Feedsterlicious !
If you track our Feedster Stats page at all (and yeah its slow to display and I know I need to make a cached version) then you'll see something interesting: 160,000 + feeds now.  That's right. Last night we added every Live Journal user to Feedster which doubled our database size. My hat's definitely tipped to Francois whose crawler architecture happily crawled 1,500,000 posts in 12 hours.  Nice job man! Jon Thompson nicely pointed out to me that while we might have implemented Sherlock support, we made it hard to find. Thanks man. Done! Now its linked to from the home page until it finds a permanent home.
[The FuzzyStuff: Feedster] 
7:27:28 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Nick Finck: The Why and How of Blogging
This a very good introduction into blogging by Nick Finck, the maker of Digital Web Magazine... [hebig.org/blog] 
6:58:40 PM      comment []   trackback []  



New weblog community built around GPS
The Redtail Canyon Geo-Community combines weblogging with an atlas, photo albums, search engine, and travel guide.

The site, created by developers David and Yuko Knight in Tokyo, encourages the publication of weblog entries tied to a particular geographic location by GPS coordinates, such as this item on Aral Sea destruction. Entries can be viewed by navigating maps like this U.S. East Coast view, which become satellite images as you click empty spots to zoom in.

Here's a nice shot of the Castillo De San Marcos in Saint Augustine. [Workbench] 
6:49:20 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Documenting blogger behavior
A pretentious and presumptuous attempt to document what bloggers have learned, without any formal instruction, to do every day...And then a description of what's needed to make blogs a medium for real conversation."

Do read the whole thing - it's worth it. [Seb's Open Research] 
6:44:35 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Custom RSS Feeds
from Adrian Holvaty. [Scripting News] 
6:21:39 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Chris Lydon interviews Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds
[Scripting News] 
6:19:33 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Chris Lydon's weblog for the ears DaveNet: [ Scripting News] 
6:16:11 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Elaine Frankonis: on women and blogging
in an article in the Chicago Tribune: "From politics to partying, from men to menopause, from feminism to family--women Webloggers seem more comfortable in viewing their personal lives in a larger, cultural context and also in looking at global issues from a very personal point of view."

Katherine Murray, in the same article: "You have the ability to be seen for who you are and have a connection with someone that has nothing to do with the kind of car you drive. It's very freeing." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
2:33:45 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Secrets of Breakout Blogs
by Dave Pollard [The Scobleizer Weblog] 
2:11:19 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Das Blog
A tool that Clemens Vasters is working on... [The Scobleizer Weblog] 
2:09:07 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Phases of social networking
Rob describes a pattern of social insertion - first an orgy of discovery and furious networking, then a discernment phase where the finite capacity for close relationships operates a selection; and finally a consolidation phase. Sounds about right. I think some people have a heavier churn rate for their inside network, while others form a much more stable net. I wonder if that affects their ability to innovate and adapt.

Tired of blogging?  if they are tired of blogging after a year. I too seem to have hit a one year wall. I want to shrink my blogging world. Why? [...] [Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

[Seb's Open Research] 
1:55:31 PM      comment []   trackback []  



The International Telecommunications Union has a weblog.
[John Robb's Weblog] 
1:49:47 PM      comment []   trackback []  

Lee Gomes says in the Wall Street Journal that "we'll soon see the end of the social infrastructure that currently exists around trends" and the erosion of the "trend-anointing caste" as "trend-spotting [is] put in the hands of common folk" via blogs and sites like Technorati and Daypop. [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
3:41:14 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Ethnic clustering in blogging communities This report by Hat Nim Choi studied and compared the LiveJournal and Xanga web... [thomas n. burg | randgänge] 
2:53:39 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Paul Stacey
"Its been quite a while since a technology 'blew me away' but last Friday I had one of those Eureka moments while riding the bus from downtown Vancouver to White Rock where I live -- all because of RSS feeds & blogs." [Scripting News] 
2:48:02 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Weblogs: the Readers' Digest analogy
Joseph Hart: Blogs as Electronic Readers' Digests. "So what does it mean that modern blogs resemble the old Reader's Digest? I'm not sure, but readers of blogs and readers of the Digest seem to share some commonality of intent and purpose in their rapid absorption of quick, bite-sized information and entertainment."

Joseph lists similarities and differences between Readers' Digest periodicals and weblogs. One crucial difference he missed is that blogs have yet to send sweepstake junkmail packages to subscribers. (Thank goodness!).

[Seb's Open Research] 
2:43:23 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Globally positioned blogging
Roland Piquepaille summarizes a TechRepublic article on the merging of GPS systems and the web.

Suppose you're standing somewhere in the middle of a foreign city with a couple of friends. Everyone's getting hungry and you had better find a good place to eat. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to instantly look up, say, all restaurant reviews within a 1000-feet radius of where you are? And then intersect the results with your personal web of trust to increase your confidence in the info?
[Seb's Open Research] 
2:40:43 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Customer Service and K-Log
What customer activities have shifted to the Web (based on a Forrester study on the sales of complex goods):

1. Researching product information (90%)
2. Comparing product features and prices (58%)
3. Contacting customer service (56%)
4. Locating a store or distributor (42%)
5. Checking product availability (36%)

Which of these activities could be enhanced by corporate use of weblogging?

1. A weblog, built and maintained by a product manager, could provide customers with an active resource on the products they are deciding to buy. 
2. This could be accomplished by building a spreadsheet comparing (feature by feature) several different products, and publishing to a weblog as an additional page accessed by the navigation system.  Additional comparison info could be presented in a weblog format for easy consumption.
3. Contacting customer service on most sites is painful.  Additionally, the FAQs and resource databases seem put together by monkeys (albeit highly paid ones).  A simple way to generate an extremely valuable and organic customer service data is to have each rep publish a weblog.  The question, including keywords, is the title of the post.  The answer is the response. 
4. Not really applicable, but for many companies the local outlet doesn't have an effective Web presence (not even for coupons, specials, etc.).  A simple weblog with a corporate template would suffice.
5. New poducts should be hyped via a weblog.  Features, improvements, etc would all factor into the weblog's posts.  A simple countdown clock would track the days or hours to availability.

[John Robb's Weblog] 
2:34:47 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Salon Blogs birthday report
Mark Hoback and a couple of other people have asked that I take the one-year mark for Salon Blogs as a chance to offer some state-of-the-project notes, since I originally described it as an "experiment." "Experiments have results, positive, negative, or ambiguous...." [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 
2:27:12 AM      comment []   trackback []  



TypePad's Template Builder... [Daypop Top 40] 
2:12:55 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Aggregator agendas
Tom Coates, in suggesting it's time to "balkanise our aggregators": "Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, Technorati and the like are no longer simple reflectors of a community's activities - they are also one of our community's best mechanisms for news discovery... Unfortunately it also means that the country with the most weblogs sets the international community's agenda." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
1:56:25 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blog service feature request
Matt Haughey: "With the advent of features like this at Technorati to tie multiple weblogs to a person, and tools like this to find similar weblogs, why can't these tools say 'you may also enjoy these 5 weblogs' whenever I check for updates?..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
1:54:29 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Stress?
BBC.  Relatively random survey:  stress caused by a loss of e-mail worse than divorce.  What about the loss of a weblog? [John Robb's Weblog] 
1:48:32 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Wiki page about definitions of blogging [Seb's Open Research] 
3:08:23 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Put Weblogs to Work
I find myself explaining the basics of blogs and rss over and over. Here is a high level primer on blogs that may be of use if you find yourself in the same position.
[tingilinde] 
3:01:52 PM      comment []   trackback []  



French geoblogging
There is something fascinating about geoblogging displays. This one is for francophones and makes one thing about the web and the standardization of language. English is unnaturally common.... [tingilinde] 
2:59:17 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Social Dynamx is about to release an easy to use desktop interface for MT and Manila weblogs. [John Robb's Weblog] 
2:48:17 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blog Brix
I enjoy camping because being busy doing nothing in midst of fresh air and enjoyable inconvenience of nature brings a rush of peculiar nothing that wash away all old thoughts and leave recollectable remains.  If you are still trying to make sense of the last sentence, you are missing the point.  Anyway, I found something interesting on the beach after that mental storm: how will blogs become webpages?

Even if one can look ahead a few years, knowing how it will happen step by step is not easy.  So I thought about what should happen in the next step.  The answers that popuped up were:

1. blog pages will be broken up into modular and configurable components.
2. bloggers will be able to build custom-built blogs simply by selecting and arranging components from blog component vendors.
3. blog component tools and services will flourish and expand into non-blog functionalities.
4. blogging services such as TypePad, AOL, and LiveJournal will use blog components as an important barrier against migration.

So far so good.  Breaking up a blog is easy enough.  There is the blog content area which breaks down further into days and weeks.  There is also the calendar with nativation functionality.  Blogroll is another key component.  Blog search and backtracking component will become more important.  Multimedia components will gain popularity as well starting with faceroll, slideshows, etc.  Components for advertising, stock tracking, movie listing, music and book recommending, endorsements, and identities (i.e. FOAF) are also just down the road.

More I think about this, clearer the picture becomes as I come up with details and nod them into place.  Now what to call it.  Need a neat catchy name.  Portlet is no good since its Java tainted and stink of API (BTW, public review draft of Portlet spec was recently released).  Bloglet, Pagelet, Weblet are taken.  Inlet sounds good but too easy to overlook in print.  Hmm.  How about Brix as in web bricks or blog bricks?

