Out here in the blogosphere we’re all hip innovative and linky and open and caring. But when we go to conferences we sit in uncomfortable chairs in bland auditoria and to let keynote speakers talk at us. Why?

Johnnie Moore, Rob Paterson and Chris Corrigan consider this question, and the notion of “unconferences,” in a very interesting podcast.

While I’m not a big one for talk of “silence journeys” and “questing paths” (okay, I made those up), their central premise — traditional conferences are a bore and don’t really work all that well at getting people to collaborate — is bang on.

As a special bonus you get to hear Rob’s claim that podcasting was invented at Zap Your PRAM.

I received a note from Urban Carmichael’s sister tonight: the benefit for Urban will now be held in St. Joachim’s Church. Date and time the same: Sunday, July 17th at 7:00 p.m.

In Things you can do with RSS it says, in part:

Quietly getting popular, a movement led by small local cinemas like City Cinema, rather than big cinema networks.

The University of Calgary has a wiki. Neat. I just made my first edit. Link from Jeremy Smith.

Anne, who I met at reboot, started work at Opera yesterday, and he’s blogging about it.

Now that I’m spinning out RSS feeds like they’re going out of style — photos, bookmarks, blog, wiki, etc. — Steven Garrity suggested that I create a ruk.ca “superfeed,” and further suggested that I used the neato Planet aggregator to do so. So I did. If you want to smooth your ruk.ca RSS experience into one handy feed, following these links to happiness:

• RSS 1.0
• RSS 2.0

Planet also spits out:

• OPML
• FOAFroll
• HTML

Steven said Planet was very easy to use. And it was.

Dan James and Steven Garrity and I had lunch last week with one of their clients, and at one point the conversation turned to Blackberries, instant messaging, email, and other novel ways of communicating. I brought up the fact that there’s an interesting split between two groups of people I exchange instant messages with: there are the people who say good-bye, and the people who don’t.

None of the people at silverorange, for example, Steven included, ever sign off with a “bye” or an “oo” (for “over and out”). They just stop typing. My mother, however, and Catherine, and Johnny, and the folks at Yankee all do.

Steven mentioned that men of his father’s generation don’t say good-bye the telephone; I wonder if this is related? Or perhaps in the world of young hep-cats, the conversation never really ends, so there’s no need to say good-bye?

I’m so stuck in the mud that I even use the phrase “ring off” from time to time when talking on the telephone — “sorry, but I’ve got to ring off now and get home for supper.” Ringing off is a holdover from ye olde days:

The “Ring Off” is a signal to indicate that the persons using a line have completed their conversation and consists of two short, distinct rings, to be given by each office, except in cases where the telephones are fitted with automatic “call” and “ring off” signals.

This is Pete. Ending the blog post. Now.

Yummy! The kind of thing you wouldn’t imagine you’d ever need, but later find strangely addictive. Link from command-n.

Just to prove that this whole “Pete the ornery” thing isn’t something new, I provide as evidence this Usenet of mine post from twelve years ago:

Users of WinFax Pro 3.0 who want to receive the recently-released “major patch” for the program but who don’t want to bear the cost of downloading the entire thing from the Delrina Tech Support BBS (phone 416-441-2752) at long distance rates can have the patch mailed to them by Delrina.

You have to call the Delrina Customer Service Line at 1-800-268-6082. When the line answers you’ll inevitably get a cryptic voice-mail message telling you to leave a message. If you leave a message you may never hear from them again, so just press ‘0’ to reach an operator and ask for Suzette in Customer Service; she’ll take your address and mail you the disks.

Disclaimer: I have no relationship to Delrina other than as a [disgruntled] customer.

I followed up with this post where I wrote, in part:

Well, today someone from Delrina called me at work; he said that their Sales Line had been inundated with calls for the patch and implied that they were none too happy about this. Their staff had been monitoring this newsgroup and he was contacting me, as ‘instigator’ of the problem, to see what was up.

…and later…

So, I don’t have my problems fixed yet, but at least I’ve talked to someone about them. Cudos to Delrina staff for monitoring this newsgroup and responding to me directly (I hope they follow up on all such problems, not just ones that cause them phone-grief); perhaps now is the time for some input directly to this newsgroup from Delrina? There still remains the fact that contacting Delrina by phone seems next to impossible and/or very expensive; I hope they’re taking steps to deal with this too.

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Delrina other than being a [formerly disgruntled, now somewhat placated] owner of their WinFax Pro software.

Three years later Delrina was purchased by Symantec.

A benefit concert in aid of Urban Carmichael, currently battling cancer, will be held Sunday July 17th at 7:00 p.m. at Vernon River hall St. Joachim’s Church. Master of Ceremonies is Nils Ling.