Blogging on the Free Web

Changing Blogs

2005-04-28T12:58:00.000-05:00

Thank you for visiting, or for subscribing to the feed from Blogging on the Free Web. Please continue to read my stuff at my new WordPress blog, Changing Way.

Who Let the Blogs Out?

2005-04-12T20:36:00.000-05:00

Biz Stone works for Google on Blogger. He's also the author of Who Let the Blogs Out? : A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs. It's part memoir, part history of blogging, part how-to-blog, part discussion of the impact of blogging in business, education, and other areas.

That sounds as though this might be a rather disjointed book, but it actually hangs together pretty well. Biz writes with clarity and enthusiasm. Here's a sample sentence (from p. 72). "Don't write about something you're not that interested in because you think people will want to read it, and don't curb your enthusiasm for fear you will sound crazy."

One of the problems with writing a book on blogging is that things happen so quickly that events may well overtake what you write. Biz confronts this head on in his Afterword, when he states that blogging is only the beginning of "the participatory web." Blogging has made the web as easily writable as it is readable, thus realizing Tim Berners-Lee's original vision. But other participatory web tools will follow blogging tools such as Blogger.

In sum, I recommend Biz's book, even though a lot has happened in the blogosphere since it was published last year.

Blogging Globally, Linking Locally

2005-04-11T21:12:00.000-05:00

I've been using StatCounter for a few weeks now. Here are a few observations on the data I see. First, it's fun to see folks from many different countries linking to this blog.

Second, the post that has probably been most popular is a rather local one. It's the BlogMap post. Much of the traffic to it came via a post I made to Universal Hub. If you don't know where the hub of the universe is, you're obviously not from Boston. When I made those posts (the one to this blog, and the one to UH), my BlogMap told me that there were 25 nearby blogs. Within a few days, that number almost doubled. I felt like Johnny Mappleseed! I am aware that not all the additions to the map were due to me, but given the dozens of people who followed the link from UH to this blog, I suspect that many of them were. There are now 57 nearby blogs on the map, by the way.

Third, thanks to Colleen for linking to me from her Open Notebook. I am flattered to find this blog in the same link list as Halley's Comment and kottke.org. Colleen's blog is fun to read, and I feel that someone who does not discriminate against dandelions or ants is probably a good human being.

There's a Volvo in My Space

2005-04-08T21:54:00.000-05:00

No, there isn't literally a Volvo in my parking space. But there's a Volvo ad on my MSN Space. I didn't put it there. This isn't a complaint, just a remark. Microsoft never promised me that the blog would be free of ads as well as free of charge. So the ads don't make me want to revise anything in my previous posts on MSN Spaces.

Tags: microsoft, msn, spaces.

Blogger/TypePad @CNET

2005-04-06T23:36:00.000-05:00

CNET reviews and compares Blogger and TypePad, coming down in favor of the latter. Here are the review summaries:

For a small monthly charge, you can create professional-looking blogs with Six Apart TypePad.com.
Beginners will love Blogger's ease of use and the fact that it's free. However, professionals should look elsewhere.

A look back through posts here will show that I prefer Blogger to TypePad, taking price into consideration, and that I may well soon be using WordPress in preference to either of them.

Tags: blogger, typepad.

Yahoo 360: More, but not much

2005-04-06T11:25:00.000-05:00

I'm not overwhelmed by Yahoo 360. I don't hate it either, but I feel no compelling reason to use my 360 page, other than curiosity. It seems as though my friends there, who are mainly people who responded to my earlier post offering invites, feel the same way, since I see very little activity at their 360 sites.

This may not be as bad as it sounds for 360. I am working from a small sample. The target audience for a beta test may not overlap much with the target audience for 360. 360 seems to be aimed at people who want an easy-to-use one-stop website, where they can blog, post photos, connect with friends, etc.

Beta testers are probably more... well, like me. I like the idea of using different services, each of which does its job well while offering, or at least allowing, integration with other services. And yes, I am thinking of Flickr, and yes, Yahoo had better not screw it up.

And yes, I still have invites to 360, just in case the above ringing endorsement has got anyone curious.

Tags: yahoo, 360.

Trackback Again

2005-04-05T11:54:00.000-05:00

Wow, trackback (outgoing) is so easy when it's built into the blog publishing tool, as it is in WordPress. If Blogger would just give us trackback and categories... but that's an old song by now, and the purpose of this post isn't to sing that song yet again...

