Ebbs and Blogs

 Technology  5 Responses »
Feb 282008
 

One of the inter­est­ing ses­sions I went to at North­ern­Voice was the Blogs are Dead; Long Live the Blog­ger ses­sion facil­it­ated ably by Chris Lott. There’s a write-up on this wiki; as usu­al a lot of thought-pro­vok­ing stuff was said, only some of which I’ve found recor­ded. I’ve noticed changes myself over the last few years of observing part of the blog­ging world (by neces­sity, only a small part). 

I’ve noticed that lots of people aren’t blog­ging as much, or indeed any more, for var­ied reas­ons. Some spend more time on twit­ter, which scratches their com­mu­nic­a­tion itch, and effect­ively let their blog lapse. Some post no longer need to tell friends and fam­ily what they’re up to via a blog. A fair num­ber of crafters are on Ravelry and post their pro­jects there and don’t need a blog any more.

I’ve noticed changes in the blogs, too; maybe because many people whose blogs I read are using twit­ter et al for the more “trivi­al” dis­cus­sions and thoughts, the blog post­ings tend to be about weight­i­er sub­jects, or work-related. In many cases the tone is more form­al and (dare I say it) bor­ing; I’ve giv­en up on quite a few blogs that used to be fun to read, even if the sub­ject mat­ter was incon­sequen­tial, because they now are more weighty and ser­i­ous and not as enter­tain­ing. Or they’ve turned into col­lec­tions of links. The occa­sion­al link posts, with com­ments as to why those links are worth click­ing on, is fine, but I quickly tire of blogs that con­sist solely of links to oth­er blogs and art­icles. I really can­’t be bothered hanging on in the hope that the author will even­tu­ally come up with some­thing original.

One big excep­tion that I’ve noticed is the craft­ing blogs, which (not­with­stand­ing the people who’ve quit now that they’re on Ravelry) have much the same type of con­tent. I star­ted a craft­ing blog after join­ing Ravelry, and I know oth­ers who’ve done the same. Many crafters see their blogs as a refresh­ing change from work, delib­er­ately not talk­ing about top­ics out­side the bound­ar­ies, keep­ing the dis­cus­sion focussed (more or less) on the ser­i­ous craft­ing issues of types of yarn, wheth­er the knit­ted object will fit once it’s fin­ished, and the best way to cre­ate a par­tic­u­lar design or concept. Or just post­ing “I did this this way and this is how it turned out.” 

I don’t think the blog is dead; it’s just chan­ging as the concept dif­fuses out­side the circle of early adop­ters who are busy twit­ter­ing at each other. 

Bravery

 Conference  2 Responses »
Feb 252008
 

You can see bravery in places you don’t expect it to be needed. In the safe con­fines of a blog­ging con­fer­ence, for example. Read Meg’s post­ing, and Nancy’s response.

I was in that ses­sion, and where Meg was brave enough to tape her pic­ture on the wall, I was not. I threw it in the bin on the way out, cast down by my own inad­equa­cies. Strange how a ses­sion that seems easy and fun on the sur­face can trig­ger so much intens­ity inside.

MooseCamp 2008

 Conference, Vancouver  1 Response »
Feb 242008
 

Anoth­er nice Fri­day in Feb­ru­ary for Moose­Camp; some­how the Moose­Camp day man­aged to score nice weath­er two years in a row. This year’s Moose­Camp was big­ger than pre­vi­ous years, and I think we’re get­ting to the lim­it of how many people we can take without los­ing some­thing. We also seem to be get­ting a lot more people who are inter­ested more in com­mer­cial aspects of blog­ging and social media than the per­son­al side, so I’m not sure how that’s going to play out in the future either.

I spent much of the morn­ing on the t‑shirt and regis­tra­tion desk until things settled down, then went to the mul­ti­lin­gual ses­sion, mostly since I occa­sion­ally won­der wheth­er (I should try blog­ging in Ger­man as well as Eng­lish. There were quite a few people in the room, but it turned out that only two of us were inter­ested in the sub­ject for a per­son­al blog; every­one else was inter­ested in the sub­ject for a cli­ent, or for their com­pany. Which isn’t bad, and I’m sure the oth­er people in the room were glad to know that sev­er­al oth­ers were inter­ested in the cor­por­ate aspects of the sub­ject, it was just of less interest to me personally. 

Pho­tocamp took the first part of the after­noon; inter­est­ing as always and some decent tips on light­ing, even for the few of us who use little pock­et cam­er­as (there were some ser­i­ously big cam­er­as on show).

