Andre Venter: Blogs

Six million cyber-Egyptians and not a single Web log?

Mon, 08 Sep 2003 01:44:42 GMT

Emerging Alternatives: Blogworld

Mon, 08 Sep 2003 01:34:55 GMT

Are bloggers the heir-apparant of the independent weekly?

Mon, 08 Sep 2003 01:30:48 GMT

Welch: For all the history made by newspapers between 1960 and 2000, the profession was also busy contracting, standardizing, and homogenizing. Most cities now have their monopolist daily, their alt weekly or two, their business journal. Journalism is done a certain way, by a certain kind of people. Bloggers are basically oblivious to such traditions, so reading the best of them is like receiving a bracing slap in the face. It's a reminder that America is far more diverse and iconoclastic than its newsrooms.
[MetaFilter]

Cary McMullen

Mon, 08 Sep 2003 00:52:07 GMT

"And on the 2,893,402,568th day, man created blogs."

(Lakeland Ledger) [via Scripting News]

Weblogs in the news..

Sun, 07 Sep 2003 18:15:00 GMT

Columbia Journalism Review : Emerging Alternatives: Blogworld by Matt Welch "This February, I attended my first Association of Alternative Newsweeklies conference, in the great media incubator of San Francisco. It's impossible to walk a single block of that storied town...
(via judith meskill's knowledge notes) [Channel 'social_software']

Chicago Tribune on blogging in the workplace

Sun, 07 Sep 2003 18:02:09 GMT

[Scripting News]

The Topic Exchange does blogrolls and images now

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 01:36:29 GMT

Getting further from what it was originally meant for (you can blame Marc Canter for this!), but towards something else useful :-)

You can now use it to host blogrolls. Here's one:

Click the '(ite)' link at the bottom to get to the documentation and see how to make your own one.

You can also upload images, but please don't upload too many as I have limited hard disk space ...
[Second p0st]

The Blogger's Platform

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 01:19:37 GMT

(Phil Wolff) [Scripting News]

Instances of edBlogging

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 00:58:18 GMT

Al Delgado is tracking lots of education blogging initiatives on the educational weblogs and EdBlogger Praxis weblogs. This thing is really booming.
[Seb's Open Research]

Online News Pioneers See Lots of Changes in the First 10 Years

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 00:55:16 GMT

An interesting comparison on the past, present and future state of online news. This piece also makes some interesting points regarding RSS and blogging.
[Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

Feed Combiner

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 00:53:39 GMT

Phil Pearson is experimenting with a feed combiner, a sort-of blogroll-style miniaggregator you can insert into your own static pages. See Experiment: constructing blogrolls with RSS for more information on how it works and how to use it....
[Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

qlogger

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 15:19:11 GMT

... offers a number of structured blogging options...
[Seb's Open Research]

Blog Spammer Exposed

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 03:23:33 GMT

Blog Spam is currently climbing up the charts on the main blogging indexes with top-penis-enlargement.com/vigrx.htm hitting No.11 at Blogdex today, all achieved through the process of spamming comments sections of blogs worldwide, including on numerous occasions, the Blog Herald. Victim sites include Scriptygoddess, Bigpinkcookie and many others currently listed on the reference page at Blogdex for the site....
[The Blog Herald]

Antipodean Flash Blogging

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 02:23:50 GMT

Christmas caroling in high summer down the Brazilian blogstreet.
[Blogalization Community]

24-Hour Trends in the Non-English Blogosphere

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 02:22:13 GMT

"We've divided the "whole blogosphere" into slices based on the language of each individual weblog ..."
[Blogalization Community]

Dietblogs make headlines losing weight

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 02:13:22 GMT

' sure I blogged this before, but it's still... ...an interesting utilisation on blogging and peer support...
(via The Blog Herald) [Rocky Mountain News: Technology]

Web Event: Trotts to speak on CNN

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 02:08:34 GMT

Six Apart founders Ben and Mena Trott will be discussing TypePad on CNN Headline News on Wednesday, September 3. We do not know the time yet, or whether this will be on CNN International as well, but would definately mark...
[The Blog Herald]

KernelTrap: Open Source RSS feeds and blogs

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 02:01:24 GMT

KernelTrap aims to bring news about all open source kernels, not just the Linux kernel. However, at this time the majority of news posted to this site is Linux-centric. KernelTrap (also) has very dynamic RSS feeds.... of specific content.

Generally speaking, any KernelTrap URL that looks like '/taxonomy/view/...' can be turned into a feed by changing the word 'view' to 'feed'. Here are a few examples: Linux stories, FreeBSD stories, OpenBSD stories, and KernelTrap features.

