Slamma jamma 

Anne Zelenka's idea to do a podcast jam for Office 2.0 fits right in with the stuff I've been working on over the past few days.

I try to be ruthless 

When I moved a few weeks ago I swore I would not keep things around if I don't use them. I'm doing pretty well, but I get sentimental. Today I almost pitched a tool box the little guy made in Cub Scouts when he was about 7. It's heavy and bulky and unsanded with a big scratchy rope for a handle. At the last minute I looked at the babyish way he'd scrawled the word "tools" with a red marker on the side, and it was so charming I couldn't bring myself to part with it.

The "s" is so wobbly and uncertain that you believe it must be backwards, then have a hard time figuring out if it is or not. Or, I do, anyway. Any other dyslexics out there?

Everything is not dead, but everything is all broken and backward 

Doc Searls penned a long round-up on the insideoutness of identity, data and conferences on the Linux Journal site. I'm with Doc; I'm sick of marketers running the world. Get them out of my way, and I'll be happier. If companies would only realize it, they could get happy too; they could do things lots cheaper if they abandoned some of their bloated, layered, old-style marketing research and messaging and marketing communications ideas and "systems."

Nice after-conference archive 

Here's a well-organized conference page for the NetSquared conference held in May. I''m listening to a recording right now.

The organizers went to a lot of trouble with the remote conference experience, having chat with planned chatroom guests. Nice. Again, though, it's all in the past tense on remote conference archive page. Game over. This is such a common practice and attitude that I vacillate between thinking I'm onto something with the asynchronous conference project, and wondering if the real time bias is too strong to challenge.

What's the barrier? 

The way I see it, the live aspect has important "being there" value -- kind of like that shared experience thing you feel when a movie you like is on TV and you find yourself sheepishly getting a little excited about it, and watching it, even though you have the DVD and you can watch it anytime you want? For me it counts for no more than 20 percent. Otherwise, as a remote participant, what does it matter when I dig into it?

There's some block and I can't quite put my finger on what it is. I think IT Conversations tried message boards and I don't know if they took off or not because weren't they for members only?

One reason might be the blog vs message board divide. There is one, don't you think? The camps have some crossover, but for the most part their campers don't get each other. If you buy that, you might also buy this stretch: blogs and bloggers and blog readers live in the same family tree as podcasting and podcasters and podcast listeners. If you listen to spoken-word mp3 files found online, you just might not be a message board kind of person?

If you'd like to help me think this through, I suppose you could post to a message board (ha!) -- on my new Moodle site. I don't have a general one set up yet, only the one forum associated with the Jay Rosen session, the only conference session I've set up so far. Maybe I'll set up a separate course for suggestions on the general concept, and use the forum that gets created automatically when a new course is made. I suppose I ought to think about changing the language file in Moodle to substitute "course" with something else, but I don't know what. It might not even be possible to make a global change through the language files, since the course is the central organizing principle -- it's a course management system after all.

Trying the wiki module for my new obsession 

I've been working on my experimental asynchronous, conferences in your jammies project.

I hadn't planned to use Moodle's built-in wiki until just this afternoon, but I think this is kind of neat. I'm plopping the docnography from Jay Rosen's BloggerCon session on "Users-Know-More-Than-We-Do Journalism" into wiki pages. People can follow along as they are listening to the audio file of the session, and they can help tidy it up, fill in details when Doc or Dave didn't know who was speaking, add links, pictures and video -- or even make their own quotes sound more erudite.

It's quite a bit of trouble, so you wouldn't want to tackle this unless the topic is worth dwelling on. I think this one is. Of course it's a lot less trouble than it would be if the docnography were not available.

It's a cool way to extend docnography, but the archive isn't the most important thing. All this stuff is available on the BloggerCon site. My real goal is to use the LMS as a place to talk about what was talked about at different conferences -- both for people who were there and people who weren't.