Blogging on the Free Web

Changing Blogs

2005-04-28T12:58:00.000-05:00

Thank you for visiting, or for subscribing to the feed from Blogging on the Free Web. Please continue to read my stuff at my new WordPress blog, Changing Way.

Who Let the Blogs Out?

2005-04-12T20:36:00.000-05:00

Biz Stone works for Google on Blogger. He's also the author of Who Let the Blogs Out? : A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs. It's part memoir, part history of blogging, part how-to-blog, part discussion of the impact of blogging in business, education, and other areas.

That sounds as though this might be a rather disjointed book, but it actually hangs together pretty well. Biz writes with clarity and enthusiasm. Here's a sample sentence (from p. 72). "Don't write about something you're not that interested in because you think people will want to read it, and don't curb your enthusiasm for fear you will sound crazy."

One of the problems with writing a book on blogging is that things happen so quickly that events may well overtake what you write. Biz confronts this head on in his Afterword, when he states that blogging is only the beginning of "the participatory web." Blogging has made the web as easily writable as it is readable, thus realizing Tim Berners-Lee's original vision. But other participatory web tools will follow blogging tools such as Blogger.

In sum, I recommend Biz's book, even though a lot has happened in the blogosphere since it was published last year.

Blogging Globally, Linking Locally

2005-04-11T21:12:00.000-05:00

I've been using StatCounter for a few weeks now. Here are a few observations on the data I see. First, it's fun to see folks from many different countries linking to this blog.

Second, the post that has probably been most popular is a rather local one. It's the BlogMap post. Much of the traffic to it came via a post I made to Universal Hub. If you don't know where the hub of the universe is, you're obviously not from Boston. When I made those posts (the one to this blog, and the one to UH), my BlogMap told me that there were 25 nearby blogs. Within a few days, that number almost doubled. I felt like Johnny Mappleseed! I am aware that not all the additions to the map were due to me, but given the dozens of people who followed the link from UH to this blog, I suspect that many of them were. There are now 57 nearby blogs on the map, by the way.

Third, thanks to Colleen for linking to me from her Open Notebook. I am flattered to find this blog in the same link list as Halley's Comment and kottke.org. Colleen's blog is fun to read, and I feel that someone who does not discriminate against dandelions or ants is probably a good human being.

There's a Volvo in My Space

2005-04-08T21:54:00.000-05:00

No, there isn't literally a Volvo in my parking space. But there's a Volvo ad on my MSN Space. I didn't put it there. This isn't a complaint, just a remark. Microsoft never promised me that the blog would be free of ads as well as free of charge. So the ads don't make me want to revise anything in my previous posts on MSN Spaces.

Tags: microsoft, msn, spaces.

Blogger/TypePad @CNET

2005-04-06T23:36:00.000-05:00

CNET reviews and compares Blogger and TypePad, coming down in favor of the latter. Here are the review summaries:

For a small monthly charge, you can create professional-looking blogs with Six Apart TypePad.com.
Beginners will love Blogger's ease of use and the fact that it's free. However, professionals should look elsewhere.

A look back through posts here will show that I prefer Blogger to TypePad, taking price into consideration, and that I may well soon be using WordPress in preference to either of them.

Tags: blogger, typepad.

Yahoo 360: More, but not much

2005-04-06T11:25:00.000-05:00

I'm not overwhelmed by Yahoo 360. I don't hate it either, but I feel no compelling reason to use my 360 page, other than curiosity. It seems as though my friends there, who are mainly people who responded to my earlier post offering invites, feel the same way, since I see very little activity at their 360 sites.

This may not be as bad as it sounds for 360. I am working from a small sample. The target audience for a beta test may not overlap much with the target audience for 360. 360 seems to be aimed at people who want an easy-to-use one-stop website, where they can blog, post photos, connect with friends, etc.

Beta testers are probably more... well, like me. I like the idea of using different services, each of which does its job well while offering, or at least allowing, integration with other services. And yes, I am thinking of Flickr, and yes, Yahoo had better not screw it up.

And yes, I still have invites to 360, just in case the above ringing endorsement has got anyone curious.

Tags: yahoo, 360.

Trackback Again

2005-04-05T11:54:00.000-05:00

Wow, trackback (outgoing) is so easy when it's built into the blog publishing tool, as it is in WordPress. If Blogger would just give us trackback and categories... but that's an old song by now, and the purpose of this post isn't to sing that song yet again...

It's to test whether incoming trackback is working on my WordPress blog. In order to do that, I'll link to, and trackback from, the most recent post.

Tags: trackback, wordpress.

The Way to WordPress

2005-04-03T22:02:00.000-05:00

The title of this post is also the title of my new WordPress blog. I previously posted about my thoughts of moving from Blogger to WordPress. I'm giving WordPress a fairly significant try. But I'll do most of my posting here for the forseeable future. One reason for not switching right away is that my WordPress theme (think template, only better) is still very much under construction.

Tags: blog, wordpress.

WordPress Themes

2005-04-01T12:41:00.000-05:00

Themes are a feature introduced into WordPress in V1.5. Alex King just posted the results of his theme design contest, which drew some 140 entries. The sidebar of the contest blog features a theme switch plugin: just click on the name of a theme, and you'll see the blog using that theme!

Almost Spring, my own favorite among the entries I had time to check out, won the "Global Appeal" prize. The "Grand Poobah" prize went to Connections, which I also like a lot. I have a weakness for pictures which, like the one at the top of Connections, prominently feature some kind of road or other route running from "front to back" of the shot.

I am impressed by WordPress not only because of the software itself, but because of the complementary resources available. Themes are just one type of resource. Another is documentation. The example most relevant to the current post is probably the Using Themes page of the WordPress Codex. It includes pointers to lists of themes. There are already over 200. (140 is just the number of contest entries, and not every theme was entered.)

But, even with all these available, some of us are thinking of developing our own themes. A very good resource here is the Visual Anatomy of a theme, which I found via this post at the WordPress Reference Center.

It's a pity that the news about WordPress isn't all good. This post at Waxy.org describes search engine spam at WordPress.org. I won't comment on this matter, except to say that... no, I really won't comment right now.

Tags: wordpress, wptheme.

Early Adoptr of 360

2005-03-29T12:33:00.000-05:00

I now have a Yahoo 360 page. Thanks to Jeremy for the invite. I'd like to go on record as saying that it was not only because I wanted an invite to 360 that I commented on Jeremy's blog the night before Beta. By the way, has anyone written the poem, "The Night Before Beta," yet?

As you can see, I haven't had time to do much with 360 yet. I've accepted an invite, issued an invite, made one blog post, and done a couple of other things. That means that I have invites to spare. I'll issue invites to those who request them via email or comment on this post. I'm not sure how long the offer will be open for. I'll post again when and if it closes.

Tags: yahoo, 360.

More on Yahoo 360

2005-03-28T23:07:00.000-05:00

Since my recent Li-360 post, I've seen a few other postworthy things about Yahoo. Some of them come from Jeremy Zawodny's blog. He has a post on the 360 preview Yahoo ran for "influencers." Apparently Flickr was mentioned time and time again. Jeremy concludes: "So, yeah. We get it. Flickr got a lot of this stuff right."

I hope that Yahoo does get it. The Creative Commons Search suggests that it does. On the other hand, I've seen several reports that the Yahoo Groups interface has become even worse! I found that it became unusable pretty much as soon as Yahoo bought Groups and turned it into a gallery of bad ads. Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr is either an extremely good thing or an extremely bad thing; I expect to know which it before the end of 2005.

Back to the preview... Danah Boyd's post on it includes the following.

I have to say that i’m impressed that Yahoo folks wanted to hear all of our crankiness head-on rather than waiting for it to appear in our random ramblings online. Even better: they didn’t make us sign any NDAs so we can blog all we want...

In fact, a lot of the product is overwhelming for the not-technically-savvy and i think that this will be their major problem... For the techgeek, it will feel like they didn’t go far enough, didn’t have enough features, etc. That’s actually a lot easier to solve than the overwhelming problem.

Jeremy has another recent post in which makes a prediction on the future of the blogging tools market. He focuses on the host-it-yourself segment, as opposed to the hosted segment. He sees it in terms of two subsegments, one comprising personal users and the other coroporate users, and predicts that these subsegments will be dominated by WordPress and Movable Type respectively. Perhaps he's not going out too far on a limb, and his thoughts on the hosted segment, which of course will soon include 360, would be more interesting...

Tags: blog, yahoo, 360.

Yahoo 360 Preview

2005-03-28T13:29:00.000-05:00

No, I haven't had a preview. But Charlene Li has, and her post includes a couple of screen shots. It looks as sounds interesting. Beta starts tomorrow. I put my name of the list for the beta. I haven't heard anything yet...

Tags: yahoo, 360.

Green Card Blues

2005-03-28T13:16:00.000-05:00

The title of this post overstates the problem, or at least, I hope it does. My wife and I went to the JFK Federal Building in Boston today, having been given 11am today as the time and date for my green card interview. We'd started the process in the summer of 2004 by submitting a bunch of forms and supporting documents.

My name was called at 10:45, i.e., 15 minutes early. That sounded good, until they told us that they couldn't do the interview today because they didn't have the documents. Apparently they had been sent via UPS to Boston from whichever central processing center had centrally processed them. But the box containing my file and a bunch of others seems to have gone missing.

I couldn't resist suggesting that it might have been a good idea to use the United States Postal Service. The very pleasant and apologetic officer with whom we were talking laughed, took our phone number, and said that we'd get a call when the file turned up. Could they have called us before we went to the Federal Building? I suspect that the answer is: no, your phone numbers are in you file, and who knows where that is.

So Judy and I took the opportunity to have a lunch date.

Tags: greencard, ins, ups, usps.

Moglen at FSF

2005-03-27T21:57:00.000-05:00

This, the third of four short posts on yesterday's Free Software Foundation meeting, focuses on the talk given by Eben Moglen. It was mainly a summary of the past year (i.e. the 12 months since the last FSF meeting) in terms of legal developments relevant to free software.

One of the biggest such developments was the progress in the SCO litigation. There hasn't been much for SCO. On the contrary, the litigation has served as a useful wakeup call to IT vendors using free software components in the solutions they provide to clients. It made these vendors aware of the need to be ready for future attacks on free software, and of the need to fund such readiness.

This awareness led to the founding of the Software Freedom Law Center. EM, who chairs the center, remarked that there are now a lot of young people who have a technical background and a law degree, and that people like this that the SFLC will recruit.

I was particularly struck by the ways in which EM referred to Microsoft. One of the terms he used most frequently was "the adversary." He also made several references to Microsoft as "the monopoly." A series of references to a coming legal battles put me in mind of Lord of the Rings, and sure enough, one of the ways in which EM emphasized the importance of Longhorn to Microsoft was to use the image of "the Eye of Sauron" being focused on Longhorn, perhaps at the expense of other issues.

This made me realize that, since I got into blogging a few months ago, much of my impression of Microsoft has come from Robert Scoble. I have been paying less attention to the free part of "blogging on the free web" than to the blogging part. Spending a day at the FSF meeting reminded me of a face of Microsoft less friendly than Scoble's.

