I’ve always wondered two things about blogs and conferences: first, whether all those people with open laptop lids in the audience are actually listening or not, and, second, why official conference blogs always seem to dry right up as soon as the conference starts.

I’m still not sure on the first point. I wonder if there’s been a conference where the speaker has requested laptop lids shut? I mean, if two or three people in the audience were playing banjos, I would probably ask them to stop. Well, actually, I probably wouldn’t, because that would be pretty cool. But if they were frying eggs, or soldering copper pipe, or making a papier mache doll house, I would probably be distracted and annoyed enough to ask them to wait until I was done speaking.

Somehow, at least so far, the pitter patter of typing has been deemed enough like banjo playing and not enough like frying eggs so that it’s been allowed to fly under the annoyance radar.

Personally, I want to try to engage my audience, and that requires a sort of presence that isn’t possible if they’re all acting like court reporters on Law and Order. My personal spirit-guide on this is Lillian Ross, writer for The New Yorker, who writes, in her book Reporting Back:

I don’t use a tape recorder when I report. To me, the machine distorts the truth. It’s fast and easy, and a lazy way of eliciting talk, but a conversationalist is not necessarily a writer. Tape recorded interviews are not only misleading: they are unrealistic: they are lifeless. I don’t want a machine to do my listening for me. Literal reality rarely rings true. It is not interesting.

To me eye, transcribo-o-blogs are more tape recordorial than thoughtful, mostly because the art in a talk happens once my head explodes into the listener’s, and I don’t think the listener can properly process that explosion and report on it at the same time.

As to the “official blog dries up” situation, I’ve come to understand that: the conversational energy that lives inside a conference blog suddenly finds traction in the reality of the conference. In a sense, it’s like the [warning: Star Trek metaphor] conference has been “beaming in” for several months, and finally all the pattern buffers are aligned, and the physical form of the conference has appeared on the transporter platform, and you want to take it out to dinner, and give it a hug, and sing about it, rather than sitting back behind the machine and hiding behind it.

As Dan blogged yesterday, the Zap conference has been going very, very well. I feel like it’s a good party, with the right mix of people to create enough turbulent conversational energy to sail on through the weekend. When things wind down this afternoon, I think we’ll have reached the top of our game, which, said my old basketball coach Bill Difranceso, is the right time to pack up the ball for the time being, and start thinking about next week’s game.

Who would have thought that a bunch of my old friends, a bunch of librarians, a bunch of 20something technology gurus, and a straggle of people who accidentally wandered in could have so much in common?

Now you can get Matt Rainnie in stereo: listen and read.

This is the audio of a talk I gave at the 2003 Zap Your PRAM conference, in Cavendish, PEI. I spoke about my role in the 2003 Provincial General Election.

Dave Winer has pictures from That Other Conference. Rip-roaring good time, it looks like.  ;-)

Buzz left me a cryptic phone message earlier in the week in which he referred to “that other deal.” I had no idea what he was talking about. Turns out that, like The Scottish Play, it’s now considered unhealthy to utter The Other Conference’s name.

Lest anyone forced to attend over there, or anyone else involved, take any offense, let me iterate something which I hope should be obvious: my good-natured razzling of those trapped in the suburban hell of West Royalty listening to speakers talk about demographic profile development and interactive jelly bean promotional tie-ins is all in good fun. I hope you’re all having a good time on the Island; really.

My friend Leah, who I wrote about here earlier, has a blog! The most interesting writing, for me, is talented, well-spoken people who can write well, writing about the sometimes mundane, sometimes thrilling, sometimes workaday pace of their everyday lives. This is why I read Rob, Cynthia and Ian every day. And now a blog.

Thanks to Amazon.com’s amazing new “full keyword search of books” service, I stumbled across a reference to disease called Rukavina type familial amyloid p. Also called Indiana type, presumably becuase so many of our kin settled there, the disease is described as follows:

Indiana type familial amyloid polyneuropathy, a slowly progressive form of familial amyloid polyneuropathy with upper limb neuropathy in the distribution of the median nerves, leading to carpal tunnel syndrome and eventually trophic ulcers; ocular symptoms such as vitreous deposits may occur. Called also Rukavina type familial amyloid p., Maryland type familial amyloid p., and Rukavina’s syndrome.

What’s the chance that a syndrome that leads to carpal tunnel syndrome would be named after my family? Amazing. And decidedly unpleasant sounding. I’ll have to give someone in the Indiana branch of the family a call for practical details.

…thanks for the link from this story about the crazy and deluded software piracy study.

Here’s the latest reply from CBC on the RSS issue:

As previously explained by the customer support representant, CBC does not allow external use of our RSS or XML files. This is a very strict policy to ensure full control by the corporation over the editorial content and branding. If I do understand your interest for a RSS feed, I have the regret to notify you that this service is not available for public use.

This leads me to understand that there actually are RSS and XML files somewhere inside the CBC; they’re just not letting them leak outside.

I can’t claim to understand their “very strict policy to ensure full control by the corporation over the editorial content and branding.”

Probably time to take this higher.

It would seem to me that if I was the CBC, I would want my work product spread as far and wide as possible. They’re a public service, after all, with a primary goal being something along the lines of “the greater good of all mankind.”

So if there was ever a technology that lent itself to eager and quick adoption by the CBC, you would think it would be the web syndication facilities offered by technologies like RSS.

RSS provides the CBC with an opportunity to, at no cost, spread its content to new and interesting audiences.

Thinking that perhaps I’d missed something, and that the CBC actually does provide RSS feeds, I sent an exploratory email to the contact address listed for their Free Headlines service (a complex, proprietary server-side solution that forces syndicators to accept the CBC’s “look and feel” and affords none of the benefits of RSS). To which I received the following response:

Following your request, it is impossible to send you any RSS feed due to our strict policy. We understand your point, but we do not send it to particulars. We hope this will answer your questions

The mind boggles. On so many levels.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.