Maybe I should change my job title to Technologist.  Engineer nor Architect seems to fit me too well these days.  Believe it or not, my job title was Rainmaker in my last job.  An eccentric voodoo man dancing for rain seemed like a good fit.  Heh. [Don Park's Daily Habit] 
2:10:59 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Zilstra's Multilingual Blog Chataqua
While this Heavenly City is on pilgrimage on earth, it calls out all peoples and so collects a society of aliens, speaking all languages. [Blogalization Community] 
1:53:56 PM      comment []   trackback []  



The Blog Change Bot [Ted Leung on the air] 
1:51:54 PM      comment []   trackback []  



BlogAds
Henry Copeland on the news that Time Out New York has placed ads on New York-based blogs Blogads represents: "This is our first metro-specific order. Expect lots more..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
1:46:30 PM      comment []   trackback []  



.Text (a new blogtool)
The .NET Weblogs are going crazy over a new blog tool from Scott W named .Text. Awesome!
[The Scobleizer Weblog] 
1:33:09 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Travel Blogs - a smorgasboard of selections
My friend Chris Cloud over at CloudTravel has a great travel blog.  He also has a great post about other travel blogs that he finds interesting. [Ernie the Attorney] 
1:24:43 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Weblog Network
A portion of the revenue model for the Weblog Network will be a tie into web service APIs from Amazon and others (depending on revenue share optimization). [John Robb: The Weblog Network] 
1:22:41 PM      comment []   trackback []  

Why Many Business Blogs Are Failing
[Microdoc News] 
4:57:04 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Sunlog 2.3 [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
1:15:50 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Being homeless
Margaret McCabe Elenko in an article in the Boston Globe on a homeless woman's blogging : "I find it interesting that she makes the time almost every day to update the journal. You start to realize everyone has a story behind them."
[Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
12:57:01 AM      comment []   trackback []  

MSDN.. is listing community blogs now.
[The Scobleizer Weblog] 
8:37:20 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Time-based tagging
We're all Gelernter Now.. Well, not really. But has anyone else noticed that time-based tagging is becoming more and more important to the way we store and process data? [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs] 
6:52:57 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Movable Blog
Mamamusings, perhaps in response to Robb's Law, decides to move her MT weblog.  She found a way to overcome the database relocation problems involved in moving her MT weblog to her new domain/server.  [John Robb's Weblog] 
6:50:25 PM      comment []   trackback []  

Technorati interview
Streaming MP3 interview with David Sifry, creator of Technorati.
[Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report] 
3:47:10 PM      comment []   trackback []  



What Blog Tools Build Better Google-indexed Blogs?..
Numbers of people have sought my advice on which blogging tool to use. Quite frankly, I did not really know what to tell them. I have been a Radio Userland for more than a year and I had always had good success in getting my Radio Userland site indexed in Google.
[Microdoc News] 
8:36:21 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Savings
Here's the TLC (Technorati link cosmos) for Saving the Net. Impressive.
[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
7:27:33 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Evan deconstructs a "Google is being spammed by weblogs" example. [John Robb's Weblog] 
7:22:32 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Chris Pirillo... "Gnomedex is gonna be the most blogged conference... ever." [The Scobleizer Weblog] 
7:13:59 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Read On.

I was about to address this post to anyone visiting from today's ABA Journal eReport article on lawyer blogs, then remembered that eReport articles supply no hyperlinks...

No matter, if you went to the extra effort of finding Bag and Baggage through a search engine (or if you followed an inbound link from a Web page that by definition would have somewhat less on the eBall than a bona fide eReport), and are curious to read what people much smarter than I have to say about relationships between the Web, organizations, individuals, and society, then by all means please visit, buy, and/or sign up for:

• World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else
• Cluetrain, the Manifesto
• Cluetrain, the Book
• Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices
• Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web
• Up2Speed
• Up2Speed's Business Weblogs—The Big List, and the weblogs there referenced
• BloggingWorks
• John Lawlor
• And just to wake you up and blow your mind, the first interview since May '02 with the "gentle person with a piercing vision" and Cluetrain co-author who started me down this rosy path, including the outline for his book-in-process, and more allusions and illusions—literary, psychosocial, philosophical and I'm leaving some out—than you can shake a Dali at.
• [Update] Bad on me for initially omitting Robert Scoble's Corporate Weblog Manifesto too.

[Bag and Baggage] 
6:57:11 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Wash Cycle: Rory Perry: "There's been a wash of articles this month that appear to solidify weblogs as a solid online content platform for politics, business and public information. This continued level of acceptance will hopefully enable more conservative institutions (like courts) to embrace the platform more widely." Rory's roundup. [Bag and Baggage] 
6:50:41 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Deane asks if readers should strip styling from RSS items. [Scripting News] 
5:08:28 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Scott Rosenberg: "The only thing I could reasonably predict, going into this project, was how thoroughly unpredictable the range of bloggers and blogging would be." [Scripting News] 
4:55:00 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Crimson: Harvard to House Blog Standards. [Scripting News] 
4:48:52 AM      comment []   trackback []  



The coming wonderworld - Technorati: Christopher Lydon in introducing his interview with Dave Sifry: "Technorati is for me the simplest clearest sketch we have of the coming wonderworld..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
2:25:42 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Stacy Cowley on Blogathon: "This year, 545 participants have enlisted, with US$56,000 pledged so far. At 6 a.m. Pacific time Saturday, they'll embark upon 24 hours of blogging..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
12:46:38 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Tim Porter on Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan Weintraub's newly launched California Insider: "Good move by Weintraub to move into the blogosphere. Politics should not be left to the thumbsuckers." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
12:45:58 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Semantic Blogalization. Blogalization turns up in Hewlett-Packard's Semantic Blogging Demonstrator. [Blogalization Community] 
4:47:14 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Buzz narrowly escapes his 15 minutes of fame. Today's NY Times story on back channels at conferences has provoked lots of interesting commentary around the web today. One tidbit to pass along. The story includes the archetypal conference blogging story of the impact of Doc Searls and Dan Gillmor sharing a link from Both "forwarded by a reader in Florida." If you want the story behind the story, go check out Buzz Bruggeman's blog buzzmodo. Buzz was that "reader in Florida" and he describes his near 15 minutes of fame. [McGee's Musings] 
2:05:49 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Netomat .."introduces two-way personal multimedia communication."

netomat is XML and Java based and built upon open formats, standards and protocols, more technical users can author directly in nml, our powerful and intuitive new XML dialect.
[thanks to the druids over at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft] 
1:46:37 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Technorati Profiles.

Technorati Adds Profiles.

A new feature you may have noticed at Technorati is Member Profiles. They're an easy way to find out more information about the people behind the weblogs. Anyone can become a Technorati member simply by signing up.

Once you're a member, you can choose to give more information about yourself and the weblogs for which you are an author.

You can "claim" your weblogs by submitting the weblog URL and then adding a small HTML snippet to the front page of your weblog. Technorati verifies that you are indeed an author of the weblog by spidering your weblog, looking for the special code you placed on your weblog.

Once you've done this, your picture and profile will be associated with all links to your weblog in any Technorati Link Cosmos. We're also working on a bunch of new features that will make writing (and reading!) weblogs more fun. Watch this space. You can "claim" your weblogs by submitting the weblog URL and then adding a small HTML snippet to the front page of your weblog. One of the first benefits you get as a Technorati member is that your profile information is available whenever your weblog is mentioned in a Technorati Link Cosmos. We're also working on a bunch of new features that make writing (and reading!) weblogs more fun. Watch this space. [Smart Mobs]

I've just finished adding my profile over at Technorati and adding this code over on the right. [McGee's Musings] 
1:32:07 AM      comment []   trackback []  

When Oliver Willis talks the blogosphere listens. Oliver makes the mainstream media! [MetaFilter] 
5:35:47 AM      comment []   trackback []  



George Siemens does a lot of work on his weblog, but still writes/points to interesting things:

• The Whole Picture of Elearning (check this one because visual is much better than words describes "the whole picture")
• Edubloggers list
• Computer Programs for Social Network Analysis
• Data Mining Email to Discover Social Networks and Communities of Practice

[Mathemagenic] 
5:30:10 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Nanotech newsletter goes blog. Josh Wolfe, who edits a Forbes newsletter on nanotech, has started a blog where you can read over his shoulder as he pieces together his editions.

Link

Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
4:54:17 AM      comment []   trackback []  



The Bloggy Politic.

John Palfrey points to an interesting Boston Globe article on the impact of blogs on the current election cycle: "'Blogs' shake the political discourse." Rick Klau, in the article, discusses why voter trust and blogging may go hand in hand: "These are very honest opinions, and they're not poll-tested." Note that Rick puts his savvy where his mouth is, and has been helping the Dean campaign add features to its official blog.

But as Dave Winer and others have noted, while blogging candidates are exciting they are just part of the equation and it's the folks on the ground who may supply coverage and information about the 2004 U.S. elections the likes of which we've never experienced. Stop by Cameron Barrett's Watchblog: 2004, for example, for some multi-party, multi-editor immersion in the issues and candidates. [via Sabrina Pacifici]

[Bag and Baggage] 
12:04:38 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Sparkpod: a Mac-based weblog service. Sparkpod is a new weblog service catering to Mac users. It offers pre-designed templates, RSS generation (not sure which version of RSS) and a 60-day trial offer. The service costs $24.99 per year. [Mac Net Journal] 
11:52:14 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Internet Roundtable on Blogging by Lawyers:. Check out the current edition of the LLRX Internet Roundtable, which has a discussion of blogging by Dennis Kennedy, Jerry Lawson, Tom Mighell and others.

After reading one of the panelist's statement about "Google URLs" (i.e. search terms that when entered in Google return a specific webpage as the first hit) Denise Howell pointed out that it was David Weinberger of Cluetrain fame coined the term "Google URL," (and she noted as well that for the time being one of her Google URL's is "Denise.")[Ernie the Attorney] 
11:34:25 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogs, Wikis and Tikis -- Oh My !.
I've been a pretty hard core blogger for over a year now.  Not that much more but still I do think I know the blogging scene pretty well.  Now given my overall penchant for blogging, you'll probably be surprised to hear that I've taken the wiki plunge -- and the water is **good**.  Damn good in fact.  While I don't have much more time tonight to go into detail, I can say this:

• TikiWiki is **outstanding**.  There are wiki tools in virtually every language but this one is in PHP, my preference.
• A wiki once you get into it feels like bloody magic.  What's that you say?  Its fully multi-user?  It has a highly granular security model that actually works?  Oh and it can version every single page and go back in time?  Good heavens!  And its easy too...?  Damn!  Where do I sign up?
• The team members (at least Marc Laporte the one I really know) are helpful, friendly and nice.
• I'd strongly recommend a Wiki as a collaborative documentation tool for technical / engineering organizations.  This is how we're using it for Feedster -- we added our business plan to it, our engineering specs*, systems administration notes and more.

