Gadgetopia

GotDotNet.com is an official Microsoft site (check the copyright at the bottom). It's a "community site" related to all things .Net. What's interesting is the number of blogs that Microsoft hosts there blogs from its own employees: Andrew Conrad, Korby Parnell, etc. In fact, "blogs" is the first option ...

weblogs.java.net: Following on the heels of Microsoft's GotDotNet.com blogs, Sun has created their own developer blogging community.

Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki: This site aggregates blogs by the employees of Fortune 500 companies. This is a directory of Fortune 500 companies that have business blogs, defined as: active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products. Found via this New York Times article, which ...

USA Today has always had some "blogs." I wrote about them a bit here. But they were always just kind of afterthoughts -- little tacked on pieces to a big newspaper. Well, today I find that they have a new domain: blogs.usatoday.com. The only one I can find is the ...

Buzz Marketing with Blogs For Dummies: I found this in Barnes and Noble today. I paged through it -- it actually seemed quite good. Some chapter titles: Checking Out Business Blogs Discovering the Buzz about Buzz Marketing Picking a Blog Solution Setting Up a Hosted Blog Taking Control with Independent ...

Something to consider: Blogging has taken off, and blogs are some of the most popular sites on the Web. Why is this? Could it be because they're so friggin' usable? A blog has all the latest content on the front page. Users can instantly see what's new. The layout is ...

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 ...

Porn Sites Hiding Behind Blogs: This is a lot like the "shill blog" concept we talked about a few months ago Over the last few days, I’ve seen a number of pseudo-realistic blogs spring up. They link to real stories, but all the comment and trackback links are just javascript ...

Blogs in the Workplace: A good article with a dozen or so examples of how blogs could fit into corporations: "Mr. Tang has also used blogs to coordinate group projects, like the recent process of interviewing job candidates for a programming position. The various people at the company who spoke ...

TypePad: Hosted Weblog Service: Look who managed to snag this domain. Wonder how long they've been there.

The Blogging Iceberg: Interesting stats. "The most dramatic finding was that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned. Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers ...

I've been thinking a bit about blogging lately, and here's a little experiment I did this morning. I went out to Technorati, and looked at its list of the most popular blogs. Then I visited each blog and looked at the most recent ten posts, and tried to determine what ...

First came gadgets, then blogs, then blogs about gadgets, and now we have blogs about blogs about gadgets. The Gadget Blog Corrections Blog is now on Blogspot, purporting to be "An actually-researched look at gadget blog bullshit." No mention of Gadgetopia yet, but it's still pretty new. Strange though; the ...

Open-Source Spying: This is a long, but incredibly interesting, article about how outdated the technology in the U.S. intelligence community is, and how current Web technologies like blogs and wikis might help them get up-to-date. I loved this article -- it confirms everything I've ever wanted to believe about what ...

Amazon should run reverse affiliate links. When you search for or look at a book on Amazon, they should have a little box that says "If you like this book, you might like these blogs..." Better yet, let people upload their OPML file to their Amazon profile. Then they could ...

Intel Education: An Innovation Odyssey Day 300: Great story about the use of blogs in education: "She also set up a weblog for each student. That allowed for instant publishing and created a space where classmates could read and comment on each other's work. Students' attitudes began to change. 'They ...

Waxy.org: Andy Baio lives here: Andy created a "mini-blog" on the right -hand side of his site for stuff which doesn't rise to the level of the "actual" blog. Boing Boing has done this too allowed "guest" bloggers to have a space on the sidebar. This brings me back ...

TechWeb: The Business Technology Network: I just thought I'd mention this TechBlog contest. No reason. Just thought you may want to know about it. Seriously -- totally casual, no ulterior motive... Do you read tech blogs? We're looking for you to tell us which are the best of the best. ...

Morphing Blogs to Business: This guy has evidently had a lot of time on his hands since selling Allaire to Macromedia. Imagine firmware updates via RSS. "Jeremy Allaire, technologist in residence at General Catalyst Partners LLC, in Cambridge, Mass., and former chief technology officer at Macromedia Inc., has drafted ...

Will the preponderance of blogs these days wreak havoc with Google's PageRank model? It used to be that you couldn't get a link from a big name site without having something they they wanted to link to. And if they linked to it, then they liked it, so others might ...

