Dan Shafer: Weblogs

Mon, 18 Nov 2002 06:38:36 GMT

What Kind of Content is Worth Buying?. If we are ever going to find ways for content providers on the Internet to make money, we're going to have to figure out what it is about information that people will pay for. I'm not sure there's much there, but we owe it to ourselves to try to dope this out. Content consists essentially of news, opinion/commentary on the news, in-depth information of a practical (how-to) nature, focused research, and entertainment. None of these categories is entirely self-describing nor are they mutuallly exclusive. There are, for example, databases of focused research designed to entertain (a la Internet Movie Database. News is too freely available to entice many people to pay for it. Opinion is a trust issue: sources of viewpoints who are deemed trustworthy might be able to get someone to pay for it, but probably only devout followers. In-depth how-to stuff might draw a payment, but it's a one-time thing and probably narrowly focused and therefore of limited total market potential. Focused research has some winning players (Meta, Giga, and others) but their Internet revenue tends to be a tiny fraction of their off-line revenue. And entertainment is highly competitive; breaking in new is hard. As I contemplate this, I'm reminded of a bold venture I thought would take off like gangbusters a few years ago. A daily sports newspaper was launched with much fanfare. I was an immediate devotee. But you had to go to the newsstand every day to buy it. No home delivery. It didn't last long. Then I remembered a New York Times piece I read several years ago. The basic message was simple: Americans will not pay for information or education but they will seriously overpay for convenience. How else explain bottled water, bottled tea, individually wrapped portions of peanut butter (I'm not making that one up)? So what we need to do is to figure out how to make Internet-based content so easily accessible that consumers will pay us for the convenience of the packaging. I have no clue what that is, but it seems to me to be the right direction. Anyone know of any successes in this area?

Sat, 16 Nov 2002 20:26:51 GMT

Aggregator cum Editor...Good Idea. I like the new tack Brent Simmons is taking with NetNewsWire Lite. A seamless news browsing, commentary, blog publishing kind of tool would be way cool. (Actually, Radio already has that set of features; I'm talking about a tool that is independent of the blog technology or server.) Weblog Editing and NetNewsWire
I’ve got the basics of weblog editing in NetNewsWire pro working—I’ve been using a Manila site initially, since Manila supports both the Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs.

[inessential.com]

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 04:08:55 GMT

How Blogs Change Site Traffic Patterns. This is an important piece for everyone interested in, involved with or affected by Web site construction and publishing, including all bloggers. Matt Haughey gives in. Matt Haughey: “I don’t keep track of post titles, I don’t think the syndication file is all that useful without HTML, and I’ve never personally found much use for a RSS reader. That all changed when a friend said she wasn’t reading my site anymore, or any sites for that matter that didn’t carry RSS feeds.”

Brent’s Law of Weblogs: If you’re not syndicating, you’re not publishing.

This law is descriptive, not prescriptive.

RSS, or something like it, was inevitable. I used to read a couple dozen sites regularly—now I read about a hundred sites. Far more than I could ever follow in my browser. And I do actually visit the sites I subscribe to: when there’s something interesting in their feed, and it links back to the site, I go to the site.

Traffic patterns are changing, definitely. But RSS is a chance for webloggers to reach an even wider audience. It doesn’t mean that the HTML version of one’s site is now irrelevant—in fact, because of RSS and newsreaders I now visit lots of sites I never used to visit. [inessential.com]

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 04:03:16 GMT

Scott Rosenberg Says This is Good Stuff. Believe It.

Blog worthy
Steven Johnson's books -- "Interface Culture" and "Emergence" -- represent some of the most thoughtful and idea-laden writing on technoculture you'll find anywhere. Johnson, who was co-editor of the late lamented Feed as well, is now blogging away at www.stevenberlinjohnson.com. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 18:56:44 GMT

