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The All-Powerful Adam
By massmarrier on Sat, 10/31/2009 - 7:35pm
So, there we were at the Westin Waterfront hearing Adam on the Rail-Volution panel telling truth about the power and/or impotence of blogs. When is Adam going to blog about blogging?
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Comments
You were there?
Why didn't you say hi? Did you go to any of the other sessions?
Yes, I was on a panel, with two bloggers who actually think about what they're writing, while I was blathering on about police twittering about zombie bites and maybe losing my cool, just a little, when some lawyer type asked what legal "accountability" bloggers have (um, miss, you're a lawyer, you realize you can sue me, right?), at Rail-Volution, which is an annual event for transit planners.
And the preceding paragraph shows, I think, why I tend not to blog about panels in which I'm a participant.
So, what was going on at the
So, what was going on at the Westin again? This post doesn't make any sense to me.
Sorry, here are the details
There's an annual conference for transit and urban planners calls Rail-Volution, where they talk about stuff like "transit-oriented development." This year's conference was in Boston. And I was on a panel talking about blogging - from whether transit officials should pay any attention to all us cranks with keyboards to whether they should blog themselves.
http://www.railvolution.com/
Big Blue
A huge guy in a blue shirt was between us. You couldn't see me from your lofty perch. Then after the session, you were swamped with, what, autograph hounds? I figured I see you picking up tchotchkes in the exhibit hall, but didn't. (The TranSystem thingummy with the level, flashlight and twin screwdriver is odd.)
You held forth pretty well. The other guys were largely transit oriented and your site is so much broader. You certainly represented the aggregator/blogger as public forum.
I grabbed that flack who didn't know how to approach bloggers afterward. I told her to be sure to present the material with a decent lead instead of just dumping info into an email. She didn't seem to understand that even bloggers want a reason to to present something to their readers and really can't pore over everything that comes to them searching for a hook.
I fairly snorted at the conservative lady damning the blogosphere for being irresponsible and unaccountable. Your plain talk about us being more exposed, particularly without corporate and legal help, was spot on.
Mike
Groupies!
Actually, one was a guy from MassBike, who wanted some advice on how to figure out what to put on the home page of their new Web site (done in WordPress, so they're trying to figure out if they do it like a traditional brochure-style site or get bloggy with it; I suggested a hybrid model - there's some stuff they're not going to want to drop off the home page right away, but, yes, see if you can make it more timely). The other was somebody who worked for the city who wanted to talk about blogging.
I thought about tchotchkeying it up when I went to get my lunch, but then I realized we already have a house full of tchotchkes and figured we didn't need any more :-).
Did you go to other sessions? If so, how were they?
Better than Fair(mount)
I had several surprises I'll blog on Harrumph! and maybe MinM.
A killer was that the very aristocratic conservative William Lind was solid. I went to his book promo/lecture-the-liberals session thinking contrarian was good for my soul. While I didn't agree with everything, he had solid arguments for installing or re-installing electric street cars in many places. He presented his rap as what progressives need to know to sway anti-transit conservatives to get cash. He had a lackey give me a copy of his "Moving Minds" book, which I'll review too.
But today had a double treat. I went to Housing and Equity, then to Measuring Success. Each had a key player in the Fairmount Corridor/Indigo Line advocacy process. They basically saw that the poor, mostly Black, neighborhoods were robbed by having a major train line between the Orange and Red Lines zip through with no stations or service, 8 minutes to downtown, while they had to take buses at 45 to 90 minutes for the same distance. They forced the city, state and MBTA to commit to building four new stops...in the works. Good stuff there.
This was my first Rail-volution and it was nice bookend to the Moving Together conferences I've been going to for I guess a decade.
Because...
Glen Beck is held SO much more accountable than a blogger...
Heh
One of the other panelists, who writes for the Economist, actually brought him up as an example of how at least bloggers are held accountable by their readers, but what about him?