NewsGator Case Study: Triple Point Technology: This is a great case study by the guys over at NewsGator about integrating blogs and RSS into the enterprise. "Internal weblogs were created using Six Apart's Movable Type. Internal authors are accustomed to sending email, but now post certain information to their new ...

Companies get into weblog act: The article is so-so, but it includes this great paragraph on the value of blogs to knowledge management: Consider: Every business needs to know what its employees know. Companies are crammed with experts on various topics whose knowledge goes to waste because nobody knows ...

As you get more and more entries in a blog, how to you ensure people can find what they're looking for? Blogs are very front page-centric unless you're watching the front page everyday, browsing the site is terribly inefficient. The category pages are all but worthless on Gadgetopia because ...

Do Penis Enlargement Pills Work?: This guy has a blog to document his attempt at increasing his penis size using those pills hawked via spam. "I got my pills from Pro Solution yesterday. Came in a plain white box as promised. I had ordered the 4-month supply and it came ...

Wal-Mart blogs revealed to be done by PR firm's employees: I can't say this is Earth-shattering news. A public relations firm has revealed that it is behind two blogs that previously appeared to be created by independent supporters of Wal-Mart. The blogs Working Families for Wal-mart and subsidiary site Paid ...

I think The Flood of New Orleans is the first really big crisis in the U.S. to come after blogs have hit their prime. 9/11 was back in 2001, before blogs were big, and before you got the unfettered accounts of amateur jounalism like we've got with this. But with ...

NITLE Weblog Census: This group has compiled a database of the blog postings from 600,000 blogs. You can download the list of URLs (3.2 MB), the URLs and meta (5.6 MB), or the complete archive of every single blog entry from 600,000 blogs stretching back to when blogs were knee-high ...

Iran's blogging boom defies media control: There's an opportunity here for me to spew some long-winded treatise about how blogging is changing the world...but I'll just label this one as "pretty cool" and call it good. Take one exasperated Iranian woman. Add a computer. Hook it up to the Internet. ...

Kids' blogs a 'paedophile's dream': I don't think I'd ever let my kid have a blog. We've schooled him repeatedly on never giving anyone his real name on EverQuest. I think he calls himself Frank on that game. A forensic psychologist has warned that children's blogs pose new threat to ...

movabletype.org: News: MT3 will apparently include something called TypeKey. From the context, I'm guessing that it's a system whereby someone can post comments under a certain identity by logging into a central authentication server. With a suite of comment management features and versatile comment registration utilizing a centralized authentication ...

Being a guy who likes lots of different music, I am somewhat surprised that I didn't know such a thing existed until I read the LifeHacker article here. I guess I am loosing my geekidness. I'm not sure how legal this is, but i like it a lot. A lot. ...

Microsoft Blog Policy Coming Down the Pike?: A few weeks ago, we wondered when this would happen. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, given that the GotDotNet blogs are hugely popular and Sun has launched its own blog site. Some Microsoft employee blogs are hosted on ...

Quixtar Blog: Quixtar Admits Google Bombing: Quixtar, a subsidiary of Amway, is apparently celebrating a coordinated Google-bombing and search engine spamming campaign. One of their people some guy named Greg Duncan boasted about it on stage in front of thousands of people. Probably not wise. Quixtar is waging ...

Why Everything You Think You Know About Blog Architecture is Wrong: This is a great article, which is so true. Blogs are outgrowing themselves, I think. We're now a few years into the blog "revolution," and blogs -- this one included -- are aggregating so much content that the old ...

The Blog Twinning Project: I shudder to think what Rob and Keith will twin this blog with. "The Blog Twinning Project asks people to tell it which blogs they consider to be similar, and tallies results. Pairs of blogs with lots of mutual votes are declared 'twinned.'"

My buddy Rob sent me a link to an article called "Blogs as Disruptive Tech: How weblogs are flying under the radar of the Content Management Giants," which includes this great anecdote: The convention center was practically empty after the go-go years of the Internet bubble, it seemed crazy to ...

the working mom: I wonder if this is the start of a trend. This lady (Jennifer, who runs the awesome ScriptyGoddess.com) password-protected her personal blog. After over two years of blogging about me, my husband and my daughter, I came to the undeniable conclusion that there's just too many freaks ...

