It is with great shame that I post this page of photos from Vienna. What am I, a 12-year-old??

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“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day. To the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty blogs.” 

Even Shakespeare thinks we all need a vacation.

So, here’s my proposal: We all take the first two weeks of August off. All of us. Yes, you. You just remove your keys from the keyboard and find something else to do with your time.

Saturday, August 2 through Sunday August 17. “Through” means you don’t start blogging again until Monday the 18th.

All in favor, swing your hammock to the left…

Brian Dear has a suggestion:

Dave Weinberger suggests all bloggers take the first two weeks of August off in a mass “blogiday”. He’s even got the logo you’re supposed to attach to your blog during that time, to let everyone know you’re taking off time when Dave is taking off time.
I say, keep on bloggin’! If the blogerati want to take off two weeks in August, fine. It’s a great opportunity for other blogs to get some attention.
A suggestion to vacationing bloggers: rather than just showing a blogiday logo, how about providing some prominent links to a lesser-known blogs, ones they like but for whatever reason ones they haven’t put in their blogroll. A sort of “while I’m away, I recommend the following fine blogs” followed by a list. Share your discoveries!

BTW, my RW vacation will be the last week of July and the first week of August, so it’s not quite me suggesting everyone stop when I stop. Besides, do you really think I’m going to stop for 2 weeks?

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Ulrich van Stipriaan has posted more photos of the BlogTalk conference in Vienna. (Through the miracle of bad lighting, I actually look like I have more hair than I do.) He also has photos of Vienna here, here. and here.

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I paid 2 pounds at Heathrow to pick up my email at a payphonish net terminal, but it won’t accept an https address so I deided to waste your time instead.

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JJ Merelo points us at an aggregator that is, I believe, aggregating the blogs from bloggers at BlogTalk (if a blogtalk could talk blog). I am under straitened Net conditions and haven’t been able to try it for myself, however…

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From David Wasser:

The Washington Post Style Invitational Contest asked readers to
rewrite some banal instructions in the style of some famous writer.

The winning entry was “The Hokey Pokey” song as if written by
W. Shakespeare.

O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heavens yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.
The Hoke, the poke — banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, ’tis what it’s all about.

— by William Shakespeare (Jeff Brechlin, Potomac Falls)

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The BlogTalk conference ended yesterday. I think the great majority of the attendees considered it a success. It was focused on the effect of blogs, not their technology, and for me was a fascinating look at the cross- and inter-cultural way blogs are being taken up.

Today my wife and I are sightseeing. It’s our last day here. It’s a beautiful city, great for walking around. Today was Museum Day for us. The Secession has a Klimt frieze and some too-conceptual installations that made as much sense to me as the cooing of pigeons. Then it was on to the Oberer Belvedere, which was lovely.

Tomorrow is a travel day. Expect no new acts of bloggery to be committed on this page.

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Jose begins with the parable of the copyist: After the printing press made scribes obsolete, monasteries switched from copying Bibles to making beer. “Thanks to the invention of the printing press, Europe has the best beer in the world.” The question for the media is: What will be our beer?

He has ten theses about the effect of the Internet on media:

1. From audience to user.
2. From media to content: It’s the content that counts, not the medium
3. From monomedia to multimedia
4. From periodicity to real time – we lose reflection but gain dynamism
5. From scarcity to abundance; now the scarcity is in the reader’s time.
6. From editor-mediated to non-mediated.
7. From distribution to access.
8. From one-way to interactive.
9. From linear to hypertext.
10. From data to knowledge.

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Dan is, of course, the business and technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and a blogger.

H says he’s tired of the debate about whether blogs are journalism. It’s endless and pointless. Some are and some aren’t. They are their own form and they complement real-world journalism. As Doc Searls says, everyone now is a “stringer,” i.e., a freelancer who occasionally feeds stories to newspapers and magazines.

Blogs are really making a difference to RW journalism, Dan says. For example, webloggers were the one who noticed Trent Lott’s “nostalgia for segregation.” He also points to the minute-by-minute weblog about the Space Shuttle Columbia. It was first to notice that the weather radar images seemed to show the debris path well before the real world noticed.

Traditional journalism says: “Here’s the news. Take it or leave it.” The conversation part has been limited to letters to the editor. Now journalism is becoming a conversation, Dan says.

Dan’s basic principle: “My readers knore more than I do.” He tells about the Joe Nacchio presentation at PC Forum. Nacchio was whining about running his monopoly. Dan blogged it. Buzz Bruggerman read it and sent Dan an email pointing to a page showing all the stock Nacchio was selling. So, Dan blogged it. The audience read it. The mood chilled. “Something changed in journalism that day.”

Newspapers will be asking people to send in images of news events. Dan says that in the next earthquake in Japan, you’ll see photos in the first 15 minutes from readers.

What about trust? Falsehoods travel faster than truths, Dan says. But, as Ken Layne said (Dan says), “We can fact-check your ass.” Further, the subject of interviews can put the transcript of their interview onto their own website. The Defense Department did this when Bob Woodward was doing interviews.

Dan gets more and better info about Groove from Ray Ozzie’s weblog than from their PR writings.

Big Journalism plays an important role we need to preserve. For example: investigative reporting.

Dan points to OhMyNews in S. Korea, an online newspaper that uses “citizen reporters” to supplement the staff writers. OhMyNews helped elect the new president who repaid them by giving them the first interview after he was elected. Dan also points to Nick Denton’s Gizmodo, a report on gadgets. And Back in Iraq 2.0: a guy who said that if we sent him money, he’d be our reporter in Iraq.

He ends by warning us about the copyright cartel that’s willing to degrade the Net in order to copy copyright “violations.” “Some day, you may need permission to publish – or your page may load only after your ISP has loaded ‘preferred content.”

Question: How can people blog and listen at the same time?

Dan: I have a friend who calls it “continuous partial attention.” We’d better get used to it.

Notable Quote (i.e., why we all love Dan Gillmor): “I learn more from people who think I’m wrong than from people who think I’m right.”

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Gilbert is a French journalist. He was involved in 1995 in setting up Sarajevo Alive, a Unesco site that supported 30 journalists. More or less by accident, the team decided to let all the local inhabitants express themselves online, unedited. There was a tremendous response: 25,000 readers in the first 20 days. “The Internet is the warmest medium of all.”

The audience is now influencing the journalist. We are moving from co-existence to conviviality,i.e., an active interest in and caring about one another. To participate is communicate and colalborate.

Gilbert announced that five years of work today have again saved the Sarajevo Online archives. You can see it here and soon here.

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