Category: Internet

UserLand (t) Product News: Frontier and Manila: New Enclosure macros and updates to Manila RPC and MetaWeblogAPI. This is the other shoe whose dropping I anticipated last week when UserLand rolled out a new enclosure support feature. By extending the support for the new feature into the API and into user interface macros, Manila (t) now gives users an unprecedented level of flexibility for managing the creation and display of content (such as podcasts (t)) that contain enclosures. Bravo.

A second, very big, bravo, is due for the long-anticipated full support of the MetaWeblogAPI (t) for creating new binary objects such as pictures or audio files, using the standard MetaWeblogAPI.newMediaObject. By adding support for this cross-vendor standard way to upload non-text content, Manila bloggers can take advantage of tools like MarsEdit (t) to manage image uploads. (Note that this announcement is the one that Brent Simmons calls out on the Ranchero blog.)

Now, if my kind host will update our Manila installation so that I can work with these new bits, I’ll be a very happy camper.

Boing Boing: Infographic of blogosphere traffic spikes. Xeni points out a curious feature of the Technorati infographic, where a point labeled “Kryptonite lock controversy” is as high as “Indian Ocean tsunami.” I say: it’s not the absolute size of the spike, it’s how it relates to its surroundings. (Uh, bow chicka chicka bow bow.)

Based on my experience interpreting online traffic, the metric of merit when comparing two events isn’t absolute amount of traffic (posts, page views, unique users) but the delta they cause from the normal volume of activity. Look at the time period around “Kryptonite lock controversy”—the spike, while high, is part of a consistently high series of spikes that appears to run from July through shortly after the election. In other words, not dramatic, considering the overall blogosphere activity at that time.

The tsunami, on the other hand, reached the same peak of activity in the middle of a seasonal down period in blog posts—in fact, as I recall, a seasonal down period for Internet activity as a whole. In other words, it’s a hell of a lot more impressive that a bunch of bloggers got off their haunches after the holidays to post about the tsunami—when they weren’t inclined to blog—than that they posted in a period of otherwise high post activity.

(This is the second in a series of occasional posts where I offer my meager expertise to interpret a BoingBoing post about online traffic trends. Maybe I should make this a series. Maybe even a sidebar.)

Boing Boing: Yahoo! bought Flickr!. Very cool, and congrats to the Flickr folks, who (though still not my sole source choice for hosting my images) are starting to intrigue me a little more with some of the possibilities for image flocking via tags. One example: the houseblog image group created by Hewn and Hammered.

My former co-worker Dave Kramer, who briefly blogged before leaving his job at Microsoft about six months before I did, has a new site called Gamestay that provides gaming info for the “casual and grown-up gamers who don’t have time to keep up with every last screenshot and tradeshow video.” The site and his personal blog are both intelligently written, and share some new-to-me tidbits about goodies like the upcoming Lego Star Wars game.

Looks like Dave—excuse me, White Male Dave Winer—is springing off a Jeff Jarvis comment to jumpstart the latest blogging meme, and outing bloggers (including myself) as White Males. I liked (White Former Professional Journalist Male) Jeff’s (unpaid) ripost to (White Professional Journalist Male) Steven Levy’s (paid) column (the point of getting to a blogosphere is so that voices, not skin colors, matter), but it is interesting—as I preface every link with a reference to the link-recipient’s sex and skin color, suddenly I’m a lot more self-conscious about what I’m doing.

Incidentally, if you annotate every single link this way, two things become apparent: there are a lot more dimensions that matter than sex and color, and divisions like pro and amateur are difficult to make.

BuzzMachine: Turn it off.. Jeff Jarvis gripes about having problems loading sites that include blogrolling lists powered by BlogRolling.com. I’ve noticed the list is slow, too.

Two things: One, you should always consider the performance of an external resource before you include it in your blog template—even if it’s just an image. But for those who like the services that Blogrolling.com provides, including the useful “updated recently” information, consider reducing the potential damage from a service outage. On this blog, for example, I address potential problems with the service by (a) only listing my blogroll on my front page and not on pages that are linked to by my RSS feed; (b) arranging the HTML of my template so that my content loads first and the column containing my blogroll loads next. This is a simple CSS layout trick (well, not so simple—read my post about getting it to work) that not only helps mitigate problems with external services—my content is fully loaded and readable while the page works to load the blogrolls from Blogrolling—but also helps make your page more navigable in screen readers and downlevel browsers.

