Link: Institute for the Future of the Book: sidebar.
I've been hanging out with some great folks in L.A. who like to sit and think about the same things I do, not just the future of books, but also the future of blogs, particularly blogs with credibility, blogs by people who have studied different areas and disciplines in depth, in short, experts.
What an incredible cross-disciplinary discussion we had! I'm just all charged up, although still here in CA, getting ready to head to the beach with my bud and her sweet and exuberant doggie.
Here are some links to the cool folks I met (many of their blogs are also linked at the side):
Bob Stein and Ben Vershbow at Future of the Book. Bob and Ben get to have altogether too much fun with new media, and I am sooooo envious, and so glad to get to hear about the cool stuff they're doing. And if they ever need a beta-tester, I hope they know whom to come to.
Virginia Kuhn (postdoc at USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy with the second born digital dissertation). Whooo hooo, a surprise visit with someone from my home discipline! (no comment on how much I enjoyed catching up on gossip)
And other folks like me, who came to incubate our brains under the Annenberg infrared grow lights at USC...
Manan Ahmed, who told me interesting stuff about Pakistan, the Old Man on the Mountain (I'm sorta obsessed about the Assassins and the Templars), and historians who influenced the Iraq war before it ever started.
Danah Boyd. Pretty cool to finally have a chance to meet Danah in person, after having briefly corresponded with her online a few years ago in an FOAF network. She's doing some great research on young people and cybercultures.
Brian Carroll. I've been a fan of Brian's Into the Blogosphere article ever since the collection came out. Who knows, maybe we'll hatch some wacky Georgia citizen journalism venture, or some kind of student project. I hope so!
Juan Cole. You gotta know it's a good day when you get to pick his brain for the better part of a day. While my friends back at CNN are wishing they could have been a fly on the wall in the discussion (that's what they get for pooh-poohing blogging), I'm reflecting more on what it was like to get help holding my chopsticks from the man behind the blog, who is personable and charming, even when delivering hard-hitting analysis.
Jenny DeMonte. Jenny D is taking a turn substitute teaching for Jay Rosen at PressThink while he works on his book. Or is she a substitute reporter? She takes on either role equally well, but I'm hoping she'll shake up the world of education policy.
Brian Drolet. I'd never met Brian before Friday, but geez he's doing some important work, and I've seen a lot of it without knowing him, including Amy Goodman's TV version of "Democracy Now," which airs on a local station in Missoula. But I've got it in my podcasts anyway. I love the goals of grassroots TV networks, and Brian and Juan Cole had the most fascinating discussion about Iraq over dinner that I will not forget. I'm working on trying to memorize everything I heard.
John Holbo. John came all the way from Singapore just to meet us and rattle our crooked timbers [G], so I hope it was good for him too. His ideas about electronic publishing and an electronic presses really set me to thinking.
Clifford Johnson Wow, I love what his group site, Cosmic Variance, is doing for physics, one of my very favorite topics to stew on as a dyslexic amateur physics nut who couldn't do an equation to save my soul. And hey, look, he's blogging about us on there!
John Mohr. I hope I set this math-inclined sociologist off into a garden of forking paths. He's ready to crunch some numbers in the blogosphere, and I know of some industry folks who are doing a hell of a lot of parsing, but perhaps not in the right way. I'd bet John could set them straight, or maybe do it better.
PZ Myers. PZ and Jenny D taught me what a blog carnival is. Up until now, I'd never heard of one, which makes me suspect it's found more in the land of the academic blogs than in straight tech-wonk-land. I still expect Bakhtin to come waltzing out with some bear-baiting or midget bowling or some such.
Larry Pryor. Larry didn't know I read and send my students to the Online Journalism Review just about every day, or every other day. Sometimes the site feels like my virtual home, along with Poynter Online and PressThink. Great write-up on Jonathan Weber's New West citizen journalism site in OJR this week too.
Karen G. Schneider. I have a soft-spot for blogging librarians, cuz librarians I've known online (like during my dissertation research) do some of the best structuring work in cybercultures. Karen's sensibilities kept bringing us around to an audience or "user-centered" focus whenever we got bird-walking too far afield, and that was a really valuable thing.
"What's this? Am I seeing things?"
As a regular reader of PZ Meyers' blog I was suprised and pleased to see a familiar face in his recent post on the Future of the Book shindig. I followed the helpful link here to your blog. Now I've apparently got lots of reading to do to see what you've been up to all these years.
Posted by: Mark J. Nofsinger | November 14, 2005 at 01:43 PM