So, like: why didn’t “Live From The Blogosphere” provide a Trackback link so everyone who wrote live entries could list their entries?

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.“