Downsides?  Requires a bit of effort to learn.  Not that much -- more switching your mind view 180 degress and then the magic begins.  Documentation is solely in PDF format which made me want to take an axe to my brain.  I ***loathe*** pdf for onscreen content.  No readme file so I had to poke about and scrape to install it since I wasn't downloading a multi-megabyte pdf file just to try it out (note - I volunteered to write the readme file for the next release).

***Strongly Recommended***

*Yes Virginia, Feedster is moving out of "Scott's Wacky Hackomatic Approach to Rapid Internet Development" (SWHARID) and into a much more professional development cycle.  And I certainly can't take all the credit for that. [The FuzzyStuff: aaBlog_Roogle] 
1:21:56 PM      comment []   trackback []  



B.O. Blivion, in an essay on blogging: "I look to the Internet not for the friendships I lack in real life, but for conversation on topics that interest me, the lack of which in everyday life being what draws me into these things." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
1:12:48 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Homage to Blogalonia. George Orwell's wartime columns have much in common with today's blogs: They were often trivial and idiosyncratic, but bore within them the seeds of something greater. [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
1:00:46 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Signing comments on blogs. Adrian Holovaty has implemented reserved comment names in his blog, a feature that prevents anyone apart from him from using the names "Adrian", "Adrian H." or "Adrian Holovaty" when posting a comment. François Nonnenmacher suggests extending the idea to allow people to "confirm" their authorship of comments on any blog using a TrackBack... [Artima Web Services Buzz] 
2:46:08 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Jim Coudal: "We have not built a web site in the last year for a client that in some way did not incorporate blogging technology." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
2:42:59 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Appellate Lawyers Reading And Writing About Weblogs.

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process has been a staple subscription of mine for a long time. Delightfully enough, Gary O'Connor and Stephanie Tai have co-authored an article in the current issue about Legal And Appellate Weblogs: What They Are, Why You Should Read Them, And Why You Should Consider Starting Your Own. (Thank you Blogger and Blog*Spot for making it ridiculously simple for one of the co-authors to make this widely available.)

Note too that Stephanie has started The Blawg Review, reviewing law journal and academic articles.

[Bag and Baggage] 
11:49:11 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Friendster couture: random profiles on tshirts. From Gawker:

"Friendster couture -- Another example of Friendster run amok: Tom Gillis from Glossosaurus is making t-shirts with random Friendster profiles on them. [Tom, right, in a t-shirt featuring Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing's profile]. Friendster t-shirts [Glossosaurus]"

There are so many overlapping memes in that photo, I fear the entire blogosphere may implode any minute now. On his blog, Tom says: "If there's any interest in this, I'm going to be selling [random Friendster profile shirts] for $10 (hand made and unique) + $5 for shipping outiside Chicago (up to 3 shirts).... pretend it's 1993, and this is a zine or something. Except that then there wouldn't be anything like Friendster, and we'd all be wearing fake auto mechanic t shirts with other people's names embroidered on them." Discuss
[Boing Boing Blog] 
11:45:42 PM      comment []   trackback []  



"Blog Change Bot" [Daypop Top 40] 
11:33:54 PM      comment []   trackback []  



My Weblog, my Avatar. Dave Pollard says: [base "][sigma]I see the weblog becoming a ubiquitous communication medium, a proxy for every individual, where everything you want to know about that individual (which they have given you permission to see) can be called up. The effect of that will be to eliminate many communications whose purpose is simply to get information.

The blog will be the main vehicle by which we educate, inform and explain (the first of the five communication objectives) and express ourselves (the last... [Industrial Technology & Witchcraft] 
10:53:45 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Mining The Blogs And Blawgs.

From today's TVC Alert: "The current business news search engine Rocketnews now enables searching blog sources. Select 'Weblogs' from the pull-down category menu." And if you want to focus on what the legal bloggers have to say, Blawg Search by Detod lets you do just that.

[Bag and Baggage] 
10:18:53 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Sites you might be interested in.  Nanodot: Slashdot for futurists, managed by Foresight.   Smartmobs: group weblog (needs a redesign).  Daily Rotation:  filtered newsfeeds from tech sites, including weblogs. [John Robb's Weblog] 
10:17:18 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Moblogging the Tour de france. Jean-Luc in Paris says:

Xeni, do you remember Patrik, the Swedish postman who bicycled from Sweden to Gibraltar, moblogging his adventures daily with a Nokia 7650 phonecam and reporting his GPS Position with a Benefon GPS unit? Well, he moblogged live from the famous Tour de France race in the Alps on July 17. Here at the end of the 8th stage point: a live image of the Basque racing cyclist Iban MAYO who won this day, and another live pic of famous and popular racing cyclist Richard VIRENQUE. And on July 18, Patrik (the bicycle mologger) followed the 9th stage point of Tour de France and here, it's the leading racing cyclist of Tour de France (with a Yellow Jacket), he is american and his team is "US Postal" -- Lance AMSTRONG in Galibier pass. And here's a shot of the Swedish postman moblogger in the Alps.

Link, Discuss
[Boing Boing Blog] 
10:06:07 PM      comment []   trackback []  



"A lot of what we do in blogging is more like prophesy about what is going to be, than commentary on what is right now [~] at least for some of us." [The Doc Searls Weblog] 
9:57:20 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Technorati talks FOAF. Technorati reads the FOAF file from your blog and creates a profile. Your picture from your FOAF file and a link to your profile shows up when you appear in people's cosmos listings. A good reason to get a FOAF file. TypePad has FOAF built in. If you want to build a FOAF file, you can go to this foaf-a-matic site (thanks for the link Sifry) and make a FOAF file. Put the FOAF file on a server and point to in from your blog with a link tag like this:

<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="http://joi.ito.com/foaf.rdf" />

FOAF stands for "Friend of a Friend" and it is a project to create a machine readable format for putting information about yourself and your friends on web pages.

Here's Marc Canter's profile

Update: As Dave Sifry says in the comments section, you must get an account on Technorati and "claim your blog" before it will make a profile from your FOAF. You can do that here.Technorati reads the FOAF file from your blog and creates a profile. Your picture from your FOAF file and a link to your profile shows up when you appear in people's cosmos listings. A good reason to get a FOAF file. TypePad has FOAF built in. If you want to build a FOAF file, you can go to this foaf-a-matic site (thanks for the link Sifry) and make a FOAF file. Put the FOAF file on a server and point to in from your blog with a link tag like this:

<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="http://joi.ito.com/foaf.rdf" />

FOAF stands for "Friend of a Friend" and it is a project to create a machine readable format for putting information about yourself and your friends on web pages.

Here's Marc Canter's profile

Update: As Dave Sifry says in the comments section, you must get an account on Technorati and "claim your blog" before it will make a profile from your FOAF. You can do that here. [Joi Ito's Web Lite] 
9:50:32 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Jonathan Peterson: "The same tools and technologies that are empowering Amateur content creation are also empowering the next generation of entrepeneurs." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
8:09:33 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Tim Porter, on the blog of the Dallas Morning News' editorial board: "It takes the decision-making out of the room and into the public... Smart move. I'll expect other papers will follow suit." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
7:58:23 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blosxom 2.0 out the door. Congrats to Rael Dornfest on getting version 2.0 of Blosxom, the tiny, perfect GPLed perl-based blogging tool out the door. All this, while he was greeting his second child (another 2.0!). Go Rael!

The biggest change in this latest incarnation of Blosxom is a plugin architecture, allowing the core of Blosxom to remain small, sleek, and simpler-than-pie while providing room for extension and integration. The Blosxom Plugin Registry is already home to some 140 plugins ranging from authentication to Google search, click-through tracking to writebacks (read: combination talkbacks and TrackBacks).

There's also a brand new Blosxom for Mac OS X Installer, the simplest way to get Blosxom on your laptop, desktop, or closet Mac without any of the muss or fuss of installing it by hand. A couple-three clicks of the mouse and it'll skip lightly through the nitty-gritties, installing Blosxom itself, some sample flavours, documentation, and some useful plug-ins.

Link

Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
6:57:36 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Public weblog portability.  I was e-mailing with xian about the portability of weblogs and how to maintain presence online.  Sure, there is nothing you can do if the people who own the domain you are using shut down your weblog or go out of business in regards to a seamless transition, however, there is alot that can be done.  Like what?  Here are some ideas for a service that would be really useful:

• First, I would start with single repository of weblogs where the owner of the weblog can change the location of their weblog and other descriptive data by signing into an account.  This service would need to be tightly controlled and trusted.   If you don't own the domain, your hosting company or hosting sponsor would need to support the account creation.   If you don't get this support from the domain owner, you are truly SOL (an old pilot term).  
  
• Second, weblog tools would need to support the option of using this repository as a means of keeping blogrolls and RSS subscriptions up to date.  A once a day check for new changes is all it would take.
  
• Third, this repository would be extremely useful if you could update Google and Yahoo automatically so that search returns on their tools find the intended data.  For example:  replace jrobb.userland.com with jrobb.mindplex.com.  In this case, all the the links to posts made in the past would work.  If there was some glitch in the folder structure, it couldn't get much worse that 100% 404 errors.

[John Robb's Weblog] 
6:49:12 PM      comment []   trackback []  



More on weblogs in business.

