Saturday, April 10, 2010

Live Interview with Scott Rosenberg on the Historical Importance of Blogging

Join me for a Conversations.net live and interactive interview with Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters.  This is a downright FASCINATING history of blogging and its historical importance.


Date:  Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tr.im/futureofed. The Elluminate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Event and Recording Page:  http://www.learncentral.org/event/60495

Book Description from the Say Everything Website
Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters"Blogs are everywhere. They have exposed truths and spread rumors. Made and lost fortunes. Brought couples together and torn them apart. Toppled cabinet members and sparked grassroots movements. Immediate, intimate, and influential, they have put the power of personal publishing into everyone's hands. Regularly dismissed as trivial and ephemeral, they have proved that they are here to stay.

"Say Everything chronicles blogging's unplanned rise and improbable triumph, tracing its impact on politics, business, the media, and our personal lives. The book offers closeups of innovators such as Blogger founder Evan Williams, investigative journalist Josh Marshall, exhibitionist diarist Justin Hall, software visionary Dave Winer, 'mommyblogger' Heather Armstrong, and many others.

"These blogging pioneers were the first to face new dilemmas that have become common in the era of Google and Facebook, and their stories offer vital insights and warnings as we navigate the future. How much of our lives should we reveal on the Web? Is anonymity a boon or a curse? Which voices can we trust? What does authenticity look like on a stage where millions are fighting for attention, yet most only write for a handful? And what happens to our culture now that everyone can say everything?

"Before blogs, it was easy to believe that the Web would grow up to be a clickable TV -- slick, passive, mass-market. Instead, blogging brought the Web's native character into focus -- convivial, expressive, democratic. Far from being pajama-clad loners, bloggers have become the curators of our collective experience, testing out their ideas in front of a crowd and linking people in ways that broadcasts can't match.

"Blogs have created a new kind of public sphere -- one in which we can think out loud together. And now that we have begun, it is impossible to imagine us stopping."


Bio from Scott's Blog:
I’m a writer, editor and Web site builder. I co-founded Salon back in 1995. I served as its first technology editor and all-around Web geek for years, then became managing editor just in time for the dot-com bubble to first over-inflate and then collapse.
In 2003 I began working on a book about software development and its discontents. I took a leave from Salon in 2005 to write it. It’s titled Dreaming in Code and was published by Crown in January, 2007. The full web site for the book is at dreamingincode.com.
I left Salon in July 2007 to begin work on a new book project.... I began blogging in July 2002. Before that most of my writing online was at Salon; there’s a full directory listing of my pieces here.
I started making Web pages in November 1994 as an editor of the short-lived San Francisco Free Press — an early experiment in Web publishing by the striking Newspaper Guild workers in San Francisco. In early 1995 I posted a prototype of a solo Web magazine called Kludge. I quickly discovered that being a one-person publishing operation was more than I could handle at that point in my, and the Web’s, career, given that I still held down a full-time job at the SF Examiner. As the year progressed I began working with David Talbot and the team he was then pulling together to start Salon. I left the Examiner that fall and helped Salon plan and post its first issue in November 1995.
I continued to maintain my own Web site, first at www.dmz.com and later here at Wordyard. Here’s the old Wordyard home page that was supplanted by this blog. Here’s the old dmz.com home page that preceded it, with some older links to my writing, many of which have yet to rot.



[Cross-posted from http://www.stevehargadon.com]