Note that I said "linking from" - usually linking is about linking to another web page, but TrackBack lets you link from someone else's weblog to your web page. It's typically used to alert that weblog's readers that you've linked to it because you had something to say about it, and then someone reading that weblog can follow your trackback link to see what you had to say. This is what makes it an interesting development in the history of web linking: the web's lack of two-way linking is a classic topic for Old Hypertext Guys to complain about, but now we can do it. (Well, sort of.)

For example, I once wrote a weblog entry titled Link Typing: Who cares?. Jeremy Smith posted an entry on his own weblog that commented on mine. To make it possible for people reading my entry to find out about his comments, he added an entry to the TrackBack listing for "Link Typing: Who cares?" that linked to his entry. By adding an old-fashioned HTML link from his weblog entry to mine and a TrackBack link from mine to his, he essentially created a two-way link. If I had written a new entry responding to his comments, I could have added a TrackBack link from the weblog entry with his comments back to my response. This can continue as a linked "conversation," and people have written software to follow these threads.
(via O'Reilly Network: Linking from Other Weblogs to yours with TrackBack [August 08, 2003]) [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] 
1:16:36 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Technorati Tutorial, Part 1
Lilia Efimova at Mathemagenic asked an interesting question about Technorati on her weblog today, and I popped by (thanks to my watchlist) and answered her questions. Given the interest, I thought I'd republish my response here, along with a few elaborations. Lilia asked, Does anyone knows how Technorati works? Do they process blog homepages only? Or only items in RSS feeds? Or only things "not older than ..."? I wonder because I usually observe some fluctuations in numbers of inbound blogs and inbould links. E.g. yesterday I had 100+ inbound blogs and today it's 80+. It would be interesting to know why these things change. I tried Technorati site and weblog of David Sifry with no luck. I guess this is a quite typical question that user has about systems that digest information: what are the criteria that are used? Some basics about Technorati 1) We spider weblogs, and correlate each weblog's outbound links to any page on your blog/site 2) Technorati works on any URL - not just URLs for weblogs. For example, you can see what people are saying about an interesting article or favorite company, and get an instant read on the conversations going on around that article or site. 3) The simplest way get your weblog included in the Technorati index is to ping us whenever you update your weblog. That puts you in the high-priority queue for indexing. You can save the page as a bookmark, or you can program your weblog software to do... [Sifry's Alerts] 
1:08:55 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Microsoft's Blogging Intentions
Just got a note from a Microsoft PR person, answering some questions I had about how the company plans to... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 
12:45:22 PM      comment []   trackback []  



BlogShares Hostile Takeovers are really very fun
Just had another hostile takeover of one of my portfolio blogs. Lawrence Lessig was taken by Ron Shelton using a Legal Brief (artefact). Very appropriate if you ask me. This is a very interesting portion of the game that I have just learned about courtesy of Joe Jenett and Joe's Crazy Game. If you have not participated in Joe's Game head on over as quick as you can, Phase 5 will be open over the weekend for your sharing pleasure.
[Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow] 
12:37:05 PM      comment []   trackback []  



System Administration Quick Links
If you are a Java weblogger chances are good that you are running your weblog on your own site or are contemplating the possibility. If so, bookmark this O'Reilly page. This resource provides some great helps that will make system administration a whole lot easier. The page provides articles that covers backup options, implementing DNS, setting up... [Artima Web Buzz] 
12:31:48 PM      comment []   trackback []  



MT courseware update
I’m chugging along on the MT as courseware project. It’s forcing me to brush off my rusty SQL skills, learn more about MT plugins, and really think about organization of information. All good things. I struggled for a while with the calendars, because I wanted them to link not to a specific entry (which is the default in the provided templates), but rather to a daily archive. That way all important entries for a given day—due dates, class topics/readings, in-class exercises—would be displayed together on that date. I finally found the solution on Sillybean’s blog... [mamamusings] 
3:09:19 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Site statistics for weblogs
More pragmatic questions: what site statistics could you recommend to use with a weblog?

I'm most interested to know the following about my weblog:

• history of referers and tracking changes (quantitative, for the rest there is Technorati :)
• search strings and their change over time
• most popular visited pages (I have some insight about popular linked pages from Blogdex)
• RSS requests/traffic vs. pages requests/traffic
• visitors that are RSS readers (this comes down to knowing how many people are subscribed to your RSS)

2:55:10 AM      comment []   trackback []  

2:42:54 AM      comment []   trackback []  

I just got my invitation to BloggerCon 2003, hosted by amazing Dave Winer.  Although I can't make it to the conference due to previous engagements, here are some juicy bits about the conference to entice you to go:

• Time is October 4.  Place is Harvard Law School.

• It's a one-day Saturday conference, with an all-day open house on Sunday for impromptu meetings and discussions about anything you want to talk about.

• This is a user's conference. Technology is important, but at this conference the people who make the products are here to listen, to learn how people use the software, and to learn how we can improve it. This guarantees that something will actually get done here. It's an important role-reversal.

• Presenters include Glenn Reynolds, Joshua Marshall, Doc Searls, Scott Rosenberg, Adam Curry, Elizabeth Spiers, Jim Moore, Susan Mernit and more. Moderators: Lance Knobel, Ed Cone, Christopher Lydon and myself. And new discoveries, people we hadn't heard about until we set out to find the most interesting and eclectic blogs and bloggers.

• We're going to talk about how weblogs are used in politics, business, journalism, the law, medicine, engineering and education.

• We're going to have a lively discussion including Web Energy and lots of philosophy, great art and technology and lots of ideas.

