STILL gets linked to every week.)   Be generous with your community of bloggers.  Put time into other people’s blogs, into your community.

Technorati this, email this, delicious this.  She emailed the Sacramento Bee about her food blog.  She got a cover article in the food section. 

Page Rank – algorhythms for search.  (GOOD: Links from other sites.  Links from sites with a high page rank. Text based content, not flash or images.  Use keywords in text, page title, subject lines.  HTML and header tags.  BAD: Links into spam, 404 errors)

Site Design – make it easy to load, easy to read, easy to find.  Page length and size under 100K.  Reduce clutter.  Colored backgrounds.  Eyetracking – focus on upper left corner, search bars, categories, check multiple browsers.  Careful with font size (and type and color)  Screen Resolution 800×600 is what more people are using. 

RSS – Personalized google (Elise likes it, I don’t.  If you’re gonna do it, there are better personalized homepages to use.  The only thing I like about the google one is that it’s better at picking up various TYPES of RSS feeds.  Netvibes is better even than google, I think.  )   Feedburner gives great stats.  Feedblitz, publish via email.  Turn your blog into an email newsletter.  Promote your feed with buttons.  Tags!

Don’t forget search engine bots are included in your bots.  1000 visitors doesn’t mean 1000 visitors, some of those may be search engine bots.

Number of subscribers, number of click thrus, individual page views  – in technorati, she cares about who is linking to her.  Server referrals also good.

~~Time for Questions~~

Heather at working moms dot com? or mommies.com?     (I didn’t catch the url clearly)  feedburner?  does it screw up anyone if I switch to feedburner?  Yes you need to redirect your original feed.  Typepad makes it easy.  If you are using something else, then you really need to follow the directions carefully otherwise you get this continuous loop. 

Ausha from parenthacks search engine recommendation to find blogs?  Elise doesn’t use google blogsearch – oh wait, when you want to search your own blog, put up a search box.  Elise likes google search bar. 

Amy Gahran (OMG CONTENTIOUSSSSSSSSSSSS – OMG!)  Leave comments is important and she has a good strategy on her Right Conversation.com or Write Conversation.com – no blog is an island.  (that was Amy’s way of building traffic and she’s a pro at this)

Kayln Denny – she sends people a list of recipes, by hand, every week.  Can she use feedblitz to do this?  Elise says yes.  That costs money at feedblitz, $10 a month.  Toby says put those recipes into categories but she’s on Blogger.  101 cookbooks uses a newsletter software thingy.  Constant Contact is what it is. 

Links to Elise’s presentation, as posted on Blogher: Intro, Content, Community, How do people find your blog

Technorati Tags: blogher, blogs, buildingtraffic, audience

So… You have this crazy idea…. community blogging with Nancy White – (OMG NANCY WHITE!  Heh.  Sort of live blogging, sort of not – depending on connection and whether I get so crazy listening to Nancy that I can’t concentrate. )

Get ready!  (Heh!  Flickr feed will have photos. ) Blurb blog books sponsored the panel – 5 minute presentation, gave us a sample book.  They need Typepad beta testers.  Contact them.

Buzz Marketing w/Blogs – Suzanna is talking now.  Introducing herself.  Talking about "tools". 

Nancy White handing out chocolate.  ’96 is when she started.  Interested in how people get together and do things they want to do online – over-passionate, is there is such a thing.

Lauren Gelvin – Center for Internet Society  – privacy, free space – Yale.  Answering any legal questions.  Working with women law students, creating a website for women law students. Women not being treated well by the guys.

Melanie Morgan – crazy person (in a cool way)  – started community for people of color 

Audience – examples of community:

Yvonne – lipsticking– marketing to women.  Connect via blogging.

Mommy Blogger Mary Tsao – mommies have come together through comments and blogging.  Daddyblogging?  There are daddyblogs. 

Myspace is a blog community for kids – Nancy’s son met, dated, broke up, made up all on line

Clutter museum – found community of women who blog anonymously in academia.  Graduate students blogging anonymously.

