bloggerati in westville
I’m posting from the bloggers/MAIN meeting at the Rocket Club in West Asheville. There are more than three dozen folks in attendance.
Gordon Smith (screwy hoolie) did an intro, now Wally Bowen (MAIN/WPVM) is talking about his vision of a way to aggregate a readership for local blogs and citizen journalists.
***
Wally’s talking about grants available for citizen-journalism, and the idea of using new networking tools: cell phones, video cameras, content management, networked computers to create a new type of journalism and build community.
***
Now he’s talking about why “progressive” isn’t left or right, liberal or conservative, but rather top-down. Progressives are grassroots activists, from all walks of life … he mentioned Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican progressive.
***
Gordon: “Are you here to listen, or to share?”
he noted that people blog for a wide variety of reasons — political, personal, promotional, etc.
***
“BlogAsheville” said that the site just evolved. No particular goal.
***
Wally: talking about how we can utilize citizen journalism via WPVM. Also talking about how the consolidation of the Web is threatening net neutrality and the telecoms are getting their hands on all of our data. Using that data to build profiles of how people use the internet to use for marketing. Mentioned the Microsoft bid for Yahoo, the consolidation of data by Google, ATT announcing that they will be the internet copyright cops. He thinks congress will not be likely to enforce any regulation on those businesses.
***
Gordon talking about the unused TV spectrum that could be used for wireless service.
***
Greg Lyons: WPVM can offer a megaphone for the community. The relationship between the radio and the Web can be synergistic. He mentioned that Gillian Coates’ new show will in some ways be an audio blog. She concurred, that she will be doing street interviews.
***
too dark to identify people here in the bar, ideas being offered about ways to enhance, interconnect local blogs.
***
7:35
Wally talking about using the Web to keep people connected with legislative changes that affect the internet, about improving the aggregation of news to keep people in touch with local politics.
***
Up to four dozen in attendance now.
***
Shelly, from WPVM “Listen to Women” talked about need for more training on how to blog, tools that might be used.
Blog Asheville: said tried that at Bele Chere, teaching people basics.
Unidentified: have taught myself to use droople. I’m sure we could organize a one-time seminar at the West Asheville Library. Come on down, I’ll show you what you need to know.
***
My connection died for a while. some great conversation about the possiblities for organized blogging, anonymous blogstorms, etc. Paul Van Heden (“Brainshrub.com”) mentioned the current battle between “anonymous” and the Church of Scientology as an emblematic battle. He noted that the blogosphere could take on mainstream media in the same way.
At 8 p.m. the meeting devolved into conversation, pizza and drinking. Life is good.
Good meeting. I think we will have to have several like this to coalesce around a purpose. I want to know what the organizers hope to achieve; or what interested bloggers envision achieving. Some proposals were unrealistic and others seemed self-serving. My own unrealistic idea is to have a virtual meta-community network that mimics the “thinkmap visual thesaurus.” Perhaps, just an Asheville blogger wiki would do.
I do think we can leverage the talent and enthusiasm of local bloggers to make a blogger network the “go to” place for news, opinion, activism, the arts, and other various weirdness that bears the Asheville stamp. I’m just not sure that consolidating under the MAIN banner is efficacious or appropriate. I’m a big fan of spontaneous order.
It might be worthwhile for now to simply follow on Zen’s proposal for a modest bloggers workshop and expand this into a fuller curriculum that includes the empowerment of cyberspace, journalistic standards, emergent technologies, writing and composition, linking, quoting, critical thinking and style.
All of these things are in the formative stage, but there certainly is potential. Let’s keep talking.
Cecil… it was not your computer, that card I handed you seems to have died. I lost all the pictures I took.
More advantages of the digital age, I guess.
Very interesting meeting, I think we need about a whole day to get this thing off off the ground.
Also, it appears your date is one day advanced, no?
Thanks for liveblogging, Cecil.
Like I said over at Blogasheville: “I put together an email list of attendees, and I’ll send y’all something soon about the future. We’ve agreed that something terribly organized will happen next. We’ll come together to have a focused session on building a common, executable agenda within the next four weeks. It was very exciting meeting folks from all these various media who are passionately pursuing their goals. It was another great milestone in the evolution of BlogAsheville and in the growing community media sector.”
Yes, thanks for being bloggerific. It went really well just judging from the showup group which seemed to be mostly bloggers and media people.
I also put up just a few photos of the event – all in black and white due to infrared photography… here.
hmmmm. date advanced? not on my computer. I think the date is automatically inserted by the wordpress system. maybe the Rocket Club is moving so fast that it has entered a time warp?
This was a nice gathering and quite informative to this Asheville newcomer. I came with my online journal still running (in it’s forth year – http://boomrbill.com) and an interest in evolving 360 communications.
There is a lot that can be easily done to aggregate our efforts (RSS for instance) and reflect each other content for a wider audience. That will require work and organization.
I hope to be at your/our next meeting.
BTW, the Rocket Club (and owner Kevin Nessle) were very accommodating. Good choice! …along with Wordsmith, BTW
The posts all say Feb 3, but were done last night on Feb 2. Is your time zone set for Universal or something?
First of all, thanks for coming yesterday. You were all a pleasure to have, and are welcome any time you need to get together.
Second, after I get a little networking issue worked out, there will be free wireless here, so bring your laptops and your thirst.
Third, if we were moving really fast, time would slow down, or at least that is the theory.
Thanks again,
Ken
The Rocket Club
Well I did not know of the meeting as I was not aware of it and probablly could not have attended due to my crazy work schedule these days.
“My own unrealistic idea is to have a virtual meta-community network”
“I do think we can leverage the talent and enthusiasm of local bloggers to make a blogger network the “go to” place for news, opinion, activism, the arts, and other various weirdness that bears the Asheville stamp.”
I don’t think any of this is unrealistic at all, as a matter of fact a community network and a lot of the other items everybody is suggesting and talking about has already been realized and been online for over a year. It is called TalkAsheville.com. MAIN, WVPM, MountainX and others have been aware of what TalkAsheville.com has to offer for quite a while yet it is still relatively unknown, mentioned, supported or used by the community of Western North Carolina.
In the next month or so we will be adding an article/media management system that will allow individuals to post entire articles or a portion with an link to the entire content on other sites. This system will also work for video and several other media formats and will also offer RSS feeds which most of TalkAsheville.com already offers.