I'm Trying Another New Blogging Tool. I've become so enchanted with blogging that I have been spending way too much time blogging and exploring the space. My old buddy Tim Lundeen of Web Crossing fame and my son-in-law Jeff Soule, who works for Tim, have been nudging me lately to check out WebX 5.0, a product that is still in pre-release. It incorporates blogging into a full-blown discussion board system, one that I've admired for many years. In addition to being a community server, WebX has always been a full-blown development platform. The new Version 5 is a major leap forward for the product I chose for discussion boards at Salon.com and later at CNET's Builder.com. It is eminently more customizable, supports a full-blown object model on the server side, is scriptable in JavaScript and now supports a plug-in architecture that will spawn new models for making money in community. But IT BLOGS!. And does so very nicely, including creation of RSS feed, categories, mutliple blog editors and two features I've really wanted in blogging: email signup by readers and email notification of the blog owner when comments get posted. I'm transitioning a couple of my categories over to WebX5 so I can do a legit comparison of the blogging experience between Radio and WebX. Here's the temporary home of my WebX Blog. I'll be interested in your comments. (If you go there and you really want to try this new tool before it's released, shoot me an email. I can only set up blogs for a small handful of folks on this test server, but I'd love to share the experience and get more feedback.)

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 02:10:34 GMT

Enter Key Deletes in Radio News Aggregator. Argh!. I just found out the hard way that the news aggregator page of my Radio Web log site responds to the Enter key (which I struck accidentall while reaching for a pretzel) by deleting all checked items on the page. Bad move. I think this is browser behavior because there's a form with no text entry field, so the Enter key is doing what it's expected to do. But it just cost me about five items I had planned to write blog entries about. Gotta find a way around that one.

Sun, 10 Nov 2002 17:43:08 GMT

This program didn't work for me iBlog is a standalone blogging tool for Mac OS X. It's not a Blogger API or MetaWeblog API app. It does its own content management. It also appears to have a news aggregator built in. It's a free beta right now. It would be interesting to see a weblog created with this software. [Scripting News] I downloaded it. I tried it. After some initial problems (mine), I got it to post one blog entry. No subsequent entry would work. If anyone reading this has an idea why, I'm open to suggestions. I like the app a lot. I wish there were one like it for Radio.

Fri, 08 Nov 2002 03:08:08 GMT

Cool: Vectoring Blogs Based on Books. Jon Udell pointed me to this All-Consuming site where you can vector in on peoples' sites via the books they mention.

Thu, 07 Nov 2002 20:56:36 GMT

MacAddict Teaches Blogging. The November issue of MacAddict has an article on using PHP, MySQL, and someting called pMachineFree to create a blog and serve it up using Apache on OS X. I may give this a try. I learned PHP a couple of years ago and thought it was pretty cool for what it did and I'm comfortable with MySQL. Always looking at new techniques and technologies for blogging. Anyone else know about this combo or have others to suggest?

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 01:14:39 GMT

Desktop Publishing for the Connected. John Robb of UserLand has some cogent comments about computers and their historic path to helping us be more effective. He focuses near the end of his piece on Radio and similar tools that facilitate Web publishing for the masses. I like what he has to say, particularly his closing paragraph: "quote"

In my view, the market opportunity for desktop publishing tools that are the equivalent of Office for the connected world is HUGE. Every ad-hoc Web site that can be built to solve business and personal needs can likely be done better using these new tools. However, it is being held back (not stopped, but stymied) by a monopoly vendor that has opted not to improve the browser -- arguably the most popular interface/application of all time and the best enabler of this technology. We will get there, it will just take longer. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] "unquote" Maybe the way to beat Microsoft is to get people to stop using just Internet Explorer. That's the invisible lynchpin in the Microsoft Strategy for World Domination. And in that arena there are tons of better products for every platform. How about a badge icon for sites that says "Any Browser But Microsoft's" or "Best Viewed With a Browser Not Owned by a Criminal Monopoly" or something?

Sat, 02 Nov 2002 19:02:50 GMT

Headlines vs. Lead-Ins. Starting a couple of days ago, I altered the layout on this blog. I used to separate stories with headlines that were larger than the story type and appeared on separate lines above the stories. I started following the more usual blog style of bold-faced lead-ins to stories like the one at the beginning of this piece. I think I like this approach better. It allows a "screenful" to display more content. It's slightly easier to type. It feels like the lead-ins disrupt the flow of reading less than headlines. Anyway, always trying new things.

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 03:54:00 GMT

I Should Have Been Clearer "quote" Dan Shafer: "A single outline blog of an entire baseball game gets unwieldy." Not true. This is where outliners shine. A large outline is no more difficult to work with than a small one. [Scripting News] "unquote" What I meant, Dave, was that trying to read the entire game's set of notes in one outline could get unwieldy for the reader. Opening all the nodes (presuming one for each half-inning, for example) can confuse people who don't grok outlines and how to use them.

