Post BloggerCon 

I knew that yesterday would be fun, but BloggerCon also proved a thought-provoking, consistently involving, fascinating day. I have never been to a conference where there was such easy intercourse between panel and audience: everyone was truly a participant, in the best sense of the word.

Part of the explanation was the generally high standard of topics and panels. But I think there is something more fundamental. Since everyone (or just about everyone — I found one exception) at the conference was a blogger themselves, everyone is comfortable with voicing their views, and is generally pretty cogent in the way they do it. It makes for a very potent mix.

Now the wonderful problem that Dave Winer and his colleagues have is what to do for an encore. Because there certainly should be an encore.

BloggerCon live 

I’m not a natural live blogger. I’d rather listen than write at the same time. But halfway through BloggerCon, it is shaping into a truly excellent conference. The first panel on journalism and mine on education both proved consistently lively, provoking plenty of questions and comments from the other participants.

Weblogs that are trying to keep up with events include Doc Searls, Dan Bricklin, Jeff Jarvis and Betsy Devine. Also Blogger Jack, Brendyn Alexander, Debbie Weil, Tim Jarrett and Enoch Choi.

Most remarkably, Heath Row has produced in real time, single-handed, a nearly complete transcript of the day.

Crisp and autumnal 

Everyone I’ve spoken to in Boston and Cambridge today has complained about the cold. They’re crazy. This is a perfect autumn day: that crystalline clear, crisp weather that almost defines New England. I walked over the bridge from Harvard to the business school this morning and for the first time in literally years I wanted to return to my rowing days (you forget the pain on a day like this).

Madchester 

It would be an exaggeration to say I choked on my breakfast, but reading The New York Times this morning I came across an odd article about policing in Manchester.

I can’t imagine what an innocent American reader would think. According to the piece, the city is “widely known as ‘Gunchester'”. Perhaps I read the wrong papers back in London, but I’ve never heard of Gunchester. And the article persistently refers to Scotland Yard as though it’s some kind of national police headquarters, when it is merely the home of London’s Metropolitan Police (and it’s certainly not home secretary David Blunkett’s “home turf”).

I’ve long known the Times takes itself too seriously, but I fear the loose wording and easy distortions of the piece may indicate that the grey lady of American journalism is borrowing a bit too much from British journalism.

Read Norman 

Courtesy of the kind people at BloggerCon, I’m staying at the technologically clued up Hotel@MIT. When I was puzzling over how to connect to the hotel WiFi, they sent up an engineer who knew about IP addresses. Not common in hotels in my experience.

But when I stepped into the shower this morning, I found technology seemed to have deserted the hotel’s designers. Figuring out how to get the shower, rather than the bath, to work took me an age. I’ve decided that it’s a clever ploy by the hotel designers to get users to read Donald Norman. The only enigma is why they don’t include a copy by the bedside.

So you thought you were going to blog live? 

I was expecting wonderful insight from Tom Watson at the Labour Party Conference. Sadly, it wasn’t to be: “A thousand apologies. I hoped to give you a running commentary on the conference. But you can’t get laptops through security, the NTL cyber cafe is always busy and vodafone (in particular the adviser called Dean) couldn’t help me configure the phone correctly. But that’s life. Next year I’ll get it right.”

Of course, if Tom had posted that earlier, he would have received timely advice.

Compare and contrast 

Talking Points Memo has a lengthy interview with Wesley Clark. I was particularly interested in some of the people he cites as helping him with policy: Laura Tyson, Gene Sperling, Bob Rubin. All key people in Clinton’s highly successful economic team (compare and contrast with Bush’s crowd).

Clark comes across pretty damned impressively in the interview. Well worth a read for anyone interested in American politics.

Travel day 

I’ll be traveling to Boston for BloggerCon today, so postings will be sparse.

Closer cat 

Schrödinger’s cat comes closer. How can you not love that headline?

Aggregation 

Ross Karchner has created a page where you can read all the latest postings by everyone attending BloggerCon. It’s a great way to get a sense of the people who will be there.

Here’s one I made at home 

Daniel Davies provides ready-made arguments for rightwingers who want to shrug off the Plame affair.

I particularly liked the “blind faith” reasoning: “One thing is clear, however; this issue doesn’t go to the heart of government, or anything like it. Bush has addressed the problem, and when he finds out who leaked, he’s going to act in his usual manner; boldly and decisively.”

Shrinking the black box 

As so often, I find Richard Gayle’s explanations of biological research vivid. Today he tries to explain why genomics isn’t yielding a quick supply of drug targets for the pharmaceutical companies — and why there is still considerable promise.

“So, what will genomics give us? It will give us a lot of headaches, that is for sure. Because a big reason why modern drug discovery is so expensive is that we just do not know very much about how the body really works. We have developed really elegant ways around this problem. Pharmaceutical companies have done some wonderful work to provide some incredible drugs for a biological system that is in many ways a big black box.

“Genomics is one way to make the black box smaller. Other areas of research generated by the collision of biotechnology and computation tools, such as proteomics, microarrays, and systems biology, will also help. While I am not convinced we will ever make the black box disappear, we can shrink it a lot.”