Thomas Burg points to B- Blogs Listing (see also for I-Blog Discussion List) and BloggingWorks Workshops. Business blogs world is speeding up. [Mathemagenic] 
6:29:38 PM      comment []   trackback []  



a weblog without an RSS feed.... Chad Dickerson: 

a weblog without an RSS feed is like a cheeseburger with only the bread

[Mathemagenic] 
6:28:12 PM      comment []   trackback []  



New! -- the invasion of LiveJournal users on Weblogs.Com. Sounds like a new sitcom on Fox. It's only 8AM in Calif, and it just hit a new high water mark, replacing one that's stood since early April. Starring Kiefer Sutherland. [Scripting News] 
6:24:20 PM      comment []   trackback []  



The Sharer of Secrets - Anonymous Blogging

The Village Voice had a very nice long piece on anonymous blogging that hangs on the story of Hasidic Rebel using an anonymous blogging tool called Invisiblog.  Invisiblog uses GPG and the Mixmaster anonymous remailer network which allow blogging without any need to divulge identity.

"Political activists, independent journalists, whistleblowersâo[per thou]anyone who is prevented from publishing by repressive laws or threats of violence" can benefit from covert-blogging software, writes Charles Farley of Invisiblog. Indeed, over the past year, online diarists in Cuba, Iran, and Tunisia have been jailed for publishing. Like these writers, Yeedel and several other Hasidic bloggers have put their lifestyle, if not their lives, on the line with their contentious chronicles.

Interestingly much of the writing on invisiblog blogs is much more about emotions and feelings than politics or revolution.  It feels stragely like evesdropping on a phychiatric session instead of listening to a bullhorn-wielding, masked anarchist.

[By way of BoingBoing]

[Corante: Amateur Hour] 
5:57:05 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Beginner's guide to trackback. Old news to most here, but with even Radio Userland now implementing the technology, trackback has the potential to be another kind of spam, with gratuitous self-links popping up all over the place. When everyone can blog, will the Blogosphere be the next victim of Usenet's neverending September? Whether providing "community support" or "publishing tool", how long before popular bloggers are forced to implement Bayesian trackback filters? [MetaFilter] 
5:44:58 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Brigittes kleiner Weblog-Führer. Na also, geht doch: Wiebke Peters in der Brigitte über Weblogs. Und die Dame spart sich alle halbgaren Vermutungen und Voyeurismen, erklärt kurz, was Sache ist, schaut den Bloggern aufs Maul und empfiehlt welche.

Gut schreiben ist doch ganz einfach: man muß nur die falschen Wörter weglassen. [Industrial Technology & Witchcraft] 
5:35:44 PM      comment []   trackback []  



RSS Feed Icon.

I replaced the  icon used for RSS feed with  from Bryan Bell.  Thanks to Brian for creating this wonderful icon!  I did shrink the image down a bit so it can line up with the coffee mug icon.  I hope you like it.  Now only if there was a bigger icon for Mail.  I want a red tomato with a mail stuck in it.  BTW, you are welcome to my shrunk version of the icon.

[Don Park's Daily Habit] 
5:24:53 PM      comment []   trackback []  



When Bloggers Meet.

It is trouble when bloggers meet.  It's like a convention for spinsters.  Uh, can I blog that?  Blah blah, oh, don't blog about this stuff.  Hey, I am getting a headache!

So I propose some rules for bloggers and non-bloggers.  If you are not a blogger and you are talking to a blogger, make it clear what is off-the-record.  If you are a blogger and you are talking to another blogger, everything is off-the-record unless you say it is on-the-record.  Why?  Because the blogger whose blab you are gonna blog about could have blogged about it himself when and if he wants to.

[Don Park's Daily Habit] 
5:19:12 PM      comment []   trackback []  



»Blogs are the democratisation of publishing«. BBC: A blog for everyone. »You know a web trend has reached a high pitch of popularity when AOL starts including it in its basic software. But can blogs be truly mainstream?« [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
5:06:19 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Martin Rölls tägliche kostenlose Consulting-Lektion. Heute: Link or Die. Rat für Weblogplattform-Betreiber. [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
5:03:29 PM      comment []   trackback []  



InfoWorld:  Debate over RSS. [John Robb's Weblog] 
4:47:23 PM      comment []   trackback []  

Similarity Searching Now Available !.

If you do a Feedster search now, you'll see a link in the result set "similar posts" (next to "cached") and, when selected, it uses the selected article to return all other articles like it.  Right now this is, unfortunately, hard wired to english.  And it operates by content analysis not by link analysis.  We had actually planned to release this later this week but we did a massive update dealing with the DDOS issues and it just happened to sneak out into the wild when we moved stuff from our dev box to our production box.  Ah well.

[The FuzzyStuff: aaaaFeedster] 
1:24:40 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Seb's Open Research turns one.

Well, believe it or not, today is this weblog's first anniversary. Over that year I've written nearly a thousand posts. I've put a lot of effort into this, but I've gotten even more out of my involvement in this growing place we like to call the blogosphere. A year ago today I wrote,

Now the Web, and tools such as weblogs in particular, is making the feedback loops shorter, so that increasingly we are perceiving first-hand that the value of what we are expressing can reach beyond a restricted circle of acquaintances. In effect, we are collaborating with people that we don't know (yet). The long now is contracting and we are becoming conscious of a "wider here". I think in time this will drive many people to try and do their best in terms of making their output usable by a wider audience.

Indeed, in the months that followed, the process I had described began happening to me. Serendipity brought a lot of strangers to pass by and read some of the words I'd put here. Many of them became collaborators, co-conspirators, friends even. And the best thing is I didn't even have to try and pretend to be someone else! And while a lot of things have been moving in my life recently, the little corner of the blogosphere that I know provided a kind of stable mental anchoring point.

So, my deepest thanks to you all for listening and/or caring. If it hadn't been for your attention and generosity with your own thoughts, for your words of encouragement, and for the patience you obviously showed when the outpour was reduced - I wouldn't still be out here thinking out loud, trying to connect whatever small pieces I can put my hands on in ways that are meaningful to me. And I wouldn't put nearly as much trust in people I don't know (yet) as I do now.

I'd certainly be missing out on a lot.

[Seb's Open Research] 
9:13:59 AM      comment []   trackback []  



AOL Journals: Blogs Made Even Easier. Well, I've made my first posting on my new blog, Dan Gillmor's AOL Journal, a test of AOL's weblog application.... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 
8:58:09 AM      comment []   trackback []  

A White House 'Blog?. A White House 'Blog would kick some serious ass. [Jake's Radio 'Blog] 
6:31:38 PM      comment []   trackback []  



SecurityFocus' Scott Granneman: "Blogs: Another Tool in the Security Pro's Toolkit." [The Scobleizer Weblog] 
3:37:20 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Oh, cool, there are some new SQL Blogs coming. I've LOVED Scott W's .NET Weblogs. I can't wait until I can hear all about Yukon (the next version of SQL Server). Awesome awesome awesome.

Now, we're just missing a couple of things: Longhorn Blogs and PDC Blogs! But, I hear that either Scott W or Mike Amundsen will do those. Our customers are the best. [The Scobleizer Weblog] 
3:22:15 AM      comment []   trackback []  



"Doing your whole site with MT" [Daypop Top 40] 
3:14:52 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Wired News: Blogging for Bucks [Daypop Top 40] 
3:14:31 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Noch mehr zu Politiker-Weblogs. Ziemlich genau 24 Stunden nach dem Posten meines Eintrags zu Politiker-Weblogs am Dienstag rief mich Sven Przepiorka an. Er hatte eine ganze Menge interessanter Kommentare zu meinem Artikel und zu Weblogs in der Politik überhaupt und so haben wir über eine Stunde lang diskutiert. Einige Punkte aus unserem Gespräch gebe ich hier wieder. [Das E-Business Weblog] 
2:10:45 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Zur Persistenz von Blogs. Nun, auch ich habe mit Frau Horsch 2x recht lange telefoniert. Und bin dankbar dafür, nicht namentlich genannt zu wer... [thomas n. burg | randgänge] 
1:06:17 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogs als Kleinanzeigen. Sehr interessant. Auf der Suche nach den Organisationsformen von online-generierten Wissen in Foren und Weblog-Communities... [thomas n. burg | randgänge] 
1:05:08 AM      comment []   trackback []  



RSS Moves a Step Forward. The debate over the future of the RSS -- the "Really Simple Syndication" format that has helped turn weblogs into... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 
12:25:49 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Marc Canter on AOL's blog format: "I've been waiting for this for a LONG time!  Please notice that there's a clear place - on the main journal page - which describes: Name, Occupation, Location.  Thus is Digital Identity born..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
11:50:53 PM      comment []   trackback []  



David Galbraith on Technorati's new feature: "Over the longer term, this is perhaps as ground breaking as what weblogs have done for web publishing and ultimately will leverage the weblog model to its full potential..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
11:49:25 PM      comment []   trackback []  



CultureBlogging.

The Arts Journal has launched a group of blogs (About Last Night - Terry Teachout on Arts in New York City, Artful Manager - Andrew Taylor on the business of art & culture, and Seeing Things - Todi Tobias on dance) by seeking out some of their favorite culture writers and getting them set up to blog.  One of the biggest complaints about the blogosphere is the quality of content that is beging created.  While creating a blog surely isn't rocket science, it is far from simple for someone who is a complete computer-phobe.

We're all aware of the tendency of technology periodicals to launch blogs and the quality of their work has had a great effect on the timeliness and interactivity of their work.  At the same time traditional news media has had a tendency to shut down blogging by their journalists in some kind of un-enlightened intellectual property crackdown.  But there is a huge world of opinion and knowledge that is under-represented at best in the blogosphere.  AOL will be bringing blogs to the masses, this eternal September will be mitigated by Google, technorati and other gestaltic tools to some extent, but who is bringing interesting voices into the conversation.

Dave Winer is blog-enabling Harvard and it seems that some sort of coordination of efforts might help various blogophiles connect with voices that are currently under-represented and help get them running.  With all the chirpiness over various techy blog standards, this is something that everyone who wants to see blogs matter shold be able to get behind.

