September 27, 2003
YAD (Yet Another Demonstration)
I'm showing my friend Vadim how I can post to my weblog using a desktop editor called w.bloggar.
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September 26, 2003
BloggerCon Infrastructure update
The BloggerCon infrastructure session is starting to come together. Among the confirmed attendees are two high-profile infrastructure developers (tease, tease). I'm still waiting to hear from a couple more folks before announcing. Also, I'm still looking for someone who fits the "writer" profile. Need your help!
In the meantime I've put together an outline of potential discussion topics. What am I missing?
Very important The outline is an outline of the topics and not how we're going to run the session. Ticking sequentially through the topics would put everyone to sleep and would impose too much structure.
Instead, I'm thinking to run the discussion the way we did in my high school Great Books class. The format was as follows: a discussion leader prepares a list of leading questions. The questions are carefully crafted to be engaging and have many possible answers. The leader asks the questions, members of the discussion group respond, provide alternative perspectives, debate each other, etc. Then we move on to the next question.
Here are a few example questions:
1. How many weblogs do you read?
2. Do you read weblogs at home? At work? The same ones?
3. Do you write a weblog at home? At work? The same one?
3. How do you find new weblogs to read?
4. What do you weblog?
5. Can you turn a Geocities home page into a weblog?
6. Can you turn a desktop computer into a weblog host?
7. Can you write a weblog without writing?
8. Do you have to write a weblog to really understand weblogs?
9. How can I make some money? What should I charge for and when?
10. Who is reading your weblog? How do you know? How did they find it?
11. Has you weblog ever gone offline? If yes, what did you do when that happened? If no, what would you do?
These are just a few random ideas. Add more in the comments section and we'll consider them.
One difference from my Great Books class is that we'll have an Internet- and projector-connected computer for short demonstrations, many discussion leaders instead of just one, and some open Q&A. Let's learn some great things together.
09:23 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 22, 2003
Okay, I'm revising my prediction. It's looking like Technorati will cross the 1 million mark this Friday or Saturday, September 26 or 27, 2003.
09:58 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Julie Powell: "This is some fucked-up shit that's going on, but it's great fucked-up shit, and it's all because of you guys."
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September 19, 2003
Unsolicited advice: weblogs are about flow
I've noticed this thought trend among technologists to want to contain, control and constrain the weblog information space. Some want the content to have more structure so that it can be searched using advanced methods. Some think about establishing uniform style rules so that every piece by every author looks and feels the same. Some exert special effort to craft each post into a work of genius. Some want to track each news message that they read, "keeping" some, marking others as read, deleting others.
The way I see it, these folks are thinking about weblogs in a static way, like a mid-90s era homepage or a Government database that gets distributed on CD ROM. But weblogs are about flow. They are closer to jazz improvisation than Beethoven's fifth.
To really get into weblogs as a writer, try to keep moving to stay with the flow. The old advice to a budding jazz musicians applies: "If you make a mistake and hit a bad note, don't stop! Hit it again and keep going". Too much worrying will make a burden of posting, making work of what should be fun.
To really get into weblogs as a reader, try to avoid micromanaging each weblog post. Holding your posts too closely will often lead to one of two outcomes: a) you'll have a narrow subscriptions list, maybe 4 or 5 sites, because you can't possibly follow more (experienced readers can follow dozens); b) you'll wind up with thousands of unread posts in your aggregator (the horrors of email all over again). I've written about this elsewhere.
In short, free your mind, and your weblog will follow.
09:21 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack
September 16, 2003
Localfeeds
10:00 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 15, 2003
Grumet blogs
Another Grumet in the blogosphere: Lukas Grumet.
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September 11, 2003
BloggerCon Infrastructure session
I'm thinking about what sorts of folks could help make the BloggerCon Infrastructure session a big success. I think people who want to learn about the infrastructure will be there by default. The trick is to make sure there are knowledgeable people there to answer questions and keep the discussion going. Here is a list of profiles to help with figuring out who to reach out to:
A writer who is famously obsessive about tracking their rankings and inbound traffic. We would expect this person to be expert on how Blogdex compares to Daypop and Technorati. They may also be familiar with how desktop editors work.
A reader who has searched for, and maybe found, the "perfect" news aggregator. This person will have tried various aggregators and can talk about how centralized aggregators compare to desktop aggregators.
