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Saturday, August 23, 2003 |
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Apparently, Steve is hooked! Today, Steve scolded me for getting him into blogging. He admitted that he's on it every day now. Now he'll be a demanding customer, which is exactly what I'd hoped for. 4:38:40 PM  trackback []
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Sunday, August 3, 2003 |
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BloggerJack weblogs now available The new site is progressing. I solved one of my IT issues with the purchase of a LinkSys router/hub. Now I can surf to the bloggerjack.com domain name from within my own house (using the DMZ feature of the router, which includes local loopback). In other words, now I don't have to leave my house, or dial in, just to check email and post to the weblogs!
Anyway, the site itself isn't quite ready, but the weblogs are up and starting to fill in: There are currently several weblogs to choose from:
I ask you, my few but loyal readers, to spread the word about these new weblogs. Also, please encourage anyone you know who is interested in weblogs in business to contact me at my new business address deeje@bloggerjack.com.
Now that these weblogs are up, I won't be blogging about weblogs here anymore. This weblog will focus more on my personal life and my commentary on more general issues such as marketing, advertising, music, books, and law. 11:09:00 PM trackback []
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Tuesday, July 15, 2003 |
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The Blog Explosion I need to find a chart of weblog growth... I was just over at Technorati and noticed the "weblogs watched" count went over 400,000 today (it's at exactly 400,091 right now). It was only March 5 when the 100,000 mark was passed. At this rate, there will be more than 6 million blogs by the end of the year. [VentureBlog]...expect a hockey stick when AOL Journals rolls out. 9:35:52 PM trackback []
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RSS Killed the Infoglut Star Here's the same meme again... RSS Killed the Infoglut Star 9:34:52 PM trackback []
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CNN on RSS and news aggregators This meme, about weblogs reducing time and increasing reach, is quickly spreading... Christine Boese writes an overview of news aggregators as a new way to read weblogs and news sites.Now if we could just drop the term surfing... which do you prefer, aggregating or harvesting?"Less wasted time and more efficient surfing might appeal to folks dealing with harassing pop-up windows and masses of spam. It helps to balance the signal-to-noise ratio back in our favor."[Ranchero] 9:30:52 PM trackback []
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the aggregator protocol The Fuzzyblog makes an interesting suggestion: Now if I was making an aggregator, I'd want to make it easy for people to subscribe to RSS feeds. Really I would. Now take a look at the Feedster seach results page and you'll see that even we're trying. The three aggregator specific links on the right allow you to click on a Feedster RSS feed and subscribe to it in any supported aggregator. So what's a supported aggregator you ask? Well its any aggregator that exposes a web interface for subscriptions. There are two ways to do this -- ports and protocols. The port mechanism means that the aggregator runs a tiny little http server on a port and uses that for subscriptions. Radio and AmphetaDesk both do this. Of course they both use different ports. Sigh. The other mechanism, protocols, is what Kevin Burton did with NewsMonster which uses NewsMonster:// links. Now what I'd recommend to aggregator vendors is that they standardize on an aggregator:// protocol so that other tools which produce RSS can easily embed that into applications. I'd gladly add a generic Aggregator button to Feedster in a heartbeat so that this could work with any tool that handles the aggregator:// protocol.BloggerJack will gladly support it! Others have pointed out that many aggregators can auto-discover an RSS feed from a website URL. But not all websites support this, and many people still want to click on something specific to get a subscription. Couldn't hurt to have both a protocol and auto-discovery. 9:20:43 PM trackback []
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The market for micro-content managers Anil Dash wants a good micro-content manager, and is willing to pay serious bucks for it! I'd pay $500 for a Google-branded microcontent management platform based on the Mozilla core if it were scriptable, stable, and integrated API-neutral blogging and aggregation tools. Or I'd pay $150 annually. So, Google, are you guys game for taking your position as a platform vendor seriously? [Anil Dash] 9:18:36 PM trackback []
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Tuesday, July 8, 2003 |
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Pad as a new term for Blog? Steve IM'ed me the other night with questions and concerns about the term blog in the name BloggerJack. His points are valid (summary = blog is an ugly word), but I countered that the term blog is being used everywhere, and as a new company, we would serve ourselves well to leverage the meme.
Now, just days later, Jack Mottram suggested a term that I kinda like... pad. ...Also, I'm sure that Pad is destined become a standard synonym for Weblog. This is a good thing on two counts: firstly, since it means both 'home' and 'place to write,' Pad reflects the evolution of personal publishing beyond simply logging the web; secondly, it doesn't sound completely bloody stupid when spoken, which Blog undoubtedly does.The dual meaning is very nice. The downside is that, in the context of weblogs, it would then have three meanings. For good or bad, "weblog" and "blog" catch the listener's ear or the reader's eye, and establish a clear context, in a way that "pad" might not. 3:26:10 PM trackback []
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SELL out to Symantec a second time? Something is about to happen to Dave Winer's company UserLand. I don't *think* Macromedia would be interested in Userland's technology...? Unless they hoped to rewrite it all in ColdFusion...? But then all you have left is the customer base, and I don't think its that big. While this is all wild speculation, it is clear that UserLand will change next week. Yahoo is the most likely to make a big move into the blogosphere, in answer to Google/Blogger and AOL.Ground is shaking in UserLand. John Robb's abrupt departure and blog disappearance smells bad. Dave is hinting at a bigger change that should be "net-net good news for Manila and Radio users and for the weblog community." While going open source is a possibility, "We weren't ready to announce, John surprised us" seems to point to a buyout. My list of suspects with recent news about AOL's entry into BlogLand are:Dave sold his company - Living Videotext - to Symantec back in 1988 - so that would be really weird for him to do that - again. And it's just not clear that the Userland technology would scale very well - but that doesn't mean it's not worth A WHOLE LOT to somebody. Macromedia could certainly use it. [Marc's Voice] 3:11:08 PM trackback []
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Wednesday, July 2, 2003 |
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RSS, Echo, Wikis, and Personality Wars This is an excellent article on the raging debate over RSS and a new syndication format. In trying to refine my own voice on this weblog, I won't post the entire article here, but I highly encourage you to read it.