How might we organize efforts to broaden the culture of the blogosphere - dicuss

[Corante: Amateur Hour] 
12:18:44 PM      comment []   trackback []  



why blogging? just publish and forget?. some good observation: first noise reduction and ego maintenance Blogs have been compared to newsgroups. It is interesting. In newsgroups there is no "uber" member. Everyone is equal. At first that seems great - however it makes it hard for people to filter out the noise. In effect, a blog gives me control over the "major" content of my... [Artima Web Services Buzz] 
12:15:06 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Moblogging, photobloging from Comic-Con in San Diego. Some interesting live photoblogging and narrative updates from folks attending the Comic-Con in San Diego this week. I am not there, but wish I was. Here's one, by way of Warren Ellis; here is a collective blog project created by the guys at textamerica (empty now, they just built it yesterday). Both of the above are also offered in a zesty RSS flavor for easy syndication. The San Diego Union-Tribune is blogging now, and there are some Comic-Con related entries on their Sci-fi/comics blog "Disembodied Brains." Wil Wheaton says he'll be audio blogging from the convention. Got more live-blogging links? Post them here: Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
12:13:23 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Online Expert: More Newspaper Blogs, Please. Michelle Nicolosi of the Online Journalism Review says mroe reporters should do blogs. "Working on them should be optional --... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 
12:11:38 PM      comment []   trackback []  



AOL-Weblogs in Betaversion. Moe ("Plastic Thinking") hat die AOL-Weblogs gefunden [wir berichteten]:

»Anscheinend sind die AOL-Weblogs (dort heissen sie Journals) in die öffentliche beta gegangen: http://beta.hometown.aol.com/. Die Weblogs sehen auf den ersten Blick so von der technischen Form her ganz ordentlich aus: PermaLinks, RSS 2.0 usw. Ein bisschen seltsam ist allerdings, dass es zwar eine Kommentarfunktion gibt, man allerdings einen AOL-Login haben muss um kommentieren zu dürfen. Ich bin... [Industrial Technology & Witchcraft] 
12:03:24 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogplan-Wahn. Nach Hamburger und Münchener und Frankfurter Bloggerplänen heute: der Entenhausener Blogplan. Haltestelle Kolloseum bitte klicken. Die spinnen, die Blogger! [Industrial Technology & Witchcraft] 
11:54:05 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Fox Searchlight Pictures launches movie PR blog. Via LA Observed:

Fox Searchlight Pictures, the 20th-Century Fox unit behind the Internet marketing hit 28 Days Later, launched a Blogspot site over the weekend. The blog is "covering" media reports friendly to the picture and the company, reporting on favorable box office numbers and doing promos for upcoming films. The lead item right now is praise for Ron Grover's Business Week column on the clever marketing of 28 Days. First they turned Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News... (Tip from Movie City News)

permalink to LA Observed post; Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
11:44:22 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Howard Dean -- Internetstar der US-Präsidentschaftsbewerber [heise online news]

As usual things take a little longer to appear on the german scene...

If you don't understand german, do take the time to translate (as far from perfect as it may be) the comments to this one. They promise to reveal much of the prevailing attitude toward the US... 
11:15:27 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Hugh Hewitt on newspapers : "[They] refuse to read the map that is in front of their noses. âo[oe] The wise editor would instead allow the battle of the blogs to throw up champions and then ink them to multiyear commentary deals." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
11:04:05 AM      comment []   trackback []  



HasidicRebel. The Hasidic Rebel. A blogger from inside the Hasidic community provides some insight into a lifestyle few are familiar with. [MetaFilter] 
10:59:38 AM      comment []   trackback []  



HELP!blog. From the creators of itown, itopik, and iteople, the HELP!blog is a “simple way to connect people who have a need with people who can give some help.” [ranchero.com] 
10:52:28 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Das breitet sich ja aus.... Blogger! Nie mehr planlos in Frankfurt und um Frankfurt und um Frankfurt herum! [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
1:32:24 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Mark Siegel, who says he's "something of a novelty in the blogosphere" given he's got spinal muscular atrophy and blogs "with a headset that emulates a mouse": "In a life where I have to depend on others for everything from turning the page in a book to taking a piss, writing is one thing that I can do independently... Blogging can be a way to fight the loneliness that plagues every human being, not just those with disabilities." (Thanks, Susannah) [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
2:53:22 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Jon Udell: Publishing, permanence, and transparency. Jon Udell: Publishing, permanence, and transparency:

First, as with email, we're going to have to accept that what goes to the Web tends to stay there. Second, since we are all going to make mistakes, say things we wish we hadn't, and suffer the effects of software glitches, we're all going to have to learn to cut one another a lot more slack.

Amen. Be liberal in what you accept, conservative in what you produce. (In other words, that's a geeky way of saying grin & bear it, but say nice things. Not always easy.) [0xDECAFBAD] 
2:22:25 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogging the Blogathon.

Blogathon 2003
'During the Blogathon, people update their websites every 30 minutes for 24 hours straight. For this, they collect sponsorships. Pledges can be a flat donation, or a certain amount for every hour the blogger manages to stay awake.' Even if you just want to enjoy the spectacle, mark your calendar for July 26th. Everything starts at 6:00am Pacific Time.

Also noteworthy is the fact that several of the participating bloggers are earning money for Book Aid International, which works to provide books, training and support to public libraries in Africa." [Libraryman]

A few people have asked if I am going to participate in this year's Blogathon, but I won't be able to because I'll be on vacation far, far away from any internet connection. I encourage others to join, though. We need a list of library bloggers we can sponsor, so leave a comment if you know of any.

[The Shifted Librarian] 
2:05:14 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, says that the architecture of blogs conforms to the way we organize things and that email clients will follow blogs' lead: "Imagine keeping e-mail a bit more like a blog. Then suddenly, you've got instant messaging qualities and e-mail qualities happening at the same time." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
1:21:48 AM      comment []   trackback []  



126 and counting. Welcome to my readers from Macau. You are from the 126th nation or territory this website reached in 2003 so... (30 words, 2 comment(s).) [hebig.org/blog] 
12:00:44 AM      comment []   trackback []  

NL bloggers wanted!.

Erik van Bekkum:

A call for bloggers in The Netherlands! I have been thinking with Lilia Efimova and Ton Zijlstra about getting bloggers together during the holidays and get to meet the people behind the blogs...we're thinking about doing something fun and informal, perhaps a picknick, on a Saturday?

Who is in? Go to the comments field of this entry and let us know who you are, where you live and what period would best suit you. If you cannot attend, syndicate this entry to your blog or email your blogofriends.

Of course, it's going to a be a Dutch treat! And: you don't have to actually have a blog to come. It's going to be fun!

[Mathemagenic] 
11:50:16 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Thanks, Dave. As I mentioned in my blog last week, I briefly met Dave Winer at OSCON last week. I have to admit being a little nervous about it, because I offended Dave earlier in a thoughtless way. But Dave paid me about the best compliment that he could have: "Oh, yeah, I read your blog all the time". I was so relieved that I forgot to say something that I wanted to say to Dave:

I was a user of the original ThinkTank and More products on the Macintosh. I used them constantly, and I still wish I had one of them. So thank you, Dave, for your pioneering work in outlining.

Meeting folks like Dave, Mitch Kapor, and Andy Hertzfeld at OSCON reminded me that there are lots of folks out the that have made big contributions to computing, and that we in the open source community are standing on their shoulders. One way of thinking about open source is that it lets us stand on the shoulders of others so that we can get taller, instead of just trying to rebuild what others have done before. It never hurt anyone to say thank you, and we could do it more with each other. [Ted Leung on the air] 
11:36:51 PM      comment []   trackback []  



A Wordplay Blog. Here's a group blog with a twist.

Form a sentence from the acronym of the last word found on the latest post. Quirky, funny, nasty, silly, serious, whatever your post may be, the words are yours. Every correct entry gives you 1 point

(via Side Salad) Permalink Created Wed, 16 Jul 2003 [The J-Walk Blog] 
11:12:22 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Information foraging and weblogs as snack-bars.

Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster by Jakob Nielsen

A bit of definition:

Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993. Developed at the Palo Alto Research Center (previously Xerox PARC) by Stuart Card, Peter Pirolli, and colleagues, information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online.

[Read the middle yourself] and then:

The patch-leaving model thus predicts that visits will become ever shorter. Google and always-on connections have changed the most fruitful design strategy to one with three components:

• Support short visits; be a snack
• Encourage users to return; use mechanisms such as newsletters as a reminder
• Emphasize search engine visibility and other ways of increasing frequent visits by addressing users' immediate needs

Next to the fact that it's a useful theory for my work, it also calls for some parallels with blogging:

• Weblogs are rather snack-bars then restaurants: you can come often, find something to eat and leave fast. They are even better: snacks are changing (there is always something new), but the cook is the same, so you can easily get a feeling of cooking style and quality.
• Weblogs use RSS feeds to notify you when something tasty is served (and you can even try it without going there).
• Google loves blogs and brings readers directly to snack they want.

From this perspective the only problem with blog-snack-bar is that once you are there you can hardly find anything beyond the front raw of snacks :)

I also wonder when Jakob Nielsen will write a bit more about weblogs (because there are only 4 pages with this word now and because his Alertbox was a role-model for me when I started my weblog).

[Mathemagenic] 
7:28:40 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Publishing, permanence, and transparency.

A palimpsest is a manuscript on which an earlier text has been effaced and the vellum or parchment reused for another.

Under heavy surveillance (which has now ceased), Dave Winer reacted:

Now that people have set up a system to record everything on Scripting that I post within five minute intervals, I don't think I'll be writing any more of that stuff here. I guess it's time for weblogs to become like television. Polished and politically correct. Impersonal. Commercial. [Scripting News]

I understand and sympathize, but I think a bigger story is unfolding around us. Last year, I wrote an item entitled Walking the fault lines about my experiences with SOAP and WSDL. Scripting News picked up on it. (This was the same posting that began my serendipitous association with an Indian programmer named Nishant S. [1, 2].) Later that day, using the Meerkat aggregator, I noticed there were two versions of Dave's commentary, and I wrote: ... [Jon's Radio] 
7:10:57 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Ghost-Blogging.

