Category: Blogging

Denise Howell and link trail…

You, dear reader, have pristine attention to detail, and never fail to close quotes in a blog post hyperlink.
I unfortunately slip every once in a while and leave off the close-quote, creating an unreadable post that can’t be removed from within the weblog editing interface. Fortunately, it’s possible to remove an offending post using the XML-RPC interface to the major blog tools.
Since I’m enough of a klutz to make this mistake on more than one weblog, I wrote a small python utility that can remove dead posts for an arbitrary weblog, using the form: kill(“blogconfig_filename”,badpostnumber). It builds on Mark Pilgrim’s python wrapper to the blogger API.
Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll post it for download. I will also be reassured to know of the existence of fellow keyboard klutzes.

Greg Elin, who really needs a weblog whose brand new weblog is here, from a mailing list
Most of the efforts of “electronic publishing” have been about how to make READING a better experience. But the READING experience is actually very well solved by linear text (e.g., books, articles, etc.) So the big money went into systems for more varied DISTRIBUTION of information already being written. And those systems failed.
But personal web sites were an instant hit — people paid money to have them. And now Weblogs appear to be here to stay. And Weblogs make it easier to WRITE. (They are also easy to read, but in large part because they are easy to WRITE.) The tools that have made money on the Internet/Web are tools that have improved the WRITING, the authorship, experience. (And the large media giants have only tried mostly to develop tools for the MANAGEMENT of written information, that is PUBLISHING WORKFLOWS.

None of the blog chat/ IM tools I’ve tried has worked so far — need to take the Yahoo button down at left because it doesn’t work.
The blogchat beta technically worked, but it took a multi-step process. Not only did you need to open a browser with your blog up, you needed to go to their site and log in with a password. Also, the sound notification feature requires flash, and I don’t have flash working in Mozilla. So you need to be looking at the window to see if someone is trying to talk to you. I’m never staring at a chat window, waiting for someone to talk to me! When I had it turned on, I missed people, and most of the time I never got around to turning it on during the day.
The Yahoo IM is easier. When your blog window is up and you’re live with IM, it shows that you’re available. But it doesn’t work. I never get the messages (if you tried to send me an IM I wasn’t ignoring you — I didn’t get the message).
If you’ve successfully troubleshot the Yahoo IM feature, please let me know.
I really like the idea of starting conversations with people who are reading the blog; wish I could get the tools to work.
(What is the past tense of troubleshoot by the way? Troubleshot? Troubleshooted? Debugged? Gotten the damn thing to work?)

Chis Gulker did some research, and found that…
If you want more readers, you should become famous and, lacking that, write frequent, long posts about stuff that you know well. Encourage inbound links, but don’t worry about outbound.

Here’s a little python script that can post to a blog entry via email.
It can be configured to post to any weblog that supports the blogger API, using the python wrapper written by Mark Pilgrim.

Why would someone build a model of the starship Enterprise in legos?
Because of micro-fame, says Tom Coates. On the internet, everyone can find the 15 other people who are interested in the same obscure hobby.
“There’s now an audience for the strangest and smallest little projects. All the disconnected people around the world who might find a Lego Enterprise cool are suddenly connected up. It’s worth making that tiny little thing you thought would be quite cool once, it’s worth writing the dumb ideas down that you thought no one would ever listen to. Because the odds of finding people who will care about them, will gel and relate to you, will celebrate your idea or project and make you famous (tiny-fame, micro-idol), is radically improved. The future will be full of dumb projects, tiny ideas, silly concepts – each celebrated by their own bespoke fan-base… And human creativity will have taken a massive leap forward…

New blog database shows who links to your blog and lets you watch your rank in the blog hierarchy; and provides a for-pay service to track your blog ranking.
What I like: lets you discover inbound links.
What I don’t like: treats blogs like a high school popularity contest.
The single-peaked popularity ranking obscures “subcommunity” patterns — there are knots of java bloggers and political bloggers and Austin bloggers; and plenty of bloggers who participate in multiple communities (like physical life).
When Blogdex started picking up a lot of Persian blogs in its top rankings, the designer considered reducing his coverage to english-language blogs only. That’s exactly wrong. The right thing to do is to reveal blog blogcommunities, and identify leading voices in those subcommunities. Hmm… Valdis Krebs probably knows how to do this…
And raw popularity seems beside the point. Some of my favorite blogs are low-traffic blogs from people who don’t do much self-promotion. This blog is a place to write about the various topics I’m interested in; not filtered by which topics are most popular.

It reads your blogroll and gives you recommended sites that you might like, using data from Phil Pearson

Blogstreet searches a database of 28,000 blogs.
Blogstreet can show which blogs are related to other blogs. If you type in a Blog URL, Blogstreet will show you a list of related blogs derived from their blogroll, and the list of blogs that blogroll it. This would be even more helpful if the neighborhood was assembled using topics and other references. After all, it’s easy enough to blogrollsurf already.