I will, however, summarize it, from my own perspective. First, the difference between weblogs and wikis. Weblogs are author-centric, whereas wikis are project-centric. Sam Ruby has started the (not)Echo project on a wiki so as to remove the personalities that invariably are tied to weblogs.
Here's the choice quote: There are lots of good reasons for using a wiki, of course, instead of a trackbacked weblog conversation. Though both weblogs and wikis support conversational patterns, weblogs are "conversation as published comments" while wikis are "conversation as shared editing." Weblogs tend towards polarized or divergent views, while wikis tend towards convergent ones, which is just what you want for a conversation around standards.Well said! I'm following the (not)Echo project closely. 12:12:32 PM trackback []
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Japanese company trademarks "Blog" WTF? I wonder how that affects BloggerJack.com?
A Japanese company filed for a trademark on the word "Blog" on March 6 and received it from the Japanese trademark office on June 28. This trademark would be utterly bogus in the US, but I don't know enough about Japanese trademark law to figure out if it's enforceable there. Link Discuss [Boing Boing] 11:36:59 AM trackback []
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Web browsing innovation dead Marc Andreessen thinks innovation in web browsing is dead... ...he laments that innovation has all but ceased on this essential piece of software that makes surfing the Net possible. "There hasn't been any innovation on the browser in the last five years... Navigation is an embarrassment. Using bookmarks and back and forth buttons -- we had about eighteen different things we had in mind for the browser."He's right, of course. And the answer is to stop browser and start aggregating. The key is to recognize that browsing the web is just one level of information processing, and that it is time to move on to the next level. 11:25:37 AM trackback []
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Sunday, June 29, 2003 |
The Blogcount Estimatewhat can we speculate about the number of readers of weblogs? 8:36:08 PM trackback []
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Ben Trott: Why We Need Echo... The Echo Project is a new movement within the blogosphere to redo the RSS spec and the weblog-editor API to be more in sync with each other. Instead of revving the RSS spec(s), many in the community have elected to start fresh with Echo. Sam Ruby seems to be the center point for this. Why start over? Ben Trott: Why We Need Echo. [Scripting News]The short list is this:
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Thursday, June 26, 2003 |
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Thinning the blogroll I tried to thin my blogroll today. Somehow I had accumulated over 230 feeds, and I was only able to pare that down to 211. I did re-organize my folder sets, broke out my Coders into Coders-Java and Coders-MacOSX. I also made a folder specifically for blog-related tools and services.
Some of my feeds really should belong in two or more folder. That's a big problem waiting for a good solution. While a weblog may be a person, i want to mostly want to read about topics. Where one person writes about more than one topic of interest to me, I want those entries to propagate to the appropriate folders. Perhaps what I want is a list of feeds separate from a list of topics, and the aggregator would route and filter incoming entries.
Currently, there are only a few people who's blog I want to read in its entirety (shout outs to steve, tony, greg, eric, and jud. now if tony would add an RSS feed and jud would start blogging again... :-). 10:47:20 AM trackback []
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iPhoto plugin for photo-bloggingEric Sigler is today's hero - he's made an iPhoto2 plugin that can post photos to weblogs using the metaweblog API. It works rather well too. Yay Eric! [Ben Hammersley.com]
Sweet! Downloading now...
UPDATE: nice idea, but I don't want full size images in my weblog. To be really compelling, I'd want options for thumbnails and/or reduced sizes, options for where to put the binary file, as well as being able to annotate. Ah well, it sounds like a job for a real weblog authoring tool. 10:25:22 AM trackback []
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The Holy Duh of WebloggingWhen I asked Brent Simmons whether he thought there was any way for people to making money via weblogs other than providing software or services, he actually answered a much bigger question when he responded:This is a good definition of a weblog (that's my emphasis, not Rand's). Just don't forget that an RSS feed is not weblogs, but a weblog is an RSS feed. RSS feeds can also be news feeds, server status feeds, CMS change feeds, etc..."... I probably wouldn't hire anybody for anything unless they had a weblog."He continued:... The main thing is: if you don't have a weblog, I probably don't know you, and I don't have an easy way to get to know you. If you have a weblog, I'm either reading it already or I can read it and look in the archives a bit to get a sense of who you are. "After sitting staring at the ceiling thinking about this comment, I realize it crystallized, for me, a very basic question about how to think about weblogs. The painfully simple question is, "What is a weblog?" The painfully simple answer is, "A weblog is the representation of a person on the Internet." [Rands in Repose] 10:06:29 AM trackback []
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Last update: 8/23/03; 16:39:03 .
