Radio UserLand, RSS, Weblog Tools and Design
Friday, September 06, 2002What Is This Thing?
For those of you new to web logs, the following might be helpful. The tweney article covers a few of the reasons I blog.
Understanding weblogs. I've been spending the past several weeks messing around with weblogs. Last week, the light bulb went on: I realized that a weblog could be a useful tool for personal knowledge management as well as for public communication. (published in tweney report, 2002-08-28) [tweney.com]
Updated About Page.
I updated the about this site page, incorporating changes with liveTopics and activeRenderer, and removing info about items that were no longer on the site. Request: if you're new to this site, take a look at the page and tell me if you can figure out what's going on. Since many people hitting this site aren't necessarily familiar with weblogs, I want to make sure that this is clear to non-bloggers. (That said, I'm interested in any opinions on the subject - so if you do know blogs and think I've missed something, let me know.)
Thanks.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]InstantOutlining Redux. 8/28/02; 10:14:02 PM by MB --Instant Outlining with IM protocols
- I've just downloaded a Jabber client (PSI) and opened an account on Jabber.org
- Next I've enabled Jabber in Radio's IM Notification preference page.
- Last step for now, I've unsubscribed from Dave and Jake's i/os, and resubscribed by clicking on their new OPML mug icons.
- Let's see what is going to happen...
- I obviously have to rework on my espressoCup macro in aR.
I released a new Radio feature this morning with some help from Jake to add monthly archives to Radio: "This feature lets you maintain monthly archive pages for your Radio weblog. Monthly archive pages contain all of the posts for a given month, so your readers can scan an entire month of posts on a single page." Example: Here's an archive page for lawrence's notebook with all the posts for August 2002. [lawrence's notebook]
Notification of instant outlining over instant messaging is now available. This is a big deal. Instant outlines require rapid delivery in order to live up to the name instant. That is easily possible using an RCS and Radio in a permissive environment (on a LAN for example) via publication/subscription built into UserLand's tools. It gets difficult on the open Internet were everyone is behind a firewall or NAT because there isn't an easy way to "push" notification to Radio on the desktop. To simulate an instant experience, Radio would need to check the files on the server every minute or so, which of course chews up bandwidth. This implementation solves this by using connections to commonly used instant messaging systems (AIM and Jabber) as a notification mechanism. Nice. There are lots of things that this notification system is going to make possible. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
IM Notification for Radio's Instant Outliner. New feature: Radio now sends and receives outline-change notifications over AIM and Jabber. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Let me explain:... What IM gives us: 1. It's fast because IM is designed to be fast. That's the nature of the transport. 2. It works behind firewalls and NAT (which includes *lots* of broadband users). Again -- it's made that way. 3. It saves bandwidth, since Radio no longer needs to poll over HTTP to see if an outline has been updated. 4. Bonus: Your copy of Radio will know who's subscribed to your outline. With a little UI work (on the way), you'll be able to see this info in your browser, and subscribe to your subscribers (and theirs, and theirs, and so on and so on...). Last, and most important: This is a first step towards opening up all kinds of doors for distributed Internet application development. Think about it... The milestone here is simple notification about changes to a file over a given IM protocol -- no big deal, right? What's new is that it's all open: the architecture in Radio is open and extensible, the protocols are known (and you can add your own at will), and the message format is a non-proprietary standard. Think about what else we might do a year from now... or 5 years from now... The mind boggles... [Jake's Radio 'Blog]
- Document Road Map by Russ Lipton: A list of what he wants to document according to this question:
Answer: My Radio docs list [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]The question on the table is, "what are the highest priority areas for documenting Radio, especially (though not exclusivley) for end users"?
- Radio Doc Sources
- Tutorials for Radio, and nuance clarifications.
- A road map to Radio documentation destinations.
- My latest major addition & I expect I will be adding more here.
- I think there may be a need for this kind of topic using the dws.Radio.FAQ model, to grow a directory of all shareable Radio documentation that anyone knows about.
- Radio url number system
- A road map to Radio urls for the newbie that I am.
- When I get versatile in Navigation Links I might not need this any more.
- Understand Radio Categories
- Grok overall concepts, then step by step implement them.
- Lots of links to other people documentation.
- I think this documentation model worked out quite well.
- Understand Radio News Aggregation
- Grok overall concepts, then links to other people documentation for the actual implementation.
- I plan to do more later like this Understand Other Topics.
I plan to repost a directory like this one, from time to time, as my collection gets significant updates.
[Al Macintyre: e Radio Ideas] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]- Until Al reverse engineered the [Radio url number system], Al was engaged in a number of wild goose chases, well armed with lots of wild misconceptions.
- [IE Spell Checker] info thanks to [Alan Brand Radio Instructions]
- Spell Checking, Thesaurus Tool, and Language Translation links shared Aug 17.
- [Understand Radio Categories] effort to walk through the process of understanding the concept, then implementing it, with links to other people documentation covering most of the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle.
- [Understand Radio News Aggregation] story that tries to conceptually define what it is all about, to potential beginners, with links to other people documentaiton for how to get it working.
Question: Are there search engines that are good at finding Weblogs on a particular topic, or in our neighborhood? Where do we find advice on increasing traffic to our web site thanks to search engines finding our content?