• Our local host committee of Boston-based bloggers includes Cluetrain author David Weinberger, InfoWorld's Jon Udell, author Halley Suitt, MIT's Andrew Grumet and Tracey Adams, Harvard librarian Jessica Baumgart and Larry Bouthillier from Harvard Business School. They're here to make sure you find what you're looking for at Harvard and in the Boston area. If you have ideas for speakers, or people we should invite, please let any of us know, including the local hosts.

• Anyway, it's time to say that seating is very limited, so if you want to come, please sign up right away. The cost for this incredible once-in-a-lifetime experience is a mere $500, and if you're a student (please provide a photocopy of your ID) it's only $250. Harvard affiliates also qualify for the discount (Harvard ID, or harvard.edu mail address). We're using the money (where needed) to get the talent in and out of the city, and to put on a few great parties so we can all mingle, share ideas, and learn a lot.

You can reserve your space, right now, at this URL:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/apps/bloggercon

Looks like it's going to be a great party of a conference.

[Don Park's Daily Habit] 
2:42:11 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Martian Soil...
Now this is truly cool... a blog on the news involving Mars and our explorations of that planet....
[Teal Sunglasses] 
2:36:07 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Orlando Vacationer weblog launched
I'm using Radio UserLand's categories feature to publish a new weblog at a separate domain. Orlando Vacationer is a weblog devoted to "Disney discounts, park perks, and tourist tips" for the Mouse-infested city that I visit with my family around 8-10 times a year. The domain is new and may not have propagated to all parts of the Internet yet, so if it can't be reached, try its category address.

I'm going to write an article on Workbench about using Radio to publish a category that looks like an entirely separate weblog. Right now, the biggest issues to resolve are two problems in the RSS file: the title element calls it "Rogers Cadenhead: Orlando Vacationer" and a link element that is using a Workbench URL instead of orlandovacationer.com. [Workbench] 
2:34:50 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Salam Pax has a photoblog
The aliased Iraqi warblogger responsible for "Where is Raed" now has a photoblog, which contains some wonderful street scene images from Iraq. (Thanks, Emily!) [Boing Boing Blog] 
2:30:07 AM      comment []   trackback []  



The other syndication format   [Daypop Top 40] 
2:27:24 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Weblogging ethics [Daypop Top 40] 
2:25:34 AM      comment []   trackback []  



David Pollard
reports that microcontent is on a roll.

"The top 75 Salon blogs received an aggregate 1,000,000 hits this month, a record and up 5% from last month. The aggregrate number of inbound links to the top 75 blogs is up 25% this month to over 3,000. We're still getting blogrolled in record numbers."[John Robb's Weblog] 
2:24:23 AM      comment []   trackback []  



How Technorati works? (2)
David Sifry answers my question about Technorati:

Here's the basics:

1) We spider blogs, and match up their links to your blog - to anywhere on your blog 2) In the inbound blog list, we use the outbound links from the blog homepage, not from the archives 3) We do process RSS feeds an other metadata, but that doesn't affect your inbound blog stats 4) Nightly, we go through the database and re-calculate the number of inbound blogs and links, which helps us double-check our work and also allows us to create the interesting newcomers list, the interesting recent blogs list, etc.

We strice to be accurate all the time. Sometimes things slip through. For example, one of the reasons why your inbound blog count may be down today is because we were doing maintenance of the database last night to remove duplicate blogs - for example, Radio Userland has an obnoxious habit of sending pings to www.weblogs.com for each weblog "category" if you use multiple categories on your blog. Same information, same author, just link spam, basically. So, last night we cleaned out a bunch of that stuff. If you were linked from a bunch of people's blog categories, then you lost those inbound blogs. Then again, so did everyone else. :-)

The last thing to remember is that while we strive for accuracy and completeness, we still do have bugs and have to fix things. If you notice something strange, please don't hesitate to send us feedback (feedback@technorati.com) and let us know.

Thanks for fast reply! And for fixing the category problem (I had it in my stats). I suggest that you add this explanation somewhere, so people know that inbound blog/link statistics are calculated based on links from homepages of other weblogs. (I guess I'm getting spoiled as a researcher: I want to know the method to trust results :) [Mathemagenic] 
2:18:38 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Authentication for RSS and Atom: Basic over HTTPS and digest over HTTP
We only have 2 mechanisms in 2003: 1. Basic Authentication over HTTPS 2. digest authentication over HTTP

We need something better but that's all we have today.
1. The auth mechanism chosen doesn't really matter for the client side. Let's be realistic, if AOL Journals goes with Digest authentication only and you are a vendor of client side tools, *you will find a way support Digest*.

2. The auth mechanism chosen does matter on the server-side, but it depends on how big you are. A. If you are large then security matters, you have control over your servers, and because of that you can implement the security mechanism of your choice. (AOL, Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal) B. If, on the other hand, you are a smaller site, like a single user install of MT, then either auth:

1. Isn't as high of a concern. 2. It is a concern and you are a power user and would choose a hosting vendor with such things in mind.

In particular I want to note that:

1. I'm offering up this categorization to generate a discussion, I *want* people to poke holes in it. 2. SixApart has the unique position of living in two worlds, as it were, with MT and TypePad.
(via Re: Authentication) [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] 
2:12:30 AM      comment []   trackback []  



VC webloggers Introducing if you haven't started reading them yet are:  Tim Oren of the Pacificafund.  Charles Hudson, formely of In-Q-Tel.   Ventureblog, a group weblog.  Geekfishing, a group weblog, and Martin Tobias from Ignition Partners.  Rich Miller of Breo Ventures. [John Robb's Weblog] 
1:18:44 AM      comment []   trackback []