[clug] Talk for July CLUG

[David Price]

The talk ended up being about blogging, rather than Smalltalk.  I can
probably organise a talk about Smalltalk at some other stage, possibly
at a PSIG meeting.  Blogging is fairly prominent in some parts of the
open source community, but is something I've never really looked at
doing, so I'll be interested to hear what James has to say.  The
speaker is James Robertson.  An abstract of the talk, and a bio of
James follow.

Abstract
--------

This session will discuss blogs, blogging, and some of the associated
technology (RSS in particular). The focus of the talk will be whether
blogs are something of relevance - for project managers, marketing
staff, or developers. I expect an interactive session with many
questions, as well as an interactive introduction to what a blog is.
I'll be taking the tack that blogs are, in fact, useful and worth
investigating. I have my own blog -
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView - and I also sponsor
other blogs on our site - http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs

A quick check of the InfoWorld site, the O'Reilly site, Microsoft or
Sun will demonstrate that many of the industry analysts and
evangelists have started blogging - what this talk will explore is
whether anyone in the audience should be.

The talk will reference BottomFeeder - an open source RSS/Atom news
aggregator. Other technical issues covered will include

* Development issues (dealing with RSS, character encoding issues)
* Deployment issues (building a deployable and installable
  application) 
* Cross platform issues (Unicode, character sets, libraries, look and
  feel)
* On the fly updating of a deployed application


Bio
---

James Robertson Cincom Systems, Inc.  I started my career as a
teacher, spending almost three years at that. I moved on to software
development with the US government, and shortly thereafter moved into
consulting work with Booz-Allen and Hamilton. After three years of
various sorts of work there, I discovered Smalltalk. I soon joined
ParcPlace, first as a trainer/consultant, and then as a sales
engineer. I stayed with the Smalltalk team through various convulsions
of the company and ended up at Cincom when VisualWorks was acquired in
1999. I have since become the Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk,
which consists of VisualWorks and ObjectStudio (another Smalltalk
dialect).