A lone developer who has used the infrastructure to build something totally different from what came before. Like the writer and reader, this person is a customer of the infrastructure. This person should be able to explain what "pings" are and explain basic distributed computing ideas to a non-technical audience.
An entrepreneur or other centralized service operator who has to worry about keeping servers alive and paying the bills.
These are just profiles, of course, many of which may live inside the same person. Also, we are not limited to having just one person per profile. The more the merrier! Can you suggest articulate people who meet these profiles and can be in New England on October 5?
05:15 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 10, 2003
10^6
Paying attention? Technorati is continuing its march to 1 million. At the current growth rate it should cross over on Saturday, October 4, 2003. You read it here first.
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September 08, 2003
BloggerCon
BloggerCon is picking up steam. Hope to see you there.
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September 05, 2003
Design proposal: External Authentication in Manila
Here is a short proposal for a Manila modification that allows authentication against either the local database or a single remote system.
1. On any page where a user is asked to create a new password ("New Site", "Sign Up"), we instruct users that have an address ending in @school.edu to leave the password fields blank. Users with emails in other domains should enter passwords as usual. We modify the input validation accordingly. With the exception of the blank passwords, user records are created in the object database at the same time and in the same way for all users.
2. On any page that validates a user's password ("Login"), we check for an @school.edu extension. If we find one, we validate against the school's authenticator. If we find some other extension, we check the password in the usual way.
3. Upon successful authentication of an external user, we issue a dummy "native" password as David Carter-Tod describes at http://www.wcc.vccs.edu/dtod/frontier/ldapManila.html, so that mainResponder to use cookies in its usual way.
Assumptions:
- Local and externally authenticated users can be distinguished by looking at their email domains. Hence student@school.edu should be authenticated against the school's authenticator and alum@corp.com should be authenticated against the local database.
- An externally authenticated user's username is equal to the first part of their email address. So student@school.edu should be authenticated against the external system with username "student".
- We will not do anything fancy to synchronize profile information, such as the user's name and address, against a central system. This information must be entered and managed in Manila for all users.
Benefits:
- No new pages or changes to screen flow.
- Small changes to existing pages.
- (I think) No changes to Manila core.
Questions:
- How do we arrange things so that our modifications to member.login() appear in each new site when it is created?
- What other pages will be affected by our change? E.g. "email my password".
08:49 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 26, 2003
At the end of a long essay Jake mentions that he's using Radio's new rich text editor with Firebird. The editor didn't work for me in Firebird 0.6, but did work in Firebird 0.6.1. If you want to be like Jake, make sure to upgrade to the latest version.
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August 23, 2003
I see that two popular techie bloggers, Aaron and Mark, are letting us see the edits they've made to their posts.
Reading a few edit trails, it's fascinating to see what they capture. Accountability and archivalness aside, I think edit trails could serve as a great tool for writing instruction. Most of us don't get it right the first time. The magic is in the editing. Capturing and studying the edits of a great writer could teach us a lot.
08:46 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 22, 2003
Technorati's "weblogs watched" continues its steady climb. At this rate it should reach 1 million by the end of September, 2003.
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August 21, 2003
An Even Non-Funkier RSS 2 Template
I gave Brad's Non-Funky MT RSS 2 Template a try but it was still too funky for my aggregator, which choked on the resulting feed.
So here it is folks, an even non-funkier template.
Note that it requires Brad's very excellent MTIfEmpty plugin.
Update 2003-09-12 We've incorporated a timezone fix as described by Diego. This uses an RFC-822 timezone plugin from John Gruber
10:28 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
I've overhauled my RSS feed and autodiscovery info. I've also, I hope, fixed the feed so that items without titles will load correctly into Radio. Finally, I've changed the permalink structure so that the date appears in it. I may yet still tweak the permalinks so that all posts from a given day appear on a single page. One step at a time.
10:09 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 19, 2003
More on deletionless aggregator reading
The deletionless reading adventure continues. I'm using the Radio timestamps to see where I left off. I scan down the page until I hit a familiar timestamp. It's working well.
This strategy doesn't work as well when you're adding subscriptions, since you get a big chunk of new stories from each source, potentially spanning days or months. That tends to break up the flow.
02:12 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 18, 2003
Aggregators, or how I gave up deletion and learned to love the scroll wheel
Wired writes about aggregators today. Dave comments.