Finally, I must say that EM was an incredible speaker. He used no overheads or other visual aids, he just presented well-organized thoughts using beautifully-turned phrases. I'd highly recommend hearing him, if you haven't done so already. I'd also highly recommend hearing Larry Lessig, but that's the next post, and it'll probably have to wait until tomorrow.

Tags: fsf, opensource.

FSF Meeting

2005-03-27T00:05:00.000-05:00

Coffee at MIT,
originally uploaded by AndWat.

I was hoping to be blogging steadily throughout the day, but I had to use up quite a bit of laptop battery time in registering for the wireless network. I'm not sure why I was able to get on without registration in the first place.

I heard several comments on the Gates building during the course of the day. The one that sticks in my mind was the assertion that it cost too much and has usability problems.

You can see the schedule for the day at the FSF site. The people listed there spoke in the order listed there, although not always at the exact times listed there. There was one extra speaker: Georg Greve, President of FSF Europe, spoke for a few minutes right after lunch.

I wish I had time to comment on every talk. I hope to see comments from others. I also hope that Peter Brown, Executive Director of the FSF, will post the "Sinclair anecdote" he used.

Since I don't have much time, I'll concentrate on a couple: those by law profs Eben Moglen and Larry Lessig. Each gets its own post.

Tags: fsf, opensource.

Live From FSF Meeting

2005-03-26T09:49:00.000-05:00

I'm at the 2005 Free Software Foundation Associates' meeting. Strangely enough, it's in the William H. Gates building, and I'm using proprietary software: Blogger and Windows. But at least I'm using Firefox as the browser.

When I booted up my PC, I expected a couple of things to happen. First, I expected a wireless network, but I expected it to be passworded. I was right at the wireless, wrong about the password. Second, I expected to my use of Windows to be detected somehow, and for some horrible example to be made of me. That hasn't happened yet.

Almost time for the first session...

Tags: fsf, opensource.

Bloglines, etc.

2005-03-24T09:55:00.000-05:00

Richard MacManus' (first?) post for today is even more interesting than I have come to expect from him. It is about the integration of search and feed aggregation. He starts by making the case that Microsoft are among the players who consider this integration important.

He then makes the point that Ask Jeeves/Bloglines is a key player, or at least sees a chance of being one. Bloglines.com now emphasizes search even more prominently than it features aggregation.

I have a few things to add. (1) Bloglines is the leading aggregator, according to data posted by the Feedburner folks (and others, including Richard). (1.1) So Bloglines, rather than Ask Jeeves, may be the more important part of the search/aggregation combo.

(2) Bloglines' home page currently features a very prominent announcement that the firm is hiring software engineers. (3) Bloglines/Ask Jeeves recently sent me a free I (heart) Bloglines t-shirt! (I was was apparently one of the first couple of hundred people to request one after the acqusisition by Ask Jeeves.)

Tags: askjeeves, bloglines.

They, We, Apple, and Me

2005-03-23T10:40:00.000-05:00

Fred the VC recently posted his opinion that Apple has become a "they" company. The post has drawn much comment and trackback, a significant portion of which argues that Apple was never a "we" company, but has always been a "they" company. I'm posting to add to that portion.

In particuar, I'm posting to contribute further evidence of Apple's they-ness. Check out this Guardian article, which describes the greedy and arrogant manner in which Apple's iTunes tried to deal with independent record labels in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe. When I first read the article, I was saddened, but not surprised, by Apple's attitude.

Talking of "we" companies, my favorite example is Flickr. But the reason I started using Flickr is that it is a "me" company: it provides exactly what I went to it for. Then I realized that it is a "me-plus" company: it provides more than I went to it for, because Flickr knows about online photos far better than I ever will. Then I realized that it is a "me-plus-others" company: I have got a lot more out of the work of fellow Flickr-ers than I expected to.

I could provide many data points to support my claim that Flickr is a great "we" company. But I'll restruct myself to two. The first of them is Caterina's most recent post to the wonderful Flickr blog. The second is Betsy's intense plea to Yahoo not to ruin Flickr. (I did blog it recently, but Betsy is very insistent.)

Tags: apple, flickr.

DIY Comics at Gnomz

2005-03-21T22:55:00.000-05:00

Gnomz is yet another cool site I discovered via the wonderful Boing Boing. Here's my first creation, The Nominatrix.

Update: I did include the comic in this post, using the Gnomz-generated javascript, but it didn't display properly, so I removed it to leave just the above link. While I'm editing, I'll mention that membership in Gnomz gives you a free-but-with-ads blog. So here's mon blogz.

Tag: comic.

IACI Acquires ASKJ

2005-03-21T12:30:00.000-05:00

Here's the press release. Here are IAC Interactive's current businesses. I'm unable to get very interested in this transaction, for reasons including the following. It's overshadowed, for me as for many others, by the Flickr acquisition. I probably blogged too much on the acquisition last month of Bloglines by ASKJ. I have no idea what the acquisition of ASKJ means for Bloglines. I hope that the aggregator I use doesn't get ruined by advertism or other corporate vandalism.

Yahoo Acquires Flickr

2005-03-20T22:26:00.000-05:00

Betsy From Above,
originally uploaded by AndWat.

Well, the much-leaked news is now official. Betsy the hound-dog can do the pleading look better than anyone I know, so I thought I'd use this photo of her to plead... Yahoo, don't ruin Flickr. But however this turns out, thanks and congratulations to the Flickr folk.

After BlogSpot?

2005-03-20T20:15:00.000-05:00

In my previous post, I blogged about how I'm probably going to leave Blogger for WordPress. That raises the question of where to host this WordPress blog, along with anything else I might want to put on my personal web space in 2006 and beyond. I guess I have spoiled whatever suspense I might otherwise have built by including that DreamHost button in this post (although I guess the button might not show up if you're reading this via a feed, rather than at the blog itself).

Researching web hosts was a strange business. There seem to be a lot of sites running reviews and ratings of hosts. So I'd read at ThatReview.com that they thought that ThisHost.com was great. I'd then search the web for ThisHost.com, usually to find lots of horror stories about ThisHost. I couldn't find horror stories on DreamHost. (Perhaps some will appear in comments on this post!)

I did find praise for DreamHost on the WordPress forums. See, for example, the topic that recently started with the news that DreamHost now offers automatic WordPress installation through the control panel.

Tags: blog, host, dreamhost.

After Blogger?

2005-03-20T09:56:00.000-05:00

I like Blogger/Blogspot in many ways. But the drawbacks are sufficient to make me seriously consider taking my blogging elsewhere. I'm thinking this because of Blogger's lack of three things: categories; trackback; and uptime. For the last of these, I'm referring to blogger.com, not to blogspot.com. As far as I know, there have been no problems reading my blog, or others hosted at blogspot, but I know I'm not the only person who's sometimes had trouble posting using Blogger.

So I'm thinking of a replacement for Blogger, which means a replacement for Blogspot, or possibly one service to replace them both at once. I'll discuss the combined blogging tools/hosting options first. I could leave Google's Blogger for Microsoft's Spaces or Yahoo's 360. But I won't, for reasons given in my most recent post on them.

I just tried TypePad. I don't think I'll go there. I'll link to the most recent of my posts on my 30-day trial of TypePad, which in turn links to some other relevant posts, from me and from others. If I had to go with TypePad, I think I'd go for the Plus level, at $8.95/month. But that wouldn't give me access to the template html, which I have with Blogger, and it wouldn't give me my own domain, which I could have if I spent the same $ in other ways.

I am inclined to move to WordPress as the blog publishing tool. There are lots of themes available, so I'm confident that I could find one that's close to what I want, and then work with the html from there. That's what I've done at Blogger; this blog's template is based on Mimina.

WordPress is free, in that it available at no charge, and in that it is free/open source software. Free is good, and so is free.

I am far from the only person thinking along these lines. Bambit has recently switched, and her new blog includes a great comparison of Blogger and WordPress. It also includes a post on switching from Blogger to WordPress. She imported her old posts into her new blog. I might well leave my old posts here. After all, Blogspot is rent-free and, as I remarked above, my problems have not been with Blogspot.

Thanks to Bambit, and to Emily, whose post directed me to Bambit, and who provides a list of WordPress 1.5 themes. She describes themes as "a new system that takes the template to the next level." That word new is important. I don't think that there's been much new and significant in Blogger for a while, and I have no reason to think that there will be in the near future.

Having said that, Blogger could prove me wrong enough that I should stay with it. I don't think I'll move my main blogging activity from here until December. I'd like to get my own domain, and that would make a good Christmas or birthday (December 22, since you didn't ask) present. That raises the question of hosting, which probably merits its own post.

Tags: blog, blogger, wordpress.

BlogMap

2005-03-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

Here's my blogmap, courtesy of BlogMap, which I found via a ScoblePost.

Blogging: Flightless Fad?

2005-03-19T21:50:00.000-05:00

My reading today included some contrasting metablogging. Seth Godin compares blogging with ostrich farming, which turned out to be a fad, or, perhaps, a kind of pyramid selling scheme that laid an egg. He hopes that blogging does not turn out to be like ostrich breeding and, in doing so, implies that blogging on the current scale may be as short-lived as was the ostrich farming boom.

In support of his implication, Seth points out that "more than 20% of blog readers are also blog writers." If he were to find out that more than 20% of people who listen in conversations also speak in them, would he be comparing conversation to some tulip trading or some such bubble from history?

In other metablogging, Jeremy Wright addresses the "Is blogging a fad?" question that he apparently gets asked every other day. He points out that blogging is a communication medium, that it has become mainstream (50+ million bloggers, 200+ million blog readers) and that:

mainstream communications mediums don't die out. They stagnate, or they evolve or they get replaced by something that does the same thing only better. Because the reality is that once people learn to connect in a new and meaningful way they are loathe letting go of it.

I am more convinced by Jeremy's view of blogging as communication than by Seth's view of blogging as bird.

Tag: blog.

Drawn

2005-03-17T20:58:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite blogs is Drawn! The typical post describes the work of one visual artist, with a sample, and a short writeup. For example, here's the post on Michael Bartalos ("just so easy on the eyes"). In a breach of blogging etiquette, I've forgotten whose blog pointed me to Drawn! in the first place.

I think that it was via Drawn! that I found Catia Chien, although there's no post there devoted to her (yet?). I've just spent a few minutes trying to describe what I like so much about her work, and about the way it's presented in her online gallery. I've been unsuccessful enough that I'll stop the attempt at description, and just provide the square detail so that you can click over to the full picture, and to the rest of the gallery.

Tag: image.

The Long Tail

2005-03-17T14:13:00.000-05:00

Chris Anderson's Long Tail article is often-cited, and deservedly so. (If you haven't read it yet, click over and do so before you waste any more time on this post.) A couple of the posts from my Bloglines subscriptions today refer to the long tail, and interestingly so.

First, David Sifry discusses the long tail of the blogosphere in part 3 of his current state of the 'sphere series. He defines blog influence in terms of linking activity, and graphs said activity. He concludes that

... even though the amount of influence that a single blog [towards the end of the long tail] may have is less than that of a single blog on the A-list, the aggregate influence of all of the long tail far outstrips even the mainstream media.

Second, Paul Kedrosky says of the long tail conversation that

... people are still missing something important, something that I think Chris Anderson underemphasizes, or maybe doesn't even get himself.

