Techknowledge

I'm off to Boston today to attend Cyberposium 11, a technology and business event hosted by the Harvard School of Business. My mission: to meet and talk with Walt Mossberg, the personal technology guru of WSJ. Although it looks very unlikely that he'll be available to moderate our panel at Tech@Tuck this year, I'd still like to meet him and spread the word about our event. I'm also a big fan of his column.

Meeting him would sort of be like the time we met Ira Glass. I had been volunteering at WBEZ for Stories on Stage (the lady who ran it was a Michigan theatre alum) - there's a story in that experience that I have yet to write - and Jonathan Goldstein sat in the next cubicle. I told him I was a big fan of This American Life and he invited me to hear a taping. Roger came with me, along with a reporter for the Sun-Times. The show featured the Sarah Vowell story about an underground cafeteria in Carlsbad Caverns and Jonathan's story about a Chicago Russian Bath.

I looked it up and here is a link to that broadcast. Wow, that was before September 11. The show featured some really funny punning titles: It's Not the Heat, It's the Humility, You Can Have Your Cave and Eat It Too. We were a big fan of the show before we came to Chicago. I started listening to TAL in Ann Arbor, and really liked the format.

The way the taping went was that the guests (including Roger and me) sat in chairs in the recording room and watched Ira "DJ" the show. The actual stories were pre-recorded: what we did see live was Ira mixing the music and taping his intros and segues. We had to be very quiet during the segues. It was fun.

What was really neat was how this voice that we enjoyed, admired, and laughed to had materialized into a real person. We didn't really talk with Ira Glass so much as complimented him. But it was fun. And the experience didn't diminish his stature for us - his storytelling became more compelling, more special.

The year before, Roger had bought that Slate Diaries book, which included an essay by Ira, and I remembering reading it in Michigan.

I like meeting writers I read in person ... to see that the sounds and images I adore or am mystified by come from a living, human source.

So anyway, back to Mr. Mossberg. His columns are pretty funny, and he's a big fan of Apple, so his views fit very nicely in our household.

Here's another quirky thing ... in a recent WSJ special on "recommended blogs," Mossberg listed some technology blogs that he liked. The first blog he listed was Engadget.com - whose editor-in-chief I recently found out was my childhood neighbor, Peter Rojas!

I had been reading Engadget for a while, as research for work. It came highly recommended from our web guru, Todd Ragaza, and Tuck Computing. Then a few other center fellows also said they followed the blog and its podcasts. I hunted around to see who the authors were, and if I could interview them for the center, and in the masthead I saw a name that was very familiar! Small world!

More meeting-the-person-behind-the-writer stuff later ...