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“This Would Make A Really Great Blog Post…”

A <a href="http://xkcd.com/c77.html">comic from XKCD</a>: <blockquote>“I feel like I'm wasting my life on the internet. Let's walk around the world.” “Sounds good.” [panels showing the world's great beauty, a truly grand adventure] “And yet all I can think of is 'this will make for a great Livejournal entry.'”</blockquote> » about 100 words

We Just Have To Go Do The Work

Nicholas Lemann, in a story on blogging and citizen journalism in the August 7 issue of The New Yorker: [N]ew media in their fresh youth [produce] a distinctive, hot-tempered rhetorical style. …transformative in their capabilities…a mass medium with a short lead time — cheap…and easily accessible to people of all classes and political inclinations. And […] » about 400 words

Blogging From Basements

My buddy Cliff emailed me excited about the following quote he found on the Yahoo Finance message boards: Sun vs Dell All you need to know about Dell & Sun was predicted 8 months ago by some blogger in his parent’s basement. The draft ads are cool: http://spiralbound.net/2005/09/15/sun-talks-some-smack/ How come the big brokerage house analysts […] » about 100 words

Higher Ed Blog Con (and other things I should have posted about last month)

I meant to post about this weeks ago, but HigherEd BlogCon has now come and gone. It had sections on teaching, libraries, CRM, and web development. (Aside: why must we call it “admissions, alumni relations, and communications & marketing” instead of the easier to swallow “CRM”?) The “events” are over, but everything is online, and […] » about 200 words

The Web Is Not A One-Way Medium

Anybody who questioned the Pew Internet and American Life report about how teens use the internet and how they expect conversations and interactivity from the online services they use might do well to take a look at this comment on my Chernobyl Tour story: Student Looking for Info that your not give us February 3rd, […] » about 300 words

To Blog Or Not To Blog

A friend revealed his reticence to blogging recently by explaining that he didn’t want to create a trail of work and opinions that could limit his future career choices. Fair point, perhaps. We’ve all heard stories of bloggers who’ve lost jobs as a result of the content of their posts. And if you believe the […] » about 300 words

Who’s Afraid Of Wikipedia?

Arguments about Wikipedia‘s value and authority will rage for quite a while, but it’s interesting to see where the lines are being drawn. On the one had we’ve got a 12 year-old pointing out errors in Encyclopaedia Britannica (via Many2Many) and now on the other side we’ve got John Seigenthaler, a former editorial page editor […] » about 500 words

Blog Value

The sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL last month for $25+ million got a lot of bloggers excited. Tristan Louis did the math and put the sale value into perspective against the number of incoming links the the Weblogs Inc. properties. It’s an interesting assertion of the value of the Google Economy, no?

The various properties have a total of almost 50,000 incoming links, which work out to being worth between about $500 and $900 each, depending on the actual sale price, which everybody’s mum about.

So Dane Carlson created this (now broken) how much is my blog worth? app based on those numbers and powered by the Technorati API. Zach took a stern look at it (while it was working) and decided the numbers probably represent the gross ad revenues of a blog over four years (or two years with strong growth).

Tech Tuesdays: Blogs and Blogging

Note: these are my presentation notes for a brown bag discussion with library faculty and university IT staff today. This may become a series…[[pageindex]] More: my presentation slides and the Daily Show video. Introduction Public awareness of blogs seems to begin during the years of campaigning leading up to the 2004 election, but many people […] » about 1400 words

bsuite_geocode Plugin For WordPress

I’m a big fan of the WP Geo plugin, but I want more. My biggest complaint is that I want to insert coordinates using Google Maps or MultiMap URLs, rather than insert them in the modified story editor. So I wrote a bit of code that reads through the URLs in a post, finds the […] » about 400 words

Editing WordPress “Pages” Via XML-RPC

WordPress‘s Pages open the door to using WP as a content management system. Unfortunately, Pages can’t be edited via XML-RPC blogging apps like Ecto. This might be a good thing, but I’m foolhardy enough to try working around it. Here’s how: Find a text editor you like and open up the wp-includes/functions-post.php file. in the […] » about 300 words

Linking Bias

Danah Boyd posted about the biases of links over at Many2Many the other day. She looked for patterns in a random set of 500 blogs tracked by Technorati as well as the 100 top blogs tracked by Technorati. She found patterns in who keeps blogrolls and who is in them, as well as patterns about how bloggers link in context and who they link to.

The patterns Boyd points to would certainly effect the Google Economy, our way of creating and identifying value based on linking structures. And though she’s emphasizing gender differences, the patterns show broad differences in linking patterns between content types as well.

Discussion?

Organizational/Institutional Blogging Done Right

Jenny Levine is talking about an example of The Perfect Library Blog over at The Shifted Librarian.

The posts are written in the first person and in a conversational tone, with the author’s first name to help stress the people in the library. The staff isn’t afraid to note problems with the new catalog, the web site, or anything else. Full transparency — nice. You can feel the level of trust building online. They respond to every comment that needs it, whether it’s a criticism, question, or suggestion. And some of the comments are fantastic. Users are even helping debug the new catalog.

Jenny quotes some examples, go look.

bStat Features

UPDATE: bstat has been updated. bStat is a hit and search term stats tracking plugin for WordPress. In addition to reporting lists of popular stories and popular search terms, it will report recent comments and a unique “pulse” graph showing the activity for a story or the entire blog over time. The documentation for the […] » about 300 words

LibDev Launched

LibDev launched today. From the Welcome message there: LibDev is a site for those interested in libraries and networked information. Want to find a way to apply tags or social bookmarking to library content? Interested in how Wikipedia can serve libraries? Want to find a better way to do patron loads or talk about what […] » about 200 words

The Difference Between Progressive and Conservative Bloggers

David Rothman points to a Daily KOS story that points to a MyDD story titled “Aristocratic Right Wing Blogosphere Stagnating.” What’s the point? Of the top 40 political blogs, more than half are ‘liberal,’ and more importantly, they support community involvement — including basic features like comments — that the conservative blogs shun. of the […] » about 300 words

Throwing Google A Bone For Cliff

Cliff worries that his website, Spiralbound.net, doesn’t get indexed by Google often enough. He’s a good guy, so I figure I’ll prime the pump for him. Here, Google Google. Solaris Docs: Migrating Veritas Volume Manager disk groups between servers Solaris Docs: Solaris Disk Partition Layout Solaris Docs: Copying A Boot Drive Between Disks With Different […] » about 200 words

Fox and Conservative Pals Out Spreading More Slander and Libel

Welcome the flacks. I don’t get many comments on stories here at MaisonBisson, so I was interested when I found a comment to my story about the Outfoxed documentary just an hour after I’d posted it. Here’s my theory, and it’s supported by stories in Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media and Al Franken’s Lies: conservative […] » about 1200 words