Blogger's aircraft emergency account draws praise, scorn: This guy blogged an emergency landing of an aircraft he was in, complete with pictures from his camera phone. Some people are upset. He was accused of endangering those aboard by turning on this camera phone -- a charge Hermanns refutes by saying ...

New on MSDN: IEBlog. The official blog of the Internet Explorer product team. As it turns out, there is an Internet Explorer product team. And they're working on IE 7. Go figure. Their take on IE? I Love This Browser! I hopefully got your attention with the title of my ...

Since everyone but the janitor started blogging at Microsoft, they've been aggregating their blogs into one big honkin' feed that I call The Fire Hose, since reading it is like trying to drink from a fire hose. I find some interesting stories occasionally, but I probably missed 50 since I ...

Are there any hard-and-fast rules about attribution in blogging? Blogs are essentially just links to other content sources, so if you find something via someone else's blog, do you link to the link, or link to the target? Put another way, if you follow the link all the way back ...

Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious: I would complain, but I'm probably guilty as hell. The most-read webloggers aren't necessarily the ones with the most original ideas, say researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs. Using newly developed techniques for graphing the flow of information between blogs, the researchers have discovered that authors of ...

Solution Watch: This is just a great blog. It's full of in-depth reviews of really cool new Web tools and services. Solution Watch surveys the bleeding-edge of the productivity world, reviewing and providing in-depth walkthroughs of today's best services all day and every day. The posting volume is low -- ...

Please Don t Steal This Web Content: Remember those people that reprinted my content a few weeks back? Apparently this phenomenon has a name. VanFossen isn t referring to the kind of plagiarism in which a lazy college student copies sections of a book or another paper. This is automated digital plagiarism ...

Worker blogs raise some company concerns: I read Scoble quite a bit, actually. We talked about employees blogging some time ago I wonder if Microsoft has come out with a definitive policy yet. "There are an estimated 1.2 million blogs, or Web logs — Web pages that function as ...

Building a Web Media Empire on a Daily Dose of Fresh Links: This guy would probably qualify as the first blog magnate, with Gawker, Fleshbot (NSFW), and Gizmodo to his credit. [Nick] Denton, a British entrepreneur and self-styled "play magazine editor," is trying to turn blogging - once only the ...

Google Search: skip intro filetype:swf: Various blogs have noted today that Google is indexing Flash files.

French Police Fear That Blogs Have Helped Incite Rioting: Interesting. Police officials say that youths have coordinated local arson attacks using cellphone messages. Two young people are under investigation for comments on the online diaries known as blogs on Skyblog, the officials said. A 14-year-old in the southern city of ...

Toward a Weblogging Empire: This is about the new Weblogs Inc. site that's launching. "The former editor of the Silicon Alley Reporter, the once high-flying chronicle of Manhattan's high-tech mania, plans this week to launch a new venture, Weblogsinc, that intends to make a go of publishing business-to-business blogs. Essentially, ...

MASSIVE Blog for Sale: Want a well-known blog? Bidding starts at $40,000. (And no, they don't say what blog it is). This is one of the defining blogs in the industry. When I go to conferences and mention the blog, and the author, I get an "oh yeah!" kind of ...

This is an excellent article at InformationWeek about the blogging trend and how blogs can be useful inside a company for things like project and knowledge management. Interestingly, UserLand popped up again: "John Robb, president and chief operating officer of UserLand Software Inc., which develops blogging technology, envisions individual workers ...

Here's a good article from the LA Times (this link is bad as July 2003) about the...subversion of the blog culture by traditional journalists. Consider: "Recently, there have been unmistakable signs that blogs are seeping into the popular consciousness. In July, for instance, New York Times language watcher William Safire ...

I tried out this SharpReader, and found it to quite competent it's a free, Windows newsreader. It seems to do all the right things. It's very Outlook-ish: three panes, unread items bolded, etc. It lets you filter and sort and such. But here's the thing. Look at this screencap: ...

WordPress.com: Looks like Wordpress is starting hosted blogs at wordpress.com. The software is still available for download and self-hosting at wordpress.org.

