23 October 2002

Making Money Through Blogging Meg Hourihan -- When people talk about making money through their blogs, their discussions focus on blog content and explore donations, advertising, or some type of sponsorship model as the means to compensate bloggers. Very little progress has been made towards finding viable economic models because people still think of Weblogs as personal sites. Most people don't blog full-time. They learn to blog to supplement genre-specific content that complements an existing marketing message. That new content attracts customers, increases revenues, and makes the blogging employee more productive. That's making money through blogging.

Google's Secret GUI Sauce Revealed Mark Hurst -- Tim Kirby pointed out Marissa Mayer's insights on Google's lean, unintimidating and highly successful interface design. "When you see a knife with all 681 functions opened up, you're terrified. That's how other sites are. You're scared to use them. Google has that same level of complexity, but we have a simple and functional interface on it, like the Swiss Army knife closed."

Radio Outliner Working with Movable Type Dave Winer -- Work is underway that rewrites Dave's weblog outliner so it works with Movable Type. I have the outliner saving, although the formatting is really sucky. Adam Curry emails to remind me that he wants this to work with Radio and Manila. But first I want to make it work with Movable Type. Everyone will expect that it will work with our own blogging stuff. The chance to blow people's minds is to show it working through the open interface of a competitor's product. This is how we show web services working, as they were always supposed to, eliminating lock-in, allowing us to enhance each others' products, and to take the fear out of serving our customers. The BigCo's don't get this, they patent stuff and have powwow's among execs who have no idea what the software is used for. Heh. In the meantime us little folk are building a market. This is a big deal. Tim Kirby is watching it. So is Emily Dubberley. "Mena Trott Talks Movable Type" to South-by-Southwest Interactive, 22 Oct 02.

RSS Validator Top of Blogdex, Top of Daypop Sam Ruby -- Perhaps in a small way, the world is a better place today than it was yesterday. RSS Validator. Top of blogdex. Top of daypop. Wow. [dive into mark/further reading]

"Space Aliens Signed the Moon Over to Me" BOING BOING -- "Space Aliens Signed the Moon Over to Me... and I Have the Contract to Prove It!". Concern over the ethics of space commercialisation have become a bona fide meme with coverage from The Weekly World News. [Mr.] Stanford claims the 8- by 10-inch document, which is written in a language not known on Earth, entitles him to full ownership of the moon and all materials within a 500-mile radius of the orb’s surface... [he] insists that he is owed royalties on any television, film, or printed material bearing the likeness of his property or songs using the word moon in their title, including the movie Man in the Moon, and popular songs like Moon River.

How to Remove Outlook and Its Costs SMART MOBS -- Mitch Kapor: "Up Periscope!". The few key words there are "securely" and "without... expensive server computers." This sounds like real, secure Peer-to-Peer groupware, and -- as Gillmor observes -- it is potentially a big deal. Think of having a good and inexpensive alternative to Microsoft's bloated, insecure, and costly Outlook and Exchange products and attendant infrastructure. Then realize that Microsoft's email and calendaring software have many firms and organizations locked into Microsoft's software upgrade extortion. Kapor, founder of the software company that sold the influential and hugely successful Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program in the 1980s, is funding the initial work through a non-profit foundation.

Disability Act Does Not Cover Web IA SLASH -- In a bit of troubling news, the court has ruled that the Disabilities Act doesn't cover the Web. Mark , Christina and Adam are discussing this US court ruling affecting accessibility of web sites. This article in news.com covers the ruling.

Emily Dubberley in Dublin DUBLIN -- Emily Dubberley visits Dublin to finish her novel. Plus, she is on Newstalk 106 on Friday (25 Oct 02) with Daire O'Brien. But you have to question her true motivation as she also has a short list that requires her to inspect all Dublin pubs frequented by journos and as she sets up her cantenna array to sniff open WiFi hotspots. Actually, I think I'd like to do those things as well. Hope she blogs her observations as a kind of WiFi Pub Crawl.