Yeah, it's a little bizarre that they didn't mention Radio in their list of aggregators. I think Radio is one of the better ones and relatively uncluttered by complex, unnecessary features.
Speaking of which, I wonder if Radio really needs the delete item feature. A few days ago I hacked up Radio to make this feature more usable. When I proudly described my accomplishment to Dave, he said "oh, I don't even use that feature, I just let the old posts slip off the end of the page."
Huh. In theory deleting should help one keep track of what they've read and haven't read. But we do that perfectly well with newspapers, which have a much more complicated layout. I think I was using "delete item" simply because it was there. The new experiment: no deleting.
11:46 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 08, 2003
Hail the unscalable aggregator
Something Sam Ruby wrote today gives me an opportunity to attempt a related point I've been meaning to make. Sam wrote:
If you are an online user of a single page aggregator, then what generally best suits you is a a short lead in with a link to the rest of the story should you be intrigued enough to follow it.
For me it's just the opposite, actually. I like everything on one page: the less clicking I have to do, the better. The "everything on one page" style lets me quickly scan a post and decide whether to read it closely before deleting. Excepting mainstream media feeds, lead-ins usually don't give me enough information to decide, and I wind up having to click anyway.
The likely objection here is that one's aggregator page can get long. Hence we have the three-pane aggregators. These are supposed to help us manage large amounts of data by providing segregated views and a folder system. But in my hands, at least, this "scalability" encouraged bad habits. I wound up with thousands of undeleted messages in my various SharpReader folders. It was the worst aspects of email, all over again.
Try an aggregator that doesn't scale. Like this one or this one. It will force you to work through the posts, and help you do it quickly. Don't worry about stuff that you didn't have time to read. Just delete it. Remember, it's not email. The data will (probably) remain out there on the Web where you can get to it later if you really need to.
12:10 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack
August 07, 2003
Lydon fix
Chris Lydon interviews Julie Powell of The Julie/Julia Project ("365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen.")
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August 06, 2003
Naturally spea^H^H^H blogging
Tracy Adams: "I wrote this entry without typing."
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July 31, 2003
A weblog for the ears
Dave sits on the Group W bench and contemplates the significance of Chris Lydon's "weblog for the ears":
Do-it-yourself radio with no sponsors, no interest other than curiosity, a searcher and his friends seeking the truth and nothing but the truth.
Chris continues to post fascinating interviews, now at a rate of two or three per week. Put 'em on your mp3 player and listen on the way to/from work.
12:52 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 30, 2003
MP3Log
Experimental: MP3 log with RSS feed. Like other Amazon feeds you may have seen, but filtered to what I happen to be listening to. Personal music recommendations fresh in your aggregator every day! See also the Listening To... section on my main page.
How does the feed look in your aggregator?
12:36 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 29, 2003
I get personal with BloggerCon
Tonight I attended a BloggerCon planning meeting at Harvard. Meeting minutes should be appearing tonight or tomorrow. I'll update this post with the permalink when it comes online. The meeting was pretty intense. Mark your calendars, folks, it's October 4, 2003 in Cambridge, MA.
On the way home I came up with a new logo idea for Bryan Bell. I was listening my MP3 player as I walked, but I had only one of the earpieces in because I wanted to be able to hear what was happening around me. That was okay, but I realized how much better and more viscerally satisfying music is in stereo.
Anyway, that got me to thinking that, if we do our job well with BloggerCon, we'll inspire something on the order of a mono to stereo evolution in weblogging. So here's the logo idea: a stylized graphic of a person listening to something through one headphone, cupping the single speaker around their ear and straining to hear. With the other hand, the listener is reaching for a second headphone---that represents BloggerCon 2003---and raising it up to the other ear.
I suppose the metaphor is a bit dated and maybe even corny. But, if weblogging has taught me anything, it's knowing how and when to say, "that's my idea and I'm stickin' to it!"
Update The meeting notes are here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/bloggerCon/lhcnotes
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July 28, 2003
Blogging and the Howard Dean Campaign on NPR
I turned on All Things Considered this evening and heard the word "blog" several times to my astonishment. The story is about online fundraising in the Howard Dean campaign. Quote: "A task that, if they succeed by doing what they've been doing, could remake American politics more radically than any reform bill passed by Congress."
