While listening to AKMA’s seminar at BloggerCon, it occurred to me that blogging communities can perhaps be differentiated by their metaphysics around truth. AKMA naturally has gathered ’round himself a set of people who may disagree about spiritual issues but who tacitly accept that faith does not give you an unequivocal spot on G-d’s own ladder so that you may peer down upon all the benighted souls who disagree with you. Rather, the people in AKMA’s informal cluster tend to believe (I think) that the nature of truth is itself a topic on the table. Another knot around some other set of bloggers may assume that there is one and only one truth, and that it looks exactly the same for all. That cluster will also have its range of topics, but the nature of the knot is different because of the difference in their philosophies of truth.

(One of the best things Akma crystallized for me is his saying that he tries to keep his students from understanding things too simply. I’m afraid that in the above paragraph I have made the simple complicated…but in an unfortunate perversion of Akma’s sense.)

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I heard the last 30 minutes of AKMA‘s seminar at BloggerCon. Indescribable. Booming voice, booming ideas. Too delectable to take notes during. Fortunately, the twelve-fingered Heath Row was there, doing a rough transcription. That’s astounding and bless Heath for doing it, but you really have to hear Akma sometime.

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Jeff Jarvis is doing the Phil Donahue thing surprisingly effectively as moderator. He asks: Has Dean’s success been due to his blog? Dan Gillmor says it’s three things: A candidate who has a message that appeals to people. Second, the campaign’s being run by Joe Trippi, a guy who “totally understands techhnology.” Third, they had the “amazing insight” inside the campaign that they shouldn’t try to control the Web activity they’d engendered.

Jeff asks if we want the candidate to be led by blogs. Room sentiment seems to be that we don’t want blogs to be an ad hoc polling system that guides the candidate’s policy. Eric Folley, the DNC blogger guy, says that we get from candidates’ blogs turns of phrases, ways of putting ideas, etc.

Dan says that we should have blogs that really drill in on issues, telling us what all the campaigns are saying.

Chris Lydon wonders whether blogging reflects social realithy which consists of individuals with complex ideas and resistant to labels.

Chris from MeetUp asks how this scales. I respond that the campaign blogs are really ways for us citizens to form conversational communities with other citizens, and that’s the only way it scales. Andrew (lost his last name) asks if there are Meetups for undecided people. (Seems like a great idea.)

Jeff asks what happens if you “give up to control to gain power” (Glenn Reynolds) and someone puts up a blog supporting a candidate that is wildly wrong? Eric from the DNC guy says you can’t control it. Scott Rosenberg of Salon says that this is only a “problem of understanding.” The “problem goes away if everyone understands that blogs are not controlled.”

Someone asks: What would have happened if the Willy Horton ad have been launched in the age of the blog? Interesting question, but I have to leave to go hear at least some of AKMA’s session…

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[At BloggerCon, Day 2]

After the World’s (intentionally) Worst Introduction by Ed Cone, Halley talks about a hypothetical case study she wrote for The Harvard Business Review about an employee, “GloveGirl,” who has a great blog about her company that on occasion blurts out uncomfortable truths (and perhaps an occasional error). The company doesn’t know what to do with her.

I was one of the “expert commentators” (hah!) in the article, and I wrote that the problem is mainly one of metadata: it needs to be clear on her site that she’s not writing for the company. Phil Wolff takes a harder line: she’s an employee and should not be allowed to disclose information about the company and is at risk of creating a hostile environment by talking about her love life.

Jon Udell says that blogging is more like collaboration than like a performance, and so GloveGirl ought to be encouraged because she’s extending collaboration to the customers. The line, he says, is necessarily fuzzy. Ed adds that this is what the Dean campaign is doing: the comments are the bloggers, and you just have to put up with the ones who are jerks.

Halley asks what the perfect tool would be for corporate blogging, allowing you to make some posts private to particular groups. Someone recommends LiveJournal. Open Text Livelink has (or is about to have) blogs as part of their corporate intranet collaborative suite, and SocialText also is headed towards corporate, in-house blogging groups. (Disclosure: I was a VP at Open Text and am on the BoA of SocialText. And I’m keynoting the Open Text user conference.)

Phil is looking for a lawyer to write up a model of an employment agreement that covers blogging. Interesting.

Halley says she’s working on a piece caled “How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Sales Force in Ten Easy Steps.”

Good, lively session.

(By the way, Ed Cone today suggests that Yom Kippur become a national holiday: “Yom Kippur is a day of introspection and not eating, and if there was ever a culture in need of introspection and not eating, we’re it.” )

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Just back from the first day of BloggerCon. I was one of the ones for whom the connectivity didn’t work, and I’m really beat, so this will be fast: A fantastic bunch of people are there. The panels ranged from to very good. The hallway conversation was just great.

The panel I liked the most was on presidential campaign blogging where there were repeated questions that seemed to me to miss the point: the campaign blogs are not so much about the candidate reaching out to the “little people” but is the way the grassroots are connecting to one another. And that is very cool.

Then it was off to vegetarian hell for dinner: A Brazilian restaurant where they bring platters of meat around without surcease. But, I sat with RageBoy and Doc, my old Cluetrain buddies, and next to Britt Blaser and Amy Wohl, which more than made up for the meatiness of the cuisine.

Tomorrow BloggerCon is free and more conversation-y and less panel-y. See you there!

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Don’t ask how, but a small bit of plastic got jammed into the PC Card slot on my ThinkPad X22, so when I put my wifi card in, I bent the pins inside the slot. I’m going on the road for much of October in a few days and need muh wifi.

So, does anyone know of a solution? I have USB 1.1 slots. I’ve found some wifi dongles that look like they’ll do the trick. Are there gotchas? Do they work?

Let me rephrase that: Heeeeelllllllppp!

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Moveon.org put together a commercial in 12 hours that reminds us that Arnold not only has been groping women for decades but that just a few weeks ago he told Entertainment Weekly, “How many times can you get away with this – to take a woman, grab her upside down, and bury her face in a toilet bowl?” What sort of person finds that even vaguely appealing?

It reminds of the time when my college had a guest lecturer in and one of the students began a comment, “Everyone wants to climb a bell tower and start picking people off with a rifle, right?” Well, no, wrong.

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Hear the major California gubernatorial candidates as you’ve never heard them before…with all their words removed. All that are left are their um’s, er’s, and breathy intakes. It’s the sort of thing that if you heard done to yourself, would keep you from ever speaking again.

And then give a listen to “ecstatic opera” from the same folks.

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Shelley Powers in an email points us to Sheila Lennon who points us to a Nieman Foundation report, an anthology of the well-known and the well-loved writing about blogging and journalism. It’s a big PDF, and from the table of contents it seems fabulous.

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Medical Bill Kosloski, having read my whining that the Atkins diet isn’t vegetarian-friendly, writes that low “glycemic load” diets are good for veggies and might work: they avoid foods that cause a rush of satiety followed by a trough of hunger. The chart is, of course, the inverse of my eating preferences because the universe is not just cruel, it’s petty.

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