just fyi, my technical difficulties with the student volunteer blog have been resolved, and i posted that rather lengthy essay on the ischools there, as well as something about the design community sig that i went to this afternoon.

so read up, if ya fancy.

there’s a backchannel discussion going on amongst the sv bloggers because some of the first posts were Boring As Sin ™, and i am of the opinion that this is because they told us to blog without using the first person, which almost made my brain explode because it was just too much of a computational challenge to reconcile that request. i wrote what i hope was a nice little email about it, saying that it saddened me to think that we would pass up the chance to let blogging do what it does best.

josh (of the family evnin) and i joked about it, and we agree that a place where a few students post stuff like “omg! i just sat next to jakob nielsen and he, like, looked at me for more than a half-second, i swear!” would actually be kind of awesome, and wouldn’t do anywhere near the harm to our reputations as i think that people fear it would.
but even if we agree to put on a slightly more official tone, isn’t there clearly some middle ground between talking about the bad bagels (and let me tell you, these are some bad bagels) and writing dry notes that seem like dictations or transcriptions of the slides?
i think the answer is decidedly yes, there is a middle ground, and we need to stick flags in it, proudly, at risk of seeming more oblivious to the realities of our field than we would if we discussed the bagels.
this is blogging, after all, and blogging is powerful. we need to own that.

so i was torn, upon arriving, about how to approach the whole thing. i decided not to completely ignore the objectivity request (by which i mean that i decided not to post things like my little revelation about the 10% milk), but i just couldn’t figure out how to keep my sense of style and perspective while still trying to sound objective, so i sought something in between.
then i was totally overwhelmed by my schedule, and i had the computer issues of yesterday, and i couldn’t post anyway, so it didn’t matter as much, and other bloggers raised some questions and a few emails were bounced back and forth and we were told:

I would be loathe to believe that anyone thought ALL they were
supposed to do here are verbatim reports. The initial guidelines were
to support ways of communicating *your* take on the session, in
tandem with live reporting, but thtat *your* take be situated in a
non first-person way.

whatever that means.

anyway, i ended up just taking the approach of writing thoughtful reports that aim to give the gist of the session and some wider implications and connections that i see. i avoid extraneous first person references, but i don’t leave them out entirely.
let me know how you think i’m doing.

at the moment, it still seems pretty boring out there to me, and i’m a little sad about it, but i’m also too whisked up in the conference to give it much mind. i’m meeting people, thinking about my work, and trying to squeeze in time to write my thoughts to you…. so i suppose i shouldn’t complain.

we’ll see what happens on the flipside.
now i need to get some sleep.
tomorrow we are doing design club, and we need to be on our game.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 27th, 2006 at 2:03 am and is filed under chi, on blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.