Blogs of executives are starting to appear and at least some of them seems to be using ghost-bloggers according to a comment by Elwyn Jenkins (aka Microdoc) to my Blogs will fade away post is of any indication.  Elwyn wrote:

"I would have to disagree that most of the writing can now go in-house for most corporations. People within corporations do not have the time to 'blog' for their company, and few feel that they can write. Already, I write three blogs for large companies and have a growing list of clientele. I will soon be putting writers on to handle the volume of writing. The task is to listen to what is going on within a company, learn the voice of a key person and blog for that person. The client ultimately publishes today's blog, but a professional writer, thinks up the ideas, and puts a spin on today's blog to match in with a series of events within the corporation."

My initial response was "Whoa!  That's cheating."  But I thought about it some more and tried to think about it from the perspective of businesses and executives.  It made sense.  While writing style matters, it is the message that matters more.  How we think and how we write also make a lot of noise that seeps into our blogs and interefere with the message we are trying to convey.

Still, I thought ghost-blogging is a topic others might want to think about.  One blogging lessons I have learned recently is that I should write, not only about what I want to write about, but also what my readers want to write about in response to my post.  Participation is a big component of blogging after all.  So tell me what you think of ghost-blogging.

If you are a forward-looking executive for a large corporation who wants to see how blogging can help you do your job better, but have either terrible writing skills or leaky-temper problems, give Elywin a call.  I have both problems, but I don't have much of an *ss to cover.  You do.

[Don Park's Daily Habit] 
7:10:28 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Chad Dickerson, in raving about blogs:  "The flow of RSS content into my newsreader each day has become as important to my personal information flow as e-mail." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
6:44:34 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Between bloggers and their employers (2).

From notes of the Voxpolitics event on blogs and politics (I have no idea what it was, you can start digging in from here) [via Cindy Lemcke-Hoong], about Stephen Pollard, "first major journalist in the country to be running a weblog":

And he's not writing for free - people respond to his comments and inspire him to write pieces for which he gets paid.

This simple phrase gets the value of blogging for free - it inspires you to come up with other pieces (with more insight/analysis/depth/structure) to get paid for.

For me it would also draw a border for copyrights: I'd like to "own" my blog (to give it away under Creative Commons) even if it is related to my work, while my company owns more elaborate products (e.g. papers) that can be inspired by it (of course when a company pays me to work on these products :).

In fact I don't like to get paid to blog, because I want the freedom of doing it and I want to own the content. I'm also addicted to blogging enough to think that I would not be happy if I couldn't do it. And I have scary phrases in my contract to worry about these issues :(

[Related: What Does European Law Say About Blog Ownership? (thanks to Martin Roell), Between bloggers and their employers, Bloggers Gain Libel Protection, BlogTalk: who owns narrated experiences?]

[Mathemagenic] 
6:43:40 PM      comment []   trackback []  



New campaign finance market mechanics.

The Dean Campaign's BlogForAmerica points this morning (without providing a link) to Carol C. Darr's USA Today editorial, Internet Donors Can Clean Up National Campaign Financing. She nails it:

Campaigns typically raise small donations, if they bother at all, from direct mail lists of their previous contributors, but costs usually consume 50 cents of every dollar raised. This means that average Americans, unless they have previously given a donation to a candidate, are not even solicited. That's one of the reasons more than 99% of Americans don't contribute.

This is what makes Dean's and Kucinich's success in raising money on the Internet so promising. For the first time, a presidential candidate, Dean, has catapulted into the top tier with small donations. The Internet now holds out the possibility that small donors might successfully fuel serious presidential campaigns [~] a sea change in American politics.

The way to minimize the corrosive effect of large contributions is to flood the political system with lots of small contributions. This will happen only if huge numbers of ordinary American citizens make modest contributions.

Small money is the only money that is reliably clean. The Internet is the best way to raise it [~] quickly, easily and cheaply.

According to the Dean Campaign, more than 80,000 people have contributed so far, with more than 62,000 in just the last quarter. The average donation was $88.11. Dean Campaign Manager Joe Trippi rightfully calls this "the greatest grassroots campaign of the modern era."

The mechanics, however, are radically different from all previous grassroots campaigns. They don't just depend on "The Internet." They depend on software that wasn't designed either to manage a campaign or to raise funds [~] successful as it may be so far at both.

Take the matter of comments.

That last post has 117 comments. Other comment piles below other posts number 40, 76, 101, 21, 71, 136, 156, 152, 98, 132 and so on. These are near-Slashdot numbers.

They are also unmoderated. In fact, there is no way to moderate them (in a Slashdot sense) on a Moveable Type blog. Or on any type of blog, far as I know. Other than by taking them down.

This apparently happened to a post by Richard Bennett to the comment list at a Dean blog entry on Monday. I was later told by email from a friend close to the Dean Campaign that the deletion was a mistake and that the Campaign has a no-censorship policy on the blog. (Also, presumably, over on the Lessig blog, where the largest comment pile currently numbers 183.)

Given that Dean's blog comment piles will only get larger, micro-editing of posts in them is bound to be a diminishing-return prospect in any case.

Clearly this is a learning experience for the Dean People. As Dr. Weinberger said yesterday,

It'd be easy to read the bluster and invective as a failure of the system. Nah. It is the system. Welcome to the Internet, Governor Dean! You're making history not just with the Lessig guest blogging but with the wild conversation it's ignited. And lots of people are going to love you for it.

This should be a learning experience for blogware designers too. Moveable Type (which Dean's and Lessig's blogs both use) is excellent (hence its popularity), but the absence of permalinks for individual comment posts [~] even for whole comments sections [~] is a huge problem that desperately needs to be corrected.

Meanwhile, if the Dean Campaign wants to encourage conversational participation of a moderated and linkable sort, I suggest they set up a Kuro5hin-like site built on Scoop, PHP-Nuke, Slash or the like.

In fact, if issues are going to be discussed (and not just stumped as "messages"), that would be the way to go. And not just for Dean. Any candidate wanting to get ahead of Dean in this Internet Thing would be wise to set up a slashsite of some kind.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
6:33:07 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogs vs. KnowledgeBoard (2).

Erik van Bekkum does a great job with bringing many Knowledge Board discussions into blogosphere. Recent links:

• Culture and communities of Practice
• Miguel Cornejo and the community-building tool overview 
• Coffee talk, a thousand miles away at Shell (btw, great example of coffee-table teleconferencing :)

[See also Blogs vs. KnowledgeBoard discussion]

[Mathemagenic] 
12:42:23 PM      comment []   trackback []  



dosis. wortkontor  ein PR-Blog eines Beraters (Dr. Burkowitz) für Gesundheitswesen etc. aus Hamburg. Recht fein. [thomas n. burg | randgänge] 
4:08:14 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Harry Hatchet in the Guardian: "It was a Norwegian Maoist who first pointed me towards the online world of weblogs, and after six months of linking and commenting, a group of ultra-Thatcherite libertarians invited me to a bloggers' dinner party. Such are the people you bump into in the blogosphere..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
4:06:53 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Portuguese Parliament to government officials: start blogging. BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc from Paris says:

Xeni, I don't know if you've already heard about this, but a new law was just unanimously passed in Portugal by deputies (Projecto Deliberacao number 10/IX) which provides all deputies the option of having their own website or blog (the word weblog is mentioned in the law!). The deputies' blogs will be hosted on the Portuguese Parliament's webserver. The original piece of news, blogged in Portuguese, is here, from July 07, and and I wrote about it here in French.

I don't read Portuguese *or* French all that well, and I couldn't locate the law on the Portuguese government's website -- but if any readers have access to English language versions of the news, or care to provide a translation, please post in the Discuss forum! Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
3:42:00 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Auch die Münchner Blogger haben jetzt einen Plan. [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
3:10:48 AM      comment []   trackback []  



FeedsterAds.

Advertising on Feedster.

Advertising on Feedster

 Its Here! 

Fully self service, powered by paypal.  Should be easy enough to use but if you have problems, let me know.

[The FuzzyBlog!]

Interesting.  Advertising has certainly been extremely kind to Google.  Good look to Scott & company they've certainly put the effort in.

[Curiouser and curiouser!] 
2:46:55 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Copyrights and Blogs.

We are about to enter the marshland of copyrights, a wet land of confusion that lies between the land and the sea.  On land, things are on firm ground of fair use.  In the sea, what sinks and what doesn't is clear cut.  In the marshland, nothing is certain.

As I mentioned before, value-added blogs and feeds are coming our way.  But copyright issues could sink it before it gets here.  Last night, I asked Dave Winer how he would feel if I created an RSS feed of his posts I liked.  His answer was no, and I suspect majority of bloggers will feel the same way.

Imagine a newspaper of blog posts delivered to 100 million readers three times a day.  While some might think this is impossible, I have walked though most of the serious technical and business issues and have concluded that such newspaper is not only possible, but potentially very profitable.

Biggest unknowns are the copyright issues.  It's not just the bloggers and how they feel about commercial syndication of their posts, but owners of the material bloggers frequently refer to or embed into their post either partially or as a whole.  It's a big iceberg that could turn any ship into Titanic.

[Don Park's Daily Habit] 
2:27:27 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Future of Blogs: Small Businesses.

Business market, particularly the small business market, is where most of the action and the money will be in the future, not personal blogs.  Benefits of blogging technologies, such as ease of update, content syndication, moblogging, audblogging, fotologging, and social networking, will allow small business owners to explode into the web like never before and propell blogging into a day-to-day necessity for survival. 

For proper perspective, think about how little hole-in-the-wall stores so common in Asia might use blogging technologies to improve their business.  Then scale it up and expand across the globe across language boundaries.

