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02/09/2004 Entry: "Dave Winer in Redmond Report"

I'm glad that I took the bus to Redmond and met up with Jack at his building. Because of that we were at the .NET dev user group early, when Dave Winer was talking to just a few folks, so I was brave enough to go up and say hi to him. If the room had been crowded and busy I'm sure I'd have said hi to Robert Scoble and thus met Dave indirectly. There was desultory chatting and hanging out until the room was filled with .NET folks; I thought I'd be the only woman for a while but it ended up with about 5 percent of the female persuasion in the crowd. I spoke with Joshua Allen and waved to Jim Blizzard.

First on the agenda, after introductions of the user group board, was asking the audience if anyone had jobs to offer, wanted a job, or had a technical question. Very sensible, and if I'd been more in the habit of going to user groups I'd have been expecting this. Jack actually had several answers to people's questions (and signed up as a user group member before the meeting).

The pizza arrived late but tasted good. They wisely switched the program order so that Robert and Dave were first instead of making east-coast Dave wait until eleven pm in his time zone. Robert listed the five pillars of blogging, then went into how RSS and syndication (the fifth pillar) were getting so big these days. What is RSS, what's an aggregator, and so on. Dave showed what an actual RSS file looks like. Dave also allowed as the ideal UI for aggregators hasn't been created yet, but he likes the one he wrote pretty well. General blogging questions, blogs and security (Jack and I simultaneously called out "Comment spam!"), business uses of RSS (I'd have liked to hear more about non-blog uses of RSS), what about Atom.

Joshua's Better Living Through Software and Tim of Jarrett House North have details on some of what Dave said to internal MS audiences during the day. I like Tim's comment: "It was interesting seeing how tightly tuned the Microsoft crowd was to issues of blogging platforms (e.g. SharePoint vs. LiveJournal vs. other platforms) and less to the social impact of blogging, both inside the organization and on society as a whole, which seemed to me to be rather more along the lines of Dave’s point."

Sounds good and Jack agrees, so we'll be there. yum, Crossroads!

Posted by Anita @ 02/10/2004 09:38 AM PST

Hi Anita! Good to see you last night! Hope you'll be able to make it to the Nerd Dinner tonight. :)

Posted by bliz @ 02/10/2004 06:02 AM PST