Monthly Archives: November 2005

Introductions to Blogging, RSS, Tagging Posted

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So, in the spirit of being more accessible to new users, I have finally taken the time to post some introductory articles here and link them from the sidebar. Now when visitors to this site look on the side, one of the first things they’ll see is:

Introductions to:

Please do check out the intros and share any suggestions for revisions. Readers of my old blog may remember that I had posted there introductions to wikis and podcasting as well. For now at least, I’m just going to concentrate on these three items on the list. The field of Web2.0 tools is so huge that I need to specialize to some degree. I’ll keep reading and posting about various weird tools, but what I really want to be doing with clients is setting them up with the life-changing pyramid of feeds, tagging and blogging.

Feeds can be set up to automatically deliver information on any subject and items of interest can be tagged into your social bookmarking archive. This information then makes great fodder for blogging. It’s a beautiful system, really.

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Nerd Community Assistance Needed

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Spammers can be a frightening bunch sometimes, not just an annoyance. The good folks over at Pingoat have taken a firm stand against their service being used to spread spam, and now they are paying the price. If there is anyone with the skills and resources to help them, they sure deserve some help. Here’s their blog where they describe the problem.

What is going on, you ask? Whenever anyone creates new online content (like blog posts) you want to ping the major search engines and other interested parties to say “hey, come look at what I just put up, you should re-index my site now!” Spammers, unfortunately, end up flooding ping services with rapid fire notifications of new content that’s really just crap intended to get you to look at ads. It’s usually all automated. For example, Ryan King of Technorati and the Super.c.ilio.us satire blog told me awhile ago that some spammers fill their blogs by having Google News alerts emailed to a Blogger post-by-email address. Then they run Adsense around it. Yuck!

How important is pinging? Well, Dave Winer just a few months ago sold one of the oldest ping services, weblogs.com for $2 million. That’s not a lot of money by some standards, but it really is a lot of money.

So Pingoat has been trying a variety of ways to exclude spammers from their service. It’s been a messy but valiant effort. Now it appears that some one is unhappy with what they’ve been doing and has attacked their computers. Possibly with an army of zombified computers sending continual messages to them and inserting malicious code into their servers. I don’t really know the specifics, but if it’s something you think you might be able to help with then you should check it out. They appear to need resources more than advice.

I only use Pingoat as a back up or for pinging for someone else one ping at a time. I use Feedburner’s Pingshot service to automate my own pinging. It works great and is one more reason to use Feedburner for all your RSS and other needs.

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Self-Submission: Spam or Not?

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One of the things I often do after making a post to this or any other blog is to tag the post in both Furl.net and Del.icio.us. I make sure to include tags like viagra, texas-hold-em and *&% expansion with every post. Just kidding.

But seriously, do you think that tagging your own blog posts into social bookmarking databases is a form of spam? I don’t. Here’s what I emailed to someone who accused me of spamming Furl after my last post.

People do ask me all the time, is it ok to bookmark my own blog posts? I think it is, and here are a couple my thoughts on the subject:
*if services like Furl and del.icio.us are collaborative databases, why wait until someone else submits my posts to the database? Doesn’t it sound like a good idea to make the post as findable as possible?
*in del.icio.us at least, you can see that no one else has bookmarked a new post I submit, so the only thing that would lead you to click through would be your own interest relative to the title.
*Most importantly: I try to title and describe the posts I submit to Furl and del.icio.us as accurately and usefully as possible. I also make posts that offer real value to readers. So when you see a post of my own that I put in the database, you’re not deceived into clicking through it, or being pointed towards something that’s of no use.

Does that seem fair?

What do you think?

Googling for Creative Commons & Open Access Content

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Interested in information and images that you can reuse for your own purposes with no fear of looking like a thief? Google has just added a function to its Advanced Search page that allows you to effectively search only items online that have been posted under a or licence. This is very cool, and an important nod to the paradigm of information sharing.

Found via the awesome group blog LifeHacker.

Speaking of Creative Commons, you might be inspired by these short films about the phenomenon:



That reminds me, I’d better add a Creative Commons badge to my site!

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Blogger is Down Right Now

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After trying to load a blog hosted on blogspot and failing, I noticed in my RSS reader that Blogger is having database problems today. They say that some sites are unavailable and the service in general is slow. You can check out the Blogger Status site for updates. If you use blogger, you should subscribe to the RSS feed for that page. I subscribe to the company feeds for all the vendors that I know any of my clients use, and I put them in a seperate folder. So I get pretty fast information on service problems – automatically. At least I do from companies that are communicating with their customers.

For other advice on getting your RSS feeds organized, check out “Getting RSS Organized.” For an in-depth introduction and list of RSS resources, check out RSS Syndication: What, How and Why.

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