It's to test whether incoming trackback is working on my WordPress blog. In order to do that, I'll link to, and trackback from, the most recent post.

Tags: trackback, wordpress.

The Way to WordPress

2005-04-03T22:02:00.000-05:00

The title of this post is also the title of my new WordPress blog. I previously posted about my thoughts of moving from Blogger to WordPress. I'm giving WordPress a fairly significant try. But I'll do most of my posting here for the forseeable future. One reason for not switching right away is that my WordPress theme (think template, only better) is still very much under construction.

Tags: blog, wordpress.

WordPress Themes

2005-04-01T12:41:00.000-05:00

Themes are a feature introduced into WordPress in V1.5. Alex King just posted the results of his theme design contest, which drew some 140 entries. The sidebar of the contest blog features a theme switch plugin: just click on the name of a theme, and you'll see the blog using that theme!

Almost Spring, my own favorite among the entries I had time to check out, won the "Global Appeal" prize. The "Grand Poobah" prize went to Connections, which I also like a lot. I have a weakness for pictures which, like the one at the top of Connections, prominently feature some kind of road or other route running from "front to back" of the shot.

I am impressed by WordPress not only because of the software itself, but because of the complementary resources available. Themes are just one type of resource. Another is documentation. The example most relevant to the current post is probably the Using Themes page of the WordPress Codex. It includes pointers to lists of themes. There are already over 200. (140 is just the number of contest entries, and not every theme was entered.)

But, even with all these available, some of us are thinking of developing our own themes. A very good resource here is the Visual Anatomy of a theme, which I found via this post at the WordPress Reference Center.

It's a pity that the news about WordPress isn't all good. This post at Waxy.org describes search engine spam at WordPress.org. I won't comment on this matter, except to say that... no, I really won't comment right now.

Tags: wordpress, wptheme.

Early Adoptr of 360

2005-03-29T12:33:00.000-05:00

I now have a Yahoo 360 page. Thanks to Jeremy for the invite. I'd like to go on record as saying that it was not only because I wanted an invite to 360 that I commented on Jeremy's blog the night before Beta. By the way, has anyone written the poem, "The Night Before Beta," yet?

As you can see, I haven't had time to do much with 360 yet. I've accepted an invite, issued an invite, made one blog post, and done a couple of other things. That means that I have invites to spare. I'll issue invites to those who request them via email or comment on this post. I'm not sure how long the offer will be open for. I'll post again when and if it closes.

Tags: yahoo, 360.

More on Yahoo 360

2005-03-28T23:07:00.000-05:00

Since my recent Li-360 post, I've seen a few other postworthy things about Yahoo. Some of them come from Jeremy Zawodny's blog. He has a post on the 360 preview Yahoo ran for "influencers." Apparently Flickr was mentioned time and time again. Jeremy concludes: "So, yeah. We get it. Flickr got a lot of this stuff right."

I hope that Yahoo does get it. The Creative Commons Search suggests that it does. On the other hand, I've seen several reports that the Yahoo Groups interface has become even worse! I found that it became unusable pretty much as soon as Yahoo bought Groups and turned it into a gallery of bad ads. Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr is either an extremely good thing or an extremely bad thing; I expect to know which it before the end of 2005.

Back to the preview... Danah Boyd's post on it includes the following.

I have to say that i’m impressed that Yahoo folks wanted to hear all of our crankiness head-on rather than waiting for it to appear in our random ramblings online. Even better: they didn’t make us sign any NDAs so we can blog all we want...

In fact, a lot of the product is overwhelming for the not-technically-savvy and i think that this will be their major problem... For the techgeek, it will feel like they didn’t go far enough, didn’t have enough features, etc. That’s actually a lot easier to solve than the overwhelming problem.

Jeremy has another recent post in which makes a prediction on the future of the blogging tools market. He focuses on the host-it-yourself segment, as opposed to the hosted segment. He sees it in terms of two subsegments, one comprising personal users and the other coroporate users, and predicts that these subsegments will be dominated by WordPress and Movable Type respectively. Perhaps he's not going out too far on a limb, and his thoughts on the hosted segment, which of course will soon include 360, would be more interesting...

Tags: blog, yahoo, 360.

