Ah, a quick lunchtime entry. I just noticed that City of Bits has gotten a facelift (and new face for author Louise Ferguson :). I'm undecided about the mouseover behaviors of her non-clickable right-nav heads, but otherwise really like the new clean look!

12:16 PM | | linkme | home

John Robb talks about being in the middle of the second web advertising boom and suggests that this one is likewise doomed to fail:

The first step is to put advertising on weblogs that are "qualified" as contextual content through an automated mechanism of keyword analysis (Google's Adsense). A flawed mechanism if there ever was one. The second step is to trust that visitors to weblogs are very likely to click-through on Adsense text ad in order to provide, at zero cost to themselves, a small stipend to the author of the weblog. This "click to contribute" impulse will grow until the system breaks down.

Besides that, they are ugly, aren't they? For example, check out typographica, which is experimenting with this blog "money grubbing." Maybe you can style 'em up a bit, but if you're going to hide 'em way below the fold to keep them less obvious, why bother at all? You're hardly going to get enough clicks to matter.

At least with , you get to decide what gratuitous product advertising you do. With Google, you're at the mercy of their algorithm.

10:00 PM | | linkme | home

I'm not sure if this is really necessary (what with this being a weblog rather than a website), but I've finally spruced up IDblog's 404 page. What's kinda creepy is that in reviewing the logfiles, I don't see 404 errors for old files that are no longer around or links that someone coded wrong...instead I see searches for FORMMAIL.PL. I wonder how many sites still have that vulnerability in place?

12:25 PM | | linkme | home

I guess I'm not done questioning weblog hosting services for the night. It appears that BloggerPro is still "offline while we retool. Sorry for the inconvenience. Please check back next week. " I got that message a month ago. Curious.

10:08 PM | | linkme | home

Here's an interesting "feature" of the new TypePad weblog hosting service. If you decide to set up a "typelist" of books or music and you didn't specify an Amazon Associate's ID when you set up your user profile, TypePad will use theirs (actually Six Apart's; see example).

If you aren't familiar with Amazon's , the program pays people based on purchases made at Amazon via links on Associates' websites. It's not a bad program...sites can make a little money (or more if they have great traffic) and Amazon gets great referral traffic.

I use an Associate ID for the links on IDblog, though I don't get the dough. What little revenue is generated goes to STC (a non-profit organization), where I founded the ID SIG.

That doesn't mean that I think it's bad for bloggers to try and make a personal profit. But what you may not know is that the Associate gets credit for anything someone buys at Amazon during the visit after they follow the link. Well, almost anything. I think I tried buying my Treo after clicking on one of my Amazon links and didn't get credit for that. But STC did get credit for the "Rough and Tumble Ball Pit" that someone purchased... makes you wonder what series of clicks that person made :)

So if you have moved to TypePad or you plan to, you might want to go ahead and sign up as an Associate...it's free, and why shouldn't you get the perks of sending traffic to Amazon!

9:15 PM | | linkme | home

I just signed up to go to BloggerCon, which will be October 4th in Cambridge MA. You have to be "invited" to the conference, but all you have to do to get it invited is to sign up for their email list or email . It'll be fab to be in the old neighborhood again...I miss it terribly.

4:00 PM | | linkme | home

And over on bloug, Lou has updated his site banner. Yeah! I was one of those who didn't get the "joke" and thus don't miss the scowling visage :).

12:56 PM | | linkme | home

Boy, if I ever really want traffic, all I need to do is write an incredibly useful article like Beyond the Blog, by Matthew Haughey. In it he describes very cool ways to extend Movable Type's basic functionality. Thanks to Nick over at Digital-Web for the pointer.

Oh, and speaking of them, in pulling up the page again, I noticed the entry about Netscape's official death. It may be tilting at windmills (I like to do that), but this seems like an organization I'll want to support: the Mozilaa Foundation. Sure like their browser!

9:45 PM | | linkme | home

Zeldman has a pointer to a fabulous validator for RSS. What's really nice are the MT-specific instructions for folks like me who have upgraded to a recent version of Movable Type. Very nice!