Story: Dean Makes New Fundraising Push Online. The hyperlink to the audio stream is at the top in blue, on the story title.
06:29 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Radio tip of the day
If you use Radio as your news aggregator and are tired of seeing warnings about POSTDATA when refreshing in your browser, here is the way out: refresh by clicking one of the other headings in the navigation bar at the top, e.g. "Home" or "Stories", and then click on "News". In the end it's the same number of clicks as before, but it requires smaller mouse movements.
Nerds only: An even better fix would be to have Radio redirect back to itself after each Delete, to clear any POST data that the browser is caching.
04:30 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 25, 2003
More on lateral thinking
News.com: "At the very least, it's encouraging to know that someone is thinking outside of the box." Read all the way to the bottom.
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Technorati weblogs vs. time graph
For some time I'd been informally watching the number of "weblogs watched" that appears at the upper left of the technorati homepage.
When this got tedious, I wrote a little scraper and connected its output to a graphing program. Here is the result. It rebuilds every night.
12:01 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 23, 2003
Makeover completed
Okay I think my weblog is updated with the new look everywhere.
Gentle MT users, Template Modules are your friend.
10:45 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 22, 2003
What's up Doc?
If you hang out in the blogosphere much you have probably heard of Doc Searls. Yesterday Christopher Lydon posted an interview with him. It's a worthwhile listen.
Hint: rather than clicking on the word "Listen in", which may cause your browser to download the entire file before playing it, try copy/pasting the hyperlink (http://media.skybuilders.com/lydon/searls.mp3) into the Open URL or Open Location option in your mp3 player. This will give the player a chance to play the file as it downloads.
Update Doc's comments about the interview.
12:03 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 19, 2003
RSS goings on
As I've written about elsewhere, one reasons it's fun to hang out in the weblog world is that weblogs let your speech flow quickly and easily through the 'net. The lube, as it were, is a data format called RSS. The copyright for that standard was recently transferred from UserLand Software to Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
There has been much discussion. Technorati can find it for you if you're interested.
I've been too busy to read all the comments, but one thing that baffles me are the folks who moan about too much control being in the hands of LittleCo's like UserLand. They seem to be missing the big news that the IBM, Google and AOL are beginning to invest. Maybe these companies will do well by the weblog community. I hope so.
But remember that it's the devil you know vs. the devil you don't know. The newcomers are big enough to hire people whose full time job is to argue with you until you run out of energy to fight. And to hire still more people whose full time job is to make the protocols so complicated that only other BigCo's can afford to support them.
Wake up, people. This isn't about whom in our little community you're rooting for. In some ways I'm not even sure it's about the technical merits. It may be simply that IBM had some extra money floating around to experiment with.
Update (23 July): I've gotten several comments after Dave linked to my post from his site. If you haven't been following my blog you might think I'm against "the evil BigCo's". I'm not. Big companies do great things all the time. The post that follows this one gives an example.
So what's my point, then? It's this. Be careful. Understand the costs and benefits of what you undertake. Strive for situational awareness in addition to thinking about the purely technical issues.
Speaking of which, if you know of a page in http://intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage that discloses who is supporting its existence, i.e. companies that fund the hosting or dedicate employee time to the development of the spec, please add it to the comments section and I will hyperlink to it here.
01:53 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBack
July 16, 2003
Candidate blogging
In case you missed it, 2004 Presidential candidate Howard Dean is guest-blogging over a Lawrence Lessig's Weblog. Though the first few posts felt mechanical, Dean seems to be warming up and getting interactive as the week goes on. From today's post: "I'm really impressed by the candor on this blog, and the complexity of the discussions."
08:27 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 15, 2003
Radio Tip of the Day
If you use Radio as your news aggregator, you can delete posts by simply hitting Enter after checking off the messages to delete. Most browsers will interpret this is as equivalent to submitting the form. This saves me the trouble of scrolling back up to the Delete button when I'm clearing out a large number of posts.
12:40 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 11, 2003
De-publishing, stalking and/or fascinating technology
Have you ever created something, put it out in front of the world and then later revised it? I do it all the time. It helps me to get past the motivational barrier. If I spend too long perfecting, I'll probably spend forever perfecting. Better to get something out there and then refine it.