KernelTrap is organized into numerous categories and subcategories utilizing Drupal's taxonomy functionality.
[via Daypop Top 40]

Well-formed writing and information routing

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 01:26:11 GMT

"The tagging conventions I've been applying for the last four months are really springing to life, now that structured search of my blog is available..." (Jon Udell)
[via Daypop Top 40]

The rise of blogging

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 13:06:42 GMT

Internet giants catch on to blogs / Major portals provide services for online journals

"It definitely seems like blogging is losing its underground image," said Matthew Haughey, co-author of the book "We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs" and co-founder of Blogroots, a Web site that chronicles blogging news. ...
(SFGate.com) [via The Blog Herald]

Fight or Switch?

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 12:39:38 GMT

PostNuke or pMachine? Portal, vortal, or classic blog? The Blogalization test-kitchens are busy cooking up alternatives.
[Blogalization Community]

The Why and How of Blogging

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 11:30:37 GMT

a presentation by Nick Finck for the Web Design World 2003 in Seattle.
[Der Schockwellenreiter]

First Draft

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 11:22:18 GMT

Today I found another source of experienced opinion on the changing face of print communications -- Tim Porter, a fellow traveler into the future of print.
From his web page bio:

"I am an editor and writer who entered newspapering as a reporter with a typewriter and left it as an editor building websites. Today, I work independently but retain a passion for newspapers and the pursuit of quality journalism."

The website he built belonged to the San Francisco Examiner, and he was formerly the city editor there as well.

Porter's weblog, First Draft, chronicles the triumphs and travails of the newspaper industry. Newspapers -- like their ailing sisters in the printing industry -- are another industrial-age giant trying desperately to cope with a geriatric future. Their road into the future of print won't be easy, but for a lot of reasons they'll figure out how to survive. It just may not look anything like it does today. And the lessons they learn may be important to all of us.
[b.cognosco]

Static or dynamic blog, which is best?

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 11:16:03 GMT

Christoph has an interesting entry on the obvious benifits of a static structure over the dynamic structure of a blog.... I bet he's a DIY fan too :) Personaly I like the MT solution, but will be the first to admit that it takes a little too much hard work to install and comes with some useable but hardly appealing templates...
(via Reflective Reality) [Channel 'social_software']

How to Organize Feeds

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 10:52:09 GMT

Via Paolo Valdemarin: "When publishing on a weblog or any other kind of site, authors could define their posts as part of a "channel", such as technology, politics, etc. Newsreaders able to parse this kind of information could provide users with additional tools to organize what they read. A shared taxonomy to define categories would make this process much more useful to the user."...
[Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

More On Semantic Blogging

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 10:46:58 GMT

I am starting to pick lots of stuff up in RSS feeds about semantic blogging. Phil has had a number of post in the past week following a semantic blogging demo at HP. Here's a presentation from the project summarizing the intent. Here's the actual blog for the project. It is very cool to see a company like HP investing resources in blogging and RSS. Paolo is working on a semantic news aggregator. This is just the beginning. Once people start grokking how this all works, it's going to explode. Semantic blogging is a way to take back the control of your online life.
[Dann Sheridan's Weblog]

Microcontent Wiki

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 10:40:48 GMT

I guess Richard means that there should be a way to subscribe to a post and all its comments and TrackBacks! Agreed!

"Weblogs and Wikis are authoring tools that enable everyday people to write to the Web. However one part of the Writeable Web is often overlooked: weblog comments. Often some of the best nuggets of content can be found buried in a comment attached to a weblog post. I've even coined a phrase for this: Microcontent Wiki, which is defined as: Weblog Post Comments. It's microcontent because it's usually content based around a single theme or topic (defined by the weblog post). And it's like a Wiki because anyone can write a comment on a weblog, so it has a similar collaborative feel to a Wiki. The problem is, currently we don't have an easy way to track Microcontent Wikis. We can subscribe to RSS feeds for weblogs and even topics (k-collector), but weblog comments aren't as simple to aggregate."

(via Read/Write Web) [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

The Spanish Feedster

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 00:41:14 GMT

And why Feedster might be the Google rival to watch.
[Blogalization Community]

The Israeli Blogs & Journals Index

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 00:35:22 GMT

Eureka! A report of Hebrew and English blogs from Israel. Add to wiki.
[Blogalization Community]

Nice Blogs!

