[Phoenix-pm] phoenix.pm.org wants to aggregate your reddit, del.icio.us, twitter, LJ, myspace

[Darrin Chandler]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 11:08:25AM -0700, Scott Walters wrote:
> Hmm.  This was a discussion topic in RL, face to face, and I strongly
> agreed with you then.  But I have some caveats now.  RSS is 
> fantastic.  If makes it not matter whether a blog is on myspace,
> livejournal, or slowass.net (my machine).  You can monitor your
> friends (as geeks and teenagers across the country enjoy doing, but
> apparently not Phoenix.PM) without having to be "homeless" or 
> having to move into the same homeless shelter as your homeless
> friends.  

"Homelessness" doesn't apply to everything on the internet. Only to the
"social" gathering places, and to sites providing services that any
competent geek can easily do for themselves.

I use RSS myself to some degree, but I find it less useful than it
should be. I've been meaning to look into a better reader/aggregator,
but that's been pushed down on my list.

> Analog sucks.  The kids have the right idea.  "Hey, I'm at Mill's
> End Coffee" on Twitter implies that if people want to hang out
> with you, they're welcome to, but no awkward coordination.
> It just kind of happens.

No. They have *one* right idea. People using the internet are not one
homogeneous group. For me, the "hang out at the mall" web sites are
utter junk. Not because they're stupid, but because they don't fit what
I want/need at all.

> So, sounding this out with you and others on the list, while
> somewhat indulgant, has been extremely helpful to me.  We do
> need RL face to face time.  But I maintain that if people did
> have blogs, the content wouldn't be much different than the
> content of meetings ;)

Very few have chimed in so far, so don't rule anything out too quickly.
Moreover, I see no reason to give up on virtual just because we'll still
meet in person. I'm not as against some of your ideas as I may have led
you to believe.  You just found (one of many) of my rant buttons.

> That's a good metaphore except that I'd thought for some reason that
> the list is full of geeks and geeks would be interested in replacing
> tedious analog processes with streamlined digital ones.

For me, you're replacing tedious analog processes with tedious online
processes. ;-P

> My next wonder is whether the virtual people out there (this list
> has far more lurkers than people who have ever made a meeting)
> would enjoy seeing digital versions of the analog meetings --
> should we try to film presentations and post them online?

I've been talking with one of the MetaBUG people about finding a way to
do simpler live presentations over the net. Basically, slides synced
with broadcast audio. We did video a few times, but it's been less than
great. Stay tuned, and feel free to ping me if it's been more than a few
weeks...

> And I'm still wondering if we benefit from having Perl 
> specific meetings with fewer people rather than larger
> meetings that aren't Perl specific -- more like Brock's
> DCFringe group, where all of the users of fringe langauges
> meet and hang out.  I'm thinking yes, but I'm capable of
> being wrong ;)

I'll throw another nasty thing in here. Lately I've been questioning the
whole concept of local meetings. We're all on the internet, after all!
And we're real geeks, after all! There are scads of little local groups
struggling to keep critical mass going, and it's an uphill battle the
whole time. Why not cast the net over the whole 'net and bring in a
bigger catch, creating a more self sustaining community? The biggest,
and perhaps only, benefit of a local group is that people really do seem
to feel more part of the community when you can put faces with names.
OTOH, I've been hanging out in #metabug on freenode.net, and we're
feeling like a community. So perhaps it's not so much face time as
interactive time that builds friendships and a sense of community. Not
sure. But I do know that people seem more ready to chat, to ask for
help, and to participate in general when the community feel is there.

Anyone interested in a #phoenix.pm on freenode.net?

-- 
Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD User Group  |  MetaBUG
dwchandler at stilyagin.com   |  http://phxbug.org/      |  http://metabug.org/
http://www.stilyagin.com/  |  Daemons in the Desert   |  Global BUG Federation