2:14 PM | | linkme | home

This one's more for me (want to log it for the record), but some of you may be interested too. Responses to a question on the (for internet research) about the origins of the terms "weblog" and "blog" have pointed to Jorn Barger and Peter Merholz, respectively as the source for each.

While Barger doesn't really take credit for "weblog" on his site (robotwisdom), Wired gives him that explicit credit in February 2000 in this article:

While declining to provide precise numbers, Jorn Barger, who publishes Robot Wisdom, one of the oldest and most popular weblogs, and who coined the term weblog, said his daily traffic has grown to tens of thousands from the mere hundreds when he started in 1998.

PeterMe does take credit for "blog" on his own weblog here:

As such, it's weird to experience how my love of words and wordplay has actually made an impact. Sometime in April or May of 1999 (I can't say for sure when I exactly did it), I posted, in the sidebar of my homepage:

For What It's Worth
I've decided to pronounce the word "weblog" as wee'- blog. Or "blog" for short.

I didn't think much of it. I was just being silly, shifting the syllabic break one letter to the left. I started using the word in my posts, and some folks, when emailing me, would use it, too. I enjoyed it's crudeness, it's dissonance... As I wrote Keith Dawson after he added "blog" to Jargon Scout, "I like that it's roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting. These sites (mine included!) tend to be a kind of information upchucking."

In this same post, Peter credits the Blogger folks with keeping "blog" from dying "a forgotten death," but I bet it would have succeeded regardless.

Anyways, just wanted to file this...bet it might come in handy when I take Nancy Kaplan's class on information culture in the fall!

6:42 PM | | linkme | home

So I was browsing technorati and came across an interesting weblog that's blogrolled IDblog: the invisible rabbit. Cool name, cool webog.

Alas, it is powered by blogger. I almost titled this post "blog snobbery" for there is a bit of snootiness that can be associated with which blog software you use, but here's my real issue. If a weblog doesn't have an RSS feed, it's kinda like, "hey, that's great...see ya in a year."

Alas, poor blogger folks. It is just fab that they have access to a free tool. I started IDblog on blogger. But it sucks that an RSS feed is (apparently) only accessible via the for-fee blogger pro interface. I say apparently because if you go check out blogger pro, you get:

Ouch! Blogger Pro ordering is currently offline while we retool. Is it just me, or would you have figured that the folks at Google would have thought of a way to let folks sign up while they retool? Good thing for them that Ben and Mena still have TypePad in limited beta!

8:22 PM | | linkme | home

After a visit today to Zen Haiku, I was inspired to update IDblog's most recent comments area (see top, right) to preview comments rather than simply list number of comments per topic. Let know how you like it.

BTW, I think Movable Type is simply wonderful, but I'm not sure I can honestly say the same about their documentation. In particular, important attributes for tags (like the "trim_to" attribute for the "MTCommentBody" tag) aren't listed where the tag is. Bizarre. So instead you wind up having to search and find source code you can modify (thanks to scriptygoddess.com and fembat.net for their help).

So in case this might help some other MT blogger, here's what I've added to my template to get the results you see:

<$MTCommentAuthorLink show_email="0"$> in

.html"><$MTEntryTitle$>:

<$MTCommentBody remove_html="1" trim_to="150"$>...
.html">more>

7:14 PM | | linkme | home

Well, this one's destined to be the blog post of the week (I saw it as an email entry by Peter Morville on an IA list). It's a slightly revised keynote by Clay Shirky, titled A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy . It's an extremely interesting read, particularly if you're interested in "social software that supports large and long-lived groups." My apologies for pulling a quote that may be somewhat out of context, but I found it interesting and amusing:

I can't tell you why it took as long for weblogs to happen as it did, except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with technology. We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn't know what we were doing.

In the article, Shirky notes that it is impossible in these situations to separate technical and social issues, that 'members' are different from 'users,' and that sometimes the group rights need priority over individual rights. He also describes four factors that contribute to successful groups, including useful 'handles' that aren't too lightweight, ways of having members of good standing, barriers to participation (this isn't unrelated to the previous factor), and a way to handle scale.