Thu, 31 Oct 2002 23:08:36 GMT

Real-Time Blogging Issues. Daniel Berlinger, author of the Web editing tool called Archipelago, was one of the folks who joined in the recent experiment in real-time blogging of the World Series that Dave Winer and Jake and a couple of others of us launched. He said me in an email this morning: "quote" Tools seem to affect the result of rt blogging far more than in other cases. I'm curious to know if you have features that you feel would make rt blogging easier, or is it just a slightly faster version of regular blogging? "unquote" I have a sort of intuitive feeling that a real-time outliner is probably a better environment for rt blogging than the usual write-edit-post-wait cycle. I'd like the idea, I think, of having an outline open that would just grow during the course of the event. that also lets me define some comments to be less interesting or relevant than others by nesting them deeper and hiding them by default, for example. OTOH, a single outline blog of an entire baseball game gets unwieldy. It occurred to me as I thought about this that what I'd really like is a rt blogging tool that captured my notes and published them in real time (even fairly automatically, like readers looking over my shoulder). It should then easily allow me, at the conclusion of the game or event, to archive the whole thing and then create a sort of highlights/summary post in correct chronological order to post on my main blog. Or something like that.

Thu, 31 Oct 2002 21:33:06 GMT

Blogging: 30 Days Later. I just realized I've been blogging daily (with two exceptions) for a full month now. New patterns and habits have emerged. I've made a bunch of new friends. I've had tons of new ideas and insights. And I haven't updated my "main" Web page one time during this period. I didn't believe anything would replace my desire to maintain my personal site, but blogging has. The instant gratification, the speed (even when things run slow) of updating, has made me much more inclined to add multiple posts and stories to the blog every day. This has the feel in many ways of the glory days of my youth as a daily newspaper reporter/editor/columnist, only faster. When Radio first came out, I called it the "Web's typewriter." It's that, but it's so much more. Blogging has done more to change me in a short period of time than anything since my first encounter with the Web. Thanks, Dave and UserLand guys! There's nothing but fun and speed bumps ahead!

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 17:59:40 GMT

A Brief Stroll Down Memory Lane on the Old Frontier

Andy Ihnatko is a long-time Mac scene observer who holds forth in a column on one of my all-time favorite newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times. He has a piece today on RSS news feeds (the source of much if not most of the content you see showing up in Web logs like this these days). In it, he mentions Radio (my personal Blogging tool of choice) and acknowledges how powerful a tool it is. "The aggregator found in Radio Userland is even more powerful, but then again things from Userland generally are," he says rightly. That got me to thinking about the first time I met Dave Winer. And about the journey his software has taken from its beginnings to today.

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 19:14:10 GMT

Many Weblogs Have Transitioned to Pulpits?

Dave Winer, in his History of Weblogs says:

Weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles. A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know.

That's certainly how Weblogs started out and got their name (they were logs of Web tours and visits and recommendations). But it's clear that many Weblogs have become something quite different. Mine, e.g., is far more often about my take on a topic or my narration of a sporting event in real time than it is a sort of set of interesting pointers with commentary. As I look around at the Weblogs I follow, I think most of them have evolved from the tour guide model to a more editorial model. (Probably most of them never were tour guides. I see blogs becoming, as I said when I first encountered Radio, more and more like the Web's typewriter. But now it's combined with a directly connected printing press. Woohoo!

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 18:54:48 GMT

Why So Much Repetitive Stuff in Wired News Feeds?

Wired News has some of the stuff I really like to read and often link to and comment on. But I'm about to unsubscribe to their news feed because of repetition. Question: is this kind of repetition something Wired could easily fix or is it sort of inherent in the system? I see other feeds provide repetitive stuff from time to time as well, but overnight, the Wired feeds at 10 p.m., 1, 4, 8, and 10 a.m. were identical in every respect. Interestingly enough, the 9 a.m. feed was not. Is something unexpected or weird going on here or is this expected behavior?

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 19:09:45 GMT

No Argument Here, Dave

"quote" Someday, not very long from now, we'll argue over bragging rights for who has the first All-Web-Services-Authored weblog. For the record, that's this site, Scripting News. [Scripting News] "endquote" I'm not actually sure we'll end up arguing about this, but if we do, I'm going with Scripting News unless someone has hard evidence to the contrary.

