In a post titled Practicing the heart of professing what I am learning, Case professor Sandy Kristen Piderit belatedly responds to my queries about blogging:

Blogging can be:

• a diversion for insomniacs…
• a way of engaging with the 24-hour open university that is the World Wide Web…
• a way of networking even when I can’t leave the house after 9 pm because I want to be home each night to put my daughter to sleep…
• a motivation to learn about new communications technologies and software like Movable Type, bloglines, delicious, Skype, wikis, drupal, etc….
• a pretext for surfing other blogs out of curiosity for what is going on in the world that may only be peripherally addressed by mainstream news media…
• a casual forum where I can be sloppy and write really long sentences that end in three dashes and then go back and edit them later….
• a mental rehearsal of conversations I would like to have with others, and a self-confidence builder…
• an invitation into conversation and a way of connecting with people I may never meet in person…
• a place to figure out what I really want to say….
• a way of amplifying my voice in the world…

That’s it! My blog is a place where I figure out what I really want to say and then say it to the world. My blog is my editorial page, my soapbox, and my spotlight on things to which I want my students and colleagues to pay attention. More and more, blogging is a mental discipline for me that sharpens my ability to recognize patterns and trends, hold on to pieces until more complex thought patterns come together completely, and to crystalize one piece of a pattern in words and share it with others each day. My blog is where I practice the mental discipline that is at the heart of professing what I am learning.

Thanks for thinking it through and sharing that, Sandy. It’s exactly the kind of social responsibility Jack is talking about.

In his post titled Why bother…?, Jeff Hess explains why he won’t blog at Cleveland.com (the subject of conversation at previous and upcoming Meetups):

Last week at the Cleveland Bloggers’ MeetUp (Dinner Conversations…, Thursday 17 February) one of the topics that arose was that of bloggers posting to cleveland.com, the website maintained by our sole daily newspaper: The Plain Dealer. Our immediate response was how much are you going to pay us?

The rational was that we all were very cheaply and conveniently publishing our own blogs, so why should we provide free content to a for-profit publication? The conclusion was, we shouldn’t.

I raise this because this morning I read Steve Outing’s In Defense of Citizen Journalism at Editor & Publisher… here will be some bloggers, of course, who will think that being hosted on the local newspaper’s website is prestigious, but I think that number is small and shrinking. There is the argument that a newspaper (or other local media outlet) can offer greater exposure to a blog, but I think that reasoning falls flat if a reader has to wade through dozens, or hundreds, of blogs.

If the media outlet is acting as gatekeeper it defeats the purpose of publishing blogs. If it doesn’t act as gatekeeper, it’s no better than any other hosting service.

I think old-style media outlets will spin their wheels for a few years trying to figure out how to make a buck (and that is truly the only thing they are driven by and that is not a bad thing) off of this blog thing while bloggers, and whatever communication technologies follow, continue to leave them farther and farther behind.

Please click through, read the entire post, and leave a comment for Jeff.

By the way, you don’t have to be a blogger to attend the Meetup. Or a podcaster either.

I’ve finally got everything in place to do podcasts.

Here’s the first one.

Props to Stuart Henshall for providing these instructions.

Just thought I’d post my tweak to Stuart Henshall’s Skypecasting instructions. Instead of using Windows Sound Recorder, I’m using Audacity. With it, you don’t have to change your sound settings at the OS level, meaning that your sound card still plays other sounds. In other words, you don’t have to go back in and change the settings after you’re done to play iTunes. The set up is the same as Stuart’s instructions, and the only thing you’ll need to do is change the setting for the playback from the virtual audio cable to your sound card to hear the file.

By the way, I don’t know if anyone has figured out how to do this on a Mac. The virtual audio cables are Windows drivers and cost $40.

Help free orphaned works:

“the copyright office is currently considering whether to recommend changes to copyright law that will make it easier and cheaper for you to use “orphaned works” — works that remain under copyright but whose “owner” can’t be found.

Click through the link above for the whole story…

Jay Yoo emails “This came about due to an Engadget.com posting“:

Dan Frakes writes in Playlist Magazine “I never thought I�??d get excited about a T-shirt, but after a couple afternoons at the gym with the BlackCoat T, I was convinced. Oddly enough, that experience convinced me to wear the T under �??normal�?� clothes for an evening, where I became even more of a fan. If the functionality I�??ve described here sounds like it would be useful to you, the BlackCoat T is highly recommended.”

Via Strategize, HoB Cleveland has an event feed.

If you have a calendar, you need to think about doing this…

John Ettorre offers this for MIA Steve Goldberg:

“A man knows when he had found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live…when we are not living up to our true vocation, thought deadens our life, or substitutes itself for life, or gives in to life so that our life drowns out our thinking and stifles the voice of conscience. When we find our vocation, thought and life are one.” -Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

But maybe Steve isn’t MIA and has found his vocation:

I was on retreat in Michigan when I decided to scan email to keep the volume down, when I got Valdis’ announcement. I quickly skyped him to see how the quality was and just to catch up. The quality was fab, and I was attracting a crowd with my headset in the basement of Jewel Heart. (Pirating the free open hotspot of the nextdoor bar/restaurant). When I explained what was happening and telling them that Valdis was somewhere over the Atlantic, there was a communal “whoa!”

I notice that Edward Vielmetti, the subject of George thru Tim’s posts, is from Ann Arbor and that was where I was. Lots of free wifi there, but doesn’t look too coordinated. A Sangha mate is plugged in to the geek crowd there and when I told him about the plans to start mesh networking for Tremont’s Wifi Neighborhood [link edited. thx, adam.] project, he proposed that we start talking and maybe collaborating to do the same for downtown Ann Arbor.

