deeje: Blogosphere

Apparently, Steve is hooked!

Sat, 23 Aug 2003 23:38:40 GMT

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.

BloggerJack weblogs now available

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 06:09:00 GMT

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:

The BloggerJack Reporter - a human-powered weblog aggregator of news about weblogs. If you want a single source for news about weblogs in our our society and the workplace, visit or subscribe to this weblog. No technical issues and no commentary from the BloggerJack crew, just straight syndicating from other weblogs around the globe. Expect a handful of new posts every other day or so.

The BloggerJack News - news about the company. Very low frequency. Visit or subscribe.

The BloggerJack Resource Center - This weblog announces new articles and other resources as they are added to the BloggerJack website. Subscribe to be notified of these occasional additions or updates.

deeje @ BloggerJack - my commentary on developments within the blogosphere and their potential impact on businesses and professionals. Updated on a semi-weekly basis, visit or subscribe to share in my thoughts as we move forward into the blogosphere.

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.

The Blog Explosion

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 04:35:52 GMT

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.

RSS Killed the Infoglut Star

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 04:34:52 GMT

Here's the same meme again...

RSS Killed the Infoglut Star
Quote:"When I started using an RSS newsreader daily, some remarkable things happened that I didn't necessarily expect: I began to spend almost no time surfing to keep up with current technology information, and I was suddenly able to manage a large body of incoming information with incredible efficiency."
Comment: I've had the same experience...more information, dealt with more quickly. Slowing the pace of information isn't a solution to our current information overload...finding new and innovative ways to deal with overload is....which is the basic point I made here. RSS is a great example. [elearnspace blog]

CNN on RSS and news aggregators

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 04:30:52 GMT

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.

"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]

Now if we could just drop the term surfing... which do you prefer, aggregating or harvesting?

the aggregator protocol

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 04:20:43 GMT

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.

The market for micro-content managers

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 04:18:36 GMT

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]

Pad as a new term for Blog?

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 22:26:10 GMT

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.

SELL out to Symantec a second time?

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 22:11:08 GMT

Something is about to happen to Dave Winer's company UserLand.

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:
Yahoo
Adobe
Symantec
Macromedia
Intriguing drama unfolding... [Don Park's Daily Habit]
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]

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.

RSS, Echo, Wikis, and Personality Wars

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 19:12:32 GMT

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.

But there is a second reason, under the surface but possibly more important -- wikis denature personality. Echo exists not because there are things wrong with the RSS markup -- there are, but they could be easily fixed. Echo exists because there are things wrong with the RSS process. RSS is having not a technological crisis but a constitutional one, where who decides what concerning RSS is not clear, and will never be clear, because the people doing the deciding don't even see themselves as being part of a decision making body.

[Corante: Social Software]

Well said! I'm following the (not)Echo project closely.