Answer: Check out
Scott Johnson's Becoming Part of the Weblogging Community which outlines Community Resources, with brief introductions to their functions and how we can participate. Also check out his Etiquette on pages 8-9. Just as there is a word Netiquette for e-Etiquette, is there a word for Blogging Etiquette?
- Weblogs.com
- Recently updated - includes Radio and Manila sites.
- News is free.com
- The blogging world includes people writing new content, and commenting on what others have written. News is free.com helps us find interesting stuff to comment on. You can also add your Weblog to their input.
- Day Pop.com
- Search Engine of Weblogs. Search for your own name and see who has commented on you. This is not the same as referrers, limited to posts in the last 24 hours.
- MIT Blog dex
- This indexes the information to which Blogs are linking.
- Meerkat
- You can select types of news you want to follow.
- Garbox
- Show you all sites that have linked to a particular weblog entry or news item.
- Syndic8
- Alternative to News is free
Go to Scott's Info to get the actual urls of these places, reviews in more detail than my outline, and step by step how to participate in them. Scott's [Fuzzy Blog] recently admired www.blogstreet.com which has 9,700 blogs there when I checked.
Answer: Check out Al Macintyre's:
- July 10 post on top UK Weblogs thanks to specific services.
- July 12 post on BlogChalking, which I do not exactly figure out.
- Later, [Joseph the Poet] shares an alternate site.
- Aug 12 post on MSNBC and Eaton Web, both organizing Weblogs by subject.
- Later, I find and explore some other conceptually similar sites.
- http://www.jjg.net/portal/tpoowl.html
- some directories have useful info even if they no longer maintained
- http://www.cyberjournalist.net/cyberjournalists.html
Directory of weblogs maintained by professional journalists - http://www.libdex.com/weblogs.html
Directory of weblogs maintained by librarians - http://portal.eatonweb.com/ appears to have approx 6,000 Weblogs on their search engine.
- http://www.bloghop.com/ and http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/ have twice as many
- http://blo.gs/ tracks 39,000 weblogs for 450 users
- Not all of them are Radio Userland of course.
- When we look at the various Cloud Status Link connections from our Radio Site, the numbers seem to be higher.
- Aug 14 I try to register my weblog at Eatonweb and relay my struggles getting that done.
Al has often mentioned [Search Day] as a great source for information about Search Engines in general. For example [Aug 22 Search Day] surveys why some perfectly good web sites fail to provide a search engine to improve user navigation. In my case it is merely that there are many things I plan to do some day & this is one of those I have procrastinated with, and I want to use it for myself. But I also want to learn what's involved in making a site Search Engine-Friendly. QUOTE
More than 1,600 webmasters responded to the survey, which covered the topics of why site managers have or have not installed search engines, correlations of the sizes of sites and the installation of search engines, frequency of updates, file formats served, languages, and number of languages used on sites. Also see [Search Engine Ratings] of the 16 most popular search tools.Key findings of the [Search Tools Survey]:
Why haven't the majority of web managers surveyed installed searchengines? Time and [complexity] were the most frequently cited reasons.
UNQUOTE.
[IT Analysis Com] reports that the US Gov FTC questions Search Engine integrity with respect to disclosing paid links.
From Search Day I have found out about some Directory based search engines, where we start with the general flavor of site we want then drill down from there, such as
- [1DO3.com] in the UK has a section just on Weblogs covering current events.
- [Speciality Search Engines] has links to
- [Invisible Web] where normal search engines cannot go
- [Web Rings] where a cluster of sites are interlinked on topics of mutual interest, such as a Science Fiction Fan Club. I think there are a lot more out there than this outfit has indexed.
- Search Engines designed for usage through Wireless.
- [Miscelaneous Other] such as discussion groups, job postings, literature, museums and art works, transportation
- Search Day newsletter subscribe from http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/
- Dig into Search Day archives. July 11 they had a big article with connections to 131 different legitimate ways to improve traffic to your web site, by ensuring that search engines will include you properly. There's also a bit here on the e-etiquette of linking to other sites, irrespective of whether they are weblogs.
- Remind Al ... 2 do includes getting into the gems = Al's notes on Traffic to Web Site ideas for increasing.
I mentioned a Radio Wish to one of my Radio correspondents, who said that it sounded like I was talking about [Mind Mapping] which intriqued me, but I still have that Radio Dream:
Many search engines give us the choice of searching the whole internet, just that one site, or just the sites run by a particular company. I want a sub-category to be a group of people who have created Radio Userland documentation, in which we can adjust the list of sites involved, perhaps have new ones and url changes communicated to us via News Aggregation. I also want a system of aliases, in which some feature might be known by different names to people familiar with different kinds of Weblogging software vendors, or may be commonly confused with some similarly appearing interface with other Computer software.
So we search for topic X and we also get links to Y and Z because of aliases, and we get hits where they exist on any one of the group of sites where people have done documentation. But I want more, a directory of Radio features, with who has documented that, so it becomes obvious on which features no one has yet documented.
This concept could also be applied to other special interests ... we compile a directory of sites that are involved in a particular category of particular interest to us, then do a search vs. all of them at the same time.
This post was originally written for Al's new category [e-Radio Ideas = Empower Freedom of e-Speech through dws.Radio.FAQ learning in Radio Userland: Questions; Wishes; Tips; Speculation] but then as it developed, Al thought also applied to the Home Page.