A single text link on the front
A single text link on the front page of wordpress.org is selling for $100,000 for seven days…for that you get only 17,000 daily pageviews. This Web 2.0 math makes 0.0 sense.
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kottke.org posts about weblogs
TED (the conference folks) have got themselves
TED (the conference folks) have got themselves a blog. If you enjoy kottke.org, it looks like TEDBlog may hold your interest as well.
In addition to weblogs.com, Verisign’s acquisition
In addition to weblogs.com, Verisign’s acquisition of Moreover was also announced this week. Two of the companies founders, Nick Denton and David Galbraith, have thoughts. Nick reveals that Moreover almost bought Pyra once upon a time, a little tidbit I didn’t reveal in my piece on Moreover from a couple years ago.
Andre Torrez: “Webloggers of 1999 don’t equal bloggers
Andre Torrez: “Webloggers of 1999 don’t equal bloggers in 2005”. Agreed, but I also think the webloggers of 1999 are different too…the game has changed but so have the people.
Neil is compiling a list of notable
Neil is compiling a list of notable musicians who blog…help him out in the comments. So far, he’s got Franz, Radiohead, Shatner (!), Ted Leo, M Doughty, etc.
Franz Ferdinand** has a blog and you
Franz Ferdinand** has a blog and you don’t probably do too.
** The band, not the archduke.
Weblogs.com sold to Verisign
Boy, the scent of money is in the air these days. The latest report is that Dave Winer has sold weblogs.com to Verisign (~$5 million is the figure being bandied about for $2.3 million). This is an interesting one because it seemed crazy (see below) when I first heard about it, but now that I’ve heard it from multiple sources, who knows?
Verisign is interested in blogs and RSS (another of their acquisitions in this space will be announced soon) and it’s not hard to see why Dave would sell weblogs.com (the site needs some firm financial backing to keep from buckling under the ever-increasing strain of all those pings), but to Verisign? To me, Verisign embodies the idiocy and ineptitude of the BigCos Dave often rails against…the BigCo to end all BigCos. If true, those are some odd bedfellows indeed.
Update: Silicon Beat says they have confirmation that Verisign bought weblogs.com:
We’re getting confirmation that the rumors about Verisign buying Dave Winer’s Weblogs.com are true. The price is $2 million. What Verisign wants with Weblogs is another matter. Weblogs was one of the first, if not the first, centralized ping servers that blogs could use to alert the world to new content.
I like how when a weblog has two independent sources on something, it’s a “rumor”…
Update #2: Verisign confirms the purchase.
John Gruber is asking folks to renew
John Gruber is asking folks to renew their Daring Fireball memberships. Money well spent, I say.
When Teen Talk Barbie came out in 1989
When Teen Talk Barbie came out in 1989 saying things like “math is hard”, could you imagine if blogs had existed at the time? The whole internet would have exploded with rage.
Praise be, someone’s picked up the development
Praise be, someone’s picked up the development of the MTAmazon plug-in for Movable Type. (thx jason)
Not sure if this is new or
Not sure if this is new or not, but Moodgrapher tracks the moods (worried, happy, depressed, sick, etc.) of LiveJournal users in order to determine what the overall mood of the world/internet/blogosphere is. (thx ben)
Six Apart announces Comet, which at this
Six Apart announces Comet, which at this early stage is hard to define exactly, but seems to be some kind of overall repositioning/refocus of their existing products toward consumer user-friendliness. Or is it an entirely other product/platform? Anyway, I doubt whether it will be the promised “next generation blogging software”…that’s been guaranteed many times by many people/companies and has yet to be lived up to. IMO, blog tools are still in the Blogger generation (although I might be the only one who thinks that at this point).
For what seems like the last 2 hours,
For what seems like the last 2 hours, I’ve been reading Kevin Smith’s blog (Flickr photos here), and I have no idea why. He calls it “Kevin’s Boring Ass Life” and that’s what it is…a typical entry is not much more than “got up, checked email, dropped off kid at school, lunch, dinner, sex with wife, then watched movies/Simpsons until asleep”. Couldn’t stop reading though…
Marginal Revolution recently experimented with opening up
Marginal Revolution recently experimented with opening up comments on their posts and here are their results. I’ve noticed the same pattern on kottke.org, especially “the more that comments are regularly available, the more rapidly the quality of comments falls”.