Usually this kind of "spiral development" is harmless at worst and a good thing at best. In the weblog world, some folks are frowning. The claim is that changing what you say is confusing and dishonest. You have to get it right the first time.
See Don Park's post about the Winer Watcher, and particularly the comments, for more.
12:59 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (22) | TrackBack
July 10, 2003
More ways to ping
Dave Sifry: "New Technorati Pinger is active: Hot 'n fresh weblog indexing"
09:42 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Feedster
Luke Hutteman notices that weblog search engine feedster is really fast. He's right, it is.
09:38 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 01, 2003
Rogers Cadenhead is my hero
I posted this comment to the "Leave RSS alone" thread on Mark Pilgrim's weblog:
A word of caution to those of you who think this is funny. As programmers we delight in things that are clever. But most of us are disinclined to use that cleverness in hurtful ways.You may think that there's plenty of hurtfulness to go around, and you may be right. But consider this. Suppose we posit that all good leaders are bound to offend somebody. How would you rather take it: out in the open with a little name-calling, or craftily and meanly?
Observe carefully what is happening here. This is your future.
It's so disheartening when people are intentionally mean. It blows me away to think that anyone could possibly believe that this reflects well on them. Contrast Mark's problem-solving approach with Rogers Cadenhead's. Now imagine that you had to choose to work with one or the other, say, in a consulting relationship, as a business partner, or on an open source project. I'd pick Rogers in a heartbeat.
09:36 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Subscriptions Harmonizer
It looks like Dave is thinking about a world where desktop aggregators can sync their subscriptions lists with a central server
The proposed api looks good. A minor question is whether the subscribe() and unsubscribe() methods should use strings instead of arrays. Strings agree more with the language that subscribing and unsubscribing are done one feed at a time. But the backend may be simpler to code if we always deal with arrays. No big deal, I think it will work fine either way.
This will be a huge usability leap, and will make me happy, for one. Excellent!
03:28 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 30, 2003
Things that make you go hmm....
I just noticed that I'm unable to reach some very specific blogs. Could it be my net connection or is the fun just beginning?
Update 8:40pm: The sites are back up, no explanations.
04:44 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack
June 29, 2003
Feature ideas for Radio's outliner
Dave asked me to keep a list of feature's I'd like to see in Radio's outliner. Here ya go.
12:44 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 26, 2003
Upon further reflection
Disclaimer: the thoughts expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of others who participated in the conversation that inspired this post.
Here are some more thoughts about Echo:
- The success or failure of software is measured by the number of people who benefit from its use.
- Today's weblog software is providing a lot of benefit to a lot of people. As that number grows, the fraction that cares about the backend details will diminish to rounding error.
- Many (most?) of the Roadmap signers are people who specifically care about the backend details, i.e. programmers. The best programmers have a keen sense of what is useful to people, but most don't. [We tend focus on how much work we will have to do, or what is possible, whether or not it is useful, or our own personal notion of source code beauty. I.e. things that are invisible to 99.99% of the world.]
- As best I can tell, "today's backend provides no value" is not among the reasons why Echo appeared.
- There is definitely an element of "today's backend is not providing enough value, a better backend is needed". That gets us into cost/benefit analysis.
- Immediate benefit: Echo is a release valve. People who feel that they haven't had a voice now have a voice. For a while, there will be less grumbing and subsequently less bad PR. The grumbling will return when it becomes apparent that lots of people have voices and their voices want different things. But maybe this time it will be more effectively managed.
- Potential benefit: Echo delivers. A spec is published, tools are built, the world changes for the better.
- Cost: "Let's hold off on implementing our feed/application/tool. There are too many competing specs. Everyone's going to be doing Echo anyway. Let's wait for Echo."
So what can we conclude? Programmer grumbling is unfortunate but it is no match for the roar of happy users. If Echo does not deliver something substantially better than what came before, we will have a net loss. Will Echo deliver? I sure hope so.
11:36 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack
"Okay if I blog this?"
Wendy and Jessica and I were having a conversation about bloggy things (see the next post) on our walk home after the post-meeting dinner. Wanting to write about the conversation in my weblog, I asked "Okay if I blog this?". Then we laughed, because it was such a funny yet appropriate thing to say. Soon to be heard in a conversation near you.
10:37 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
It's Thursday again
See you at the Berkman. Where are we going for dinner tonight? Hopefully somewhere with outdoor seating.