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:31:34 GMT

For all you folks that haven't come across hicksdesign it's well worth a visit. The site is a beautiful example of CSS based design and should provide inspiration to us all. Poking around in my comments I also came across this little gem from Jeff Croft. It's still under construction (aren't most blogs though?) but is already high on my reccomendations list. Both these blogs have a few things in common. First off they both make use of overflow: auto to create a scrolling "frame like" area for the content. Normally frames and their ilk bug me but in both...
[Andy Budd::Blogography]

Zen and the Art of Social Software

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:29:14 GMT

Teledynamics Communiqué reports on a local project to leverage social software in an alternative health-care clinic: "The Hoita Kokoro Centre has contracted Teledynamics [ie us] to create a new social software portal...
(via TeledyN) [Channel 'social_software']

Microsoft Bloggers Multiplying Exponentially

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:22:28 GMT

It had been a while since we updated the Microsoft Watch list of current and former Microsoft employees who are bloggingThere are now more [sigma]
lots more. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley]

Tagging conventions for microcontent

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:06:19 GMT

Jon Udell has put up his structured blog search which allows you to write XPaths over an XML representation of his blog and get some useful information out of it. In the accompanying blog post he makes the plea for well formedness, since that makes things easier. No argument from me. What I'm more interested in is a description of his tagging conventions.
[Ted Leung on the air]

The September That Never Began

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:01:43 GMT

I have been watching and waiting for the impact of AOL Journals. Back in January I outlined the business case for AOL to enter the market, using LiveJournal stats to suggest a $48m revenue stream as the prize. I wondered...
[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Second sight

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 02:32:00 GMT

It's a strange time to be a weblogger. Our little hobby looks like it's finally about to enter the big time. I mean, you know you've made it when Lycos has a weblogging system, right? When AOL's system has just been launched? ....
(by Tom Coates)

Linking Blogs and Wikis

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 13:22:32 GMT

Imagine posts and comments flowing from blogs to wikis like the way streams feed into lakes. Got the picture yet? Now think of a blog category as a wiki page. The picture changes so that the blog becomes a mountain and categories become the streams running down the side of the mountain in all directions toward wikis into which streams from other mountains also feed into. The resulting picture you have in your mind is the 10,000 feet view of how I think blogs and wikis should be connected.
[Don Park's Daily Habit]

Typepad Gripepad

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 13:10:07 GMT

Walter of HTML Life reviews the blog hosting service of the Six and glowers at the camera.
[Blogalization Community]

Blog History, Made in Brazil

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 13:07:47 GMT

Lest we forget, the geeks came first; in the global South, however, they're seeing it the other way around.
[Blogalization Community]

AP gives LiveJournal great press

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 22:36:52 GMT

The folks at LiveJournal will be very happy with an AP report heavily syndicated today which focuses almost exclusively on them:...
[The Blog Herald]

Different ways to organize RSS feeds

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 16:43:04 GMT

...At evectors we are working on a reputation-based filtering system, where users of k-collector will be able to have their news filtered according to who is writing about some specific topic. It's still at a very early stage, but it sounds promising. Whew... it looks like there's still a lot of stuff to invent and code to write, uh?
[w4feed:RSS 2.0]

Bush Campaign Reaching Out to Bloggers

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 16:37:16 GMT

Perish the thought...

Washington Post: President Bush's campaign will unveil a Web site today that allows proprietors of online journals -- Blogs or Web logs -- to "get the latest campaign headlines and inside scoop posted instantly to your site through a live...
[The Blog Herald]

Tripod Blogs better than Blogger?

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 16:33:57 GMT

PC Mag has rated Tripod Blogs higher than Blogger, Live Journal and Weblogger in a review published today that is bound to attract criticism. Lycos is trumpeting its win with a release to Yahoo! Finance, although the Blog Census figures...
[The Blog Herald]

Integrating Trackbacks into the whole blog

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 15:38:46 GMT

but not just in post comments... Everywhere! MT did a poor job of integrating trackbacks. I've made some changes that push them up the focus a little. They will now appear in the main and archive templates and in the comments sections. I hope everyone finds this useful in one way or another :) Adam Kalsey has done a lot to help out with this with hist fantastice MT Plugin, SimpleComments, which is required for these changes. (It's a simple install of copying 2 files to your...
(via Reflective Reality) [Channel 'social_software']

Update: My.Yahoo RSS Aggregator is live

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 15:15:10 GMT

Just tried it myself - works like a charm. You have to add the Blogs section, available here:
http://e.my.yahoo.com/config/add_module?.module=xcontent
The interface is nice. Summaries of the latest entries, headlines for older entries. [Blogdigger Development Blog]

Enriching Blog Calendar

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 15:09:39 GMT

Someone has to thinks of it first - here's another natural blog feature development in the making:

"Most blogs have a calendar for navigation but not for much else. I was thinking how nice it would be to enrich it automatically with other information like birthdays of people on blogroll, anniversaries, schedule of conferences I am planning to attend, etc. Size of the calendar will have to get a little bigger, but mouse-over sensitive date specific details can be displayed in an area immediately below the calendar. FOAF and iCal/vCal formats can be useful here. Calendars are also amazing yet under-utilized advertising medium IMHO."

