Odds & ends: iDay, Lessig and more

I've missed quite a lot of action in the past week or so, given the near-death experience of my PC 11 days ago. (We're a joint PC-Mac household, so things weren't as dire as it might have been.) Behind on a lot of stuff, so I'll post some quick items here:

iDay 2003
I attended iDay 2003 in Palo Alto Feb. 8, along with a crowd of 150 or so other Mac users who wanted insider tips on how to make the most of Apple's digital suite: iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD. Jim Heid, author of The Macintosh Digital Hub, handled most of the sessions, and was joined by Steve Broback, president of Avondale Media. Picked up quite a few tricks. Joe Lambert, head of the Center for Digital Storytelling. also captivated the audience with his rap on how we've all got important personal stories to tell. As soon as I'm finished with this manuscript, I'll be diving big-time into iMovie and iDVD.

Geek Cruise
One of the items in our iDay goodie bag was a brochure to sign up for a Geek Cruise. There, in full color on the cover, was our very own Doc Searls with his fellow geeks on last year's cruise. (Here's an image of the brochure cover.) This year the cruise ship is bound for Oahu, Maui, Kauai and Fanning Island. Glenn F., who joined Doc last year, is one of the speakers. Cost? $1,000 for the course and cruise rates ranging from $1,100 to $1,850, depending on cabin.

Larry Lessig

Three days later I returned to Palo Alto to interview Larry Lessig in his office at Stanford for my upcoming book on intellectual property and digital rights. Had a good, engaging and provocative 80-minute Q&A. He's brilliant on this subject, of course. I'll try to post the session sometime in the next few months. The timing depends partly on how much of the conversation winds up in the book.

Google & Pyra
Been following the news about Google's purchase of Pyra and its Blogger software. Dan broke the story, I believe, on his blog Saturday night, and he's got a million pointers at the bottom of his entry. This could be huge, portentous news for the blog community, though it also presents delicate issues for Google, as Dave W. points out. And OJR's Glaser Online has a new column up, Google + Blogger = Mainstream Weblog Acceptance?

SXSW
Speaking of Dan, I just found out a few days ago that Dan will be on the same panel as I am (for about the fifth time), this one on Old media vs. new forms of journalism like blogging, at SXSW next month. More anon.

She's the She in SheNews
Sheila, per usual, has a host of blog-yummy items, ranging from Bono's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize and the sad saga of Bob Greene to Salon's interview with Molly Ivins.

A new blog & website host

Home page has moved
I've redesigned my personal website (1,500+ pages), jdlasica.com. When I decided to move from Manila to Movable Type for my blog -- a difficult decision, considering mine was the 2nd-highest rated blog on Manila -- it kicked in a series of major changes.

I've been online for a long time, and I'm kind of a fuddy duddy about too much change. I've had (and still have) the same WELL email address I've had for many moons. My home page has been on the WELL for years. Well, the WELL -- whose future might be shaky if its mother ship Salon goes down -- doesn't support some of the advanced cgi tricks that Movable Type requires.

So my new blogger compadre Charles Wiltgen turned me on to Dreamhost, which is now hosting both my website and blog. So far, it's gone pretty well. Dreamhost is damn cheap ($10/month, compared to the $36/mo. I've been spending at the WELL, which admittedly also provides a robust online community; I'll be keeping my WELL membership but taking down my home page there in a month).

Movable Type
Movable Type has proved to be reliable and remarkable operation, though the inner workings of it all is more complex than I had expected. It'll take me a couple of weeks to get all the kinks sorted out (I've got a dozen questions or so ... for instance, still not sure how to enable TrackBack, or the Creative Commons license). Both Charles and kpaul, incidentally, have been extraordinarily helpful in helping me with the finer points of advanced CSS to get this blog in shape. Thanks, gents.

By the way, I toyed with the idea of setting up separate "bloglets" for different subjects -- say, one blog for new media, one for politics & current events, etc. -- as Movable Type lets you do, but decided against doing so for now. I tend to think our social and political spectrums have become too narrow and limiting, and roping off each genre or niche into a separate domain may help those looking to graze only certain topics, but ultimately having all the subjects on one page provides a richer experience, imho.

Meantime, it'll be nice to have my weblog and website integrated.

Let me know if you spot any weirdness in the display. For instance, the main blog page (the one you're on) displays with several major quirks in Safari on the Mac.