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June 25, 2003
Comments and comments on comments
Weblogs like this one proliferate their content through RSS syndication. Frustrated in their attempts to get RSS to work the way they think it should, a group of folks is embarking on a journey to better syndication. I haven't formed a strong opinion really. Certainly I salute their existence and enthusiasm. But I hope that they don't forget some important lessons about the dangers of having too many cooks. The best comment I've seen comes, not surprisingly, from Dave Sifry: "[let's] get to what's really important - sophisticated interoperability and new features that users will love" (emphasis added).
12:33 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 13, 2003
TechnoBot
To do: install TechnoBot.
11:54 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Markup in the title
Dave wonders whether markup in <title> of an RSS <item> will cause aggregators to barf. Works fine in SharpReader.
11:40 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 12, 2003
Upgraded
I've upgraded my authoring tool to version 2.64 and, using these instructions, upgraded my syndication feed to RSS 2.0.
11:35 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 11, 2003
And the coverage continues...
BusinessWeek online: The Wild World of "Open-Source Media". Excellent treatment. By way of Dave Sifry.
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Ad-funded blogs
In my weblogs essay I wrote, "We haven't seen much in the way of paid advertisements on weblogs." That changed at the Jupiter conference. Several ad-funded blogs were in evidence. One of the more memorable was AlwaysOn, which inspired one of the panelists to introduce himself as follows: "My name is Michael Moore and I'd like to thank the Academy. I'd also like to say that AlwaysOn sucks! I sit here in protest of their existence." This to the cheers of many in the crowd. More coverage at AlwaysOn's heavily popup-laden site. Also in attendance was Gawker, a hip, gossipy Manhattan-centric blog.
08:34 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 10, 2003
Demonstration
I am demonstrating how my weblog works for Paul.
03:04 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 28, 2003
Blogs Opening Iranian Society?
wired.com: "Motallebi is now awaiting trial. According to the Islamic news agency, he has been charged with "undermining national security through cultural activities" for the content of his blog, as well as his other writings and interviews he gave to foreign media outlets."
08:57 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 23, 2003
Go get your GeoURL now
Adding a GeoURL to your weblog lets you participate in a very cool system called the World as a Blog. So...what are you waiting for? Thanks to Jim in Tokyo for the pointer.
The next question, of course, is how can I make this run as my Desktop background? Answer (Windows): Control Panel -> Display -> Desktop -> Customize Desktop -> Web -> New -> (type in the URL) -> OK.
12:35 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Demo for Julie and Chris and Jenny
I am demonstrating how Categories work in Movable Type for my colleagues.
11:36 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack
May 22, 2003
It's Thursday
See you at Berkman.
01:21 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 20, 2003
Permalink free associations
Dave's new idea: "It uses the fact that URLs in a weblog have structure."
A permalink is a permanent URL link to an item. A place where you can find it after it has aged and slipped off of the front page. A permalink should be archival.
Manila puts the date directly into the permalink like this:
http://scriptingnews.userland.com/2003/05/20#todaysNewIdea
So from the permalink URL you can deduce the publish date of the item, and sort results in reverse chronological order.
Movable Type puts the post id into the permalink like this:
http://grumet.net/weblog/archives/000051.html
You cannot deduce the publish date from the permalink URL. But you can sort results in reverse chronological order, because the post ids increase with time.
BlogX puts a globally unique identifier (GUID) into the permalink like this:
http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/saraw/PermaLink.aspx/
49899274-4e74-451f-a29c-414c32e39719
You cannot deduce the publish date nor sort the results from the GUID. Note also that the BlogX permalinks enshrine the ASP.NET suffix,
.aspx. Cutting edge today perhaps, but five years from now it will be quaint.
10:28 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack
On the strength of weak ties
Joi Ito: "A single weblog and even a single entry in a weblog can have an operational purpose, a social purpose and an impact on the political network." By way of Carl.
09:41 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 19, 2003
A desktop aggregator with good server tracking?
I haven't fooled much with server based aggregators. I find the desktop ones to be more responsive. The problem with desktop based aggregators is that they (at least the ones I've tried) don't provide an easy way to share subscriptions and items-viewed-and-closed information among instances running on different PCs. I want a desktop aggregator that can sync subscriptions and message status with a central server. Do any of the existing aggregators solve this problem?
