Great–here we are in the car, lost in downtown LA, looking for the onramp to 101. Why can’t I have access to the Internet all the time?

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Wrap-up from Darin and Paul (who were standing, so they actually heard what was going on):

“Why does the Boingboing guy look so familiar?”
“Mark Frauenfelder? He was in a Switch ad. He said using Windows was like staying in a bad relationship.”
“Yup, that’s it.”

“The people up there were a good mix. The Tony Pearce guy?he was low-brow. He said he was neither a writer nor an IT genius. Use of the term ‘IT genius’ sort of summed it all up. He got his hits from having nude pics of Anna Kournikova on his site. He earns big low-brow points for that. He’s a street philosopher of the blog.”
“Wouldn’t it be funny if he turned out to be the William S. Burroughs of the blog?”
“There’s not a chance of that.”

“The blogger.com guy was really boring. He’s just totally the type of guy I’m used to. Seemed really smart, did this blogger thing…seen it all before.”

(Oho! Tony Pearce got the three million hits from the nude pix of Anna! I didn’t hear that part. Okay.)

“He’s conducting experiments. Can I get a response with this sort of stuff, and can I track it? The answer is yes.”
“I was thinking more selfishly. I was thinking, ‘This guy is boring to me.'”

“I did keep thinking about your ‘egalitarian dream’ and how it’s still a tight circle.”

“I kept thinking about Power Law [a mathematical law of network topology and the inevitable rise of supernodes in a network?the more connected you are, the more connected you’ll get]. Why it’s actually correct instead of thinking, Oh, we can violate that law. Some nodes get elevated in status in the network, because they are perceived to be more useful…How do you scale a village casbah or a regional casbah to the whole world?”

“In terms of predicting the future on this stuff, it seems like no one has as good a record as a psychic predicting the next year. None of these people is qualified to predict what’s going to happen.” [This was Darin. Darin thinks psychics rank somewhere below pond scum, so you can only imagine what he thinks of predictions of where the blogging phenomenon is going.]

“I would have much preferred a panel where everyone was trying to be interesting.”
“I think everyone was trying to be interesting.”
“Then they fell short.”

“How many times can you have a panel that asks the fundamental questions? Storytelling is what I enjoy. This idea that punditry is interesting, that predicting the future is interesting…that’s not where I want to go. That’s why I never got into journaling the way Diane did. Too few people wanted to tell stories every day.”

“So many of these people, their thrust is ostensibly creative…”
“Yeah, gee. What’s more exciting than artists talking about art?”

“I did like it because it got me out of the house on a Saturday night. I also liked the ‘This is the kind of thing that could happen in San Francisco or New York but not Los Angeles.'”
“Well, it’s so true. Los Angeles is just a wasteland.”

“This’ll sound better when Diane writes it down.”
“Oh, I know. She’s made me sound like a fuckin’ genius before.“

I think I’m too uncomfortable to keep doing this. Sitting Indian-style on hard and cold concrete is not good for the bones. Or the well-padded butt, for that matter.

“Gee, you’re kind of boring compared to your cartoon character.” Yes, we are more eloquent on the page than we are in real life. In real life, there is no editing!

What’s missing from blogging: damn, I didn’t understand a word that guy was saying. I’m sure Darin will fill me in later. Oops, now they’re showing something on the screen, which I can’t see, since I’m down here on the hard concrete floor.

Showing an “audio blogging” experiment. Much applause. A guy added an audio blog entry via cell phone.

To be challenging to the reader is fun—to mindfuck your visitor is great. Pages on the web that tell you how to do it are just wrong. You can just post an image. Maybe the images take you different places.

“I do it because I get off on it.” Boy, does that sound familiar.

How has blogging changed your habits as a writer? “There’s a lot more guilt in my life about not writing. The instant feedback from people is great…I trust myself more because of the feedback.”

How much of Boing Boing’s content comes from readers? The editor estimates 50-50. That’s pretty amazing.

Blogs as threat to conventional journalism? “Conventional journalism will change. It’s going to get harder to make money at it.” (Because so many people are willing to do it for free? I’m unclear where he’s going with this.) The writer needs to know about something, and thousands of readers can immediately help him out with it.

“Now that I get to do exactly what I want to do in the way I want to do it, how do I make money off it?” Welcome to the Internet, honey. Of course, she has a pilot at MTV, so what do I know?

“Advertising may work for special interest blogs.” Well, how true. See also: MSNBC’s blogs.

Oh dear. Questions from the audience. I find my already tenuous attention span drifting more. I’m websurfing. The perils of WiFi—sure, I’m supposed to be paying attention, but instead I’m checking out reports from today’s 4 Million Al Qaeda Member Marches.