Yahoo 360 Preview

2005-03-28T13:29:00.000-05:00

No, I haven't had a preview. But Charlene Li has, and her post includes a couple of screen shots. It looks as sounds interesting. Beta starts tomorrow. I put my name of the list for the beta. I haven't heard anything yet...

Tags: yahoo, 360.

Green Card Blues

2005-03-28T13:16:00.000-05:00

The title of this post overstates the problem, or at least, I hope it does. My wife and I went to the JFK Federal Building in Boston today, having been given 11am today as the time and date for my green card interview. We'd started the process in the summer of 2004 by submitting a bunch of forms and supporting documents.

My name was called at 10:45, i.e., 15 minutes early. That sounded good, until they told us that they couldn't do the interview today because they didn't have the documents. Apparently they had been sent via UPS to Boston from whichever central processing center had centrally processed them. But the box containing my file and a bunch of others seems to have gone missing.

I couldn't resist suggesting that it might have been a good idea to use the United States Postal Service. The very pleasant and apologetic officer with whom we were talking laughed, took our phone number, and said that we'd get a call when the file turned up. Could they have called us before we went to the Federal Building? I suspect that the answer is: no, your phone numbers are in you file, and who knows where that is.

So Judy and I took the opportunity to have a lunch date.

Tags: greencard, ins, ups, usps.

Moglen at FSF

2005-03-27T21:57:00.000-05:00

This, the third of four short posts on yesterday's Free Software Foundation meeting, focuses on the talk given by Eben Moglen. It was mainly a summary of the past year (i.e. the 12 months since the last FSF meeting) in terms of legal developments relevant to free software.

One of the biggest such developments was the progress in the SCO litigation. There hasn't been much for SCO. On the contrary, the litigation has served as a useful wakeup call to IT vendors using free software components in the solutions they provide to clients. It made these vendors aware of the need to be ready for future attacks on free software, and of the need to fund such readiness.

This awareness led to the founding of the Software Freedom Law Center. EM, who chairs the center, remarked that there are now a lot of young people who have a technical background and a law degree, and that people like this that the SFLC will recruit.

I was particularly struck by the ways in which EM referred to Microsoft. One of the terms he used most frequently was "the adversary." He also made several references to Microsoft as "the monopoly." A series of references to a coming legal battles put me in mind of Lord of the Rings, and sure enough, one of the ways in which EM emphasized the importance of Longhorn to Microsoft was to use the image of "the Eye of Sauron" being focused on Longhorn, perhaps at the expense of other issues.

This made me realize that, since I got into blogging a few months ago, much of my impression of Microsoft has come from Robert Scoble. I have been paying less attention to the free part of "blogging on the free web" than to the blogging part. Spending a day at the FSF meeting reminded me of a face of Microsoft less friendly than Scoble's.

Finally, I must say that EM was an incredible speaker. He used no overheads or other visual aids, he just presented well-organized thoughts using beautifully-turned phrases. I'd highly recommend hearing him, if you haven't done so already. I'd also highly recommend hearing Larry Lessig, but that's the next post, and it'll probably have to wait until tomorrow.

Tags: fsf, opensource.

FSF Meeting

2005-03-27T00:05:00.000-05:00

Coffee at MIT,
originally uploaded by AndWat.

I was hoping to be blogging steadily throughout the day, but I had to use up quite a bit of laptop battery time in registering for the wireless network. I'm not sure why I was able to get on without registration in the first place.

I heard several comments on the Gates building during the course of the day. The one that sticks in my mind was the assertion that it cost too much and has usability problems.

You can see the schedule for the day at the FSF site. The people listed there spoke in the order listed there, although not always at the exact times listed there. There was one extra speaker: Georg Greve, President of FSF Europe, spoke for a few minutes right after lunch.

I wish I had time to comment on every talk. I hope to see comments from others. I also hope that Peter Brown, Executive Director of the FSF, will post the "Sinclair anecdote" he used.

Since I don't have much time, I'll concentrate on a couple: those by law profs Eben Moglen and Larry Lessig. Each gets its own post.

Tags: fsf, opensource.

Live From FSF Meeting

2005-03-26T09:49:00.000-05:00

I'm at the 2005 Free Software Foundation Associates' meeting. Strangely enough, it's in the William H. Gates building, and I'm using proprietary software: Blogger and Windows. But at least I'm using Firefox as the browser.

