Gadgetopia

FTC: Bloggers must disclose payments for reviews : This won’t be hard for me to comply with, since very few people send me free stuff [sniff, sob].

The Federal Trade Commission will require bloggers to clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.

Six Apart - WordPress: Six Apart — makers of Movable Type — is offering a bunch of their tools as WordPress plugins.

We believe in the power of blogging, and that’s why we’ve got a whole bunch of powerful services available for WordPress users: TypePad AntiSpam, Six Apart Media, TypePad Connect, Blogs.com and more

WordPress creator Mullenweg is many bloggers’ best friend: Apparently wordpress.com is taking 10,000 signups a day.

WordPress has become so entrenched on the Web that many of the biggest names use it now — a roster that includes CNN, Fox News and The New York Times, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Coca-Cola and General Electric, along with millions of ordinary bloggers.

“People might start with LiveJournal or Blogger, but if they get serious, they’ll graduate to WordPress. We try to cater to the more powerful users,” says Mullenweg, 25.

Please Don’t: Linkjack!: I see this term on Reddit all the time, and finally looked it up:

In its very basic form, linkjacking is the act of taking content from another site, posting it to yours, and then submitting your site to a traffic driving source such as Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and so on. Assuming it goes unnoticed and your submission goes popular, you deprive the original content producer of the deserved traffic and redirect it to yourself.

Interesting, but how do you avoid this? For instance, if this very post starts ranking high for “linkjacking,” then could it be said that I linkjacked this guy’s content? Do you run the risk of linkjacking everytime you quote someone else’s work?

Consider too:

[…] how much of the original content can you fairly quote and how much original insight must you have to add before your content can evade the much hated stamp of ‘merely re-purposed (linkjacked) content’?

I’ve discussed this a couple times, like in this post:

The other day, I added a “via Anil Dash” link to one of my entries for no particular reason, and it got me thinking about it. If the content is A, and Anil Dash’s entry that links to it is B, then should I link to Anil as C? Or should I follow Anil’s link to the target and become a B? If I become a B via Anil’s link, do I need to add attribution to his B?

Or, here:

[…] here’s my theory that there are fundamentally three types of blog posts:

1. A link to something with no commentary of any value.

This is 80% of the posts on this site. There is really no reason for anyone to link to this — they should just link to the source. If the target URL is A, and Gadgetopia links to it as B, then C should just link directly to A, bypassing me at B since I didn’t provide any value at all. A “Via Gadgetopia” might be nice, but I shouldn’t be the actual target of the primary link.

I hope I never linkjack, but I think it’d be easy to do it without trying.

RSS feed sponsorship: Kottke is asking $1,200 a week to sponsor his RSS feed. That’s what 110,000 subscribers gets you, I suppose.

What Makes for a Good Blog?: When Merlin Mann published this post, two separate people wrote me and told me that it reminded them of Gadgetopia.

I put off reading this list, because I think I was afraid that I wouldn’t measure up. I’ve met Merlin, and I have a lot of respect for him, so I was afraid of the prospect that his observations would somehow mean that Gadgetopia wasn’t “good.”

But, after finally reading this list, I’m comfortable in saying this is a good blog. In fact, my entire blogging existence is summed up in point two:

Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?

And that’s it right there. At the risk of drama, I couldn’t stop Gadgetopia. I just have too much stuff banging around in my head that I have to get out.

School-of-Thought: I’m unsubscribing from this blog today, but not because I don’t like it. I love it, in fact, but not for the content, which is the problem.

This is a blog by Fred Deutsch, a school board member in Watertown, South Dakota. Corey turned me on to it, and it’s one of the best education blogs I’ve seen. I don’t seek these types of blogs out, but I’m really impressed in the depth of it, the technical prowess, and the guy’s obvious devotion to the craft of education.

However, the fact remains that this guy is way more into education than I am, and I’m quickly out of my depth. I’m unsubscribing because, more often than not, Fred is talking about things I don’t understand and have only a tangential relationship to.

So why post about a blog I’m unsubscribing to? Because I want a blog like this to succeed. It’s good, and we need more like it. So, if you’re an educator, or if you know one, please send them this link and encourage them to take a look.

Roger Ebert’s Journal: Fanzines beget blogs: Roger Ebert has a blog now, which is crazy cool in and of itself. This week he talks about how the old world of fanzines preceded the current crop of blogs and perhaps even the Web itself.