I spoke in the last part of the inter­net boot­camp. The talk I’d pre­pared was meant, in good uncon­fer­ence fash­ion, to be reas­on­ably inter­act­ive. James agreed to help out, since he also found the top­ic inter­est­ing: What Next? The idea was to talk to people who’d been blog­ging for a little while and wanted to take their blog to the next level; I was primed with top­ics such as broad­en­ing the focus versus nar­row­ing it, how the tone and style of blogs tend to devel­op, what effect incor­por­at­ing work top­ics often has, mul­tiple blogs versus one blog on mul­tiple top­ics. A few minutes in it became really obvi­ous that people wer­en’t inter­ested in the sub­ject, and when I asked why they were there, almost all were inter­ested in fig­ur­ing out how their com­pany should start blog­ging, or make their com­pany blogs more effect­ive. So in even bet­ter uncon­fer­ence style, I changed the sub­ject and star­ted talk­ing about how Sun had imple­men­ted blog­ging. Most people seemed much hap­pi­er with that sub­ject, and we dis­cussed a lot of related issues. For­tu­nately it was the last ses­sion of the day so the fact we then went over time did­n’t seem to upset too many people. 

Retreating Fibre

 Crafts, Travel  No Responses »
Feb 202008
 

I went to my first fibre retreat ever over the week­end (actu­ally, a four-day week­end, includ­ing Valentine’s Day, which struck me as iron­ic). The organ­isers of the retreat did a great job, giv­en that the hotel was being ren­ov­ated, with some of the res­taur­ants and pub­lic spaces closed, and work­ers crawl­ing over much of the rest of the hotel’s pub­lic spaces. It was run just like a tutori­al-style con­fer­ence, with three-hour classes where the instruct­or talked a bit, showed a tech­nique (for tech­nique classes) or samples of end res­ults (for the artist­ic ideas classes), and then got you to try it out while they came around and helped. There were lots of tables set up for inform­al get-togeth­ers, out­side the classrooms and the marketplace. 

The dif­fer­ences to tech con­fer­ences were obvi­ous — not a laptop to be seen, although I’m sure some people went back to their hotel rooms at the breaks to blog or check email, giv­en that many people appeared to work at loc­al tech­no­logy com­pan­ies, and the male/female ratio was even more skewed than for most tech con­fer­ences (I saw about five men at the retreat, out of about 200). The mar­ket­place was busy selling as well as show­ing (unlike exhib­it halls at most tech con­fer­ences), though the vendors looked just as exhausted by the end of the four days as I can remem­ber being after long days on the booth at any oth­er conference.

I learnt a lot (I’ll post more details of the knit­ting high­lights on my craft­ing blog), saw a bit of Tacoma (where the retreat was held), met a few people, and hung out a lot with Eve and Yvonne. Culin­ary high­lights included a yummy din­ner at Wild Ginger where we downed a good bottle of cham­pagne (Inflor­es­cence Blanc de Noirs brut, 100% pinot noir, from Jean-Pierre Bouchard and Cédric Bouchard), Eve’s home-made bore­kas, and a good quick tagine, which I’ll be mak­ing again. 

I’m slowly catch­ing up on sleep; just like any con­fer­ence it was pretty intense and was both invig­or­at­ing and exhaust­ing at the same time. 

Twitters

 Technology  No Responses »
Feb 182008
 

I’ve been try­ing to post a little more to Twit­ter, not that I’m brave enough to have a pub­lic feed des­pite the non-inter­est­ing tone of my twit­ters (yes, I know they’re meant to be called tweets, but twit­ters sounds more appro­pri­ate to me some­how). And then I noticed some­thing trundling by on the pub­lic feed and clicked on it. It’s the Sydney (Aus­tralia) traffic report, in twit­ter format, which I think is a great idea! sydneytraffic, pulled togeth­er by someone who calls him­self Adam. Are there oth­er use­ful twit­ter streams like this out there? 

Energy Deprivation and NorthernVoice

 Conference, Vancouver  No Responses »
Feb 112008
 

There’s some­thing about these grey gloomy days that saps my energy. I’m still here, just not blog­ging much. I do post occa­sion­ally to my craft­ing blog, that seems easi­er some­how than this “main” blog. I’ll have to think about what that says about my blog­ging right now. I’m hop­ing that going to the North­ern Voice con­fer­ence at the end of next week brings back some of my blog­ging energy.

Oh, if you were think­ing about attend­ing that con­fer­ence, and haven’t yet registered, you’re too late. We have a couple of spots left for Moose­Camp on Fri­day Feb­ru­ary 22nd (which is when I’m speak­ing, in the Inter­net Boot­camp), but the Sat­urday con­fer­ence is full. The sched­ule is look­ing great, we don’t have to trek across cam­pus in the rain for lunch like last year, since lunch is provided, and I got my flu shot already in case the dreaded lurgy strikes again. So I’m all pre­pared. Except, of course, for my talk, but I’ve got over a week to get ready for that.

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