When I booted up my PC, I expected a couple of things to happen. First, I expected a wireless network, but I expected it to be passworded. I was right at the wireless, wrong about the password. Second, I expected to my use of Windows to be detected somehow, and for some horrible example to be made of me. That hasn't happened yet.

Almost time for the first session...

Tags: fsf, opensource.

Bloglines, etc.

2005-03-24T09:55:00.000-05:00

Richard MacManus' (first?) post for today is even more interesting than I have come to expect from him. It is about the integration of search and feed aggregation. He starts by making the case that Microsoft are among the players who consider this integration important.

He then makes the point that Ask Jeeves/Bloglines is a key player, or at least sees a chance of being one. Bloglines.com now emphasizes search even more prominently than it features aggregation.

I have a few things to add. (1) Bloglines is the leading aggregator, according to data posted by the Feedburner folks (and others, including Richard). (1.1) So Bloglines, rather than Ask Jeeves, may be the more important part of the search/aggregation combo.

(2) Bloglines' home page currently features a very prominent announcement that the firm is hiring software engineers. (3) Bloglines/Ask Jeeves recently sent me a free I (heart) Bloglines t-shirt! (I was was apparently one of the first couple of hundred people to request one after the acqusisition by Ask Jeeves.)

Tags: askjeeves, bloglines.

They, We, Apple, and Me

2005-03-23T10:40:00.000-05:00

Fred the VC recently posted his opinion that Apple has become a "they" company. The post has drawn much comment and trackback, a significant portion of which argues that Apple was never a "we" company, but has always been a "they" company. I'm posting to add to that portion.

In particuar, I'm posting to contribute further evidence of Apple's they-ness. Check out this Guardian article, which describes the greedy and arrogant manner in which Apple's iTunes tried to deal with independent record labels in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe. When I first read the article, I was saddened, but not surprised, by Apple's attitude.

Talking of "we" companies, my favorite example is Flickr. But the reason I started using Flickr is that it is a "me" company: it provides exactly what I went to it for. Then I realized that it is a "me-plus" company: it provides more than I went to it for, because Flickr knows about online photos far better than I ever will. Then I realized that it is a "me-plus-others" company: I have got a lot more out of the work of fellow Flickr-ers than I expected to.

I could provide many data points to support my claim that Flickr is a great "we" company. But I'll restruct myself to two. The first of them is Caterina's most recent post to the wonderful Flickr blog. The second is Betsy's intense plea to Yahoo not to ruin Flickr. (I did blog it recently, but Betsy is very insistent.)

Tags: apple, flickr.

DIY Comics at Gnomz

2005-03-21T22:55:00.000-05:00

Gnomz is yet another cool site I discovered via the wonderful Boing Boing. Here's my first creation, The Nominatrix.

Update: I did include the comic in this post, using the Gnomz-generated javascript, but it didn't display properly, so I removed it to leave just the above link. While I'm editing, I'll mention that membership in Gnomz gives you a free-but-with-ads blog. So here's mon blogz.

Tag: comic.

IACI Acquires ASKJ

2005-03-21T12:30:00.000-05:00

Here's the press release. Here are IAC Interactive's current businesses. I'm unable to get very interested in this transaction, for reasons including the following. It's overshadowed, for me as for many others, by the Flickr acquisition. I probably blogged too much on the acquisition last month of Bloglines by ASKJ. I have no idea what the acquisition of ASKJ means for Bloglines. I hope that the aggregator I use doesn't get ruined by advertism or other corporate vandalism.

Yahoo Acquires Flickr

2005-03-20T22:26:00.000-05:00

Betsy From Above,
originally uploaded by AndWat.

Well, the much-leaked news is now official. Betsy the hound-dog can do the pleading look better than anyone I know, so I thought I'd use this photo of her to plead... Yahoo, don't ruin Flickr. But however this turns out, thanks and congratulations to the Flickr folk.

After BlogSpot?

2005-03-20T20:15:00.000-05:00

In my previous post, I blogged about how I'm probably going to leave Blogger for WordPress. That raises the question of where to host this WordPress blog, along with anything else I might want to put on my personal web space in 2006 and beyond. I guess I have spoiled whatever suspense I might otherwise have built by including that DreamHost button in this post (although I guess the button might not show up if you're reading this via a feed, rather than at the blog itself).