And another thing. It's too labor intensive keeping up with and deleting the flood of posts from traditional news sites. Wouldn't it be great if there was a "delete all posts older than 1 day" feature?
08:39 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 16, 2003
Netscan
I had the good fortune to attend a talk today by Marc Smith, a sociologist at Microsoft Research. Marc's system, Netscan, tracks Usenet messages and lets you ask questions like "Which authors reply to lots of questions but don't ask many?" and "What groups have lots of long threads?". It's fascinating stuff, and readily accessible from their Web frontend. I'd love to see this kind of analysis applied to weblogs.
11:52 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 15, 2003
Cosmos enabled!
Here's how you can add a Cosmos URL to your Movable Type template:
<a href="http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/links.html?rank=&sub=Get+Link+Cosmos&url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>">Cosmos</a>
Now we just need to get Dave Sifry to round out the Technorati API with a way to retrieve Cosmos result counts.
10:53 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 12, 2003
Stigmergy
Joe Gregorio: "The World-Wide Web is the first stimeric communication medium for humans." I wanted to link the word "stimeric" in the quote to a web page containing a good definition of stigmergy. But a google search on "stygmergy" returns a lot of weblog posts that simply point to Joe's page. Now I see the point Orlowski was making. Alternative searches: stigmergic, "stygmergy brooks" (to see what the robotics community makes of the term), "swarm intelligence"
09:25 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 10, 2003
Deep thinking: 60 hour feedback
So I've been keeping an eye on the Comments and Cosmos for my "Deep Thinking" essay. There has been some nice praise, some good commentary and some constructive criticism.
But let's start with the flamage. The closest thing I've seen to a flame comes from Matthew Thomas, who wrote "I was disappointed to see Andrew Grumet's essay on Weblogs didn't say anything at all, it seemed intended merely as Weblog linkbait...". Ouch! Actually he's mostly right. As for the "didn't say anything" part, I think that Matthew is raising the point, also noted by several others, that I haven't said much that is new. That's definitely true. Most of what I wrote has appeared at least once in the blogosphere. So I would expect an experienced weblogger to have this reaction. The problem I saw was that these things were hard to find and, for a new weblogger, hard to understand. My intended audience is the outsiders, people that might have heard about weblogs but can't make heads or tails of the mostly inward-focussed chatter of the weblogging world. Linkbait? Well, yeah, sure I want flow to my essay. If I didn't want flow, I could have left it on my harddrive. But if all I wanted was flow, I would have spent less time and tried to offend more people :-).
My friend Perry asked in the Comments section about blogging and business. I pointed her to Dan Bricklin's Small Business Blogging as one good hopping-off point. The other thing I noted was that press releases seem like a good way to begin. Publishing the press releases in RSS would help promotional information about a company to flow through the Net. Publishing in RSS would also make it easy for sector reports and VC portfolio company listings to display the latest releases from groups of companies. No specialized technology required: companies would use any of several blogging tools to author the press releases; VCs and sector reports could use any of several news aggregators.
My friend Doug writes that he is "still a little skeptical about the predictions of massive impact of syndicated blog content. Speaking purely about my own habits, I don't have the interest or time to scan even RSS summaries of many blogs." This is a useful observation. We can only read so much in a day, and most weblogs aren't particularly well-written or interesting. The question is, which sources will you depend on? I hereby make the claim that weblogs will give you more choices by levelling the playing field. In your news aggregator, crank weblog writers look the same as employees of multinational media conglomerates. It's up to you to decide who is worth reading, but everybody has an equal shot at your subscription list.
Finally, by way of this post at L'oeil de Mouche, I found my way over to Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog. Windley talks about weblogs as "loosely coupled conversations", which is exactly what I was trying to get at in the Weblogs and online communities section of the essay, but Phil does a much better job.
09:17 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 09, 2003
Weblogs and mental health
EdCone: "Putting thoughts into words on a daily basis...keeps me mentally limber and also increases the number of subjects I spend a little time learning about". APA: "There seems to be mounting evidence that a lifetime of learning, mental and physical activity, and rewarding work is good for people. That finding also appears to be true when it comes to warding off Alzheimer's disease." Hey, can I get my health insurance to cover this thing?