I have always been convinced that the culture of sf fanzines contributed heavily to the formative culture of the early Web, and generated models for web site and blogs. The very tone of the discourse is similar, and like fanzines, the Web took new word coinages, turned them into acronyms, and ran with them. Think about it. Science fiction fans in the decades before the internet were already interested in computers, big-time — first with the supercomputers of science fiction myth, and then with the earliest home-built models. Fans tended to be youngish, male, geeky, obsessed with popular culture, and compelled to circulate their ideas. In the reviews and criticism they ran, they slanted heavily toward expertise in narrow pop fields.

Ebert rules.

(Roger Ebert emailed me, not once, but twice. Have I mentioned that recently? Seriously. Twice. Two friggin’ emails.)

Harvard Weblogs: What makes a weblog a weblog?: This post is five years old, but it’s important and touches on a point I’ve always kind of wondered about — what makes a blog? When do you have a blog as opposed to a regular Web site?

At Berkman we’re studying weblogs, how they’re used, and what they are. Rather than saying “I know it when I see it” I wanted to list all the known features of weblog software, but more important, get to the heart of what a weblog is, and how a weblog is different from a Wiki, or a news site managed with software like Vignette or Interwoven.

There’s a lot of technical information about templates and calendars and such, but in my mind, the differences is in perspective and tone, and Winer hits it on the head right here:

The personalities of the writers come through. That is the essential element of weblog writing, and almost all the other elements can be missing, and the rules can be violated, imho, as long as the voice of a person comes through, it’s a weblog.

When people read a weblog, they’re getting the voice of an actual person, not some nameless, faceless organization. That’s really the trick.

Federated Media’s $50 Million C-Round Confirmed — No Plans to Buy Up Blog Partners: FM raised a bunch of new money, and this TechCrunch article has some good information about how they work behind-the-scenes.

After turning down a $100 million buyout offer, Federated Media Publishing has opted instead to raise $50 million in a C round led by Oak Investment Partners. As was reported two weeks ago, the rumored valuation is $200 million. While the company is not confirming that number, publisher Chas Edwards quips, “We have to be worth at least $101 million.”

[…] In 2007, according to Edwards, Federated Media sold $22 million worth of ads across its network, up from $4 million in 2006. It generally splits the ad revenues with publishers, taking 40 percent for itself.

I just unsubscribed from the Freakonomics blog feed, and that bums me out. I loved the book, but the simple fact is that the feed sucked.

Two problems:

1. Bad: They only put abbreviated parts of the feed in each post. So you couldn’t read the whole thing in your feedreader, and kept having to click-through to the New York Times to read all the posts.

2. Worse: All they did for the excepts was take the first X words from the full post. This sucks on its face, but it’s worsened by the writing style of the authors. They tend to start off with something irrelevant, then work around to their point. This means that all that was in the feed was something completely random that got cut off and gave me no indication if I wanted to click-through to read the rest of it.

   If you’re going to abbreviate your feed and make people click through, write explicit excerpts that are designed to give your reader the information they need to decide whether or not to click-through.

I’m sad because the blog didn’t live up to the book, largely for nothing but usability reasons. Too bad.

Action Streams: An interesting new plugin from Movable Type that will aggregate your actions from 75 different social networking services and publish them as a feed from your MT install.

The Action Streams plugin is an amazing new plugin for Movable Type 4.1 that lets you aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web as well as a list of your profiles on various services. With the Action Streams plugin you keep control over the record of your actions on the web. And of course, you also have full control over showing and hiding each of your actions. The Action Streams plugin, by default, also publishes your stream using Atom and the Microformat hAtom so that your actions aren’t trapped in any one service.

(Note: If you’re reading this in RSS, it refers to an audio widget only available on the HTML side. Click the post title to go to the page which contains the widget.)

Okay, here’s the first one. I hope it goes well. (And I’m purposely not calling this a “podcast,” because I have no idea just how to get this into RSS. Maybe with the next one…)

Comments are open. Be gentle. (I’ve already been notified by Karla that some of my complaints have been addressed already in various podcasting platforms, so it’s just more evidence of how much of a noob I am…)

Andy Olmsted: A blogger in Iraq left a pre-written post with a friend in the event he died. He did.

This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits.

I promise I don’t have a cleaning fetish, but, still, my first two posts to FM’s annual Holiday Gadget Guide have been about vacuums:

• The Dyson DCO7
• My Roomba

Even if you don’t like house-cleaning, they’re both pretty interesting.

Disclaimer: FM sells the advertising on Gadgetopia, and Blend designed and implemented the Holiday Gadget Guide site.