11:58:17 PM      comment []   trackback []  

I'm thinking about putting links for the Top Topics on the Blogdigger home page.  Probably later in the week...
(via Blogdigger) [Channel 'social_software'] 
11:37:28 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Journalist Michel Dumais interviews
Dan Gillmor, JD Lasica, and Doc Searls - all three of whom wear both blogger and professional journalist hats - about the relationship between weblogs and journalism. Look towards the end of the post for full transcripts of the interviews.
[Seb's Open Research] 
11:03:00 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Nicely written 'Baghdad Burning' weblog
(via NewsIsFree) [Robot Wisdom] 
10:50:28 PM      comment []   trackback []  



My Blog Experiment
For his Ph.D. thesis project on weblog writing style, Scott Nowson, a PhD student in Informatics at The University of Edinburgh, is soliciting a month's worth of blog entries from native-English speaking authors of personal blogs. He has a page on studying blogs and maintains a weblog himself detailing the progress of the project.
[Follow Me Here...] 
3:05:50 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Eric Zorn Now Blogging on Chicago Tribune Site
Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn has started a blog called Breaking Views
[The Shifted Librarian] 
3:01:26 PM      comment []   trackback []  



I'm Yours, Body And Soul—But Not Blog (LazyBlawg)
Phil Wolff observes that "One in 4 or 5 bloggers will start a new job this year. Maybe 750 thousand. They and their blogs are at risk." Phil is interested in developing some form language for use in employment agreements that would govern "my blog, my rights to blog, my ownership of my blog, and explicit freedom from retaliation for anything I post."

Justin Hitt offers an excellent comment in response to Phil's post, discussing employee/independent contractor distinctions and his own experiences in negotiating similar issues with employers. Justin's comment helps emphasize how a "one size fits all" approach might not be the best solution to this problem. The same thing can be said about licensing, but that doesn't make Creative Commons any less valuable, or, on the other hand, any guarantee against potential litigation. Could a Creative Commons-type system nevertheless be implemented for this situation? Of course, in theory, but Creative Commons represents a unique combination of expertise, commitment, and funding, and unfortunately I don't think it's realistic to expect such programs to spring up wherever a legal powderkeg awaits a match.

As for Phil's hope that a boilerplate "Blogging Employee's" agreement could include a provision ensuring "explicit freedom from retaliation for anything I post?" If someone manages to negotiate such an arrangement, I want that person as my lawyer. I cannot imagine any employer willingly giving any employee carte blanche to potentially defame the company or its representatives, or to disclose its competitive confidential information. That said, there may be work-related subjects an employer would be happy, even eager, to have employees blog about, and there may be employers that would make a church-and-state distinction for employee writing that is purely non-work related. More reasons why it's smart to address such concerns up front, and not to take on employment terms and conditions without some trusted legal advice.

My panel at the Weblog Business Strategies conference touched on these kinds of issues, and I have linked to all the panel coverage I could locate from B&B's About page. The panel also took a stab at answering some of Phil's further and related questions after the conference ("Drops Of Jupiter").
[Bag and Baggage] 
2:57:05 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blog for the world's poorest
Bloggers have been trashed lately for being too parochial and introspective. In an attempt to hitch the medium to a global cause the Guardian (in an editorial ) today is launching a political blog with one aim: the abolition of all agricultural subsidies. In less than a month the World Trade Organisation negotiations will resume in Cancun, Mexico. There is still a vast gap between the desire of developing countries for a big cut in the $300 billion a year handed out in subsidies to Western farmers and the mood of governments, heavily influenced by agricultural lobbies, to keep the status quo in one form or another. Yet the abolition of subsidies is the nearest thing to a free lunch in economics.
Developing countries - with natural advantages in growing products like sugar, cotton and cereals - would be given an unprecedented boost if they didn't have to compete with heavily subsidised products dumped in their back gardens at uneconomic prices by Western (ie European and American) producers. And the West would have $300 billion (equivalent to over $200 a year for each of us) to spend on schools, hospitals or whatever. Reform won't happen by tinkering with the incredibly complex system of subsidies. There is only one answer: we must KICK ALL AGRICULTURAL SUBSIDIES. Join us and KICKAAS. Only the politicians stand in the way.
[onlineblog.com] 
2:53:53 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Ben Hammersley is one of the first with ads in his RSS feed...
Notice how complex the RSS RDF laden feed he uses is. Dann Sheridan has some ideas on dynamic ad placement in RSS streams.
[John Robb's Weblog] 
2:10:36 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogstakes -- sweepstakes for blogs -- launches
My former Silicon Alley Reporter Magazine colleague Brian "Dr. Frankensite" Alvey, host of the very cool "Meet the Makers" web building workshop series, just launched a new project called Blogstakes. It's a sort of sweepstakes that rewards blogs that link to it by giving them the same prizes that the people they referred win ( = if you win a Hawaiian vacation on Blogstakes, so does the blog that referred you). I'll let Brian explain:

