Notes on the 4/5 Raleigh Meetup (the long version)

by Josh Staiger

April 07, 2005

The latest Raleigh/Cary Bloggers meetup took place earlier this week. In attendance:

The only truly new face this week was Chris, who is an IBM Extreme Blue intern, and also a Senior at Case.

Owing to the beautiful weather, we decided to park ourselves outside at a sidewalk table in front of Cafe Cyclo.

Dave and I observed that there is currently a fairly clear contrast in the type of crowd that frequents the Raleigh meetup vs. the Chapel Hill meetup. Thus far the discussion our discussions in Raleigh have been almost exclusively technical, while those taking place in Chapel Hill tend to put a greater emphasis on journalism and social activism.

It's interesting to observe the different "cliques" that are attracted to blogging for different reasons, but why the clear split between the towns thus far? Most likely, we can simply chalk this up to luck of the draw with two techies primarily promoting the Raleigh meetup thus far...

Here are a few topics, and links that we discussed during the meetup:

Owing to Dave's recent dive into podcast listening, we talked briefly about podcasting.
Dave gives ITConversations a big thumbs up, as most techies do when they discover the site
As usual, Dave reports that he's been busy lately with Roller installations and his book
We also talked briefly about triangleblogs.com, registered by theshu, which will reportedly become a triangle blogs aggregator (similar to Dave's Planet Triangle experiment), along with a "community" site, running drupal.
When the Extreme Blue crew (Martin, Vincent, and Chris) decided to join use, they reported that they had just been go-carting at Funworks in Raleigh. Something that they highly recommended, as they apparently slick down the track somehow to give the feeling of driving a rally car (sounds kickass to me).
We spoke briefly about Yahoo 360. None of us had actually used it, but by the end of the meeting Chris had obtained and invite from one of his friends and sent out invites to the rest of us as well.
Vincent reports that after having questioned a Google developer at a recruitment event, internal blog usage at Google is surprisingly less common than one might expect.
Dave reports that judging from the error messages he has seen, Blogger is likely written in Java (I found this to be somewhat surprising).
Martin showed us a slick Firefox extension called GooglePreview that adds thumbnail images of webpages inline with Google search results.
We spoke briefly about the Robert Soble, Cory Doctorow autolink argument broadcast on ITConversations. This brought up the "moral" issues of tools such as autolink and greasemonky.
Dave reports that Mark Pilgrim has written a handful of new greasemonkey scripts, one of which "hijacks" Amazon.com affiliate links, allowing you to send proceeds to a "worthy charity partner" of your choice.
Martin reports that Jon Udell has written a bookmarklet that automatically links isbns for books appearing on webpages to an information lookup for the book at your local library.
Martin asked me how my own greasemonkey escapades were progressing, and I gave a quick overview of my experience developing Interchange, a greasemonkey scrip that adds links to view Yahoo Maps searches in Google Maps.
Dave reports that blogging has really caught fire at Sun, with Solaris developers mobbing OSNews to the point where OSNews had to push back to allow other viewpoints through.
The Wordpress scandal was briefly discussed, and it was also noted that wordpress.org now still shows up as the number 1 search result for "wordpress" on Google. Google must have given Matt Mullenweg a reprieve?
I mentioned having started an internal blog on my own server at IBM as an experiment to help me keep track of things I learn, and also help me to communicate information to my teammates. I'm running blosxom, having been attracted to it for it's simplicity.
Dave reports that there is a Java version of Blosxom available called Blosjom (which also happens to be his chief competitor to Roller).
On the topic of using blogs to help organize one's thoughts and remember things at work, Vince mentioned that he is currently reading a book called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen, and was thinking about how he could write some software to facilitate the principles highlighted therein.
D pointed out that David Allen, himself, already puts out an Outlook plugin to help with this.
D also points out that an Emacs PlannerMode is available, that could also help (sounds really cool to me).
We discussed tagging a la Gmail and agreed that it is a much more natural way of organizing information than the traditional hierarchy structure.
D says that his aggregator, Gregarius now allows him to tag incoming items for alter retrieval
We talked about OurMedia.org, a new content management interface to Archive.org, though none of use had much experience with using it
We talked about Google's solicitation for home video uploadsfor analysis. Chris proposed that Google likely already has an abundance of commercial and otherwise processed video to work with, and are likely looking to balance out their sample pool with personal video (given that it obviously has a different style from commercial video).
Chris mentioned that HP is offering an incredibly interesting video editing research internship, where the idea is to develop software and algorithms for automated editing of video.
Speaking of cool internships, we talked briefly about Paul Graham's Summer Founders program, with different opinions on Paul Graham, himself.
Vince, talked about his Logitech io pen, a pen that automatically keeps a digital copy of things that you write, for later retreival.
Martin wondered whether there was a site that would extract only the photos from Engadget. None of us knew of such a script (even though it sounds trivial to write), however I mentioned LiveJournal Image Theft, a site which extracts the last 200 photos posted to Livejournal (may not be safe for work).

Please feel free to note any omissions or corrections in the comments.

Alternate Perspectives:

-D-
Vince

We will be meeting again in two weeks, same place, same time: Tuesday April 19th, 6:30pm @ Cafe Cyclo.

Stay tuned for an rsvp link.