Foolishly Tossing My Hat into the Ring on Echo ... Here's What I Want: Scott Johnson over at The Fuzzy Blog has a great idea: "What I want is a zip code / latitude / longitude / gps coords that can be applied to a single post. Why? Because blogs ...

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 ...

USAToday is really embracing the blog. Hip Clicks (now Pop Candy) -- their entertainment blog -- hit the Net 14 months ago. Shortly after that they started using RSS. Then they created blogs.usatoday.com a few months back. Now, they've taken all their news and have created "On Deadline," a "real-time ...

The long road to Longhorn: Salon has an extremely intelligent article about Longhorn and what it's going to mean for Microsoft and the computing world in general. ...if Longhorn is too radical a break with the past there's always a chance that Microsoft's two key constituencies "end users" like ...

Aaron Mentele is asking about posting practices for people who blog a lot. But while the first part of my prediction seems to be true, I can't say the same about posting getting any easier. Deane Barker tells me he spends 15 minutes on each post with the exception of ...

It's nice to see pretty much every last MS employee blogging now, but the background still lingers with that slight marketing/PR fish odor. They've clearly attempted to provide employees with a direct outlet, but I get the feeling that those folks must have to sign some agreements before they get ...

Yahoo 360 takes spin through blogosphere: Yahoo is gonna blog. "Yahoo 360 allows consumers to conveniently connect with the people they care about by creating and sharing blogs, photos and other content across Yahoo."

Comment Spam: Six Apart is looking at the problem of comment spam on Movable Type blogs, and they offer some solutions. In particular, I'm encouraged by the new MT-BlackList plugin.

Dave Winer has exposed his subs.opml file. If you ever wanted to know what the grandaddy of blogs has subscribed to, here it is. One-hundred ninety feeds, none of which is this site.

Federated Media/Tech: FM Publshing has released their "metablog" for technology, which aggregates posts from all the technology blogs in their networks: us, GigaOm, STREETTech, SearchBlog, Boing Boing, TechDirt, Google Blogoscoped, TechCrunch, 43 Folders, etc.

Oddpost: Learn More: More competition for NewsGator. This is from the latest release of OddPost: Oddpost's integrated RSS client delivers all the latest news and blog entries straight to your mailbox. Receive posts from your favorite blogs moments after they're published.

My TypePad Beta site managed to get a #5 ranking for "Gadgetopia" on Google. Funny. I'll change the name of it now so it stops climbing the ranks, but kudos to Six Apart for getting TypePad blogs so far into the Google index.

Recommended PHP reading list: IBM has turned into a big supporter of PHP lately. Here's their "PHP Reading List," which includes things like development environments (they recommend Xampp which rules), articles, blogs, books, magazines, etc. A bunch of really good resources. Via Slashdot.

I've read two things on blogs lately that I find very cool. These are two situations in which blogs were used to connect people, and to do things that matter outside of this little, fake world we bloggers have created for ourselves. 4 Generations Blogger A writes about how a ...

Google AdSense for RSS running at Weblogs, Inc.: This is gonna be big. With screencap. In case you didn’t notice, some of your favorite Weblogs, Inc. blogs now have Google AdSense in the RSS feeds. Of course, I'm just trying to trick people anyway.

Our Authors: FM has released a nice-looking page which lists all the blogs in their network with a summary of each. We're in really, really good company it turns out. If you like this site, there are many others in this list you'll like too.

Packing a Wallop: This is very new on the Microsoft radar. Apparently it's a blog index tool like Daypop and Technorati. "Microsoft researcher and social interface expert Lili Cheng showed off new technology under development code-named 'Wallop.' Wallop is software that intelligently groups projects, data and people information and displays ...

Content Management Systems Forum: This looks like a good resource. CMS-forum.org is a structured home for the information that circulates on the industry's main mailing list server, cms-list.org. We also offer vendor forums and aggregation of the major CMS News and CMS Blogs a quick look at what's happening ...

Whizzkid develops Linux application for Windows: This apparently isn't a new thing, but it's making the rounds of the tech blogs this morning. The significance of the development is that Linux and Windows are able to work in parallel on the same computer or server. To now, the computer world ...

ieSpell - Spell Checker add-on for Internet Explorer: This is asked for so often by end users. How long before we get a Mozilla or Firebird extension for this? ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. It should come in ...

