NL bloggers wanted!.

Erik van Bekkum:

A call for bloggers in The Netherlands! I have been thinking with Lilia Efimova and Ton Zijlstra about getting bloggers together during the holidays and get to meet the people behind the blogs...we're thinking about doing something fun and informal, perhaps a picknick, on a Saturday?

Who is in? Go to the comments field of this entry and let us know who you are, where you live and what period would best suit you. If you cannot attend, syndicate this entry to your blog or email your blogofriends.

Of course, it's going to a be a Dutch treat! And: you don't have to actually have a blog to come. It's going to be fun!

[Mathemagenic] 
11:50:16 PM      comment []   trackback []  



A Wordplay Blog. Here's a group blog with a twist.

Form a sentence from the acronym of the last word found on the latest post. Quirky, funny, nasty, silly, serious, whatever your post may be, the words are yours. Every correct entry gives you 1 point

(via Side Salad) Permalink Created Wed, 16 Jul 2003 [The J-Walk Blog] 
11:12:22 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Information foraging and weblogs as snack-bars.

Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster by Jakob Nielsen

A bit of definition:

Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993. Developed at the Palo Alto Research Center (previously Xerox PARC) by Stuart Card, Peter Pirolli, and colleagues, information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online.

[Read the middle yourself] and then:

The patch-leaving model thus predicts that visits will become ever shorter. Google and always-on connections have changed the most fruitful design strategy to one with three components:

• Support short visits; be a snack
• Encourage users to return; use mechanisms such as newsletters as a reminder
• Emphasize search engine visibility and other ways of increasing frequent visits by addressing users' immediate needs

Next to the fact that it's a useful theory for my work, it also calls for some parallels with blogging:

• Weblogs are rather snack-bars then restaurants: you can come often, find something to eat and leave fast. They are even better: snacks are changing (there is always something new), but the cook is the same, so you can easily get a feeling of cooking style and quality.
• Weblogs use RSS feeds to notify you when something tasty is served (and you can even try it without going there).
• Google loves blogs and brings readers directly to snack they want.

From this perspective the only problem with blog-snack-bar is that once you are there you can hardly find anything beyond the front raw of snacks :)

I also wonder when Jakob Nielsen will write a bit more about weblogs (because there are only 4 pages with this word now and because his Alertbox was a role-model for me when I started my weblog).

[Mathemagenic] 
7:28:40 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Cultural Assumptions in the Wiki World. The grandfather of all wikis on the terms of intercultural conversation. [Blogalization Community] 
7:24:13 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Chad Dickerson, in raving about blogs:  "The flow of RSS content into my newsreader each day has become as important to my personal information flow as e-mail." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
6:44:34 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Between bloggers and their employers (2).

From notes of the Voxpolitics event on blogs and politics (I have no idea what it was, you can start digging in from here) [via Cindy Lemcke-Hoong], about Stephen Pollard, "first major journalist in the country to be running a weblog":

And he's not writing for free - people respond to his comments and inspire him to write pieces for which he gets paid.

This simple phrase gets the value of blogging for free - it inspires you to come up with other pieces (with more insight/analysis/depth/structure) to get paid for.

For me it would also draw a border for copyrights: I'd like to "own" my blog (to give it away under Creative Commons) even if it is related to my work, while my company owns more elaborate products (e.g. papers) that can be inspired by it (of course when a company pays me to work on these products :).

In fact I don't like to get paid to blog, because I want the freedom of doing it and I want to own the content. I'm also addicted to blogging enough to think that I would not be happy if I couldn't do it. And I have scary phrases in my contract to worry about these issues :(

[Related: What Does European Law Say About Blog Ownership? (thanks to Martin Roell), Between bloggers and their employers, Bloggers Gain Libel Protection, BlogTalk: who owns narrated experiences?]

[Mathemagenic] 
6:43:40 PM      comment []   trackback []  



One billion ends added.

Miles Yao has translated World of Ends to Chinese. Here it is.

Thanks, Miles!

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
6:29:13 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Random Numbers Key to Encryption. How two math geeks with a lava lamp and a webcam are about to unleash chaos on the Internet. Tom McNichol from Wired magazine reports. [Wired News] 
12:40:03 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Steve Gillmor: "Nothing sways me from the notion that RSS is a transcendent technology." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
4:06:02 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Portuguese Parliament to government officials: start blogging. BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc from Paris says:

Xeni, I don't know if you've already heard about this, but a new law was just unanimously passed in Portugal by deputies (Projecto Deliberacao number 10/IX) which provides all deputies the option of having their own website or blog (the word weblog is mentioned in the law!). The deputies' blogs will be hosted on the Portuguese Parliament's webserver. The original piece of news, blogged in Portuguese, is here, from July 07, and and I wrote about it here in French.

I don't read Portuguese *or* French all that well, and I couldn't locate the law on the Portuguese government's website -- but if any readers have access to English language versions of the news, or care to provide a translation, please post in the Discuss forum! Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
3:42:00 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Auch die Münchner Blogger haben jetzt einen Plan. [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
3:10:48 AM      comment []   trackback []  



FeedsterAds.

Advertising on Feedster.

Advertising on Feedster

 Its Here! 

Fully self service, powered by paypal.  Should be easy enough to use but if you have problems, let me know.

[The FuzzyBlog!]

Interesting.  Advertising has certainly been extremely kind to Google.  Good look to Scott & company they've certainly put the effort in.

[Curiouser and curiouser!] 
2:46:55 AM      comment []   trackback []