[Don Park's Daily Habit]

My.Yahoo is now an RSS Aggregator!

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 15:03:27 GMT

"Sneak peek: Yahoo RSS module

"The My Yahoo RSS module appeared briefly yesterday on the Choose Content page under Personal Information Management with the name "Blogs", but it seems to have disappeared now. Here is a screenshot of the config page for the module:"

(via Blogdigger, BloggingRoller, Arjun) [Blogdigger Development Blog]

Blogware developed in Ruby!?!

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 14:56:26 GMT

"Congrats on the first publicly deployed blog hosting system in Ruby! Cool! Could we have some more technical details please, Joey? Like why Ruby and why not Perl, PHP, ASP, etc? The things you mention are nice computer science arguments, but some juicy ammunition for PHB's :-) would be awesome!"

"Boss Ross has declared that we are far enough out of stealth mode for me to use my powers as Tucows' TC/DC (Technical Community Development Coordinator) and actually say what language the developers are using to write this pretty cool blogging tool called Blogware...

Ruby!

Some of you might right now be cocking your head to one side. Ru-what? If you're one of these people, Ruby is:

* A complete, full, pure object oriented language. Even the number 1 is an instance of class Fixnum.
* Flexible and dynamic. It's both dynamic (no need to declare variables) and strongly typed (types are checked at runtime). What to add methods to a class at runtime? No prob. Want to add methods to an instance at runtime? Once again, No prob.
* A language with a nice clean, consistent syntax
* Open source

(via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century) [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Blogging Explained to Old UNIX Hacks

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 14:49:30 GMT

"The other day I was talking to an old friend of mine that used to be really into UNIX but that ended up choosing a different path. He wanted to know what the heck a weblog was. I had to evoke old UNIX images: back when we were in school, people used to cook up elaborate .plan files and change them occasionally to reflect news in their lives. The .plan files were displayed whenever that user was fingered (always elicited a giggle or two from UNIX newbies), and that was the state of the art in displaying up-to-date personal information. (Of course static web pages quickly made .plan files extinct, but we're talking prehistoric times here). During that time, there was also the Usenet phenomenon - news protocols such as NNTP, and newsreaders like rn and variants. Usenet was a huge time sink for us back then - I remember a year or two where I was religiously following newsgroups such as comp.unix.wizards or comp.os.research, and I knew others that spent multiple hours a day keeping up with dozens of newsgroups. Well, combine those two things and you arrive at my explanation of blogging in terms of old UNIX analogies: you're basically pivoting the table - you're publishing a "newsgroup" about yourself (alt.omrig.die.die.die :-)) on a set of topics (a.k.a. categories) where all the threads are started by you, and others can subscribe to it using an RSS aggregator, and post responses. Most people are probably thoroughly confused by this definition, but to my friend this seemed to make perfect sense..."
(via Omri Gazitt's Weblog [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Macworld's Weblog Roundup Falls Short

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 00:26:46 GMT

MacWorld magazine's July issue contains an article by Scot Hacker (great name for a computer magazine writer, no?) entitled 'Put Weblogs To Work' (sorry, not yet available on their site). In it, he compares seven weblog packages (Blogger Pro, Geeklog, iBlog, LiveJournal, Movable Type, pMachine Pro, and Radio). It's too bad he didn't think to include Free-Conversant (which this blog is built on). It competes extremely well in all categories he looked at, and then some. What's more, it adds depth to many. Take 'Search', for example. Everything in Free-Conversant sits in a hierarchical database and one can performed very detailed searches (by date, author, subject, message body, etc.) and includes the ability to search for user-defined metadata. Take a look at Free-Conversant's Support site search page. Any weblog hosted there can have a similarly robust search interface. Rich Site Summary. Every package he looked at can generate RSS. Conversant can generate numerous rss feeds via channels. What does that mean? Let's say you only wanted to see posts I make on a certain topic. With Conversant, I can give you access to rss feeds that are topic specific (see the right side of this page. See all those rss feeds? Lots of work, right? Wrong. All done automagically, leveraging Conversant's search capabilities. Pretty clever, huh? If you wanna blog, take a look at Conversant. For me, it's not just a blog platform, however. Macrobyte (Conversan't creators) hosts my e-mail accounts, ftp accounts, and static web hosting. Macrobyte does custom developing, too. From really big stuff (like writing a Conversant plug-in to import xml data from the National Library of Medicine), to smaller stuff (like writing an Applescript that automates image uploading to the static server) and, soon, adding a WYSIWYG editor to my weblog posting interface...
[romanvenable Weblog]

Closing the loop on XHTML blog content

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 23:08:45 GMT

James Farmer asks about the difference between WYSIWYG XML and HTML editing:
[Jon's Radio]