[Don Park's Daily Habit] 
2:26:55 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Steve Gillmor: "Back to watching Scoble narrowly escape being fired..." [The Scobleizer Weblog] 
1:52:49 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Phil Wolff, in predicting the syndicated blogosphere will reach 300 million feeds over the next three years: "I assume AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Terra will turn on blogging tools in the next 18 months, and 10% of the online community (70 million people) become bloggers." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
1:47:50 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Stuart Henshall: "Corporate Blogging is just the edge of a revolution that will harness the collective intelligence of organizations in new ways." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
1:47:23 PM      comment []   trackback []  



"Not A Dollarshort: AOL Journals" [Daypop Top 40] 
1:44:54 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Non-profit blogs.

Nice story in Wired News by Katie Dean on the Advocacy Project's use of weblogs to support non-profit activities.  They are empowering Interns with blogs to tell stories of their field work. 

One of the challenges for a non-profit engaged in educational and technical aid is communicating the problem and how they are solving it in a way that resonates.  These very human stories of the experiences impassioned volunteers could only come out directly.

...Weblogs are an excellent tool for nonprofit organizations, according to Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, which makes Web publishing tools for groups.

"Weblogs are the cheapest way for an individual or organization to communicate," he says. "It's a more natural, human voice than what someone could generate with a press release."

Mayfield says blogs can also help nonprofits keep their donor base and supporters updated. Plus, "there's a wide body of fairly influential and growing body of (weblog) readers that pay attention on a regular basis."

[Ross Mayfield: On Blogging] 
3:46:35 AM      comment []   trackback []  



AOL to Introduce Moblogging, Too!.

'AOL Journals' To Bring Blogs To Millions

"Whatever you call them, the idea is a Web page that people can update frequently with commentary and links to material they find interesting online. Blog software automates posting the commentary, images and links.

AOL will give members three ways to update their blogs -- through an online template with blank boxes for text input, through AOL's instant-messaging system or by telephone. The phone option will be available only to subscribers to the extra-cost "AOL by Phone" service, who will be able to leave voice messages that will be posted as MP3 sound files.

To publish via instant messaging, AOL members will send a text message to an IM software 'bot' -- or automated script -- that will post the message to the user's blog. The IM posting will work only with AOL's internal messaging system, not its free AOL Instant Messenger program. Robinson said this would be a quicker way to publish than navigating to a Web page to type into a form: 'You might have a fleeting thought you want to capture, and you don't want to take the extra few seconds to go and open up the publishing interface.' " [The Washington Post]

More details about AOL's upcoming integration of blogging software into the company's software. I still think this is going to be big, as will the RSS trail that follows. I didn't realize that they are going to integrate pictures, but of course they are because it makes perfect sense. Mo' moblogging down the road.

That idea has me quite intrigued because I've been following Aaron Schmidt's photoblog of pictures sent from his cell phone. It's fascinating to watch his daily life through it. I like that I can see Aaron's friends (none of whom I know), his cute puppy, and snapshots of the places he goes, so I can't imagine how much more enticing it would be to find feeds of photos and blog posts in my aggregator daily. And audio files posted by phone? You mean I could hear my niece in my aggregator? I am so there!

[The Shifted Librarian] 
3:38:28 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blawgaroonie.

These lists of new blawgs just don't quit, and the ranks keep getting more and more diverse and exciting. See for yourself by paying a visit to this week's additions to the B&B blawgroll:

Academic

• Carol Irvin teaches real estate law at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio.
• Tom Mayo writes the HealthLawBlog when he is not busy teaching at Dedman School of Law, SMU. [Via Ernie Svenson]

Political

• Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich also is a Democratic Congressman from Ohio. [Via Doc Searls]

Practicing

• Hey, great news for us denizens of the Ninth, and all the rest of you as well: Bart is blogging the Ninth Circuit at The Limit of its Logic. Someone had to do it. I'm assuming you're a lawyer, Bart; please correct me if I'm wrong. [Via the SoCalLawyer]
• Chaesq. is a lawyer in New York, a Buffy fan, and the author of the well-named MC Estoppel. [Via Blawg.org]
• Steve Eugster practices in Spokane, WA, and blogs about his work, life, politics and more. [Via Blawg.org]
• Ooh, this is kind of exciting: the 260-lawyer law firm of Holland & Hart is blogging health care law at its Rocky Mountain Health Care Blog. To my knowledge, this makes Holland & Hart the largest law firm to date to have a blog. [Via Blawg.org]
• Perfectly Sassy is a lawyer in the Philippines. [Via Blawg.org]
• David Scott is blogging charter shcool law at the blog of the CharterSchooLaw.com site. [Via the Blawg Ring]
• Doug Simpson writes Unintended Consequences, a "Weblog focused on law, regulation and disruptive technologies." [Via Ernie Svenson] Doug also writes a blog about "the geography, culture and people of the Connecticut River Valley." Doug served for many years as in-house counsel to a large insurance company.
• The Sophorist is an Arkansas Missouri attorney with a flare for irony. [Via Ernie Svenson]
• The law firm of Wiggin & Dana LLP is blogging franchise law at, appropriately enough, their Franchise Law blog: what could be sweeter than the doughnut wars? [Via Ernie Svenson]

Clerking

• Bill is a federal judicial clerk in Philadelphia. [Via Howard Bashman]

Learning The Craft

• Angel is in law school down in Ernie's neck of the woods. [Via Blawg.org]
• The ASU Law Devil is a group blog by 2Ls at ASU. [Via Blawg.org]
• Minh starts law school in Denver this fall. [Via the Blawg Ring]
• Jason Nemes is blogging the Sixth Circuit between his studies at Brandeis. [Via Ernie Svenson]
• Patent Defect will start law school in the fall. [Via Blawg.org]
• Anthony Rickey is ready to start law school at Columbia in the fall, even though he appears full well to recognize it's "Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil." He's already reading his Civ Pro text (really A, there're a lot of other options!), and for good measure has fired up a group blog for members of the Columbia Class of 2006. How about that? [Via Blawg.org]
• Andrew Sinclair is in the 2004 class at BU and a former Gaucho. [Via the Blawg Ring]
• wburtis writes the great new Mac Justice blog, and is starting law school at the Washburn School of Law in Topeka, KS [Via Ernie Svenson; isn't it heartwarming to watch Ernie literally cuddle up with his new Mac toys?]

Blawgers At Large

• Evan is blogging cyberlaw issues at FreeLaw.au. [Via Blawg.org]
• The author of Misplaced Thoughts is studying (hard now, hopefully) for the bar exam. [Via the Blawg Ring]
• There's a blog about the acronymically acrobatic USA PATRIOT Act, PATRIOTWATCH. [Via Blawg.org]

Integrating

• Ron Friedmann is a lawyer who now runs his own law technology consulting firm, Prism Legal Consulting, in Arlington, VA. It's key when those who know law and technology are able to offer that knowledge to their colleagues in the legal profession. The disconnect too often is too wide. [Via Ernie Svenson]

Conglomerates

• The German American Law Journal (English Edition) is a group blog "for information sharing in the areas of German and American law, mainly where the two intersect, vary or intrigue." [Via Blawg.org]
• Omni Legal News is the blog of LawTalkers, a site for news, rumor, information and gossip about the legal world. [Via Blawg.org]
• One Big Blawg is a promising-looking new Glenn Garnes project (launched July 11), a collaborative site where lawyers can share knowledge about the jurisdictions where they practice. The site has many features and goals, so here's more from Glenn.

Truckstops

• I see Chad at Detod now writes a blog with news about the site, such as its well deserved recognition as Jerry Lawson's Netlawtools MVP site of the month.
• The Virtual Chase now has a guide to RSS Newsfeeds for Law.

[Bag and Baggage] 
2:18:43 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Karl-Friedrich Lenz: What Does European Law Say About Blog Ownership?. [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
2:11:39 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Google Tricks & Tips - Stuff you Bloggers need to know. Steve Covell has a good post on how to use Google to search just blogs, or just law blogs.  Inspired by his love of Google (and his specific recommendation) I have purchased Google Hacks, which contains a wealth of information on how use Google productively. [Ernie the Attorney] 
1:56:46 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Why can't my aggregator do this?. Why can't my aggregator do this? Why doesn't your aggregator do this? to my knowledge, no aggregator does this... Everyone's... [Teal Sunglasses] 
1:34:06 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Parliament goes wireless for bloggers' summit... [Channel 'social_software'] 
1:13:13 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Announcing The Blog Cooperative. via Web Dawn - Rebirth of the Social Marketplace: I launched a new site today, The Blog Cooperative (www.BlogCoop.com). The idea was inspired by my previous post about liquid democracy in business and by an email conversation with Seyed Razavi, creator of BlogShares. Other inspirations and ideas are from... [Channel 'social_software'] 
1:06:06 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Kathleen Parker: Blogs breaking logjam of journalism [Daypop Top 40] 
12:49:39 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Terry Teachout on the launch of ArtsJournal's new blogs [Be sure to check them out - they just launched today]: "Here I am, finally. I've been talking about starting an arts blog for the past couple of years, but I never got up the nerve to do the dirty work... So when artsjournal.com kindly offered to do it for me, it took me about three seconds to say yes." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
12:47:16 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Mena Trott on AOL's blog offering: "This isn't just some message board with a blogging label slapped on -- the AOL Journals team is taking the time and effort to get this right and that's highly commendable." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
11:58:25 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Tom Matrullo: "Bloggging can give us access to portions of what lies beyond what we believe we already know... It's the possibility of Keats' snailhorn sensibility, probing with finesse, what the juggernauts of media crush before they convey." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
11:57:08 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Jason Kottke: "Movable Type is the new way to do absolutely everything, BTW.... It checks my vision, does root canals, makes my travel plans, transports me back in time, and balances my checkbook. Even expensive hookers are a thing of the past with Movable Type..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
11:56:26 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Adam Greenfield in his wrap-up on the moblogging conference held in Tokyo recently: "I know in my bones that the act of self-publishing material from mobile to devices to a shared global network, and retrieving similarly user-generated material, is going to be one of the defining cultural features of the next few years." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
11:55:30 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Bloggers Responsibilities. No matter how much you want to believe it, the blog you "run" is a shared resource. Once you have one reader or one user post a comment you are creating a community. If your intentions were to only post... [Artima Web Buzz] 
11:49:53 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Bloggers take on politicians. Bloggers are going to parliament to encourage more MPs to share their interest and passions on the web. [BBC News | Technology | World Edition] 
7:51:29 PM      comment []   trackback []  



