Monday, February 24, 2003

"Almost nobody reads blogs anymo[r]e," says Marc Canter, "Everything comes in through RSS." Actually, a tiny technical elite reads RSS. Everyone else reads on the web. Maybe that will change. I'm not sure. [evhead] This is very true. Are we really so far ahead of the curve on this one? 9:18:09 PM

Hollyblog - Can Hollywood Get Blogging? The blogging phenomenon has taken off for two reasons. First, there are fewer technical barriers to posting content, and second there is little editorial control of the content. The continuing discussion of journalism and blogging is trying to figure out how these two worlds intersect. Salon is running a story about a new independent film that is being produced by a few folks who are into blogging. As part of the plan to get publicity for the film (which appears to be working) they hired a blogger to hang out on the set and blog the experience. The question, then, is does Hollywood get blogging? The answer, in this case, is "not yet". Everyone on the set wants input into what the blogger is writing, which is delaying any posts from going up for approximately three weeks. The blogger has a list of rules over what she can and can't write about, and is mostly being told to stay out of the way. On the whole, it sounds like the publicity stunt is more around this attempt to blog, rather than the blog itself. [Techdirt] What this blog experience illustrates is that when you put a journalist inside an organization, there are often going to be controls over the content being produced, and in fact, the journalist becomes more a copy editor for the marketing department than a reporter for the news department. Nothing wrong with that, mind you. The movie Adaptation has a blog which I thought was very interesting. 9:48:50 AM

Google API terms Ug. I can't imagine Google doesn't want to search across all weblogs. They should change this language to remove the ambiguity. If you're using a Google API with your weblog system, like the MTGoogleSearch tags for Movable Type or google.macros.box for Radio Userland, you might wish to re-read this section of the Google Web APIs Terms of Service: And you may not use the search results provided by the Google Web APIs service with an existing product or service that competes with products or services offered by Google. It's probably worth considering whether you're in danger of violating the terms. Most likely, you're not, as you'd have to offer weblogging services of your own that used the Google API to compete with Blogger, but it's certainly something that seems like it could raise an issue for how these APIs are implemented. [Anil Dash] 9:29:16 AM