11:45 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Notes from the weblog writers' meeting
Last night's meeting was lively and fun as always. I learned among other things that Radio has an easily-missed GUI application. That's because 99% of the users will want to work with their weblog through a browser, which is what you get when you launch Radio from the start menu. If you want to fool around with the outliner and other tools, you launch the GUI by right-clicking on the system tray icon and selecting "Open Radio".
I also learned that we should probably set a firm cutoff of 8:30pm. It's pretty hard to keep everyone's attention for more than an hour and a half. I also learned that you should try to avoid eating cheeseburgers at 10pm. Unless of course you like heartburn :-)
09:03 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 08, 2003
Smarmy
The introduction to my weblogs essay used to contain this sentence
Also known by the smarmy and inscrutable nickname "blogs", weblogs are something of a hard nut to crack.
until a friend pointed out to me that a term cannot be smarmy. Instead, we might say we perceive a tone of smarmy self-satisfaction whenever someone uses the term "blog". But that doesn't really fit the sentence, so I've simply excised the word "smarmy".
11:59 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Deep Thinking About Weblogs
Having spent a month writing a weblog and thinking about weblogs, I've written an essay about what they are and what I think makes them interesting.
10:17 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack
May 07, 2003
This is a test
I am showing Cesar how my blog works.
03:37 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Joi Ito
Joi Ito is doing some very cool things with weblogs. Example: Moblog. It looks as if these pictures were sent directly from a cell phone.
12:15 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 05, 2003
Review of Blogging APIs
I've been meaning to take a closer look at the blogging api stuff. Diego's review is a great introduction.
09:49 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 30, 2003
Changing the world
Dave Winer writes about how to change the world with weblogs at the Harvard Crimson: Citizen Bloggers in N.H.?
08:07 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 29, 2003
Read your blog in an aggregator
Note to self: read your blog in an aggregator. That's how others are likely to read it. I took a look at my blog in SharpReader and realized that the category names were way too long. They are shorter now.
08:42 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 27, 2003
Trackback again
There is a good discussion of trackback going on over at Phil Ringnalda's. Interesting points: "The most visible sort is post-to-post, where one post expands on, comments on, or replies to another post, and so the reply post sends a TrackBack ping to the original post...Though that's the most visible sort of TrackBack, post-to-category, or category-to-post or -category, are also very useful ways to ping."
11:19 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 25, 2003
Good vibrations
Now I'm testing out Windows Media Player integration. Results below. Many moons ago Simon Fell wrote a similar thing that works with Radio and WinAmp.
03:36 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
I am posting this message from a Windows XP desktop machine using w.bloggar. There were a couple of wrinkles. I accidentally hit "post" when I really wanted "post & publish". Also, I guess it prefills the title even if you want to leave the title blank. Let's see, if I re-load the message in w.bloggar and then re-post, will it fill the title again? The answer is No.
11:45 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Dave, the early riser, has already written up a summary of last night's weblog writers' meeting. The discussion about weblogs and presidential elections was pretty inspiring. If you believe that news coverage influences politics, and that weblogging democratizes the news reporting process, then weblogging should give the average citizen greater influence to shape presidential elections. Chris brought to our attention the related idea of semiotic democracy.
08:18 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 10, 2003
The Hunt
I am hunting around for a news aggregator to guide me through my journey into the blogosphere.
SharpReader is looking good. It's desktop-based and has a nice, responsive user interface. But I read news at more than one computer. Question: does or will SharpReader provide a way to synchronize subscriptions against a file out on the web?
02:36 PM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 09, 2003
TrackBack
TrackBack is a relatively new feature in the weblogging world, but it is a natural extension of the medium when you think about it.
Though most weblog tools have a "comment on this item" feature, the response to an item is more likely to appear in the responder's weblog. Before TrackBack, such discussion would remain amorphous and distributed until a robot program came along and assembled the pieces from across the Internet. TrackBack allows me to cross-post my comment to both of our servers, eliminating the middle man (though in the weblogging world, middle men are often a good thing).
At first this scheme might seem kludgish, but it has some fairly interesting characteristics. For example, my weblog URL now serves as a kind of digital identity. Because I am authenticated by my URL (thank you DNS), I can now post messages to all kinds of places without having to sign in at each one. Nor do I have to learn a new set of user interfaces for each one. I simply post to my own blog and ping the appropriate TrackBack URL.
11:17 AM in Weblogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
