Sunday, May 11, 2003

Dave, once more, this time on one of my recurring themes: Starting weblogs at universities. Here's how you get weblogs started at a university like Harvard or Dartmouth. First, know that universities thrive on having their experts visible outside the university. Not just publishing in academic journals, which most alumni don't read, but being called in as experts on radio talk shows, esp NPR. That's how you reach into their wallets, show them why they should be proud of their alma mater. Pride gets the money flowing. So how do you get your professors on the radar, as acknowledged experts who can communicate to everyday people? With a weblog of course. And then realize that other bloggers (like me!) are consumers of expertise. We need experts to turn to just like the radio guys do. So there's lots of value in staking out the still largely virgin territory of expertise flowing through weblogs. This was one of the key epiphanies at the dinner we had last night. But that's not all. Dartmouth is in a special position to flow information to and from the rest of the world about the New Hampshire primary. Student volunteers (aka interns) can train the people to use the software, and read what they write and find the nuggets for the rest of us. [Scripting News] The is one of the two big themes -- or one-and-a-half of the two big themes -- of A vision for the Web at Webster. 9:02:50 AM    comment []

Send Your Name to a Comet!. Today, we'll talk about a kind of collective action which doesn't use mobile or pervasive technologies, but only your browser. Here is an exclusive -- and free -- offer from NASA to put your name inside the spacecraft that will crash into Comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005. SPACE.com tells us the story. NASA has launched a campaign to send hundreds of thousands of names to comet Tempel 1 on board the agency's Deep Impact spacecraft. Deep Impact is the first deep-space mission designed to really reach out and touch a comet. Deep Impact's larger flyby spacecraft will carry a smaller impactor spacecraft. The impactor is expected to make a spectacular, football field-sized crater, seven to 15 stories deep, in the speeding comet. Carried aboard the impactor will be a standard mini-CD containing the names of comet, space and other enthusiasts from around the world. Check this column for more details on the Deep Impact program. And if you want to sign up, you can do it here until January 2004. [Smart Mobs] 8:59:20 AM    comment []

More Dave, on how Microsoft will move to win blogspace: Let's get ready, now. Their blogging tool will support RSS 2.0. Basic stuff like title, link, description, and maybe to be nice, a few extras like guid, category, and generator. Then they're going to define a namespace with poorly documented stuff the rest of us don't understand. Some of us will support Microsoft's extensions, others won't. Either way it won't matter. They'll be able to say they're supporting the standard and we won't be able to say they're not. And they'll add and subtract features unpredictably until users get the idea that it's safer just to stay with MS, and they'll own yet another market. Now get this -- it doesn't have to be that way. We could establish a profile of RSS 2.0 and implement strict compliance with that profile in the major blogging tools. We could give that profile a name, and jointly market it to users. Then when MS comes in, the users would know what to insist on. It would make history, it would be the first time a market anticipated Microsoft tactics, and took effective, preventive measures against it. Re-inventing RSS was a bad thing to do. I forgive you. Now fix it, quickly and let's get ready to survive the onslaught. I like the way Dave's thinking here. 8:57:38 AM    comment []