Shirky suggests that the lack of barriers killed Usenet. I'm not sure I agree. It is certainly the case that as the masses poured in (FidoNet was a huge problem), previously manageable groups became much less useful. But the other thing that "killed" Usenet (which isn't really dead anyways) was that the popularity of the WWW took off at nearly the same time. Lots of folks who spent all their time in foo.bar now were experimenting with this new toy. But what Shirky doesn't really mention is that web-based discussion groups still suffer greatly in comparison to client-server Usenet groups. Usenet readers are still preferable in terms of their user experience (in part because they can maintain state between sessions; cookies buy you some, but not all of the functionality in newsreaders).

Or to state the point a different way, who isn't depressed about the state of spam? Yet most folks I know aren't dumping email because they are getting bushels of crap in their inboxes...they are learning to cope because there is no useful alternative to email...nor is there another type of software (even IM) which is causing folks to keep email in the back burner.

My subscription list on Usenet is much smaller than it was in the mid-80s. But I still have 8 subscriptions. I might have had more, but email lists (if which I'm subscribed to a scary number) have supplemented this. When you add the web-based archive capability and the ease of setup (a la Yahoo Groups) to the direct in-your-inbox interaction, email lists are great applications of social software. But Shirky's right...they can be their own worst enemy!

7:08 PM | | linkme | home

Here's another one of those 'may be more useful for me than you' features (a la search, mentioned previously). But I'm experimenting with doing my blogroll (over on the right, under categories, key links, and groups) via blogroll.com. I'm doing this because I like the feature that shows you weblogs that have been recently updated (the way I have it configured, that's the last 24 hours).

Of course, this is really a nice feature for you as well as me...there's nothing so annoying as being presented with 80 links in a blogroll and then finding out that they've not been updated in 10 years. Then again, maybe you're all using an , so this is a moot point?

So...while I'm experimenting, feel free to let me know if you're on my blogroll but I don't have the link that matches your blogroll.com entry, or find out how to ping blogroll.com if you want to show up as an updated blog any weblog that uses the blogroll.com service, or if you're wondering why you aren't on my blogroll!

7:50 PM | | linkme | home

Finally! I've upgraded to the latest version of Movable Type. I have to (perish the thought) read the manual to find out what else I may want to tweak, but I've already gone ahead and added the search capability to IDblog (see top of right nav area). I'm not sure if anyone besides me will find it useful, but if so, enjoy!

6:50 PM | | linkme | home

I just spent the last three days at a WebTrends class. Since we've been using WebTrendsLive for two years, the first two days were a total wash (yep, I know the difference between a 'hit' and a 'page view'). Fortunately, on day three we got to the advanced stuff (and the things that were different between WTL and the new WebTrends Reporting Service we were being migrated to).

Since my company had moved to web-accessible Outlook, I spent the better part of those first two days on email, dealing with work stuff. I had a great PC, with all the Windows 2000 bells and trappings that the training center could muster.

Know what I really missed? My AmphetaDesk RSS reader.

Yes, I had a web browser with broadband access to the web. But without my nice little RSS subscriptions (I think I'm at 50+ weblogs now), it was just impossible to do my daily check up on all but my faves.

So, it was kind of amusing today (now that I could surf thru all my subscriptions) to see this blogged by Doc Searls: RSS newsreaders are TiVo for blogs.

I had to laugh, as I'm also a TiVo devotee now. I hadn't been that tempted by their offering, but I figured my TV-happy sister would love it, so I bought one off of eBay one November (there weren't any available in stores that close to Christmas) and then decided to make sure it was working.

I hooked it up, and three days later, I knew I wasn't giving her the one that I had bought. It was just way too cool to be able to pause live TV so you could go to the loo or answer the phone. Couple that with the way that it could easily record the programs you were interested in, and that was it...I'm a DVR lifer!

RSS has been much the same. I don't tend to read my weblogs via the RSS interface. But it helps me know when one of the weblogs I like has new content, and thus saves me all that "oh drat, hasn't been updated" effort to stay current.

RSS=TiVo? Maybe not, but I'd sure hate to give up either.

8:27 PM | | linkme | home