Tonight I went over to Harvard for Dave Winer's weekly weblog meeting. While it is intended primarily for people in the Harvard community to learn about weblogs, he invites readers of his blog to show up also. I thought it was really interesting. I'm not sure how interactive he wanted it to be, so I mostly listened. One thing I wish I could have done is gotten online while I was there and blogged some things as I was there. Instead you'll get some random thoughts of mine on the whole thing.
He gave a short intro to blogs, also covered making a post and simple things like uploading a picture. One thing I found most interesting was that it seemed like a lot of the people there were very much novices. There were a number of basic computer/web concepts that I felt there being a slight stumbling block on. This is something I run into with my parents a lot and when I was working I'd run into with co-workers. There are some basic ideas to do with computers that I think some people never really get taught well. My favorite example is folders. I think a lot of people get them somewhat, but don't really fully get how they can can use them effectively.
Anyways, people asked a lot of interesting questions. One topic I thought was kind of cool was the question of community. Just what is the community of a weblog? Who's going to be reading? Should you worry about Google indexing it? To an large extent these are things I don't even think about. Mostly because internally I think I've already made a lot of those decisions. I made them back when I was working. I knew I had other people at HealthGate who read my blog and so definitely had a level of internal censorship going on. I can easily see this being an issue for people who don't really get that part of the web.
One thing that kind of got my brain working was a question someone asked. They asked if it was possible to search groups of RSS feeds during the meeting. It got me thinking, wouldn't it be handy if your aggregator was also indexing things as it grabbed posts. You could keep a month's worth of simple keyword indexing to things. This is kind of also like how I wanted Net News Wire to have support for some kind of 'scoring' You could have keywords that you are always interested and ones that you aren't and let it hilite posts that might interest you. If you have a large number of feeds it might be handy for a first pass skim through a few hundred posts.
I thought the meeting was pretty interesting. One thing I like about blogs is seeing people who are new to the web discovering them and discovering what they can do. Especially once they get past some of the initial stumbling blocks. It also made me think about different tools for people doing web/blogging stuff. But I'll post about that tomorrow after I've slept on it.
