Month: June 2005

On the way home from the KRON event yesterday, Scott and I stopped off at a Cingular store and finally got around to unifying our cell phone accounts into one family plan, which ought to save us about $50 a month.

Of course, we offset these savings by going for the saleswoman’s offer of “buy one, get one free” on the oh-so-cool Motorola V3 Razor. So now we have a new 2 year Cingular contract and his-and-hers Razors, and I finally have a phone with a camera in it.

I’ve wanted to try photoblogging for a while but didn’t have the tools to make it happen. It’s not that hard to pull photos off my Sony digital camera onto my PC and then upload to the blog, but it’s not something I can do on the go. After poking around the net last night looking for moblogging apps, I found that Flickr has a tool that integrates with an existing Movable Type blog, and signed up. The post below shows that it works, although I have to figure out how to streamline the formatting a bit.

I could, of course, set up a full moblog here on the website; I found at least 2 freeware packages that would allow me to do it. But I’d need to set up a new MYSQL database on the web server and that would mean paying my web host some extra $. Plus it would mean some hours dusting off my old code skills to try to integrate that blog with this one. If Flickr starts to suck I might do that, but for now I’ll go the free, no coding required route.

So, expect to see some photoblogging along with the usual stuff in the future.

So this lovely Saturday, Scott and I headed down to the KRON-4 studios by invitation, there to meet up with about 100 or so of our fellow Bay Area Bloggers. Apparently KRON is trying to get a handle on this ‘new’ (at least to them) medium of communication and community.

There were snacks, free t-shirts, and a few short speeches by KRON staff about how great it was that we were there and what great things KRON would like to do to support the local blogger community, but the main focus was for bloggers to network with each other.

Anil Dash from SixApart was there, as was Craig from CraigsList, and Chris Nolan of Politics From Left To Right (one of my blogrolled sites). I also saw some of the local blog-related businesses represented, if the Technorati, Blogger, and Feedster t-shirts some folks were wearing was evidence. There were a bunch of local food bloggers and a broad range of other folks, from gay bloggers to photobloggers. I even ran into a former co-worker from Critical Path.

It was fun, but I found the event very stressful and ended up getting very snippy at Scott. I realized why on the drive home. Watching the food bloggers chat with each other and Chris, Anil, and Craig comfortably schmoozing, I felt like I’d felt all through high school — I was sitting on the sidelines watching the cool kids all interact effortlessly while I struggled to make friends at all.

Despite making great gains over the years against my innate shyness, it is really hard for me to network, especially in a room full of people I don’t know. Opening my mouth to talk to a new person is a big effort, and when the other person is someone who I perceive to be more accomplished than me, I’m often too intimidated to say anything at all. I get frustrated that I feel this way, which today led to me being short with the one person in the room that I could talk to without feeling scared.

Anyway, despite it all, I did get to tell someone whose work I enjoy that I like her blog, so that’s a small victory. Maybe next time I’ll be brave enough to tell Craig “thank you” for Craigslist.

UPDATE: KRON’s coverage of the event is online now.