Category: Blogging

This would be a nifty application for city-based arts festivals, like the Edinburgh Festival or SXSW.
The programmers could encode the program by venue. Then individual bloggers could create entries related to performances and plans at a particular place.

The first thing people are doing with GeoUrls is mapping blogs — a standard way of doing what nycblogger does — so you can see which bloggers are in a city or a neighborhood.
Other nifty applications would turn this around and create blog entries for a place — a spot on a hiking trail or a restaurant.
This seems like an open version of the HP CoolTown scheme to give urls to places. But simpler and better. Just a layer of location ID — not tied to hardware platform and device interaction model.
Lots of LazyWeb fodder.

Welcome to my new blog home. I’m excited to be here, with search, category archives, integrated comments, and the chance to play around with MovableType hackery.
I still need to tweak the categorization of some of the older posts; should be cleared up in the next few days. The book archive is working — click the book category at right and see a list of all the book reviews on the site. (Yay!)
Please let me know what you think; and please update your blogroll or bookmarks if you haven’t already. Comments and suggestions welcome.

The reason I get all all excited about weblog clustering is that the “winner-takes-most” aspect of the log scale graph is NOT what is most interesting about weblog networks.
If it were, then the net would be like network television — a few top broadcasters, and an infinite number of passive viewers.
It’s not. The weblog network is a mesh of communities with overlapping and shifting memberships; each subcommunity has its connectors and popular voices.
When we focus on identifying the “most central node” of the network, we turn a world with multiple centers into a hierarchy.

In a comment on the post below, Howard Greenstein refers to nycbloggers, a site that aggregates New York blogs. I love the map that locates NYC bloggers by proximity to subway stops.
Relates to a conversation I was having with Peter Merholz about sites for local blogs, which he writes about here. One of Peter’s insights is that blogs are a great way to report trivia that gets bypassed by traditional media: “I’d love to know that I ought to avoid the intersection of Sacramento and Oregon because there’s a massive pothole.”
The comments to Peterme’s post include links to other regional blog sites, including Los Angeles and the UK.

Ross Mayfield writes about some nifty work by Valdis Krebs to map the network of relationships at Ryze, an online business networking group, and the weblog tribe on Ryze.
Here’s some more analysis that would be really interesting:
a) identify clusters of blogs — blogs that share a number of blogroll blogs in common (first filter out the most popular blogs).
b) use text analysis to identify the topics the clusters have in common by identifying words they use much more frequently than average.
This would identify groups of New York bloggers, Java bloggers, warbloggers, etc. Groups wouldn’t be mutually exclusive; lots of people would belong to more than one cluster.
Blogrolling.com exports blogrolls in RSS and OPML format, so that might be a workable dataset. They have 6915 blogrolls with 108278 links.
The math to do this is pretty far over my head — so this one goes out to the Lazyweb!

From a comment to Mitch Kapor’s Chandler weblog.
DUCKY’S LAWS OF EMAIL
1. People are more efficient when related messages are grouped together and the groups are in rough priority order.
2. People want to be able to see all their “to-do” messages — ones that they need to read, respond to, or act upon — easily.
3. (or maybe 2b). When a message has no more pending actions, people want to remove it from their list of “to-do” messages.
4. People want to execute actions with one or fewer clicks.
5. Old messages are a valuable resource.
6. The faster and better a Search tool is, the less important it is to file messaages.
7. Fuzzy-logic or “scoring” filters are much more accurate than the “sudden death” filters that most email clients now have.
8. Most people won’t customize their own setup, but are usually willing to import customizations that other people have made.
9. Messages that are to you and only you are usually more important than messages where you’re one of many recipients.
10. Some people (e.g. customer service reps) answer the same questions over and over, but computers are not quite smart enough to be able to figure out which response is appropriate.
and MORE

On an experimental MovableType weblog I’ve been playing with comments syndication. I would love to be able to subscribe to comments when I’m following a conversation, instead of manually pinging the weblog, and would be happy to syndicate comments feeds to others.
So far the “comments syndication” examples I’ve seen from Bill Kearney and Phil Ringnalda have involved syndicating all of the comments for a given weblog.
Instead I’d like to be able to syndicate and subscribe to a single conversation at a time — isn’t that how you particate in blogconversations?
I’m still futzing with it, will let you know when and if something works.

follow up to a thread at the Austin bloggers meeting. Somebody at O’Reilly read Mark Pilgrim’s blog and offered him a column at XML.com. Where he wrote this transparently clear introduction to RSS.

People get to my site searching for Jumpline and “leather bound Moby Dick and Kenmore vacuum cleaner manual.
Unfortunately for those visitors, Google doesn’t have a filter for sarcasm and irony.