UnBeige blogged the blog panel that I
UnBeige blogged the blog panel that I participated on with Michael Bierut, Jen Bekman, Armin Vit, and Steven Heller. More here and here.
Papalotzin is a project to follow the
Papalotzin is a project to follow the migration of the monarch butterfly from Canada to Mexico in an ultralight airplane (they call it their big butterfly). They’ve made it as far as NYC so far and are blogging and taking pictures as they go. (via gurgly)
Google finally launches a blog search service.
Google finally launches a blog search service. The default search is by relevance, which I’m not sure is correct, and it’s pretty bare bones so far, but I’m sure that many other people will be saying so long, Technorati. Also available in Blogger flavor. (via waxy)
The writer of this blog hates the
The writer of this blog hates the New Yorker, especially the David Denby part of it. From reading the site a bit, it seems to me that they actually like the NYer, but wish it were better, a feeling which I’ve had for several things in my life.
Stephen Baker at Business Week is reporting
Stephen Baker at Business Week is reporting that Huffington Post has a backlog of 15,000 comments that need to be approved for display on the site. Crazy. (I just found BW’s Blogspotting blog today…they’ve got some interesting coverage, including whether or not Technorati is paying for ping data priority.)
Covering the AIGA Design Conference 2005
From September 15-18, I will be attending the AIGA Design Conference in Boston. As an experiment (for both the AIGA and me), I will be covering the event at their request[1] on kottke.org. I’ll be covering the conference as a blogger, but the easiest way to think about it in terms of a conference is that I’m a speaker[2]…a sort of roving speaker with the readers of kottke.org as the audience and my topic is the conference itself.
As usual, I have no solid plan as to how this is going to work exactly, but I’m looking forward to seeing how the conference goes and adapting accordingly. I’m hoping to provide a moving snapshot of the event so that readers of kottke.org can follow along fairly well without being at the conference. I’ll probably have comments open on most posts so hopefully those reading along at home and those reading along at the conference can have some dialogue, with each little world spilling over into the other a bit.
One other quick thing…if you’re going to be at the conference and plan to blog it, let me know…I’ll definitely be linking to other people’s stuff. I’m sure Design Observer and Speak Up will be covering things pretty well. I’ll also be watching Flickr and del.icio.us for links and photos…I’d suggest tagging relevent entries with aigadc2005 for easy aggregation.
More next week as the conference draws near.
[1] Disclaimer: Kottke.org’s budget for covering out-of-town conferences with costly entry fees is limited, so I’m exploring other ways of gaining access to be able to bring you some interesting content that you might not get otherwise. The AIGA is a curious organization and they’re looking at various ways of using weblogs, so they asked me to come and blog the conference as an experiment. To make it economically feasible for me to be there, they are paying me a small speaker’s honorarium and putting me up in a hotel.
In talking with the AIGA about this, they’ve made it exceedingly clear that I’m to consider myself independent and write whatever I want about the conference, which is pretty much what I intend to do. If I thought the hotel room and honorarium would be a problem w/r/t my objectivity in covering the event, I would have declined them both. The bottom line is that if money were no object (if the conference were free and took place entirely within walking distance of my apartment), I’d want to go and write about it anyway.
[2] Although I will also be appearing on a related panel about blogs, journalism, and design with Steve Heller, Michael Bierut, Armin Vit, and Jen Bekman.
Update: I’ve changed the first paragraph slightly, from “covering the conference as a blogger/journalist” to “covering the conference as a blogger”, which under the circumstances is more accurate. I am not a journalist in this instance or any other.
Use the Technorati Accelerator to “search on
Use the Technorati Accelerator to “search on any URL and get the same response you would have to wait thirty seconds for on their site”. Zing!
There’s a book coming out in December
There’s a book coming out in December based on PostSecret, a web site that displays postcards with secrets written on them sent in by readers. I heard something long ago about the site not actually using reader submissions, at least in the beginning before it got popular enough to get the quality of entries that they post…did anyone actually verify or debunk that rumor?
