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 []  



Thanks, Dave. As I mentioned in my blog last week, I briefly met Dave Winer at OSCON last week. I have to admit being a little nervous about it, because I offended Dave earlier in a thoughtless way. But Dave paid me about the best compliment that he could have: "Oh, yeah, I read your blog all the time". I was so relieved that I forgot to say something that I wanted to say to Dave:

I was a user of the original ThinkTank and More products on the Macintosh. I used them constantly, and I still wish I had one of them. So thank you, Dave, for your pioneering work in outlining.

Meeting folks like Dave, Mitch Kapor, and Andy Hertzfeld at OSCON reminded me that there are lots of folks out the that have made big contributions to computing, and that we in the open source community are standing on their shoulders. One way of thinking about open source is that it lets us stand on the shoulders of others so that we can get taller, instead of just trying to rebuild what others have done before. It never hurt anyone to say thank you, and we could do it more with each other. [Ted Leung on the air] 
11:36:51 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 []  



Publishing, permanence, and transparency.

A palimpsest is a manuscript on which an earlier text has been effaced and the vellum or parchment reused for another.

Under heavy surveillance (which has now ceased), Dave Winer reacted:

Now that people have set up a system to record everything on Scripting that I post within five minute intervals, I don't think I'll be writing any more of that stuff here. I guess it's time for weblogs to become like television. Polished and politically correct. Impersonal. Commercial. [Scripting News]

I understand and sympathize, but I think a bigger story is unfolding around us. Last year, I wrote an item entitled Walking the fault lines about my experiences with SOAP and WSDL. Scripting News picked up on it. (This was the same posting that began my serendipitous association with an Indian programmer named Nishant S. [1, 2].) Later that day, using the Meerkat aggregator, I noticed there were two versions of Dave's commentary, and I wrote: ... [Jon's Radio] 
7:10:57 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Ghost-Blogging.

Blogs of executives are starting to appear and at least some of them seems to be using ghost-bloggers according to a comment by Elwyn Jenkins (aka Microdoc) to my Blogs will fade away post is of any indication.  Elwyn wrote:

"I would have to disagree that most of the writing can now go in-house for most corporations. People within corporations do not have the time to 'blog' for their company, and few feel that they can write. Already, I write three blogs for large companies and have a growing list of clientele. I will soon be putting writers on to handle the volume of writing. The task is to listen to what is going on within a company, learn the voice of a key person and blog for that person. The client ultimately publishes today's blog, but a professional writer, thinks up the ideas, and puts a spin on today's blog to match in with a series of events within the corporation."

My initial response was "Whoa!  That's cheating."  But I thought about it some more and tried to think about it from the perspective of businesses and executives.  It made sense.  While writing style matters, it is the message that matters more.  How we think and how we write also make a lot of noise that seeps into our blogs and interefere with the message we are trying to convey.

Still, I thought ghost-blogging is a topic others might want to think about.  One blogging lessons I have learned recently is that I should write, not only about what I want to write about, but also what my readers want to write about in response to my post.  Participation is a big component of blogging after all.  So tell me what you think of ghost-blogging.

If you are a forward-looking executive for a large corporation who wants to see how blogging can help you do your job better, but have either terrible writing skills or leaky-temper problems, give Elywin a call.  I have both problems, but I don't have much of an *ss to cover.  You do.

[Don Park's Daily Habit] 
7:10:28 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 []  



New campaign finance market mechanics.

The Dean Campaign's BlogForAmerica points this morning (without providing a link) to Carol C. Darr's USA Today editorial, Internet Donors Can Clean Up National Campaign Financing. She nails it:

Campaigns typically raise small donations, if they bother at all, from direct mail lists of their previous contributors, but costs usually consume 50 cents of every dollar raised. This means that average Americans, unless they have previously given a donation to a candidate, are not even solicited. That's one of the reasons more than 99% of Americans don't contribute.

This is what makes Dean's and Kucinich's success in raising money on the Internet so promising. For the first time, a presidential candidate, Dean, has catapulted into the top tier with small donations. The Internet now holds out the possibility that small donors might successfully fuel serious presidential campaigns [~] a sea change in American politics.

The way to minimize the corrosive effect of large contributions is to flood the political system with lots of small contributions. This will happen only if huge numbers of ordinary American citizens make modest contributions.

Small money is the only money that is reliably clean. The Internet is the best way to raise it [~] quickly, easily and cheaply.

According to the Dean Campaign, more than 80,000 people have contributed so far, with more than 62,000 in just the last quarter. The average donation was $88.11. Dean Campaign Manager Joe Trippi rightfully calls this "the greatest grassroots campaign of the modern era."

The mechanics, however, are radically different from all previous grassroots campaigns. They don't just depend on "The Internet." They depend on software that wasn't designed either to manage a campaign or to raise funds [~] successful as it may be so far at both.

Take the matter of comments.

That last post has 117 comments. Other comment piles below other posts number 40, 76, 101, 21, 71, 136, 156, 152, 98, 132 and so on. These are near-Slashdot numbers.

They are also unmoderated. In fact, there is no way to moderate them (in a Slashdot sense) on a Moveable Type blog. Or on any type of blog, far as I know. Other than by taking them down.

This apparently happened to a post by Richard Bennett to the comment list at a Dean blog entry on Monday. I was later told by email from a friend close to the Dean Campaign that the deletion was a mistake and that the Campaign has a no-censorship policy on the blog. (Also, presumably, over on the Lessig blog, where the largest comment pile currently numbers 183.)

Given that Dean's blog comment piles will only get larger, micro-editing of posts in them is bound to be a diminishing-return prospect in any case.

Clearly this is a learning experience for the Dean People. As Dr. Weinberger said yesterday,

It'd be easy to read the bluster and invective as a failure of the system. Nah. It is the system. Welcome to the Internet, Governor Dean! You're making history not just with the Lessig guest blogging but with the wild conversation it's ignited. And lots of people are going to love you for it.

This should be a learning experience for blogware designers too. Moveable Type (which Dean's and Lessig's blogs both use) is excellent (hence its popularity), but the absence of permalinks for individual comment posts [~] even for whole comments sections [~] is a huge problem that desperately needs to be corrected.

Meanwhile, if the Dean Campaign wants to encourage conversational participation of a moderated and linkable sort, I suggest they set up a Kuro5hin-like site built on Scoop, PHP-Nuke, Slash or the like.

In fact, if issues are going to be discussed (and not just stumped as "messages"), that would be the way to go. And not just for Dean. Any candidate wanting to get ahead of Dean in this Internet Thing would be wise to set up a slashsite of some kind.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
6:33:07 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogs vs. KnowledgeBoard (2).

Erik van Bekkum does a great job with bringing many Knowledge Board discussions into blogosphere. Recent links:

• Culture and communities of Practice
• Miguel Cornejo and the community-building tool overview 
• Coffee talk, a thousand miles away at Shell (btw, great example of coffee-table teleconferencing :)

[See also Blogs vs. KnowledgeBoard discussion]

[Mathemagenic] 
12:42:23 PM      comment []   trackback []  



dosis. wortkontor  ein PR-Blog eines Beraters (Dr. Burkowitz) für Gesundheitswesen etc. aus Hamburg. Recht fein. [thomas n. burg | randgänge] 
4:08:14 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Harry Hatchet in the Guardian: "It was a Norwegian Maoist who first pointed me towards the online world of weblogs, and after six months of linking and commenting, a group of ultra-Thatcherite libertarians invited me to a bloggers' dinner party. Such are the people you bump into in the blogosphere..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
4:06:53 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.

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 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 []