A friend of a friend was asking me for ways to promote his product that were better than begging top bloggers for links in exchange for samples. I took more than a week to respond since I didn't have any answers. Then I told him he should do a contest and give out prizes to the randomly-chosen winners AND the blogs that sent them. The more I explained about it technically (how it should track 'referer strings' rather than force blogs to sign up for affiliate tracking URLs and how that means everyone can just use the same link to the contest), he explained that it was beyond him to build.

So I built it. It was quietly launched yesterday afternoon and already this morning I've had a bunch of requests from people who want to either interview me about it or have things that they want to give away (or both). Many of them have been people with blog-related software that they want me to promote. I did a lot of testing of the concept and the execution to make sure it conveys the message that I'm just a guy who builds Web sites, not a Raging Cow marketing outsider who is here to rip you off and the feedback was great. People were worried that they were going to refer thousands of people to my site and I was going to steal their email addresses and my sponsors were going to spam them endlessly. They're not, because they never get to see individual data on anyone except the winners. So the privacy policy is really simple and in-your-face. We hate spam too.

Another person was concerned about having to link to contests that they didn't want to win. The easy answer is: link to contests you want to win and don't link to ones you don't want to win. And already some people are adding this to their non-content column -- in fixture positions just like their Blogrolling lists and Blogshares icons. That was without prompting. They just saw that as how these contests will fit into their blogs. That was really cool to see. In many ways it's a social experiment. I've been asked why the contests last 4 weeks and 6 weeks. "Won't they have a ton of interest in the first week and then die off?" Who knows? I'm going to find out.

2:01:45 PM      comment []   trackback []  

"Weblogs.com + Geocoding + RSS." [Scripting News]

Congrats Mikel. You've finally made it. [Marc's Voice] 
1:49:23 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Macromedia's Version of Weblogs.com
After seeing John's post about Macromedia weblogs, I took a closer look at the site and found this page. It look like they are attempting to replicate what you get from Weblogs.com. The problem is that they are using Cold Fusion on the backend, which can't scale to meet the demands of hundreds of thousands of weblogs pinging it with updates. Furthermore, the list appears to be dated or not yet set up to receive pings.
[Dann Sheridan's Weblog] 
1:46:01 PM      comment []   trackback []  



MP3s via RSS
An experiment with RSS enclosures. If this works, users who subscribe to my feed with an enclosure-aware aggregator will have an MP3 of the interview Chris Lydon did with me last month, with no click-wait. [Scripting News]

Whoa!! I got it, Dave. Very nice. [Dann Sheridan's Weblog] 
1:44:02 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogstakes launch
A new sweepstakes leverages the network and in particular the segment that develops weblogs and other forms of independent content.
[Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report] 
1:20:37 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Lessig and Trippi
Over at Blog for America, Lawrence Lessig interviewed Joe Trippi. Too much good stuff to even bother trying to do pullquotes... [Backup Brain] 
1:16:36 PM      comment []   trackback []