Update: PostSecret proprietor Frank Warren responds and John Nick effectively explains how the site was bootstrapped from an offline event.
Taking a little break
I’m taking a few days off from the site, publicly anyway. I’m still going to be working on some upcoming posts and such, but there won’t be any posts or links to the site. I was going to write about why, but it got to be too long and I just scrapped the whole thing. Something about the crappiness of online communication and the faceless, nameless, hugless, merciless place the blogosphere can be sometimes…along with my desire to not post much more about Katrina or to post much of anything else that seems trivial in comparison.
So yeah, back after the long weekend.
Brian Lebakken is blogging the Minnesota State
Brian Lebakken is blogging the Minnesota State Fair (here’s an article in the Pioneer Press about it). He’s planning on going every day and, from the looks of it, eating as much as he can while doing it, as every Fair-goer worth their salt should. (thx alex)
Blogging on the job…
A man was forced to resign from the Met for videoblogging on the job. (via zach)
New Orleans blogger Brendan Loy is furiously blogging Hurricane Katrina.
New Orleans blogger Brendan Loy is furiously blogging Hurricane Katrina.
Remaindered links format change
As some of you may have noticed, I changed the way I do my remaindered links a few weeks ago. Instead of a “headline” with a single link accompanied by some (optional) extra text:
“Does anyone devote as much energy to avoiding simple, sensible solutions as the modern graphic designer?”
Novelty is necessary to foster innovation, but is missing the mark so frequently worth the effort?
I switched to a short paragraph of text with one or more links:
Following the elimination of tipping at Per Se, an op-ed by Steven Shaw says tipping should be abolished in restaurants. (via tmn) Considering the statistics on tipping, perhaps he’s right. For a less refined take, here’s why Reservoir Dog Mr. Pink doesn’t tip.
I’m really happy with the switch so far. Posting each entry takes a little longer (especially if there’s more than one link per entry), but the format is a lot more flexible than the headline/link/text way. It allows me to explicitly follow up on previous posts (e.g. Remember this link I posted last week? Well, here’s some more info on that…), make connections between what I’m posting and what I’ve read/seen/heard elsewhere previously, credit where I find links, and is generally more Web-like and weblog-like in style. That and I can still do the headline/link/text thing if I want.
It’s a subtle change, but in a lot of ways it’s a return for me to an older style of blogging: link-dense, off-the-cuff, linking for subtext and not reference (a practice pioneered by Suck). Not having to limit myself to one link (as with the old style of remaindered link) or feel like I need to write something of substance to justify a post with a title and it’s own archive page (as with my main posts…it’s kind of amazing how post titles and individual archives have made blog posts seem more like magazine or newspaper articles than, well, blog posts) has been great. There was a missing intermediate baby bear sort of post that was difficult for me to do easily and on a regular basis. With this switch, it’s just right.
For those of you who read the remaindered links in a newsreader, you may not have even noticed the change. Depending on how your newsreader works and how you use it, you may not be seeing the extra links. I still have the URL pointing to whatever it is I’m primarily linking to rather than the permalink for the entry. I’m doing it that way now for backward compatibility, but I’m not sure how long that will continue…it makes less sense with this new format. I may even roll the remaindered links into the main RSS file…it would make a lot of sense (although I would still offer a separate RSS file for the r-links).
The bottom line is, if you’re reading the remaindered links in a newsreader, you may be missing out. The relative simplicity of RSS/Atom (and the applications that utilize them) is often a strength, but it’s not ideal for some methods of content display, which can be frustrating to those of us who revel in the flexibility of HTML in formatting content.
As always, questions, comments, and concerns are appreciated.
When dealing with information sent to them
When dealing with information sent to them on mobile devices like the Blackberry, people tend to not read anything that closely and seem to take the information less seriously. Like Matt and Foe, I’ve noticed this…but with blogs and (especially) newsreaders. Having 1000s of unread items to deal with per day would tend to diminish the value of individual blog posts, n’est pas? I wonder if this is partially what Gladwell is getting at with his upcoming NYer festival talk, The American Obsession with Precociousness, Learning quickly versus learning well…
Radiohead has a weblog, although it just
Radiohead has a weblog, although it just got going and Thom’s the only person who’s posted to it so far.
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