I suspect that it is a question of emphasis rather than of understanding. Paul goes on to emphasize the demand side of the long tail, the "infrequent buyers who want fringe products." Most of the long tail discussion that I've seen focuses on the supply side, the "fringe products." Of course, the two sides are related; the more available the fringe products become, the more frequently these people will buy them.

Tags: blog, longtail.

YHOO & MSFT (cont.)

2005-03-17T13:08:00.000-05:00

I found this cnet article on Yahoo 360 yesterday, but too late to link to in yesterday's post. I was struck by the following quote from Yahoo's VP for network services. Her use of the words "first" and "immediate" worries me, especially in the light of how hideously ad-ridden Yahoo Groups is.

Herendeen said Yahoo had no immediate plans to add advertising to the service. "We're focused on engaging people first," she said.

I think that I can now put into words my objection to MSN Spaces, following Mike Torres' comment to yesterday's post, and a little more time spent with "my" MSN space. It doesn't feel like my space. It feels like MSN's space with content provided by me. For example, MSN grabs a big slice of the top of the page, and puts some of its stuff there.

I can't help drawing the contrast with Blogger/Blogspot. That service grabs the top slice of screen for its NavBar, but it's a fairly thin slice. Because it gives me access to the template HTML, I can hack it off my blog if it really annoys me. Blogger requests that I include their button somewhere in my template, but I don't mind that: it's only 88x31 px, and I can place it anywhere I want.

Tags: yahoo, microsoft.

Yahoo and Microsoft

2005-03-16T08:12:00.000-05:00

There's news about each of these two giants. Yahoo 360 will be "an easy way to keep connected to friends and family with blogs, photos, and more." I've put my name on the "beta waiting list" and will try out 360, or at least the blog component of it, when they let me in the door.

That reminds me, I had a little play around with MSN spaces yesterday. I created a blog. My first impression is not good. As you can see, the template seems to leave very little of the screen for the posts, preferring to fill much of it with garish color. The (few) other templates I tried were no better, and I couldn't find much in the way of template customization.

The news from Microsoft takes the form of a leak about Internet Explorer 7.0. Hey, it has tabbed browsing! I've been enjoying tabbed browsing for a while, thanks to Firefox. It also has a built-in feed aggregator. That sounds familiar too... and I don't want my feeds in a browser, I want them on the web, so that I can get at them even when I'm not on my computer.

Tags: yahoo, microsoft.

TypePad Trial

2005-03-15T14:09:00.000-05:00

My 30-day free trial of TypePad ends in a couple of days. It was an interesting trial, and I liked TypePad, but I was never tempted to move to it from Blogger. My recent comparison between Blogger and TypePad gives my reasons for staying with Blogger; it also includes links to my earlier posts on my trial of TypePad.

I'll make just one final note that may be of interest to those who try TypePad and want to stay with it. It appears that changes to the template you make at Plus or Pro levels of service are retained after downgrade to a lower level. For example, I started off my trial at the Basic level. I then upgraded, still within the free trial period, to Plus. I made some changes to the template that had not been available to me at the Basic level. I just downgraded back to Basic. The template changes are still there.

So if you like TypePad at the Basic level except for restrictions on what you can do to the template, you can sign up for the 30-day trial at the Plus or Pro level, set up your template, then downgrade to Basic in time to get the $4.95/month rate. Of course, your template will to some extent be frozen once you go down to Basic, and you may decide that you can't live without one of the Plus or Pro features.

Thanks to Six Apart for the test drive of TypePad. I may return if Blogger doesn't include key features such as categories and trackback soon.

Tag: typepad.

Red Couch: Microsoft

2005-03-15T12:55:00.000-05:00

Scoble and Israel have posted their Microsoft chapter at their book blog. It's currently due to be called "Souls of the Borg" and to be chapter 2. It's a very interesting case study of blogging at Microsoft, and the role that blogging seems to have played in improving Microsoft's public image.

I have two and a half more specific comments. The first is that the chapter, including the stuff about Scoble, is written in the 3rd person. This seems to be a missed opportunity to use Scoble's first-hand perspective to the fullest. I'd consider having Scoble write some or all of the Microsoft material in the first person. Or perhaps I should say that I'd reconsider having this chapter in the third person; I'm sure that the question has already been discussed among authors, editors, etc.

My second comment is that while I think the book should have a Microsoft chapter, I'm not sure that it should be chapter 2. That somehow seems to make Microsoft more prominent than it should be in a book that's about blogging, rather than about Microsoft. I'd consider (again, perhaps I should say reconsider) making this the penultimate chapter.

The half-comment is rather a nitpick, or edit, and it may be silly to make it when I've just made a comment that suggests a radical rewrite. But the phrase "Scoble was posting up to 50 blogs or more on his personal site, Scobleizer, on his own time each night" says that Scoble had 50 blogs at the site, whereas I think it means that he was making up to 50 posts each night.

Thanks to Robert and Shel for posting as they write. I'll look forward to more, and will continue to attempt to be helpful enough to merit a signed copy of the book when it comes out early next year!

Tag: redcouch.

State of the Blogosphere

2005-03-15T12:15:00.000-05:00

David Sifry is posting on the state of the blogosphere using statistics from Technorati, of which he is CEO. He has so far posted part 1, on the growth of blogs, and part 2, on posting volume. Technorati now tracks about 8 million blogs; that number has doubled since October 2004.

While the graph of number of blogs shows shows that growth is steady as well as impressive, the graph of posting volume is spikier. David highlights spikes around events such as the US Presidential election.

Technorati and other blog-concerned parties have had to spend time recently dealing with spam blogs. As the term suggests, they are blogs made of pure spam. They are the logical, if vile, successors to comment spam and trackback spam.

Talking of Technorati, it has suddenly started to recognize some tags I pinged it about weeks ago. These include googleshare, redcouch, and iupload. I'm not sure why Technorati didn't pick up on them before, but thanks to whoever fixed the previous oversight.

Tags: blog, technorati.

Weather Turns... Orange?

2005-03-14T11:51:00.000-05:00

As my regular reader(s) will know, we've had a lot of snow in New England this winter. So it was good to see this bright weather forecast. Thanks to the forecaster/artist/orange for permission to link to it from here.

Hang on, none of those nice warm oranges forecast for much of the USA seem to be on their way to us frozen up here in the top right corner. There is an explanation for this, as you will see if you go to the post in which the image originally appeared. If you do that, be sure to check out the other orangey goodness at the blog. I particularly like the deep seafruit.

Tags: image, orange.

Blogger/TypePad Comparison

2005-03-12T21:41:00.000-05:00

I just discovered Emily's blog, How to Blog, and her recent post comparing Blogger and TypePad. She compares them in order to decide which is the easiest way to get started blogging, focusing on these two because each includes hosting and requires no knowledge of HTML. I found the comparison particularly interesting; I use Blogger for this blog, but have been trying TypePad recently.

Emily comes down on the side of TypePad, having compared the two services under a variety of headings. I'm going to give a few comments under some of those headings, and then add a couple more headings.

Cost. Blogger is free. Emily considers the "nominal cost" of TypePad to be worth it. I presume that she's referring to $4.95/month for the Basic (as opposed to Plus or Pro) level. As I said in a previous post, I found Basic TypePad rather inflexible. In a more recent post, I noted that you can now get a free TypePad blog via Friendster, if you are willing to put up with ads.

Categories. I agree with Emily that this is a very important feature, and that Blogger's lack of it gives a huge advantage to TypePad.

Trackback. Again, advantage to TypePad, since this is another feature that Blogger lacks. By the way, I currently use the Wizbang Standalone Trackback Pinger in order to do outgoing trackbacks from Blogger. In fact, as soon as I've posted this, I'll use it to link back to this post from Emily's blog.

Images. It's hard to disagree with Emily's giving the nod to TypePad again, since, it has far more built-in support for images than does Blogger. However, I find including images in Blogger posts easy, due to the wonders of Flickr. Even if I switched to TypePad, I think I'd still keep my images at Flickr, and blog them from there more often than not.

Templates. Emily gives the advantage to TypePad. But I don't like any of TypePad's templates as much as I like some of Blogger's. For example, I really like Minima, which was the starting point for this blog.

Customization. Emily finds TypePad's templates more customizable. I can see what she means, but I found Basic TypePad extemely inflexible. Plus is better. But you have to go to Pro in order to be allowed to get at the template HTML. In contrast, Blogger lets you at the HTML. There are Help pages telling you how to do some of what are probably the most-requested tweaks to templates. My template for this blog is the product of multiple changes to the original Minima.

Visitor statistics. Emily points out that Blogger does not provide visitor stats, so TypePad's decent stats give it a big advantage here. However, Blogger's lack of built-in visitor stats doesn't bother me very much. Blogger Help points to a bunch of stats add-ons. I'm using StatCounter, which was simple to add to this blog and is working fine.

Now, here are a couple of things that Emily didn't mention.

Number of blogs. Blogger lets you have as many blogs as you want. Basic TypePad restricts you to one, and Plus to three. You have to go to TypePad Pro to get unlimited blogs.

Hosting. At Blogger Forum there are many scathing posts about the low quality of Blogspot hosting. I get the impression that TypePad hosting is better, but I'm not sure.

Emily's post is very fair and informative. She amply justifies her preference for TypePad over Blogger. I still lean toward Blogger. Free is a very good price point. My biggest problem with Blogger is the lack of categories.

Tags: blogger, typepad.

Blogger Buzz Blog

2005-03-11T22:30:00.000-05:00

The Blogger team recently started a new blog. To quote Biz Stone, they "decided to launch Blogger Buzz so the Blogger team has an easy way of telling you about stuff that connects to Blogger, blogging, blogs, and bloggers."

It's a one-way street, in that it doesn't take comments or trackbacks. Not that it could take trackbacks, given that the feature is missing from Blogger itself. But I've subscribed to it, and will be interested to read what the team has to say.

Tag: blogger.

Blogging Value Chain

2005-03-11T12:55:00.000-05:00

I've recently been thinking of ways in which to explain the components of the blogosphere to a business-oriented, rather than technical, audience. It seemed to me that the value chain, as described by Michael Porter, might provide a good starting point. The value chain describes business in terms of activities. There are two types of activity: primary and support. Primary activities are those that directly involve the product itself.

In the context of blogging, the product is the weblog, and, in particular, the posts that comprise it. So, in the blogging value chain (BVC), primary activities are those that directly involve the posts. First among the primary activities is writing: the composition of a post. It's what I'm doing now, using Blogger's post editor. I'll edit in a link to this diagram of the BVC.

Next comes the publishing of the post to the blog. Once published, it is ready for reading. It can be read using any browser, since a blog is a particular type of web site. However, if you follow more than a few blogs, regularly visiting each web site becomes cumbersome and time-consuming.

This is where syndication comes in. Publishing a post to a blog usually produces not only the web pages that comprise the blog, but also a "feed" that describes updates to the blog. Multiple feeds can be viewed at one web page or within one application; this is known as aggregation. Hence reading can be adjacent to either publication or aggregation in the BVC.

Surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November 2004 suggest that most Americans who read blogs do so using a browser, rather than an aggregator. Hence the three-activity (write-publish-read) path is more common than the five-activity path (write-publish-syndicate-aggregate-read) in terms of users. However, it is likely that the five-activity path is more frequently trodden, since heavy blog readers are likely to use an aggregator. Note that the five-activity path is less work for the reader, since it streamlines the reading activity, and the two extra activities are automated.

The BVC includes three support services as well as the five above-described primary activities. These services do not directly affect the content of the blog (i.e. the posts), but are nonetheless important. First, and closest to the content, is the template, which specifies blog page characteristics such as layout and fonts used.

Next come technical services. This is something of a residual category, to describe components not yet covered. An example of a service fitting into this category is Feedburner. It adds value to a blog's feed by providing statistics on the use of the feed (and in other ways, described at the Feedburner site).

At the top of the diagram are financial services, which pay for the other BVC services and activities, and sometimes enable the BVC to be a profitable system. Advertising is an example of a financial service. Tools such as Google's AdSense are located at the boundary between financial and technical services. Advertising is not the only financial service that may support a blog: the writing and publishing tools may be purchased by the blogger, or they may, like Blogger, be provided at no charge.

So that's the BVC. It illustrates the blogging process in terms of activities and services, and hence in terms of opportunties to add value. The BVC may work well for audiences already familiar with the value chain as described by Porter in Competitive Advantage. The value chain is described in many subsequent books, articles, and web sites (such as this one).

Thanks to: Todd Amicon for producing the above .gif from my scrawled original; Richard McManus for encouraging (although perhaps puzzled) comments on said scrawled original; and anyone who cares to comment, in this blog or by email, on questions such as the following. Are there other frameworks and diagrams with the same objectives as the BVC? Does the BVC work as a means of explanation? Could it be improved so as to be a better one?

Tags: blog, valuechain.

Microsoft Acquires Groove

2005-03-11T11:55:00.000-05:00

Was it 10 years ago that IBM acquired Lotus? The story, as I remember it, went something like this. IBM bought Lotus because of Notes. How well the acquisition turns out will depend to a large extent on whether Ray Ozzie, architect of Notes, stayed. In fact he stayed for a couple of years.

Then, in 1997, Ozzie founded Groove Networks, and the firm developed Groove Virtual Office. Yesterday, Microsoft acquired Groove and appointed Ray Ozzie as CTO, reporting to Bill Gates. It seems as though Microsoft is at least as determined to hang on to Ozzie as was IBM. Interesting chap, this Ozzie. It's a pity, although understandable, that he hasn't posted to his blog in almost a year.

Another interesting chap who does blog regularly is Mitch Kapor. His post on the MicroGroove deal makes fascinating reading (to me at least).

When Ray came to me the other week and said that the Microsoft acquisition would keep the current Groove employees in place in Massachusetts and create incentives for them and that it was best way to continue to realize the company's vision of peer-to-peer information sharing, I decided I could support the transaction even though a surface reading of my career might suggest otherwise.

In several press calls I've tried to emphasize that the world looks very different in 2005 than it did in 1998 when Groove started. Now I would say a project like Groove should most likely be started as free/open source software.

I'm wondering whether Mitch tried to persuade Ray to open-source the Groove code. Would this have been better than the Microsoft deal as a way to realize the Groove "vision of peer-to-peer information sharing"?

Tags: groove, microsoft.

Deja Kozmo?

2005-03-10T10:39:00.000-05:00

I just saw a post on Fred Wilson's blog about MaxDelivery, which sounds rather like Kozmo 2.0 (take orders on the web, deliver to your home within an hour). Fred has six pieces of advice for Max, two of which I found particularly interesting. First from Fred is the warning not to take venture capital; this from A VC!

Fred's last piece of advice to Max is: "Don't become the cover boy for Web 2.0." Which makes me wonder: which firm(s), if any, should become the cover child?

My own two thoughts for Max: it's not good that many of your pages have tiny type and lots of whitespace; I hope that, against Fred's advice, you make it to Boston.

Tags: startup, vc.

The Poster and Technorati

2005-03-10T00:10:00.000-05:00

This post may be another member of the "haven't I read about this on lots of other blogs already" club, but I wanted to say a little about the recent episode of Niall Kennedy, the poster he posted, and his employer.

Niall was struck by the resemblance between current corporate concerns about what employees might reveal on their blogs, and wartime worries of the "loose lips sink ships" nature. He found this propaganda poster and edited it to include the logos of some popular blog publishing tools. He then posted his handiwork to his personal blog.

Soon after, he unposted the poster. It began to look as though he had done so under pressure from his employer, Technorati. Many who read about this, including me, started to think of Technorati as some blogger-censoring villan. That's not a good image for a firm that describes itself as "the authority on what's going on in the world of weblogs."

I now think that this is a complex case of an employee blogging on a work-related subject in such a way as to cause legitimate concern for the employer. If this sounds interesting to you, check out the posts by Niall Kennedy, by Technorati CEO David Sifry, and by Jason Kottke. I think that all three of them come out of it well.

Tags: blog, freespeech, technorati.

Newspapers and Blogs

2005-03-09T23:44:00.000-05:00

No, this isn't another post about whether bloggers can be considered journalists, whether bloggers have the right to protect their sources, whether a blog is a kind of newspaper, etc. Rather, it's about what kind of blog a newspaper is. According to Danae in a recent Non Sequitur strip, a newspaper is a "dinosaur blog." Such a dinosaur might well look like this. The strip and the image are just two of the many wonderful things to which Boing Boing has directed me.

Six Apart in LA Times

2005-03-07T22:49:00.000-05:00

Today's LA Times has an article about Six Apart. (I'm not sure how long the link will be good for, since the LA times seems to charge for access to its archives.) I got to it via a blog post by Anil Dash of Six Apart, who seems to recommend the article.

I'm not sure that I can recommend it, since it includes several points with which I'd take issue. I'll focus on a couple. The first is the claim that "it's hard to find many weblogs, save for the most rudimentary, that don't run on Movable Type." I hope that Anil Dash, Ben Trott, Mena Trott, and others at Six Apart will contradict that statement. It is insulting to bloggers who are customers of Six Apart but not users of Movable Type. There are many such bloggers, thanks to the success of TypePad and to the success of LiveJournal.

It's also insulting to bloggers who are not users of any of Six Apart's three blog publishing products. For example, Robert Scoble's blog is far from rudimentary, but Scobleizer manages to scrape by on Radio Userland. And then there are all the blogs in Blogger.

That brings me to the second point in the article with which I take issue. Blogger and its associated hosting service Blogspot apparently "are competitors [of Six Apart's products], but are... aimed mostly at novices." I'm not taking this personally, although a look at this blog will show reasons why I might. I'd disagree with the article's dismissal of Blogger and its users by pointing to fine blogs such as A Consuming Experience and The Mumpsimus.

I'm not trying to be a cheerleader or a diehard for Blogger. In fact, a look at recent posts to this blog will show that I am exasperated with Blogger's lack of categories and other important features, and that I am trying out TypePad. But this LA Times article seems to be cheerleading for Six Apart, and particularly for Movable Type.

Tags: sixapart, media.

Metablogging

2005-03-07T21:04:00.000-05:00

I recently discovered gapingvoid, the blog of Hugh "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" Macleod. He's recently posted twice about "the death of metablogging."

I think that rumours of metablogging's death are greatly exaggerated. We'll continue to see a lot of blogging about blogging. Blogging is big: millions of people blog; many organizations are using blogging as a means of communicating with stakeholders. Therefore, blogging will continue to be extensively written about. And blogging isn't a bad way of writing about it.

In other words, the story of metablogging is far from over. It will be a long tale (as opposed to a long tail, although one could related metablogging to the long tail). And yes, I know that this post is an example of metametametablogging, or something like that...

Tags: blog, metablog.

Friendster Blogs

2005-03-05T23:55:00.000-05:00

Friendster now includes blogging. To be more specific, it includes TypePad. There are four levels of service. The top three correspond to TypePad's three levels of service, in price as well as features. I've previous posted about my trial of TypePad, so I won't repeat my comments in this post. There is also a free, ad-supported level of Friendster blog.

There's already been a lot of blogging about this news. One post describes free TypePad as "fantastic value," and estimates Friendster membership at 13 million. Another post approves of, and predicts the spread of, this "strategy of content sites offering blogs to their users."

As a serial blogger, I signed up for Friendster and created myself a blog. Here is my new, free blog at Friendster. My initial reaction on viewing the blog is that banners grab a lot of prime above-the-fold screen real estate before we get to the posts. I was also irked at the number of ads I had to wade through on my short time at Friendster.

So Blogger is still my preferred blogging service. But I think that the Friendster-TypePad deal is a threat to Blogger and hence to its parent company Google. First, the deal puts those millions of Friendster customers closer to Six Apart, owner of TypePad and Blogger's main competitor. Second, Friendster blogging, even at the free level, offers categories and trackback, two features that Blogger conspicuously lacks.

Tags: blog, friendster, typepad.

Apple vs Fifth Estate

2005-03-04T20:53:00.000-05:00

The big business and blogging news story today is the preliminary ruling in Apple's case against bloggers who revealed details of forthcoming Apple products, but would not reveal their sources. The ruling is in favor of Apple, stating that the right of the press to protect its sources does not extend to web publishers such as bloggers.

Of course, the story has been extensively covered by traditional media (the fourth estate) and blogs (the fifth estate) alike. For example, there's this post at Business Week's tech blog. As well as presenting a slightly more extensive version of the story, it raises some interesting questions.

If a BW journalist files a story for the magazine, she can protect her sources. If the same journalist blogs the same story using the same words, can she protect her sources?

The link to EFF's coverage of the story is useful, but shouldn't whoever blogged the story know that EFF stands for Electronic Frontier Foundation (not Freedom Foundation, as the BW blog has it as I write this)? Is such a slip more acceptable on a blog than in an article published in a magazine?

Tags: apple, blog, legal.

Snowy Scenes

2005-03-04T16:37:00.000-05:00

Cleared and winding path,
originally uploaded by AndWat.

It's been a very snowy and photogenic winter here in New England. I've taken a lot of pictures in the Arnold Arboretum recently. I've posted many of them to Flickr, which I continue to regard as a wonderful site/service. I post a link to this particular picture for a couple of reasons. First, I really like images like this, with a path of some kind winding away into the distance. Second, this was the first of my photos on which another Flickr user commented. (Thanks, Catherine!)

Open Source Marketing

2005-03-04T12:01:00.000-05:00

This is a term that I'm starting to see a lot of. Google tells me that there are currently over 54,000 results for "Open Source Marketing."

To the extent that the discussion has a center, it appears to be the article "What is Open Source Marketing?" You can read it as a pdf or as a blog post with comments. James Cherkoff, the author, writes that the values of the open source software movement are now being embraced by mainstream consumers.

The buzz of meeting like-minded people from all over the world: the fun of sharing ideas, however crazy or leftfield; the feeling of empowerment; the can-do, pioneering freedom.

The empowerment arises from control over content. In the context of software, the control comes from access to the source code. In the context of marketing, according to Cherkoff, the equivalent of the source code is brand-related content. Blogs are an important medium in that they make it easy for consumers to create and publish brand-related content.

Many people have commented on Cherkoff's article. Of the comments I've read so far, my favorite is a post by Greg Brooks. He doubts that Cherkoff has really defined open-source marketing. He's not sure that there's anything going on at the moment that is usefully termed open-source marketing, although he regards open-source branding as another matter.