Thu, 24 Oct 2002 16:39:53 GMT

Blogging Away About the World Series

Jake over at UserLand blogged Game 4 of the World Series last night. He and I chatted on AIM throughout the experience as well. I also tried BlogChat last night. The program is still in beta and feels like a sort of unformed AIM at this point, but I had a nice interaction there and I'll probably try it again when the software's a little farther along. I sort of thought I had invented this notion of blogging a live sports event. Now there are several folks doing it, which I absolutely love. I have some thoughts on how to turn this into something even richer and more interesting. But it turns out this isn't my invention. One of my blog readers told me a newspaper in South Carolina did this with a high school football game a year ago. Good. Validates my belief. Let me know if you're blogging the game, watching other bloggers, or doing something else cool and interactive in real time during the games. I'd love to keep track of this stuff. (Dave Winer and Jake will be at he game tonight in person, so I doubt they'll be able to blog even if they wanted to. Which they won't want to do anyway because the game will be so much more engaging in person!)

Mon, 21 Oct 2002 19:56:14 GMT

Blogging: Don't You Have to Have Something to Say?

"quote" Doonesbury & weblogs. "Don't you have something to say?" [Scripting News] "unquote"

Aggregator Confusion

Sat, 19 Oct 2002 23:18:42 GMT

Grokking the Aggregator...and Trying Replacements

I really like the News Aggregator built into Radio, which is what I use to create my Web log. But I don't understand something about it. Why is that I very often get duplicated feeds from the same site? I mean, there doesn't seem to be anything built into RSS feed technology that says, "Oh, don't send this subscriber that headline, because he's already seen it." I sometimes see the same story off some of these feeds six or eight or ten times a day. Seems inefficient on a number of levels. Also, I don't see a way to tell the aggregator to kind of take a break and not update for a while or until I tell it. I can't get it to skip an hour or two here and there. That would be useful sometimes because here's what happens. I check the aggregator, uncheck the stories I want to pursue, start looking at them and then, at some point when I'm in the midst of that, an hour passes and a new batch of stuff appears, stuff I haven't yet seen. Now I have to filter once again. Maybe only a news junkie like me encounters this kind of stuff. Anyway, I'm now playing with NetNewsWire Lite as a replacement for the Aggregator. It doesn't do the nifty automatic posting to my Weblog that Radio's tool does, but it seems to be a bit more manageable, less automagical.

Sat, 19 Oct 2002 21:57:10 GMT

Google News Lacks Context

Jon Udell writes about Google News and why its lack of context is an issue. I hadn't thought about it before reading Jon's blog entry but he's right. And I think this represents a huge opportunity for Google (or some other news aggregator perhaps?) to bring this news-gathering experience to the next level. I'm egerly awaiting someone to do that.

Fri, 18 Oct 2002 07:16:39 GMT

I'm at an Online Communities Conference Today

I won't be blogging most of the day today. I'm venturing to Wine Country to join Jim Cashel (Online Community Report) and 38 other folks interested in online community for Jim's first Online Community Summit. I may get computer access some time during the day to do an email update to my Radio log. If not, I'll undoubtedly post something when I get back Friday night.

blogging for profit 2

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 20:52:59 GMT

A Small Idea for Profitable Blogging

I'm not sure it's entirely original and I have no clue how well it might work, but I've had one of those "ideas that refuses to die" about a small model for how some bloggers might make some money. Check out my story and jump into the discussion with your take on this idea. Or offer some alternatives?

blogging profit 1

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 19:23:27 GMT

Blogging for Profit? Not Likely, Say a Couple of Gurus

I'm inclined to agree with Mark Pilgrim and with Dorothea Salo, whom he cites. A good blog is personally chosen content. Sponsorship - the only obvious way to revenue - always collides with opinion in such matters, in all media. (I do think there are other revenue streams to be tapped; they're just not obvious.) "quote" Blogging for pennies. 1. Wile away the best years of your life building a weblog and filling it with useful, interesting, relevant, topical, engaging content every day. 2. ??? 3. Profit! (196 words) [dive into mark] "endquote" BTW, Mark is becoming one of my favorite people. He's a Python pro and a thoughtful blogger.