MacWorld: Put Weblogs to Work. Low-Cost Tools Let You Publish Professional and Personal Sites Instantly. [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
6:26:03 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Post to MovableType from Jabber. [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
6:25:03 PM      comment []   trackback []  

Ruminations on a bee. I love Matt Webb's blog entries. They're superdense, thought-provoking, serious and playful at the same time. He's a smart one, our Matt. Today's entry is awfully tasty.

esterday morning, hot sun and hot pavement, I found a dead bee. I can't remember the last time I saw a dead bee - not since I've lived in a city, I guess - and this one was still brightly coloured, fuzzy and fat. I poked it with a piece of leaf for a while. That knot of complexity! The desk my computer is on now looks vulgar in comparison, so vast, so selfish, squatting over a million bees-worth of space, and doing nothing: one piece of the desk is much like another, and the whole like any desk, anywhere. But this bee, white black and yellow, I bet every single element of it had purpose: every particle, every force, every relative position and potentiality of it, oh and more and wider than I have space here to say, all the way down to the substrate of the universe itself. Not like my desk, built on top of all these layers, in the highly stacked and abstracted world of people -- which is, in fact, just like London around me, there at the west end of Fleet Street, a human construction, a deeply nested virtual machine really, that's all it is -- there with our precarious artifact around me, I witnessed a bee, not built on top of reality but part of reality itself. Indivisible from it. A window to the true reality so far from me. "Auspicious event! Going to be a good day" I texted Es, excited. "Not for the bee" she replied. I'm not sure, it's still there, more real than any of us. Thank you, bee!

Link

Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
3:56:50 AM      comment []   trackback []  



600,000 blogs for the downloading. Weblog Census is a Technorati/Blogdex/Daypop-style project that has indexed over 600,000 blogs from around the world, archiving all the posts its ever discovered. You can download all this data from the project site, and invent your own data-mining alogrithms to discover the topology of Blogistan.

Link

Discuss

(via Oblomovka) [Boing Boing Blog] 
3:53:28 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogs will fade away.

I woke up yesterday with these thought.

Blogs will fade away within two years.  What we know now as blogs will not be recognized by web users of tommorrow.  Website technologies and blogging technologies are on a converging path and will soon be indistinguishable from one another.

RSS will also disappear in favor of subscriptions.  People will take it for granted that webpages can be subscribed to.  Web browsers will be changed to support single-click webpage subscription.  No mess, no fuss.  Throw in client-side highlighting of changes as well.  No RSS, no Echo, just subscriptions.

[Don Park's Daily Habit] 
3:36:41 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Iran Joins China in Blocking Blogs. Hoder: July 9 Unrest, Updates. Confirmed reports are saying that akunews (prominent student news website) and major blogging services websites... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 
5:41:30 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Compression, Glorious Compression. I added the XML files and quicktime movies to the list of things that are now compressed for this site. Expect and even faster TNL.net experience! [TNL.net weblog] 
5:35:41 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Rheingold Preaches Mob-Logging. drjparker writes "Howard Rheingold author of Smart Mobs and The Virtual Community among other works has an article in the Online Journalism Review in which he ... [Slashdot] 
5:34:45 AM      comment []   trackback []  



mp3 of Cory saying "Boing Boing". I got Cory to say "Boing Boing" into my Olympus voice recorder. Here's the mp3. Maybe I should start a collection of people saying their blog or product names... Maybe not... Also got Cory saying, venti mocha latte americana frap espresso-chino [Joi Ito's Web Lite] 
4:59:54 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Ultra-liberal feed parser.

This is an ultra-liberal feed parser, suitable for reading RSS and Pie feeds as produced by weblogs, news sites, wikis, and many other types of sites.

As I guessed and as Mark replied, his ultra-liberal feed parser now supports initial Pie (nee nEcho (nee Echo (nee Pie))) feeds.

But you know what else? He left in support for RSS. My news aggregator remains fully able to read all my feeds even after dropping in his new code. No breakage here. [0xDECAFBAD] 
4:34:06 AM      comment []   trackback []  



On the vine
I'm opening the doors today on a new project -- something I'm doing on the side, not affiliated with Salon -- called Storyvine. It's a themed blog, focusing on digital storytelling -- the description is "the digital storytelling grapevine." Here's the mission statement: "I've got two goals for this blog: First, by providing timely news and links I hope to provide a useful service to the existing community that has formed around the idea of digital storytelling over the last decade or so, since the first Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, Colorado, in 1995. Second, I hope to help people who are curious about this phenomenon get a clearer handle on what it is, and where to find out more."

I intend to update it as regularly as there's news, information, links or thoughts that are of interest to the people who are interested in this subject. Come visit. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 
4:28:16 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Aggregators a go-go.

Aggregator Traffic Stats. Inspired by hebig's post on the subject, I ran the user agent numbers for my RSS feeds (last 30 ...... [LaughingMeme]

There is some question about what the stats actually mean (unique IP's vs. requests) but it was interesting just to see how many aggregator agents there are now.  NetNewsWire still appears to be the firm favourite.

[Curiouser and curiouser!] 
4:10:47 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Thanks Google!
Where have I been or is this fairly recent? Google seems to be hitting weblogs.com pretty regularly... wonder how often... every few minutes... every hour?
I can now see with time and date stamp when my ping from iteople.com News, etc.. hits via Google without scrolling down the weblogs.com list (which is not geting old... Dave, is there a new UI idea vs. the scrolling list?).

Seems it only took Google a day or so to pick up on iteople's existence. Thanks Google!

And thanks to Brent of Ranchero (and the famous birthday wife: Yes, Sheila we're still celebrating your birthday here!) Software, creators of the spaztacious newsreader, NetNewsWire for an iteople.com mention.

And by the way, is there a way for Radio to tell me that someone has commented on my blogs? [Harvey Kirkpatrick: itopik.com News] 
3:55:52 PM      comment []   trackback []  



"Winds of Change.NET: July 9 Carnival of the Liberties" [Daypop Top 40] 
3:43:54 PM      comment []   trackback []  



"blogosphere.us" [Daypop Top 40] 
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Bioblogging... well, sort'a
Seems the entries coming in to iteople.com for the iteople directory are folks who just want their directory seen by.. you guess, yep, their name. Their blog really isn't about anyone as a bioblog like here.
Does the phrase "law of unintended consequences" kinda grab ya? What do you think? Should we list folks who are blogging about whatever by name or limit it to folks who are writing about someone else? Or just live and let live... bioblog or autobioblog?

A nice reply today from Dave Sifry of Technorati... you gotta love looking up your blog on the Tech Cosmos.

And a chat over when to send out the post feeds for the directory trilogy (iteople, itown, & itopik) with Scott Johnson, co-founder of Feedster. Both very helpful directories for bloggers and growing bigger daily. [Harvey Kirkpatrick: itopik.com News] 
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Purple as in the number.

Oxen bloxsom purple communities. EE Kim speaks!.

Eugene Kim has started blogging: EEK Speaks.

Eugene and his partner, Chris Dent (who blogs at Glacial Erratics), of Blue Oxen Associates, both have PurpleNumbers on their blogs, where each paragraph has its own fragment permalink.

Eugene wrote a plugin for his bloxsom blog, and Chris is generating his in Moveable Type. Chis also sends these paragraph level links out in one of his RSS 2.0 feeds.

PurpleNumbers are something totally good for the iCite net, which likes links to content at as fine a granularity as interesting, like a paragraph.

[the iCite net development blog]

I had the pleasure to meet Gene during Planetwork conference.  Somehow they convinced Pierre Omidyar to fund them! 

[Marc's Voice]

I have a question about PurpleNumbers which is:

• What happens when the paragraph gets edited?

Does it get a new purple number?  If so, where does the old purple number go?  If not, how do you find out that the paragraph you are linking to is no longer the paragraph you thought you were linking to?

 

[Curiouser and curiouser!] 
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Shared transcripts for the masses.

Blogs in the Workplace.

An NY Times article on weblogs in business that somehow missed Socialtext ;-(

..."People are starting to use Web logs to archive data that would have otherwise been lost," Mr. Tang said. He noted that much of the company's internal communications had been via instant messaging [~] and was lost as soon as the correspondents closed their chat windows. Now, though, employees are starting to post transcripts of relevant discussions on the Web logs, he said.

"It's not just making life more convenient," Mr. Tang said, "but actually giving us something new we didn't have before."

[via Scripting News]

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

This would seem to support the argument for IM-to-blog as a useful publishing metaphor.  Although I wonder how well it can be made to work in practice:  I can think of few IM conversations that I would want to appear on a blog unedited.  Perhaps there is a middle-step.

An interesting approach to this, for me, would be the idea of a shared transcript editor.  Roughly what I have in mind is a 3rd participant in the conversation (a bot of some kind) which records what is said.  When the conversation is over it sends (via IM) both participants a link to a shared transcript editing page.  Once the participants have agreed the final transcript it then blogs it to both their weblogs.

Of course all of this sounds like it would work much more seamlessly as a Groove application.

[Curiouser and curiouser!] 
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iteople.com. iteople.com is a brand-new “directory for organizing blogs by people.” It’s a companion to itown.com and itopik.com. [ranchero.com] 
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Switcherooting.

Ubergeek's latest: Hairy Blogger and the Flying Matrix.

I want to see a "Swith to Blogging" to match Ubergeek's "Switch to Linux", "Switch to Mac" and "IntelliToast".

Bonus link: My interview with Ubergeek at Linux Journal.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
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Justin Hall, in reporting on the First International Moblogging Conference held in Tokyo the other day: "All the fun of posting pictures from phones is a polite rehearsal for the incredible social upheaval that moblogging could bring or join." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
12:23:51 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Wrappers, injectors, and writing tools.