Blogstock in Cambridge

Seeing as brother Johnny and I were in New England this week, we took the opportunity to drive south into Cambridge to attend the Dave Winer-sponsored “weblog event” at Harvard last night.

The gathering was primarily of people “in the blogosphere” — in other words people with weblogs, with an interest in weblogs, who circulate, to some extent in orbit around Dave and the software that his company, UserLand, creates for assisting people to create weblogs.

I took the effort to attend because I am a longtime reader of Dave’s weblog, Scripting.com, and a casual user of UserLand’s Frontier system (we used it to build an early e-commerce system for Cows). I was also curious, to be honest, to see what ‘webloggers’ look like.

Given the nature of the medium, the event itself was well-blogged: Donna Wentworth, Bob Frankston, Frank Field, Derek Slater; Dan Bricklin took lots of photos.

I quite enjoyed the evening: the people were interesting, the conversations novel. Dave Winer is a good showman, and a capable discussion wrangler: he managed to keep things rolling along for two hours, and when things got too tangential, or too repetitive, he instantly steered the boat in a new direction.

I made a comment about writing for Oliver more than for a amorphous audience of unknown netizens and in making the comment realized it was true (Oliver, hello, it’s me, your father, thinking of you here in the past). I also mentioned that, as far as I knew, I’d never actually been “linked to” in the big and important validating way that weblogs “build flow.” This was immediately rectified when Dave asked Donna, who was liveblogging the event, to link to me. Which she did (thanks!).

We took off after the session so as to be back at a reasonable hour in southern New Hampshire; many of those attending went off to eat spicy food afterwards.

Dave promises there will be other similar events as his time at Harvard continues; if you’re in the area, and are interested in weblogging, you can’t go wrong by attending.