As for me, I'm not sure that software source code and content about brands are similar enough that taking the term open source from the software context to the brand/marketing context is very useful. But over 50,000 Google results suggest that the term is sticking, so I may as well use it, comment on it, and hope that this blog posting gets some of the traffic.

Tags: opensource, marketing.

HBR on Blogging

2005-03-02T22:45:00.000-05:00

Harvard Business Review is yet another publication to recently feature blogging multiple times. The February 2005 issue included a list of 20 "breakthrough ideas for 2005." Number 10 on the list is "Blog-Trolling in the Bitstream." There's a page or so written by Mohan Sawhney. It's aimed at marketers, and focuses on the blogosphere as a contrast with traditional media.

The June 2004 issue included a 2-page article by Paul Kedrosky called "Feeding Time." As the title suggests, it's about RSS (and Atom) syndication. It mentions bloggers as early adopters of RSS. But the focus, interestingly, is on syndication rather than on blogging. Paul's last paragraph starts with the following prediction. "As corporate feeds become more visible, your stakeholders will come to expect them and will demand more."

The September 2003 issue included a fictional case study by Halley Suitt, entitled "A Blogger in Their Midst." The viewpoint character is the CEO of a firm who finds out that one of the employees has a blog, and that customers have been reading it...

Tags: blog, media.

Free or Open Source?

2005-03-02T12:50:00.000-05:00

One of the aspects of technology I'm interested in is FLOSS: Free/Libre/Open Source Software. The Linux operating system is the best-known example of FLOSS. Linux is also the reason why I post photos of penguins in this blog (see here, here, and here); to be more specific, Tux the Linux penguin is the reason. This blog is currently hosted on a Linux server, according to a Netcraft webserver search.

Few people really like the term FLOSS. But some people strongly prefer free software, while others strongly prefer open source software. Yet others point out that the word libre denotes "free as in freedom" while avoiding the ambiguity of the word free, which can stand for "free as in beer." If we put all these terms together, we get FLOSS.

While writing a paper on the links between FLOSS and blogging, it occurred to me to wonder what term tends to be used in the blogosphere to denote FLOSS. As a test of this, I looked at how many blog posts are tagged with each term. So I used Technorati searches for each of the following tags: free; opensource; libre. I've linked each term to a search on it, so that you can click to see the most recent results available.

The results as of the time of this post are as follows. Free: 201 posts from 47 blogs. Opensource: 171 posts from 59 blogs. Libre: 8 posts from 4 blogs. It is difficult to interpret the results for the first of these searches. I expected difficulty due to the ambiguity of free. I didn't expect that most of the listed posts would be in alphabets I don't understand.

If I establish the eligibility conditition that in order for me to count it as referring to FLOSS, a post must clearly refer to software such as Apache, and must do so in a language I understand, then opensource seems to be the blogosphere's tag of choice.

I accept the criticism that this is very rough. I also realize that I may seem biased, since I refer above to Linux, while the free software folks would prefer the term GNU/Linux. So maybe it's worth running searches for the following tags: GNU; Linux; and, finally, FLOSS. The second of these is at the time of this writing one of the most widely-used tags, according to Technorati.

Tags: opensource, tag.

Tux Smashing Windows

2005-03-02T10:35:00.000-05:00

Tux smashing windows,
originally uploaded by Amidasu.

Another photo of Tux, the Linux penguin... Tags: opensource.

From WSJ and BW

2005-03-01T09:51:00.000-05:00

I don't subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. I don't think that I need to, since interesting stuff from it comes to my attention via colleagues, students, blogs, and other valuable inforchannels. For example, I just saw this post to PaidContent, summarizing a WSJ article about differences between Google and Yahoo. Then via a couple of other blogs (I'm sorry, I forget which ones) I found this WSJ online free article on blogging as a tool for business, particularly small business.

Over at Business Week online, there's an article on tagging and its impact on search, with references to del.icio.us and other relevant sites. In the print edition (and also online) there's an article about "the next generation" of media executives, with no mention of blogging. I do subscribe to Business Week, by the way; it's my only dead tree subscription.

I don't post every time the "old media" says anything about blogging, but there seemed to be a critical mass of articles this morning.

Red Couch: New Cover?

2005-02-28T10:28:00.000-05:00

I would have titled this post something like "Blog or Die Comment 1.1," but it seems that I was far from the only person who dislikes Blog or Die as the title of Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's book. Shel's posting of a few hours ago acknowledges this. It also shows how genuine he and Robert are about using the book's blog to solicit feedback.

For the book's title, how about Your Business Needs Blogs? The first paragraph might be something like:

Your business should not blog. That might seem like a strange way to open a book about why your business needs blogs. But blogs are not written by businesses. Blogs, or at least good blogs, are written by people. To be more specific, a good blog post is written by an individual with passion and authority.

The second paragraph might remark on how difficult and dangerous this might seem. Which individual employees? What limits, if any, should be set on their blogging?

I'll shut up about the book itself for now, and close this post with a comment on titles and tagging. I did a Technorati search on tag: blogordie, and found that the tag was not in use. That tag won't be useful if the book's title is going to change. I then did a search on tag: redcouch. It didn't come up with any blog postings. But it did come up with a few photos on Flickr, my favorite of which was this one.

Tag: redcouch.

Blog or Die: Comment 1

2005-02-27T23:09:00.000-05:00

Blog or Die is the current working title (and likely final title) of the book that Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are currently working on. The book has its own blog (separate from the authors' respective blogs, to which I just linked). The book's blog is called The Red Couch, and was so named before the book had a title.

The authors are posting drafts of chapters to the blog. They recently posted chapter 1. Here is a key quote from it.

Why does blogging work, even as other communications mechanisms fail? Part of it is style. Quite simply, people respond better to lowered voices spoken in credible tones than they do to the aggressive in-your-face marketing-speak that prevails almost everywhere else.

One of my problems with this draft of chapter 1 is that its voice is not as "lowered" as I'd like it to be. Rather, it veers toward what might be termed "aggressive in-your-face bestseller-speak." I'm referring to things such as the claim that blogs "are the best way to make your company more profitable, grow faster, or get your product more rapidly adopted." And of course, there's the very title of the book.

But what Scoble and Israel have posted is chapter 1 of what they hope will be a bestseller. They want their opening chapter to grab the reader's attention. If it does that, they can fill in the details in subsequent chapters. For example, they can expand on their important point that blogging, or at least the type of blogging that the authors recommend, is not controlled from the corporate center.

The authors may, by the end of the book, have substantiated their above-quoted statement that blogs are "the best way." They may even have justified the title Blog or Die. They are not short of impressive statistics (e.g., "number of blogs worldwide today is probably about 10 million"). But even I, as a serial blogger and enthusiast myself, suspect that they overstate their case.

But this is an early draft of the very chapter. I salute the authors' decision to post as they write. And I'll look forward to the rest of the book, much of which I expect will be more balanced and measured.

Tags: blog, book, scoble.

Tagging Tales

2005-02-25T12:45:00.000-05:00

Here are a bunch of thoughts and links on tagging. In order to describe or categorize a post to this blog, I can associate one or more tags with the post. For example, when I recently posted about Jason Kottke giving up his day job to work full-time on his blog, I tagged the posts kottke. Tools such as Technorati allow search of the blogosphere by tag.

I started writing this about a week ago, but was lucky enough to get overtaken by a couple of posts that put things a lot better than I was probably going to. Here's all I had a week ago... Tagging is a hot topic in early 2005. For example, February has already seen an article at Salon, and a post on the Business Week tech blog.

More recently, I've seen this post, which provides an excellent introduction to Technorati tags: what they are, how to use them, why they're good, some problems, etc. Then there are posts all over the place about the more general concept of folksonomy. I've just linked to the Wikipedia entry for it, which provides a definition and links galore. I think I'll leave it at that for now. Apart, of course, from tagging the current post...

Tags: tag, tagging, tags.

Contributing to Kottke

2005-02-24T21:09:00.000-05:00

I recently posted about Jason Kottke, who is making his blog his job. His "fund drive" seems to be going well so far. But there's still time to contribute...

Tags: blog, kottke.

Post for Profit?

2005-02-24T09:55:00.000-05:00

The Guardian is the paper I used to read when I lived in the UK. It's now one of the media web sites I visit most frequently. Today's Guardian includes this article on the business potential of blogging.

Tags: blog, business.

Tech Beat Beats on Dell

2005-02-23T22:40:00.000-05:00

Business Week publishes several blogs, among them Tech Beat. A recent post tells a horror story of Dell technical support. It caught my eye for a multiple reasons. First, it suggests that the tradition of technical support for the personal computer user as somewhere between hideous and nonexistent persists. Second, it's about Dell, a firm often hailed for its execution. Third, it shows how quickly and widely bad news can travel from a single dissatisified customer.

Last, it's a link between the two topics I'll be discussing with my classes on Friday: Dell and business blogging.

From the Office of...

2005-02-23T21:04:00.000-05:00

This blog isn't part of my work web site, so it bears no logo for the university at which I work. But here are a few objects from my office, arranged in a way pleasing to me, and perhaps to others. And my work web site is here.

Tag: northeasternu.

Trackback is Half-Back

2005-02-23T13:40:00.000-05:00

I just found out that there is a way of doing outbound trackback without having to change one's template. It is the Wizbang Standalone Trackback Pinger. I'll try it out by pinging a relevant post at the Wizbang blog, and also the post at Blog Business World that sent me off to see the Wizbang.

For those who are wondering what trackback is, I'll use this post as an example. What I'm about to do is tell each of the posts linked to above that I've blogged about them. Each of the posts will then add the current post (Trackback is Half-Back) to its trackback list. That means that future visitors to the post at Wizbang (and at BBW) will see a link back to the current post.

Blogger does not have trackback. Along with the lack of categories, this is one of the major ways in which Blogger lags competitors such as TypePad.

Tags: blogger, trackback, wizbang.

Blogging Full-Time

2005-02-22T14:36:00.000-05:00

Is it possible to make a living by blogging? Jason Kottke hopes so. His blog is already popular. He posts frequently, and was finding it hard to find room for his blog, his job, and the rest of his life. He considered quitting his blog. Instead, he quit his job.

Jason recently posted about his reasons for making blogging his full-time job, and his hope that it will make him enough money to live on.

Tags: blog, kottke.

Commenting and Trackback

2005-02-22T13:58:00.000-05:00

I have changed the settings on this blog to use the commenting built into Blogger itself, rather than the commenting service provided by Haloscan. The reason for this is that Haloscan limits the length of each comment. I didn't realize this until one of my students tried to do an online assignment by leaving a comment at this blog, and hit the limit of 1000 characters. By upgrading my Haloscan account from free to premium, I could get this limit raised to 3000 characters, but that may not be enough.

So I decided to switch to Blogger commenting, which has recently been enhanced. I checked that it imposes no limit on comment length.

The simplest way of making the switch seemed to be to remove all the Haloscan code from the blog's template. This removes trackback, as well as commenting. I regret the loss of trackback, and hope to be able to reinstate it in this blog. It is high on my wishlist of things I'd like to see in Blogger. If Blogger doesn't add it soon, and I find myself really missing it, I may put Haloscan trackback back in. But right now, I don't have time.