Second, this is the flip side of the argument I had with Lisa Williams at the last Berkman Thursday Night Meeting I went to. The great thing about the blogosphere is that blogging platforms have a fairly low “lowest common denominator” of features—headline + body + comments + calendar archives + permalinks (+RSS). This means that there is lots of room for innovation by a Blogrolling.com, Technorati, Flickr, or Feedster type service to add additional “missing” features. But because there is no platform that does it all, you have to worry about dependencies on outside services for these functions.

The second point is why I haven’t hopped aboard Flickr yet—besides the incredibly slow speed of uploading multiple images. My photos are too important a part of my site for me to outsource them, and so far I haven’t seen enough benefit from the social aspects of the service to outweigh the shortcomings of being dependent on Yet Another Blog Support Service.

UserLand Product News: Enclosure Support for News Item Sites in Manila. For non-techies, that means it will now be easier for folks with Manila sites (like mine, or the ones on the Harvard bloggs server) to produce podcasts. Thanks, UserLand!

(There is one point left unclear by the article: has the API been updated to allow for enclosure support as well? If so, then tool vendors like Ranchero will need to update their tools to facilitate this new feature.)

Steve Kirks nails a vision statement for the future of Radio Userland: “Remove the barriers to get your content on line. Become your lightweight personal content manager.”

This is interesting timing, coming as it does at a time when the Berkman Thursday Meetings crowd is taking up the topic of the future of weblog software again. When you have a product vision, it’s a lot easier to take input from passionate users like the Berkman crowd and figure out which of the ideas you should work to turn into reality.

The Federal Election Commission’s Bradley Smith says that blogs, or at least political blogs, might get regulated soon, as part of the ongoing rollout of McCain-Feingold. (Thanks to Dave for the pointer).

On the one hand, what kind of crack is he smoking? Regulating the right of a blogger to link is like regulating the right of a human to breathe; it would be a draconian curtailment of freedom of speech. On the other hand, in this country campaign finance laws already curtail certain freedoms of speech in the interest of limiting the influence of deep pocketed contributors in the political process.

Except, of course, that our belief in general is that blogs re-democratize the individual citizen and enable them to participate in the process to a very large extent. That appears to be the angle that Smith is covering in raising the specter of Internet regulation.

The one piece that makes me nervous about the article is that Smith is a Republican member of the election commission, striking against a move by Democratic members of the commission. Is his alarmism merited, or just a partisan tactic to put his Democratic commission mates on the defensive? Where is the perspective in favor of taking this action? This is one of those issues where there are more layers in the mix than just blogging and speech.

Micro Persuasion: WSJ Extols Business Blogging. The WSJ article says that business blogging has shown its value as part of an online strategy by allowing customers to connect to the business on a personal level and by keeping them coming back to the business’s web site regularly.

The first point is the core of the reasoning behind Microsoft’s entry into business blogging. This, in fact, underlies my objection of the WSJ’s claim that “small businesses may benefit most” from business blogging. I’m not sure you can measure the impact of putting a human face back onto the largest software company in the world, but I’m pretty sure it has a pretty dramatic impact on the business’s future. That said, I certainly agree with the points the WSJ made about a blog’s power to make a small business or consultant an authority in a field.

The second point? You know, I’m going to go out on a limb and say something heretical here. You don’t need to start a business blog to keep people coming back to a corporate web site regularly. You just need frequently updated, honestly and directly written content. What you get from a blog is a framework in which you can publish that content which is:

1. Search engine friendly: all the content has a permanent address and can always be found again. Contrast that with a corporate website where marketing content gets published, then silently disappears.
2. Interactive: easy support for features like comments and trackback.
3. Easy to syndicate: Built in RSS or Atom support allows users to read the content in other formats or recombine it in digest form to make it more useful to them—and incidentally to spread your message.
4. Easy to navigate: A chronological architecture overlaid on top of the content makes it easy to follow evolutions in the story.
5. Easy to find just the topics relevant to you: Support for categorization, keyword tags, and other taxonomy technologies makes it easy for a user to filter the content to find just the stuff he or she is interested in.

Plus, by starting a blog you sign a social contract. Whaaaah? Well, posting a blog these days, thanks to the work of blog practitioners like Scoble and others, is equivalent to signing a contract with your customers that you want to speak personally with them; that you want to hear what they say; and that you will be updating the story regularly. In short, you are saying that you want to establish a relationship that will be deeper than a single transaction. If you don’t go into business blogging with this spirit, you’ll get no value from it.

Boing Boing: HOWTO get a CD, DVD or book listed on Amazon. Looks relatively easy, especially if you’ve already invested in the UPC code for another retailer. Cheese Lords, are you listening?