Brainjams New Orleans
You can read the takeaway from Brainjams from the perspective of it’s organizer Chris Heuer.
I went in skpetical, of course. I feel that we’ve done the best to organize ourselves, but it could have been much easier. People don’t understand that we’re not in a position to beta test “Web 2.0″ applications for people. Self-organizing was something we shouldn’t have had to do.
I was afraid to hear that some squishy new web application was going to save us, when I’ve had the hardest time explaining why you’d want information on the web in the first place.
Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells understood that the message is hard to get accross, however, and had shared a lot of the same frustrations in promoting the idea of the unconference. We were able to share experiences in describing the value of tagging for organization and making information available for search engines.
That is the only part of “Web 2.0″ that has an immediate impacton New Orleans, I feel. We need to organize our information and make it public and searchable. Everyone in the New Orleans blogging community understands the importance of presenting the information that we as citizens deem relevant.
There is a lot of “Web 2.0″ that is JavaScript trickery. It’s very cool, but it’s not at the center of the discussion of our needs. There are some cool tools out there, true, but I’d hate to tell someone they have to learn Wiki markup before they can share their meeting agenda.
The nice thing is that speaking with people at Brainjams reassured me that when more information is available in a searchable and taggable format, then the tools that pick up on taht information are very effective.
Chris Heuer gave a tour of Flickr. He showed me all the features that I knew were there, but in a way that made me see why they are there. He told about how once his father-in-law started tagging the paintings people would find them through tags, looking for “watercolor” and “boat”, for example.
I’m so focused on getting people logged in and typing, I lose sight of why I feel this is so important.
Toward the end, I tried to explain that much of what we need we have, in the form of the New Orleans bloggers. That rather than more and better technology, we need to bridge online communities. We are all down to earth and down to business around here. It’s not the hopless drama you see on cable news.
We are working hard. We need to tell people about it. We really need to grow the conversation. The help we need is social, not technical.
I did a demo of NOLA.com. After being shown some sexy “Web 2.0″ applications, I wanted to show them how important “Web 0.2″ was for us in the midst of the crisis. It still is. We all rely on NOLA.com, for the reasons, again, that it is not a matter of technology, but a matter of communication.
That was my take away. Now. In bite sized posts. I’m going to tell you about each of the nice people that I met, and what they shared.
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Tagging is simply an extension of linking, which is Web 1.0, and as you point out it is the key. Blogging is simply a new tool for web 1.0 for many users, simply another page posting tool. Early adopters and techies lap up Web 2.0 and similar ideas, but what is needed are tools that continue to make the web accessible and useful. Accessible means not having to explain how to insert tags into a tool like blogger. If Technorati wanted to make good use of Web 2.0, they would provide a client-side java applet that provided simple tagging for environments like blogger that don’t. A friend who’s been blogging for a while now is just beginning to try to figure out how to tag her work, so that people who share her interests in quilting, gardening and the Pagan/Wiccan community can find her site. It shouldn’t be something a person has to set aside time to study and learn. It should be as simple as using the Office thesaurus or running a spell-check
WordPress does have a tagging interface through UltimateTagWarrior. It’s not perfect, but it is much better than typing out the links by hand. It creates category pages within your weblog that become a way to organize posts. I’m very pleased with it.
Okay hons….
Teach me what to do and I can go into my ’school marm’ mode. (I don’t rap knuckles with a ruler… LOL)
I have the time to deal with this.
GG. Become an elf!
I’m an elf now.
Thank you elves. You’ll all be put to work as more Think New Orleans hosted weblogs come online. It’s a gradual process. Thank you.