Tags: haloscan, trackback.

iUpload: Trying

2005-02-22T11:35:00.000-05:00

There is a lot of buzz about iUpload as a firm to watch in 2005 and beyond. Is the buzz merited by the product, or it "just" public relations? Of course, it could be both. One of the places I read about iUpload is at the blog of its PR person, Renee Blodgett. In a recent post she provides pointers to coverage of iUpload. It's an impressive list of sites, including not only bloggers such as Jeremy Wright, but also news sites such as Forbes.com.

So what does iUpload offer? It provides a blog publishing tool/hosting service called iUplog. iUpload starts to sound more distinctive when we add Perspectives, which is a means of directing content from iUplog to multiple channels. This sounds interesting. I could post to my iUplog blog, and use Perspectives to send one post to the "free web" blog you're currently reading, and also to a Yahoo group. Then I could send another iUplog post to my book-oriented blog and also to Ebay (if I was strong-willed enough to be selling books), and so on.

So, as I understand it, just as I use Bloglines to aggregate my much of the content I consume from blogs and other sites with XML (Atom or RSS) feeds, I could use iUplog to aggregate my content production, then use Perspectives to direct each post to the right places. The advantages of centralized content management like this are of course potentially far bigger for an organization than for an individual such as me.

iUpload is currently offering a free trial. I am a serial blogger who finds it hard to resist the chance to start yet another blog. So there's a new blog at iUplog, AndWat's perspective. There are three posts there so far. The first is just an introduction. The second is about iUplog as a blog, and about the difficulties I'm having with its feed, which does not appear to be XML. The third is about Perspectives. The fourth will probably be about iUpload's technical support, with whom I am in touch.

More on iUpload soon...

Tags: cms, iupload.

Six Apart in 2005

2005-02-21T10:18:00.000-05:00

Already, 2005 has been a big year for Six Apart. I'll mention three momentous events, and focus on the third of them.

Six Apart started the year with two main products, Movable Type and TypePad. In early January, it bought LiveJournal. Here is the post in which Brad of LJ commented on the deal. In mid-February, I started a TypePad blog. Well, maybe the LJ deal was rather bigger for 6A than was my taking advantage of its free 30-day trial offer.

The recently revamped 6A web site is also bigger news than having me wandering round the TypePad lot kicking tires. It looks great, and embodies the message that each of the three products (MT, TP, LJ) has its own place in the family, with a balance between individual identity and family resemblance.

I'm particularly impressed by the way that the 6A/LJ page looks very much like 6A and very much like LJ, the adopted sibling. One could argue that it should look like both, and that it's obvious that it should have been designed for that effect. But if good web design was as easy and obvious as it looks when we see it, then it would be far more common that it actually is.

Another page I particularly like is one that provides the chart comparing the three levels of TypePad service (and price). As well as being useful in its own right, it would provide a good starting point for a similar comparison chart I'd like to see. I refer to a comparison between the three big easy-to-use hosted blog publishing tools: TP, LJ, and Blogger. Someone will probably produce one soon. It's unlikely to be me, although I do plan to post a more broad-brush comparison between the three tools in a week or two.

I think that 2005 will continue to be a crucial year for Six Apart, and for blogging in general. Here are a few questions that particularly interest me. Will 6A's actions spur Blogger to improve its product more quickly? Perhaps a better way of phrasing that question might be: Will they spur Google into providing the resources to improve Blogger? Will one of the big portals make a run at 6A?

Tags: sixapart, typepad, livejournal, movabletype.

A Good Sunday

2005-02-20T23:47:00.000-05:00

Icy pond,
originally uploaded by AndWat.

We went to the Boston Children's Museum this morning. We shouldn't have been surprised that the place was packed. It was a sunny enough day to convince people they should go out, but cold enough to convince them they shouldn't do anything outdoors. Betsy the dog had to stay at home. Her turn came in the afternoon, when I took her to Jamaica Pond. This is one of the pictures we took. I'm posting it mainly because I'm playing around with my settings for blogging directly from Flickr.

Tags: boston, flickr.

The Gates Parodies

2005-02-19T07:39:00.000-05:00

If I had to read just a few blogs, one of them would be Boing Boing, the "directory of wonderful things" maintained by Xeni Jardin and other wonderful bloggers. Xeni has recent posted links to parodies of The Gates. Here's the first post of what I hope will be many in that series.

The second post provides a link to The Crackers, which cracked me up. Follow that link for The Crackers, stay for the rather good pictures of The Gates being enjoyed by orange-clad kids.

Tags: parody, thegates.

NYT Acquires About.com

2005-02-18T20:31:00.000-05:00

A couple of the bloggers I read remarked on this deal today. Fred Wilson remarked that he'd predicted the deal over a week ago, and hailed it as "a very smart buy" for the Times. Jason Calacanis went further:

[T]his will be looked at as the moment the New York Times because a major player in the Internet industry. Yahoo, Google, AOL, and Microsoft are the real losers here, I’m shocked they let About.com slip away.

Here's the NYT's press release.

Tags: about, NYT.

Online Assignment

2005-02-18T13:55:00.000-05:00

This is an assignment for the class I'm teaching this semester. If you're not one of my students, you are still of course very free to read this post, to comment on it, to link to it from your own blog, etc. If you want to see the syllabus, here's the pdf.

This is one of the things I'm offering as an online assignment in place of class on Feb 25, which is the Friday before spring break. There will be other online options: students, see Blackboard; others, you can't. You can submit the assignment either as a comment to this blog post, or on the appropriate discussion thread on Blackboard.

The assignment is to read recent entries from two "business blogs," and then to write about them. I provide two lists, one of suggested blogs, and one of suggested discussion questions. You are free to find and write about blogs not on the blog list, or to address questions not on the question list.

Here's the list of firms and blogs:

Here's the list of questions:

What do the blogs you read have in common with each other?
How are they different from each other?
Who is writing the blogs?
What are they trying to achieve?
Are they succeeding?
What are your more general thoughts on blogging as a business tool? In particular, are there things for which a blog is better than alternatives such as a regular web site or an email newsletter?

There's an enormous amount of material on blogging and business. Some of it's in this very blog; for example, this earlier post points you to a definition of the word blog. Other posts here send you to other blogs, some of which are very good. Here's yet another link to another blog and, in particular, to a post identifying six types of business blog.

I look forward to seeing comments, here or on Blackboard. My thanks to Todd Amicon, my graduate assistant, for providing most of the links I've used here.

Google's CFO (F is for?)

2005-02-18T12:30:00.000-05:00

Just saw this post at the Infectious Greed blog. Paul Kedrosky quotes from a NYT story about a recent analyst relations day at Google. Apparently those presenting to the analysts included the chef (Chief Food Officer?) but not the Chief Financial Officer. To be fair, the CFO (in the sense of C$O) was present and did answer questions.

The article quotes the CEO (yes, I do mean Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive) as saying that: "We are moving to a Google that knows more about you." I think that's meant to be good news.

Thanks to Paul for passing this on, for giving us the fun stuff without sending us over to the NYT site (where we may be questioned at the door) and for resisting the temptation to attempt a joke about "cooking the books." As you can see, my willpower is not as strong as Paul's.

Google Share and TypePad

2005-02-16T11:02:00.000-05:00

Elise Bauer recently posted an update to her overview of the blog publishing tools market. She used data from Google to generate a measure of blogging tool use. In the update, she introduces the term Google Share to refer to a percentage derived from her measure. (Hey, googleshare isn't yet a Technorati tag... let me fix that!) I won't summarize Elise's article here. It's well worth reading the whole thing, which is short given the amount of good information it contains (although it is considerably longer than most blog postings).

I want to focus on TypePad. In terms of Google Share, it is in third place, behind Blogger and LiveJournal. In terms of growth in share over the last 6 months, it is in second place behind only Blogger. Elise remarks that it is doing very well charging for its tool/hosting, given many of its competitors (including Blogger and LiveJournal) provide a similar service at no charge. Robert MacManus posts a theory about TypePad's success.

I attribute this to the customization features that TypePad offers. Both Blogger and LJ have very limited customization functionality, and MT and Wordpress are generally too difficult for average non-technical users to customize. So TypePad offers a unique service (combining customization with ease-of-use) that is obviously well valued in the market.

I am currently trying TypePad. I posted there yesterday evening that one of my initial reactions was its lack of customizability compared with Blogger. In particular, I wanted more control over the template, preferably in the form of access to the html. Maybe I should try to upgrade my free trial from the Basic level to Plus or Pro . TypePad's comparison chart shows that each of the three levels gives more control over the template.

Technorati Tags: googleshare, typepad.

Firefox: 25 Mdownloads!

2005-02-16T10:22:00.000-05:00

Firefox is the web browser I use. It is free, in two senses of the word. It is free, in that you can download it for no charge; in fact, one of the buttons in the sidebar of my blog invites you to do just that. It is also free in that it is free/open source software; you can if you wish download and modify the code (subject to the Mozilla Public License).

It now been downloaded over 25 million times! See posts from Asa Dotzler and Blake Ross of Firefox, and from Robert Scoble of Microsoft. Yes, Scoble did congratulate the developers of an application that is taking market share from a Microsoft product (Internet Explorer). Good for him; and, I suppose I should add, good for Microsoft for tolerating (and even encouraging?) Scobleizer.

Technorati Tags: firefox, mozilla, opensource.

Trying TypePad

2005-02-15T21:25:00.000-05:00

I'm currently trying out TypePad. See my blog over there for my comments on it, and comparisons with Blogger.

Technorati Tags: blogger, typepad

Definition: Blog

2005-02-15T14:43:00.000-05:00

I intended to include in the very early posts to this blog the definitions of basic terms. For example, what is blogging? What is a blog? What is "the free web"? I seem to have got caught up inblogging about other things, such the the Bloglines acquisition.

So here, better late than never, is a definition of the term blog. It is of course illustrated by this very blog, which is a set of postings, with the most recent listed first, each of which has its own permalink, etc.

In linking to another site, I am not so much being lazy as I am being a good blogger. I haven't just given you a single defintion. I have sent you to a glossary of blogging terms, one that you may find useful in the future.

Tags: blog, definition, glossary

Flickr: Day 367

2005-02-11T14:10:00.000-05:00

As mentioned in previous posts, Valentine's day is on the way, and the Chinese new year just started. Amidst posting images for each of those occasions, I forgot another important one. I refer to yesterday, the first birthday of Flickr, a good friend to bloggers, photographers, and people who just want to share images online. Here's a picture I took this morning while walking the dog. The thumbnail will take you over to Flickr.com. You may be there for some time. To you, dear reader: enjoy! And to you, dear Flickr: many happy returns!

Tags: flickr, birthday

Blogging 1.0... and 2.0

2005-02-10T21:10:00.000-05:00

This is prompted by a post by venture capitalists Fred Wilson at his AVC blog. He describes what he sees as the difference between Blogging 1.0 and Blogging 2.0. For me, as a newcomer to blogging, but not to the web, 2.0 is what I think of as blogging, or what I see it turning into.