I have been keeping my head down as of late, but the karmic converges of synchronicity and serendipity continue to blaze a trail that forms the path under my feet.

Stop by and let him know he’s missed.

I haven’t switched over completely to Gmail until now. SBC is blocking outgoing mail on port 25, which is a real pain for someone who works at different hotspots almost daily. Just one more reason not to like telcos.

Just wanted to remind everyone how important it is to make sure your data is backed up and you have all of the software for you machine handy.

I had to deal with two situations in the past week. One was a laptop that’s hard drive wore out after about a year. Fortunately, the data was being backed up with an iOmega Rev drive.

The other was a situation where someone let another person installed something they shouldn’t have and totally hosed the machine. To make matters worse, the company that made the laptop provided the wrong drivers. Even the drivers on their support website were the wrong ones.

Bottom line. Stuff goes wrong with computers. Help yourself out by being prepared.

Bill Callahan expands on an Op-Ed in the PD. A BFD must read.

Adam Harvey is blogging about getting involved thanks in part to the things the rest of us are talking about. Peppermint Lisa comments that she’s optimistic too.

Let’s keep up the good work!

I heart Jerry’s AKA Red Wheelbarrow’s wife’s blog Your Daily Art. Kind of like a daily art history lesson.

Although it’s not listed anywhere on his blog (that I can find) Jack Ricchuito emailed saying CASE’s Lev Gonick “proposes a city wide ‘Late Out-Late In’ program, where corporations let people start work at 11 am if they attend an art performance in Cleveland. Love it.”

Recording with Skype works! Check out my conversation with KOYONO’s Jay Yoo, where we talk about BlackCoats, Cleveland, blogs, and innovation.

Who’s next?

Sorry I don’t remember where I read this first, but if you use Firefox, type about:mozilla in the address bar.

You wonder why our phonebills are so high? Via SmartMobs.com:

Larry Lessig offers an explanation of why American broadband rollout has been so slow and poorly serviced - the telecom lobby protects itself.

this sort of insanity is raging across the US today. Pushed by lobbyists, at least 14 states have passed legislation similar to Pennsylvania’s. I’ve always wondered what almost $1 billion spent on lobbying state lawmakers gets you. Now I’m beginning to see.

Dan Wismar writes he’s joined Matt Naugle of The Open End to do the Ohio for Blackwell Blog.

I’ve got all the relevant sites and feeds in the NeoBlog and NeoFeeds sections of BFD. Please excercise your social responsibility as a blogger and welcome them to the blogsphere.

Ok. I know very little about modern dance. I know a more about minimalistic composers and strange directors, so when I talk about DanceCleveland’s presentation of Les Ballets Jazz De Montreal I’ll say that the dancers were phenomenal, the original music was a excellent blend of Aphex Twin and Harold Budd with a dash of Shirley Bassey and some industrial beats thrown in for good measure. Short Works: 23 felt like a Jim Jarmusch film, while The Stolen Show evoked David Lynch for me.

While MoMix might have been cool, in my opinion, [bjm_danse] was probably cooler. Even the way it’s - what would you call that, textulated (like pixaleted)? - is cooler then intercaps.

So much for my career doing modern dance reviews…

I’ve been seeing a lot of emails from PayPal. Make sure you check their page on protecting yourself from phishing. Bottom line for me, don’t click links an email from a website that has information in it you want to protect. Open a browser, type the url in yourself, and login there.

Comments?

Glenn Fleishman notes that Hugo Gernsback is the father of amateur radio and draws a parallel between then and now with community WiFi groups.

That would make Gernsback the father of podcasting as well.

My first exposure to the name Hugo Gernsback was when I read William Gibson’s The Gernsback Continuum.

Check out this BFD podcast that was made by Tim recording a three way call with Only One. Jack, Tim, and I banter about the last election, platform envy, podcasting, and community building. What else do guys talk about over drinks on a Saturday night?

By the way, Tim’s posted a related comment over at GeekZen.com

I’m chatting with BFD reader Mary Beth Goodman on Skype. She’s posted pictures of her visit to The Gates yesterday. She comments, “As events went I think it’s best described as a real ‘happening’ — so many people there just to see what it was, take photos, look at other people looking at it and taking pictures and wondering what it was all about.”

It’s amazing how many bloggers captured the experience and shared it with the rest of us…

Frank Mills and I are trying to figure out when we can get together for coffee. Part of one of his emails contained this gem:

I am excited about the buzz Vision Downtown is creating. Hopefully this will spread to the other neighborhoods too. I have spent the last few days in our most depressed neighborhoods. I am saddened to see how many residents of these neighborhoods have simply given up. As one person said, “We are the poorest neighborhood in the poorest city in America, and we’re just going to get poorer.” Their faith in the ability of political system to solve neighborhood problems is nil. Worse yet, there is the growing belief that Cleveland’s and Ohio’s politicians and big business don’t care about the plight of neighborhoods and the residents.

To answer Andy Timity’s question about podcasting:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Podcasting” is a portmanteau of the words iPod and broadcasting. A podcast is like an audio magazine subscription: a subscriber receives regular audio programs delivered via the internet, and she or he can listen to them at her or his leisure.

Podcasts differ from traditional internet audio in two important ways. In the past, listeners have had to either tune in to web radio on a schedule, or they have had to search for and download individual files from webpages. Podcasts are much easier to get. They can be listened to at any time because a copy is on the listener’s computer or portable music player (hence the “pod” in “podcasting”), and they are automatically delivered to subscribers, so no active downloading is required.

Podcasting is functionally similar to the use of timeshift-capable digital video recorders (DVRs), such as TiVo, which let users record and store television programs for later viewing.