Maria Bennet – wiki – essays about plays. Too much spam in the wiki.  Moved to a yahoo message board and use blogs now.  Wiki as a tool for community. 

Beth! Kanter!  Community! Cambodian Blogosphere/Global Voices.  (I love Beth)  Her kids are Cambodian – she learns about culture through blogging to share with her kids.  Lost tooth story, Cambodian culture.

Jenn ____ – writing exercise, death in the family, post partum writing her way through it.  Offline community friends she encouraged them to start their own blogs to help them get through it.  Why do it? Why blog your way through these things?  To get similar views, to get different ideas and to just put it out there and know someone else was reading it, listening.  Now some of her offline friends are doing it.  Became better friends through blogging than they were "face to face friends" (this is interesting and I think this happens a lot…)

Mary Tsao wants to know how to set a community blog for offline people – you have a club, a blog would work great, how do you set up a blog? Get people started.

Someone wants to know how you get people together, to DO something ie citizen journalism.

How do you define a community.  The purpose.

How do you choose your technology for a group?

Legal aspects of wetting up a community blog around a brand. 

Strategy for seeking out local bloggers – metro bloggers. Jess (I have some ideas for jess, emailing her this week)

Liz Henry (OMG BADGER!  in the back!  I knew we should have sat back there, hehe) she wants people to introduce themselves.

How do you cultivate your community and then not burn out?

Jill Davis – how to encourage productive communication particularly in a controversial topic situation.  us/them.  Here’s the us/them stuff from sxsw

Parents group – things to do for kids.  targeted for non-bloggers.  2nd wave strategy.

Jewish fringe? Friends?  How to get more people involved.

What’s your primary motivation, when joining a group site.

Lauren is speaking – no site, in development.  Stanford law school (didn’t she say Yale first?)  There were problems with the guys not treating female law students well.  Inappropriate touching, guys going out and talking about the women, men speaking out in class and over-speaking the women.  This can’t be just a problem with Stanford.  How do we get in touch with other women, at other schools?    She’d attended Blogher and so they decided to start a group – ran into a lot of problems.  What was it gonna be about, what was the format? group blogs?  None of the women had blogged so it wasn’t as easy – she mentored them through the blogging process. Workshop with 15 different law schools – flew 2 women from each school and walked them through the process.  Laura Scott, Lisa Stone.   Her goal was to be able to walk away from it and be run by the students themselves.  It wasn’t her site, her vision – she wanted to set it up, give them the tools and training and walk away.    Two days – tension and friction about design and goals and guidelines.  Not the goal to be the best women’s politics site but could be the best women in law site.  Set some guidelines so you’re good at one thing, rather than a little bit of everything.   (Ping Vision aka Laura Scott set up forums/blogs to discuss what they wanted the site to be – got use to using the tools before launch. )  http://ms-jd.org  will be the site (it will be non-profit).

~~

New Media Collective – launched at black history month – people of color in the blogosphere. video, audio, photo.  She started because the real people site only had one person of color featured.   

~~

Suzanna inherently flawed community.  Technology questions – newbies.  "We talk, the get their info and then they leave."  Oh can I relate!  A lot of her "community" happens in email.  People ask questions in email, she connects people to each other.  Facilitating connections. 

~~

Nancy – Share Your Story – started as message boards.  These are the second wave people, she wasn’t sure Lee LeFever was right about giving them blogs.  She was wrong.  20K active users in a month.  No story goes unresponded to.  24 hours for a response.  webcrossing blogs. not great software but simpled it down.  community had the power, they told them what to add what to fix what tools weren’t working in the blogs.   

Bloghogs on Share – the community doesn’t like a bloghog, posting really often because they want to read every single person’s blog and they can’t do that if people post a lot.   Some troll-like behavior on the blogs.  They have health professionals who check to make sure people aren’t posting unprofessionally.  They have health professionals to encourage people to seek crisis assistance if they need it.

~~

We’re breaking off into groups to talk about real situations.  We can move to other groups.  Or start our own community.

Technorati Tags: blogher, bloghercon, blogher06, bloggingcommunity, onlinecommunity, nancywhite