Blogging 1.0 refers to sites like Geocities and About.com. Geocites was acquired by Yahoo, while About.com is apparently about to be acquired by the New York Times company. So two things that Geocities and About have in common are survival (i.e. both still exist) and acqusition. Another thing they have in common is that they are both intolerable, to me at least, due to ads that annoy and distract me.

Fred identifies four main differences between Blogging 1.0 and 2.0. They are:

The post as the unit of content.
The permalink, which makes it possible to refer to a specific post.
RSS.
Cost per click (CPC) ads and contextual ads.

I don't want to paraphrase Fred's four points, since they are his points, and he makes them clearly in the post to which I've linked. Besides, the fact that I am responding to a specific AVC post, and enabling you to click over to it via its permalink, illustrates the first two of his points.

It's Fred's fourth aspect of Blogging 2.0 that concerns me. I'm hoping that Blogging 2.0, and, more generally, Web 2.0, will not be made unbearable by ads. My hope takes something of a knock when I visit the blog of one of the people Fred hails as an important builder of Blogging 2.0. When I visit Jason Calacanis' blog, the above-the-fold portion is so dominated by ads that I just want to get away from the page. If Jason is one of the architects of Blogging 2.0, and the entrance to his office is so bedecked with ill-matched fliers, then I fear that 2.0 is an ugly destination.

I suspect that I'm overreacting to one blog, which is just one of the web sites with which just one of the people seen as important to Blogging 2.0 is associated. My reaction centres only on the fourth of Fred's four differences, and I certainly don't deny the importance of each of the first three. Neither do I deny the importance of the fourth; there's a lot more unobtrusive and even useful advertising on the web than there used to be. I think that my (over)reaction is driven in part by the vehemence of Jason's post on Bloglines, which was driven in part by his objection to Bloglines selling advertising against his blog.

I just hope that, if it's useful to talk of version 2.0 of blogging, or of the web, then the new version will not be rendered unbearable by ads.

Blogger: Wishes, etc.

2005-02-10T13:12:00.000-05:00

This post is a list of features I'd like to see in Blogger, the tool I use for this blog. I don't think that there's anything that will surprise support at Blogger, or anyone who's looked around the blogosphere a while, but here's the list, followed by comments on some of the items on it.

Tagging, or something that can be picked up by Technorati tagging and other uses of tagging. This could take the form of categories or keywords; either of these means of implementing tagging would be fine with me. Providing both would be ideal.
Trackback.
Some kind of forum for the Blogger/Blogspot community to discuss wishlist items such as these. Yes, this is a meta-wishlist item.
Categories or keywords. This would have been on my wishlist even before tagging took off, since it makes large blog archives more searchable.

Of these, I'd rate tagging as overwhelmingly the most urgent. If I want to use trackback, I can get it from Haloscan, and in fact I've done just that. I don't know of any equally convienient way of using tagging. The nearest thing I've found via Google is this hack from Laura Limay at limon, but I don't think that it would work for me.

The following will work, and in fact is illustrated by the current post. But it's far too clumsy and laborious to be called a hack. (I believe the term is kludge.) It's based on the procedure described by Technorati.

First, include in the post you want to tag html such as the following.

<p>Technorati tag: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/wishlist" rel="tag">wishlist</a>

You can include something like the above in a post template for your blog (see the bottom of the Settings/Formatting page).

Of course, you can make the text on your page anything you want, and can use multiple tags. That's what I've done at the end of this very post, so you can view the html source for an example.

Then, after you've posted to your blog, you need to ping Technorati (or whatever site(s) you need to make aware of your tags). You currently need to do this manually. It would be helpful if Blogger allowed you to automate this. I've put the link to the ping page on my bookmarks toolbar.

So you can use tagging with Blogger is you want to. But even with the shortcuts I've suggested (post template in Blogger, ping link on the toolbar) it's rather... I come back to the word laborious. This means that Blogger pages will tend go untagged, and so will not be accessible to some from Technorati and other sites that use tagging. It may be a factor driving bloggers from Blogger to rival tools that implement categories or keywords.

Tags: blogger, tagging, trackback, wishlist.

Update, the following day. It seems that the bookmarklet described in this post from Matt at Oddiophile prompts you for tags and then generates the html code. Let's use it to add another tag or two below...

Technorati Tags: bookmarklet, tag

I checked Matt's bookmarklet by previewing the post and clicking on the link to bookmarklet. The first (i.e. at the time most recent) link Technorati listed told me about this post from Ted at Humanize the Earth. Ted had a thought that had also occurred to me: hey, maybe you can use del.icio.us tags to make your Blogger blog seem to have categories, and hence tags. But Ted actually did something about it!

I think that I will use Matt's bookmarket. I link to Ted's as well because some may prefer it due to the integration with del.icio.us. Thanks to both Matt and Ted for sharing!

In closing... I still think that this belongs in Blogger itself, and indeed in any blogging tool other then very small simple ones.

What to sell? Ads or firm?

2005-02-10T11:05:00.000-05:00

Yes, this is another post about the acquisition of Bloglines by Ask Jeeves. It's also about one of the main themes of this blog. How do you make money when your product is free of charge?

Making money from free stuff is particularly difficult when you face competitors that are either: also charging zero; or huge . The difficulty increases dramatically when some of your competitors, or likely future competitors, come into both these categories, that is, they are huge, and they change zero for the product that competes with yours.

This is course is one of the big general challanges of e-business. The web includes giants like Google, MSN, and Yahoo. It also includes a vast amount of content, tools, and other stuff available at no charge.

It is also a big challenge in the specific case of Bloglines and of Mark Fletcher. Notice that I say is rather than was. Mark still heads Bloglines. Bloglines, the web-based aggregator, is still owned by a firm, as opposed to a nonprofit. The difference is that it's now owned by a firm that is larger, offers a broader base of products, and sells shares (ASKJ on Nasdaq). So the challenge remains, although the response to it may well be, and probably should be, different now that Bloglines is a subunit of a large organization.

In particular, one way of attempting to meet the challenge is by selling advertising. Bloglines feeds (pun intended, but probably far from original, so track down the person who did it first and shoot them) a lot of people. For example, it knows about me, because it keeps my blogroll and clipblog. It probably tracks how I use this blogroll. It sounds as though contextual advertising could provide a good revenue stream for Bloglines. This is one of the things that doesn't change with the acquisition.

There are of course arguments against Bloglines advertising to its users as it feeds them. Its users might be upset. I certainly would be, unless the contextual advertising was both highly unobtrusive and highly relevant. On the other end of Bloglines' supply chain, the bloggers might be upset. Jason Calacanis certainly would be. In this forceful post, he explains why in no uncertain terms, and also argues that Bloglines "is not a business."

Richard MacManus takes Jason's post, blends it with some of his own previous thoughts, throws in some seasoning, and cooks up the post at Read/Write Web most likely to be made into a movie by Oliver Stone. He posits that Mark may have deliberately "let slip" the prospect of adverts on Bloglines in order to test the waters without actually getting wet. Seeing the reaction from Jason and others, Mark decided that he couldn't turn Bloglines into a money-making business, and that he should sell the firm while he could get a good price for it.

So, more generally, you've grown your web-based business by giving away your product. You've got lots of customers, and lots of customer data. Is advertising to your customers a route to profit, or just a way of alienating them and other stakeholders? How do you find out whether advertising will work without actually doing it? If it won't work, do you have any good options, other than selling the business? Will the acquirer be able to make use of it as a broader and profitable range of businesses?

Others on ASKJ/Bloglines

2005-02-08T21:35:00.000-05:00

Not surprisingly, it seems as though everyone and his blog is weighing on the deal. Among those commenting are:

Jim Lanzone at the Ask Jeeves blog.
John Battelle at his SearchBlog. He estimated that the deal was worth $25M or more, but reports having subsequently been told that it was nearer to $14M.
Charlene Li of Forrester considers the deal a "win-win."
Allen Weiner of Gartner views the deal as a salvo in the "battle for the blogosphere" between the major portals due to rage in 2005. Obviously, the majors include Google, MSN, and Yahoo. During his short article, Weiner seems to change his mind about whether Ask Jeeves is also a major portal.

See also my posts/links of earlier today.

Bloglines CEO Perspective

2005-02-08T13:50:00.000-05:00

Mark Fletcher, in addition to being CEO of Bloglines, writes a blog. This post at wingedpig.com (wonderful domain name!) is a sort of personal FAQ from Mark about the Ask Jeeves deal.

I (Andrew) did, in my previous post, promise incisive commentary. But, for now at least, you'll have to make do with the following. I'll comment on each of the three points from the numbered list in Mark's post, and also on a fourth point that he makes.

Mark is staying with Bloglines/ASKJ. Good news! But good luck to him if he changes his mind. His current bio makes him sound like a founder/entrepreneur type. He did leave his previous firm, ONElist, when it was acquired by Yahoo.
Bloglines will remain at bloglines.com, doing "business as usual." Good news, and I believe it, at least for the short term. I don't think that ASKJ bought Bloglines in order to mess with success.
What will change is that Bloglines will have access to more resources. Mark mentions in particular ASKJ's Teoma search technology. I haven't made a particular study of web search, and so I don't know how good ASKJ's technology is compared with, say, Google.
Mark describes the fit between the two firms. In particular, he emphasizes "the start-up/fast moving mentality" of Ask Jeeves, while noting that this is his subjective impression. I suspect that the extent to which it remains his impression will determine whether he stays, or whether he leaves to start another new venture.

In some ways, this deal seems good for each side. ASKJ gets the leading aggregator, at a time when blogging is huge and still growing. Bloglines may well be at a point in its impressive growth at which it could really use more resources, in technological, financial, and other terms.

On the other hand, I have my doubts about the the new, larger, firm--mainly in terms of finance and in terms of ASKJ's position in its main market: search. Competition in search is harsh, with Google as the gorilla, and Microsoft and Yahoo each representing, to say the least, a strong competitor. Will ASKJ remain healthy enough to provide Bloglines with the resources it needs? Will it, over the longer term, be able to retain Mark Fletcher and other factors that made Bloglines what it is today?

My last doubt is rooted in one of the main themes of this blog. How can one make money from free stuff? Each of Ask Jeeves and Bloglines is a free service, with competition including other free services. Will the combined firm be able to turn technology and customer eyeballs into profits?

In closing, I'll be explicit about the perspective from which I am writing this. I am a user of Bloglines. I have previously posted about its success in becoming the leader in the aggregator market. I wish Bloglines, and Mark, well. My impression of Mark, from his blog and from other online sources, is very positive. I don't know him personally.

Ask Jeeves Buys Bloglines

2005-02-08T08:44:00.000-05:00

This news broke over the weekend. Now it's official. Ask Jeeves (Nasdaq: ASKJ) has acquired Bloglines.

Each of the two firms (actually, now one firm) has posted about the deal. From Bloglines, there's a press release, and a letter to subscribers/FAQ. From ASKJ, there's a press release.

Incisive commentary to follow...

Happy Chinese New Year!

2005-02-05T23:28:00.000-05:00

Rooster!,
originally uploaded by kmikeym.

The year of the rooster starts on February 9. Here's an appropriate and cool image; the thumbnail links over to the photo's page at Flickr.

