Category Archives: Blogging

Blogging: It’s Not Just About Cats Anymore

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I find it maddening how widely held the belief is that blogs are personal journals about unserious topics. Not out of any sense of professional pride on my part, but because of the huge loss this represents to organizations that could benefit greatly from a these powerful tools of self-publishing with global reach. (Not to mention authenticity, dialog and the benefits of social bookmarking and RSS!)

So I love it when ever I find examples of serious blogs.

  • Terry Teachout just wrote a column in the Wall St. Journal about the impact of blogs on art criticism. This excerpt via Jeff Jarvis:

    The emergence of the practitioner-blogger has the highest potential significance for arts journalism. Many, perhaps most, of the greatest critics in history — George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Edwin Denby and Fairfield Porter come immediately to mind — were also practicing artists. But with the growing tendency of mainstream-media journalists to think of themselves as members of an academically credentialed profession, the practitioner-critic has lately become a comparative rarity in the American print media. Not so on the Web, which is one of the reasons why readers in search of stimulating commentary on the arts are going online to find it.

    I find myself rather than asking “why aren’t more writers practitioners” instead, “why aren’t more practitioners writing?” The benefits of writing (blogging) about your practice, whatever it is, are innumerable.

  • Harvard Law School now has an official blog for the admissions department. Written by the Assistant Dean for Admissions, the blog’s sidebar reads

    This blog is intended to make the admissions process at Harvard Law School more transparent while providing a venue for those tips, nuggets and ideas that get lost in the wave of information greeting law school applicants.

    Blogging for your organization must be a thousand times, no ten thousand times, easier than getting into Harvard Law School. But if you’re the type who likes signals from authority figures that something is a good idea…

  • So No Child Must Wait is a blog network for surgeons traveling to the poorest parts of the world to perform complex surgeries for children. It appears to be posted to irregularly, which is a shame, but it is a demonstration of one more wonderful use of the technology.

These are just a few of the most recent examples of great applications of this technology that I’ve found. I cannot emphasize enough the potential for communication, visibility, dialog and learning that is enabled by blogging. It’s not just about cats anymore.

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Firefox news re early adopters

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Zdnet just reported that after one year Firefox has 8%+ of the browser market. Pretty cool. I don’t use Firefox on my Mac, but I wish I did. It’s too slow for some reason, though perhaps getting a newer version would help. Tabbed browsing is available in Safari, the Mac browser, but the huge open-source developer community is not. Getfirefox.com is the place to go to download it if you haven’t, takes about 2 minutes and is very easy.

Update: I am NOT getting paid to talk you into getting Firefox, though I think this campaign is hillarious!

That said, I couldn’t help but notice that my traffic here is very different. Not 8% but 71% of my recent pageloads have come via Firefox/Mozilla. Only 23% through IE. Now my stats don’t go back very far, so a few big reading sessions by Firefox users could dramatically alter this, but I think it does say something. I think it says that Firefox is the browser of choice for early adopters of Web2.0 (probably you if you’re reading this blog). And to be honest, that’s significant. There are many things that don’t translate well between the two. For example, readers here in IE 6 probably see my sidebar pushed way down to the bottom of the screen. I’m working on fixing that if I can, but it’s an issue. Likewise, the Technorati Tag bookmarklet that I was working on awhile ago doesn’t work in IE 7! As we try to make Web 2.0 more inclusive, that means turning people on to it who are still using IE. Heck, I talked to a guy this morning on the phone who’s pretty big into Web 2.0 and he was using IE! So this is something to think about, perhaps mitigating some enthusiasm about Web 2.0 evangelism.

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My Little Circulation Celebration

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Well, I told myself I was going to have a little celebration when I hit 100 subscribers to my RSS feed. That happened this morning. Woo hoo! I’m really glad that 100+ of you find the info here of enough interest to stay subscribed. I will try and keep posting things that are useful and interesting. Readers who are unfamiliar with RSS, or who don’t know how life changing it is should check out my Intro to RSS.

Here’s how the numbers break down, in case it’s of interest. I hope this isn’t obnoxious enough that people unsubscribe!

