BloggerCon . . .versation with Dave Winer

In Sunday's Scripting News [1] Dave Winer [2] asks:

Should I do a 1.5 hour session on October 5 on Outlining and the Web?

I sent Dave an e-mail saying, among other things:

OF COURSE YOU SHOULD! We might even consider it something of a, er, "think tank" or even "more" than that!

The e-mail went on to say:

You often write about the outline as an initial step to composing entries. This would be a great opportunity to formulate this into a seminar. I know I would consider this a "must-attend" session.

On another note: please, please, please consider the NON-TECH writer/blogger's predicament. I know, as a decidedly non-technical type, but surely one who loves to write, that there are numerous challenges and quite the learning curve.

Sure, over almost three years of blogging I have learned a thing or two. But I remain ever the newbie. So much of the [tech related] discussion goes over my head.

Now Dave, I'm no dummy. I could waste our time bragging about test scores and all that (hey, you and I both went to the NYC school system, although you went there all the way through, I only lasted through part of grade school).

But I am not technically inclined.

I would love to collaborate with someone on explaining and educating those who are not tech types on what much of this stuff is all about.

Here's an example: I hope and trust that it is not a surprise to you that RSS and XML are a completely foreign language and concept to many of the bloggers out there. Yikes, look at me, I am still perplexed by anchor tags in Manila, and how to get permalinks on the blog. I want to separate entries so they have permalinks. But I am lost in the non-tech ozone.

I've been spending a good amount of time looking at how schools and small businesses use blogging for greater productivity. This came from discovering that a college in Canada, with a **course on blogging** used http://DeanLand.weblogs.com [3] as an example in their syllabus.

In small business, in my consulting capacity, I see blogging as an extension of the old forums and boards, enabling dynamic and contemporaneous collaboration and sharing. Using separate topic or thread areas (stories, actually, in Manila terms), departments can bypass the obstacles of time (and time zones) to harness thought and concept, to promote extension of ideas and theory, and generally create a greater productivity and communication throughout the enterprise, as MBAs like to say.

I am also very interested in using the blogging model (and here it is more a Radio matter than a Manila one) as a specific method of achieving distributed communications. That can be prose, streaming of audio or video, or of presentations in progress, and more.

Gee, I've been meaning to post something of this sort on the Bloggercon list, but suddenly it all came rushing out of me.

Your short query in Scripting News was the catalyst.

So to sum up, YES! Do the session on Outlining.

--Dean

Dave asked me to put this on the net so he could point to it. And here you have it.

Knowing that a pointer from Dave gets oodles of referrer hits, let me not too shamelessly or subtly suggest you check out my Blackout 2003 Coverage:

The Night of the Blackout [4]

The Next Day [5]

The short of it is this: I was there, stuck on the 10th Floor of a Lower Manhattan office building, and made my way home that same evening.