Researching web hosts was a strange business. There seem to be a lot of sites running reviews and ratings of hosts. So I'd read at ThatReview.com that they thought that ThisHost.com was great. I'd then search the web for ThisHost.com, usually to find lots of horror stories about ThisHost. I couldn't find horror stories on DreamHost. (Perhaps some will appear in comments on this post!)

I did find praise for DreamHost on the WordPress forums. See, for example, the topic that recently started with the news that DreamHost now offers automatic WordPress installation through the control panel.

Tags: blog, host, dreamhost.

After Blogger?

2005-03-20T09:56:00.000-05:00

I like Blogger/Blogspot in many ways. But the drawbacks are sufficient to make me seriously consider taking my blogging elsewhere. I'm thinking this because of Blogger's lack of three things: categories; trackback; and uptime. For the last of these, I'm referring to blogger.com, not to blogspot.com. As far as I know, there have been no problems reading my blog, or others hosted at blogspot, but I know I'm not the only person who's sometimes had trouble posting using Blogger.

So I'm thinking of a replacement for Blogger, which means a replacement for Blogspot, or possibly one service to replace them both at once. I'll discuss the combined blogging tools/hosting options first. I could leave Google's Blogger for Microsoft's Spaces or Yahoo's 360. But I won't, for reasons given in my most recent post on them.

I just tried TypePad. I don't think I'll go there. I'll link to the most recent of my posts on my 30-day trial of TypePad, which in turn links to some other relevant posts, from me and from others. If I had to go with TypePad, I think I'd go for the Plus level, at $8.95/month. But that wouldn't give me access to the template html, which I have with Blogger, and it wouldn't give me my own domain, which I could have if I spent the same $ in other ways.

I am inclined to move to WordPress as the blog publishing tool. There are lots of themes available, so I'm confident that I could find one that's close to what I want, and then work with the html from there. That's what I've done at Blogger; this blog's template is based on Mimina.

WordPress is free, in that it available at no charge, and in that it is free/open source software. Free is good, and so is free.

I am far from the only person thinking along these lines. Bambit has recently switched, and her new blog includes a great comparison of Blogger and WordPress. It also includes a post on switching from Blogger to WordPress. She imported her old posts into her new blog. I might well leave my old posts here. After all, Blogspot is rent-free and, as I remarked above, my problems have not been with Blogspot.

Thanks to Bambit, and to Emily, whose post directed me to Bambit, and who provides a list of WordPress 1.5 themes. She describes themes as "a new system that takes the template to the next level." That word new is important. I don't think that there's been much new and significant in Blogger for a while, and I have no reason to think that there will be in the near future.

Having said that, Blogger could prove me wrong enough that I should stay with it. I don't think I'll move my main blogging activity from here until December. I'd like to get my own domain, and that would make a good Christmas or birthday (December 22, since you didn't ask) present. That raises the question of hosting, which probably merits its own post.

Tags: blog, blogger, wordpress.

BlogMap

2005-03-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

Here's my blogmap, courtesy of BlogMap, which I found via a ScoblePost.

Blogging: Flightless Fad?

2005-03-19T21:50:00.000-05:00

My reading today included some contrasting metablogging. Seth Godin compares blogging with ostrich farming, which turned out to be a fad, or, perhaps, a kind of pyramid selling scheme that laid an egg. He hopes that blogging does not turn out to be like ostrich breeding and, in doing so, implies that blogging on the current scale may be as short-lived as was the ostrich farming boom.

In support of his implication, Seth points out that "more than 20% of blog readers are also blog writers." If he were to find out that more than 20% of people who listen in conversations also speak in them, would he be comparing conversation to some tulip trading or some such bubble from history?

In other metablogging, Jeremy Wright addresses the "Is blogging a fad?" question that he apparently gets asked every other day. He points out that blogging is a communication medium, that it has become mainstream (50+ million bloggers, 200+ million blog readers) and that:

mainstream communications mediums don't die out. They stagnate, or they evolve or they get replaced by something that does the same thing only better. Because the reality is that once people learn to connect in a new and meaningful way they are loathe letting go of it.

I am more convinced by Jeremy's view of blogging as communication than by Seth's view of blogging as bird.

Tag: blog.