On Convincing People to Blog

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Reader IANG posted a comment yesterday asking about convincing an organization to blog. I thought it would be of general interest, wanted to get others’ thoughts and so I moved it here.

I am having a hard time trying to convince my organization (a small non profit) to blog on area of expertise. they seem to think it will require a full time person (based on some comments at a seminar PR folks went to without me) and that it will not add anything to our fairly good PR/Media out-reach we already do. How can I get them to understand the importance of blogging vs. our traditional media outreach?

Here’s my response:

It is very hard to convince someone to blog if they don’t want to. I suggest you find out who in your organization most highly prioritizes open, regular, two-way communication with people in the field. You and they can blog, or just you, about your work in the organization and/or your thoughts on the issues faced by people in your field. It’s ideal to get support and participation from upper management for such a project (though they are apt to take a week to write a 2000 word essay!). But short of that, perhaps your blog could prove its own worth and then move towards the inside of the organization – or into another organization that more highly prioritizes such values.

I think that if you set up a good suite of search and other RSS feeds about your issues, then you will have lots of very timely fodder for regular blogging. If you set up your blog to maximize participation by others (one-click RSS subscription and subscribe by email options, etc. -) then you should be able to establish yourself as a person at the center of the online discussion and a good source of news. (Those are the kinds of things I help people with.)

Perhaps your organization will see the vibrant communication you’ve got going on and make a paradigm shift. People who aren’t familiar with this type of media go gaga over seeing strangers make good comments! That really helps them see that the communication is real and valuable.

It is a time investment, but I don’t think it requires a full time person by any means.

What thoughts do others here have about “convincing people to blog”?

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Control and Web 2.0 Don’t Mix

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Yuck, two dreadful pieces of news from TechDirt. They are interesting, I think, because they demonstrate what a struggle it really is when these new technologies hit mainstream use. There are some real issues to wrestle with!

The first story is perhaps good news, about vindication. A school in NJ today decided to settle out of court for $117,500 with a student who had been suspended for blogging critically about his school.

Second story I’ll just repost verbatim from the original story:

…from the blame-it-on-the-web dept…
All but 400 of the 3,000 students at a San Antonio high school didn’t show up yesterday after somebody posted some messages on MySpace saying some kids were going to show up at the school with machine guns. This sort of stupidity is nothing new, but apparently, since it went out over a web site, the clueless school administrators want retribution, saying MySpace should be held “accountable”, with the district’s lawyers deciding if they should file a lawsuit. An administrator says that letting kids post unmonitored messages is “asking for trouble” — so should all these kids’ phone conversations be tapped and their face-to-face conversations be monitored as well? MySpace and other internet services aren’t creating these problems and aren’t to blame for them; they just make the spreading of information (sometimes known as communication) quicker and more efficient.

Please, do us all a favor and try to tell one person you know who is less web-savvy than yourself about this story and how inane it is. Blogs enable some serious work to be done in the world, and the only thing worse than people saying “blogs? isn’t that just people writing about their cats?” would be “blogs? is that like that MySpace thing that kids use to say they’re going to shoot up the school?”

According to the original story on San Antonio’s WOAI.com News one school district official says, “This particular web site has been a pain for all Bexar County schools for a long time now, and it just seems that the owners of MySpace-dot-com should be held accountable.”

What if said post had been made on Blogger-dot-com or on En-dot-Wikipedia-dot-org or any other stinkin’ place in the world that is no longer a one-way means of communication? Terribly sorry Mr. school district official, if this giant shift in human communication has the entire Bexar County school district frightened then maybe you should sue. But I hope you know what you’re getting into!

Not to only make light of such things; I don’t know what the answer is. But for an educator to be so provincial as to so completely miss the boat about the last 3 years of the web is a real disservice to the young people he is supposed to be preparing for the world around them.

If you need a reminder about the seriousness of blogs, or a shot in the arm to remember their potential, go visit my friends at The Committee to Protect Bloggers.

Ps. Dear dumb kids, stop posting things like that.

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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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