Ben and Mena Trott are here, visiting Seabury as part of our technology lecture series. They gave a spectacular workshop talk this afternoon for a gathering of students, stimulating their imaginations about the potential of personal publishing beyond anything they’d dreamed before.
They joined Trevor and Margaret (and Pippa) and me for dinner at Cozy Noodle, and now are beginning their evening presentation at Seabury. Three Seabury students are surrounded by a sea of Chicago-area bloggers who came out to show their appreciation for Ben and Mena.
They’re beginning with a quick overview of Movable Type’s new version, and pointing us to sites that use MT without it necessarily being obvious that MT is behind the scenes. First, the Urban School of San Francisco; they use MT not so much as a blog, but uses MT for content management by calling on categories. The Urban School uses the standard MT calendar to power an event calendar (!), filtered by type of event.
Second, they point us to the 826 Valencia, a writing center and pirate store in San Francisco. 826 Valencia actually gets their students writing; they sent a student to NYU, I believe, who continues to blog on the site (demonstrating to current students that there can be a benefit to the work of learning writing skills).
Third, they point to a site that aggregates TrackBack feeds from a number of disparate individual blogs, AustinBloggers. This site collects TrackBack pings from separate individuals’ blogs, and compiles them into the Austin Bloggers page (they do mention Topic Exchange, Liz). Ben and Mena suggest that Seabury could use this schema to compile entries from individual blogs, into a shared meta-blog (as it were). They mocked-up a Seabury version of one of these, based on Trevor’s ethics class blog.
Now they’re discussing helper applications, such as NetNewsWire Pro and Kung-Log (on OS X), or w.bloggar or NewsGator (on Windows). It’s hard to overstate their enthusiasm for NetNewsWire and Kung-Log. . . .
Now they’re talking about the upcoming release of Moveable Type Pro. Among the upcoming features are a photo album tool, differentiation of editors from authors, custom entry fields, registration for Comments and Posting, and hierarchized categories.
Questions? A Chicago blogger asked whether there were any alternatives to the word “blog”? Ben and Mena don’t like the word, but they don’t see an effective alternative. Better support for Windows installations? Ben says “some.” One user had a firewall problem. Will the moblog feature be available on future releases? Mena notes that some features are very hard to implement at each specific server location. They’ve had blog-by-email ready for ten months, but the haven’t released it because it requires too much customization.
Alex asks about the effect of weblogging software on social groups who meet face-to-face regularly. Mena notes first of all the the Chicago Bloggers are out in force tonight — weblogs brought a couple dozen people to Seabury tonight who would never have been here otherwise, who knew one another in the face-to-face world. Blogging in academic settings brings together self-expression by writing with interpersonal interaction. Ben mentions the different perspectives one gains from reading various accounts of, for instance, a conference. Mena notes that when Ben blogs during their vacations, she reads his blog to find out what he really thinks.
I missed some questions about marketing, hype, blogs, Raging Cow, and the future. I was busy putting the brownies and molasses cookies out.
I’ll ask Liz’s question (from the comments): “Can you convince Ben & Mena to create "Movable Course" software? :-) Or to let us turn it into that?” Ben says it’s an interesting direction, and allows that they will in fact be looking at other applications for their software. They had built an education portal at their previous workplace. They know there’s a big market; maybe, but Mena doesn’t think it’s in the immediate future.
Will Moveable Type Pro eclipse any free versions, or will there be a free version alongside MT Pro? Mena says that they will always keep a free version along with the Pro version, but will also allow the incentive of a more powerful version for those who are willing to contribute. They note that they’ve done very well from donations, that their donors have been very generous.
What are their favorite blogs? Boing Boing — they don’t specify any others. Have they met them all? They’ve met the authors of about half of their favorite blogs. Most of the bloggers they read go to tech conferences, where they meet.
What’s the timing on their release cycles? Mena’s telling funny stories about the release of the first version.
Later. . . . Well, I lost the note-tracking trail there, and after a few minutes I got up to make an official end to the presentation portion of the festivities. That didn’t bring the evening itself to an end, though. The Chicago Bloggers assembled for a team picture (bigger and better at me3dia.com) with Ben and Mena (Mena: “So, we’re big in Tokyo and Chicago”);
Ahhhhh...excellent. I've been thinking a lot about Movable Type as an underlying engine for CMS.
It get back to my interest in better courseware. Can you convince Ben & Mena to create "Movable Course" software? :-) Or to let us turn it into that?
Posted by: Liz at March 13, 2003 08:05 PMOh--and the AustinBloggers thing sounds a lot like TopicExchange, which also aggregates pings. WE're using that for the Emergent Democracy discussions: http://topicexchange.com/t/emergent_democracy/
Posted by: Liz at March 13, 2003 08:06 PMyou're obviously much more proficient at note taking than myself :-) nice turnout. fun time.
Posted by: Eric Snowdeal at March 13, 2003 08:09 PMI'm sorry that I missed the evening, but I did catch the afternoon. Thank you to AKMA, Mena, and Ben!!!!!
Posted by: Heather at March 13, 2003 10:25 PMDitto what Heather said! I especially appreciate reading the blow by blow from the comfort of my heating pad; wish I could have seen the live version, and I'm looking forward to the further conversation that seems destined to ensue.
Posted by: Jane at March 13, 2003 11:25 PMInteresting. We always enjoy your writing. Today we get a picture too.
Thanks for giving all of us a good read.
Posted by: meg at March 14, 2003 01:53 AMThanks AKMA for hosting this, and thanks to Ben and Mena for coming out.
AKMA, remind us before Jim McGee's presentation! We wouldn't want to miss that.
Posted by: paul at March 14, 2003 08:14 AMThanks to you, Ben and Mena for the presentation last evening. I really enjoyed hearing what they had to say as well as getting to meet some fellow people from our community...
Some pictures I took from last night are available at http://www.marusin.com/gallery/BenAndMena
and some notes I took during the presentation are available at http://www.marusin.com/archives/week_2003_03_09.php#000550
Posted by: mike at March 14, 2003 09:55 AMA variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.
Posted by: Cassandra at January 13, 2004 01:50 AMBut variables get one benefit people do not
Posted by: Denton at January 13, 2004 01:51 AMWe can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.
Posted by: Bartholomew at January 13, 2004 01:51 AMThe rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:
Posted by: Edmund at January 13, 2004 10:12 AMTo address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Posted by: Georgette at January 13, 2004 10:13 AMThis back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec
Posted by: Francisca at January 13, 2004 10:13 AM