February 11, 2003

Visiting Professor Dave
I went to this live blog thing that Dave Winer had over at Harvard; he's an official Harvard man now, for some stretch anyway. Pretty interesting. First of all, the ratio of recognizable smart people to Josh was at least 10:1, and that's mostly because I didn't put names on most of the faces. At any rate, Brent Simmons from Userland was there, along with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, the guys who invented VisiCalc, the first ever spreadsheet, and several others my audience of five don't care about. This surprised me: of the 50 or so people there, 96% were white men, a large fraction of whom had beards.

Donna Wentworth from Copyfight (the same one as in the sidebar) kept a semi-transcript, which can be found here. I'm the "Blogger" about 2/3 of the way down with lots of ellipses. I talked kind of fast, and miscommunicated (and Dave either missed or didn't care about---hard to tell) my point. Me and a bunch of clever operators of (and machinists behind) websites with heavy flow. Are these sites journalism? Are they prose's grand return to being the preferred communication form of the rabble? Is it just a bunch of dudes who have easily updated websites all of a sudden?

The kind of random event lurking at which makes one glad to live in Boston.
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