Friday, February 21, 2003

Blog Basics "What the heck is a weblog, anyway?" Let's step back and ask the question "What is a website?" This may seem like a rhetorical question, but can you answer it in one paragraph? Since you're reading this, you're probably very comfortable with the Internet and the concept of the web, but try to answer this question like your grandma just asked it. I don't think it's easy to describe simply! But I'll give it a shot anyway. Here's one answer. The Internet refers to all all the connectioned computers around the world. A website is a particular point within the Internet space, where knowledge can be found and commerce can occur. Like going to a library or a store, you must "go" to a website using a browse function on your computer. OK, given that answer, let's answer the original question. A weblog is a website that streams to your desktop. It can still contain knowledge and can still allow commerce to occur, but instead of you going to the website, the contents of the website come to you using an aggregate function on your computer. Why is the notion of a website that comes to you significant? TIME! Once I've identified the websites on the Internet that I want track, I want to tell my computer to do the grunt work of tracking the website and telling me when new information is available. Weblogs are easy to both content producers and content consumers! 5:12:51 PM

Blosxom 2.0 beta 1 I suspect there’s really no need for preamble. If you’ve been reading my blog over the past few weeks, you’ve more than seen it coming. Here’s Blosxom 2.0 beta 1, replete with sample plugins for: RSS 1.0, Weblogs.com Ping, Foreshortened, Tiki, Readme, Buy from Amazon, Lucene-Powered Search, and TrackBack count. :-p [raelity bytes] Indeed we have. It's amazing how much power Rael has squeezed out of a little bit o' code. I might need to reconsider bloxsom again. 5:10:34 PM

Turn RSS into speech and synch to your iPod Listen to your blogroll as your commute into work... VoiceBox is a little OS X app that converts text files to AIFF files of computer-generated speech, and supports turning the output of your RSS aggregator into an audio file that is automatically synched to your iPod. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, James!) [Boing Boing] 9:19:23 AM

Blogspot shows ads via Google The first sign of a google/blogger integration seems to be textads on Blogspot that are keyed off words used in posts. Take a look at these random blogspot examples: one, two, three. Are these new targetted ads just the tip of the iceberg, or the real reason for the buyout of Blogger's content? [Blogroots] It certainly does look interesting... 9:19:19 AM