V-Day is on the Way

2005-02-04T12:50:00.000-05:00

With Valentine's day only 10 days away, it's time to start thinking about cards, gifts, .gifs, and .jpgs appropriate for the occasion. Such as this one:

You can find more images by the artist, Jason Sho Green, here. The link goes to the page at which you can buy cards from him. (The text link, that is; the image links to Jason's home page.)

At the time of writing, all the cards there are for V-day, which implies to me that the selection may change as different occasions approach. But, assuming that your click gets you to a page similar to the one currently up, I should warn (or promise) you that not all of the images are suitable for Grandma. Of the current V-day images, I particularly like #10, which is one of the unsuitable ones.

Because he's selling stuff, and because he's either smart or generous as well as talented, Jason allows, and in fact encourages, links to his work. It's usually silly to discourage use of your work. People can't buy it, enjoy it, or even experience it, if they don't find it.

Notice that I say (and emphasize) usually. There are exceptions. And even when you want to encourage use of your work, you may wish to set limits on the use. That's why I like Creative Commons, and have a "CC: some rights reserved" button in the sidebar of this and other blogs.

I found Jason's work by following the link from this post by Randa at the moorishgirl blog.

MoFo and the Global Economy

2005-02-02T11:44:00.000-05:00

MoFo is, among other things, the nickname of the law firm Morrison & Foerster. The web site is mofo.com, and it includes this page about the mofo nickname. As you can see if you follow the link, the top of each page identifies the firm as MoFo: lawyers for the global economy. Isn't that hilarious?

I mean, come on, global economy! Barriers to international trade still include: tariffs, terror, anti-terror, currency exchange, etc. We don't have a single global economy, and I doubt that we ever will. Now, I agree that we see evidence of globalization: the reduction in barriers to trade and other interactions between countries. The Euro is one example. But it's the Euro, not the Globo, or whatever ugly name would be applied to the world currency we will probably never have, at least not in the current century.

I have a list of words I think are used too often, and too loosely, often in an attempt to make one's words sound more important than they really are. The list includes: strategic, synergy, and, of course, global. Anyone else have a similar list?

Bloggie votes due Feb 3

2005-02-01T17:20:00.000-05:00

Hey, that's Thursday! So if you intend to vote, go to the 2005 Bloggies page. My only firm voting intention at the moment is for Flickr as best application. I'll have to surf around the nominees in some of the other categories, which should be fun.

Having said that, I must admit to being a skeptic about awards. Of the many data I could point to in support of this, I prefer to use the 1976 Oscar for best picture. It went to Rocky, one of the worst movies I've ever sat all the way through. Other nominees included Taxi Driver and Network. It seems appropriate to use as a link for this the relevant page at Pop Culture Madness.

Web 2.0 Definition(s)

2005-02-01T13:18:00.000-05:00

"Web 2.0" is a much-flung-about buzzphrase these days. But what does it mean? Richard MacManus addresses this question in a recent post to his excellent blog, Read/Write web.

Warning: if you are perplexed by the term "Web 2.0," Richard's post is unlikely to unperplex you. It includes no fewer than 11 definitions, including his own favorite.

Well I prefer the succinct "The Web as Platform", because I can then fill in the blanks depending on who I'm talking to. For corporate people, the Web is a platform for business. For marketers, the Web is a platform for communications. For journalists, the Web is a platform for new media. For geeks, the Web is a platform for software development. And so on.

What I'd like to see is an explanation of the geek definition that makes it interesting and relevant to corporate people, journalists, etc. I think that web as a platform for software development is relevant to such (mainly) non-technical audiences, or at least to portions of them. Chances are, someone has probably written a good, accessible account of why it's relevant. Now, if someone would give me the link...

Inside Higher Ed Web Site

2005-02-01T11:47:00.000-05:00

Insider Higher Ed is a new "online source for news, opinion and career advice and services for all of higher education." It states as underlying principles excellence, accessibility, and community. The second of these includes making all content free of charge.

I found out about IHE at the Crooked Timber blog, in a post that compares IHE with The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Copyright, my ass!

2005-01-31T22:25:00.000-05:00

Intellectual property will be a recurrent topic on this blog. It is central to this post, which is about an opinion written by Chief Judge Carolyn Dineen King of the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals. It sounds serious so far, doesn't it?

Well, D.J. Jubilee was apparently serious when he claimed that his copyright on his song 1997 "Back That Ass Up" had been infringed by Juvenile's similarly-titled hit of the same year. I found much to love in the "financial news" article on the case, but I was particularly enamoured of this bit:

Nathan Gisclair, a partner in New Orleans' Montgomery Barnett Brown Read Hammond & Mintz who represents D.J. Jubilee, says the opinion is disappointing -- it gives little guidance on how plaintiffs should litigate cases such as this one in the future.

Future cases such as this one? I look forward to them!

I became aware of the case via this post on Boing Boing a few days ago. I hesitated to re-blog something that had appeared on such a (deservedly) popular blog, but just couldn't resist. Now, I should make sure before I publish this that I remembered to put the comma in the post title...

Penguins and Pictures

2005-01-30T14:28:00.000-05:00

Christmas Penguins, Japan,
originally uploaded by Piero Sierra.

Inspried by Tux, I went looking for images of penguins at Flickr.com, a site for storing and sharing photos on the web. A basic account there is free of charge. You don't even have to have an account to browse photos. But you may, like me, decide that it's worth having an account once you check the site out.

Typing of Tux...

2005-01-28T17:15:00.000-05:00

Peter Penguin resembles Tux,
originally uploaded by Damian Cugley.

How could I have missed this when in England for the new year? Marks & Spencer sold these guys as Peter Penguin, but this is obviously Tux in deep chocolate cover.

Linux at Business Week

2005-01-28T17:10:00.000-05:00

Linux has been the Business Week cover story a couple of times now. BW online includes for free (no registration required, either) the recent feature on "Linux Inc." and the March 2003 feature on "The Linux Uprising." I particularly like the cover picture from the uprising story, which shows Tux, Linux' mascot penguin, glaring with flyswatter in flipper at the Microsoft butterfly.

Perhaps the reason Linux has made the cover of BW is that Tux is cuter than most CEOs. Or perhaps it's because BW is "tech-savvy," or some such horrible phrase. They even have blogs; let's go to The Tech Beat. Hang on, why can't I just sub with bloglines from my toolbar, and why doesn't that funny button appear at the bottom right of my Firefox window? Oh all right, I'll go to their ugly XML to subscribe.

Leaders: Blogger and Bloglines

2005-01-28T13:40:00.000-05:00

There have been recent studies of some of the markets for blog-related tools. Elise Bauer computed a usage index for blog publishing tools, and estimated that Blogger leads, with 30% of the market. Richard McManus, using data from his own blog and from Feedburner, looked at the market for aggregators, and identifies Bloglines as the leader, with 33% (Feedburner stats, or 51% using his own stats). While the authors are quick to add caveats to their numbers, the studies are interesting, and probably accurate in their identification of the leaders in the publisher and aggregator markets.

So I thought it would be interesting to identify similarities between Blogger and Bloglines, the leaders in their respective markets. Each is:

Free of charge (although neither is "free software" - see the last bullet of this list.
Web-based, not requiring any software to be installed, or data maintained, on the client side.
Simple to use.
Apparently reaping an early-mover advantage. According to Rebecca Blood's history of blogging, Blogger was launched in 1999, the year that blogging exploded. However, it was not the first or only blogging tool released that year. Bloglines "debuted the world's first free online service for tracking and reading websites and weblogs" on July 1, 2003 (press release), and so had a first-mover advantage, rather than "only" an early-mover advantage.
Proprietary software, rather than free/open source software. However, the Bloglines FAQ proclaims that the firm proudly uses and supports Linux, Apache, and other free/open source software.

So it seems that what you have to do to lead your segment of the blog software market is to take the risk of developing and releasing early, make your product free of charge (throwing in hosting as well if your product is a publishing tool), and emphasize ease of use. Now, how can you make money from that? One answer is that you might be bought by Google (as Blogger was). More answers, and a lot more questions, in future posts...

By the way, I currently use both Blogger (obviously!) and Bloglines, for reasons explained by the first three points on the above list. I've used a few other tools to see what they offer. I suspect that I will have a harder look at some of the less simple blog publishing tools at some point soonish.

The End of Free?

2005-01-27T23:40:00.000-05:00

I've just been drafting a post on "the free web," using Blogger, a tool that I choose in part because it is free of charge. It was therefore an interesting time to stumble across The End of Free, a blog chronicling a move from free to fee as the basis for online business models, and to note that the first posts were made by Evan Williams, co-founder and former CEO of Blogger.

The blog itself is less provocative than its title. It is about the growth of paid subscriptions and other non-free models on the web. It does not predict the extinction of no-charge models.

State of the Sidebar

2005-01-26T23:40:00.001-05:00

So, what goes in the sidebar? Among the things that the Blogger-supplied template gives me by default are Recent Posts and Archive, each of which makes sense to keep. I think that a archiving by month (the default) will be appropriate, since I doubt that I'll be blogging here frequently enough to merit weekly archiving.

I've replaced the Blogger profile with a link to my home page at my place of work, since the profile is oriented toward a different and less work-related blog. What about other links?

I decided to manage most of the links through del.icio.us. There are two benefits to this. First, it directs my readers to del.icio.us, which they will probably find interesting. Second, it makes it easy for me to maintain the links for this blog, since it's just a matter of setting up links and tags at del.icio.us, which is less cumbersome than editing the template for the blog. On the other hand, it means that readers interested in the links have an extra site to navigate through, and I have less control over the way the links look at del.icio.us than I do over the Blogger template.

The only other initial link, besides the home page and del.icio.us, is to the Atom feed, which Blogger automatically sets up. I'm not sure that this link is necessary, since most people who want to subscribe to a blog do so using a tool that handles the feed url for them (e.g., Bloglines or Firefox).

Then there are the Cool Buttons, each of which is really a link to a site that happens to provide buttons. First is the Blogger button, which arrived with the template. I don't feel inclined to remove it, since Blogger is kind enough to provide both publishing tools and hosting at no charge. Then there's Haloscan, which I use to add trackback to Blogger, which doesn't currently provide it. (If you're wondering what this is, check out Haloscan's trackback FAQ.)

Creative Commons is a fine organization which provides and explains the license under which I publish this blog. Clicking on the CC button will take you to the human-readable summary of the license. The Firefox button is there for a few reasons. It's my browser of choice. It's free/open source software (much more about this in future posts to this blog). Among the fine features of Firefox I used is tabbed browsing. Among the fine features I don't use is Live Bookmarks, which makes it particularly easy to follow blogs in Firefox.

I use Bloglines to read blogs. It's browser-independent, free of charge (although it is not free/open source), and easy to use. The button inviting you to subscribe to this blog through Bloglines is the last thing on the sidebar.

Update, the following morning: a few edits to the above, and two things to add. First, if you're reading this blog through an aggregator such as Bloglines, you won't see the sidebar discussed in this post. Second, this does seem a little like gazing at the navel of one's blog, but this is one of the many blogs that is to some extent about blogging.

Here we go...

2005-01-26T23:40:00.000-05:00

Early posts here will include what I mean by "the free web" and what I find useful, interesting, or otherwise good about blogging. But this evening, I'll just get things started with this short post, and a tinker with the template (the starting point for which was the Minima template provided by Blogger).