Blogging Survey Results: Blog Search Engine did a survey. The 610 survey respondents were made up mainly of blog owners who have submitted their blog to the Blog Search Engine (over 2,800 blogs submitted) and other blog owners contacted through different channels. Only 13% of bloggers run ads. Movable Type ...

About.com has re-launched all their "guide sites" as Movable Type blogs. This means they all have RSS feeds. Joy. Trivia: I was hired by The Mining Company (as they were known then) in 1997 to be a guide for James Bond, but they retracted their offer when I signed on ...

I was reading a little e-book by Seth Godin the other day called "Everyone's an Expert" which turned out to be a big promo for his new venture: Squidoo (it's not live yet -- so there's not much to look at). In this little book (it's quite good), Godin brings ...

Prompted by a comment to my earlier post about the lack of Sioux Falls blogs on LocalFeeds.com, we have added Gadgetopia. It is currently the only Sioux Falls blog. Kudos to the LocalFeeds team for a great set of instructions spelling out how to do it. They walk you through ...

Blogger is evidently a really easy way to set up and run search engine spamming campaigns. No Web development experience required. All of the illustrated "blogs" were found under one user profile at blogger. As you can imagine, each page was a keyword-saturated pile of garbage...with affiliate links, of course. ...

I got to thinking about wikis a little more last night, and I started to wonder where the dividing line between wikis and blogs lay. What makes a wiki a wiki? Wikis have some common characteristics: 1. The ability for anyone to edit any page. 2. The ability to create ...

Microsoft gets in on blogging phenomenon: All your blogs are belong to us. MSN Spaces, which debuts in test form Thursday, is targeted at home users who want to share things like vacation pictures, text journals or a list of favorite songs. The service, free to anyone with a Hotmail ...

Here's something that plagues organizations and their Web sites: knowing what information should be published to their readers and having the willingness to publish that information. I don't think a lot of organizations get it. I just did some work for a group with which I'm involved. Part of the ...

Open-source PHP applications that changed the world: A nice roll-up of the most influential PHP apps of the last 10 years, from phpMyAdmin in 1998 to Magneto last year. From managing databases to shopping, writing blogs to sending emails. Ten years of passion, great software architectures, team work and revolutionary ...

dp.SyntaxHighlighter - free JavaScript syntax highlighting: This is an insanely well-done syntax-hilighter in JavaScript. Just dump code in a CSSed textarea, and it comes out looking like these examples, which are nuts. The script is meant to help a developer to post code snippets online with ease and without having ...

Why Europe still doesn't get the Internet: A European council has decided that if you flame someone, you have to allow them to respond in the same space. The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or 'blogs'), must ...

Using Firefox on OS X? Like to find free content for your iPod? If so, FoxiPod just made your job a little bit easier. FoxiPod is a Greasemonkey script that will place a small icon next to any link to an audio file compatible with iTunes. Clicking the icon downloads ...

Amazon.com: Gadgetopia: The Kindle Store: Due to my association with Federated Media, Gadgetopia is available for purchase at the Kindle Store (along with all the other FM blogs). For only $1.99 per month, you too can read Gadgetopia on your Kindle. What s kind of neat is that Gadgetopia now has ...

Interesting exchange between Paris Hilton and an Associated Press journalist: Q: Do you read blogs? HILTON: What's that? Q: Um, they're these things on the Internet where people write about news and stuff. HILTON: No, I don't really read anything on the Internet except my AOL mail. I don't like ...

Hurricane Ivan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Wikipedia coverage of Hurricane Ivan is just phenomenal. They have hotlinked satellite images, all the latest announcement and statistics, links to about everything you need to know, etc. Like the Madrid bombing coverage and the Olympics coverage, Wikipedia again gets the official "Pretend ...

XFN - XHTML Friends Network: I'm working on a spider now to log all the Gadgetopia HREFs and finally find out what you all think of me. XFN (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the ...

Blog Stats Software Reviews - MeasureMap: Adaptive Path (who have one of the most perfect Web site designs ever) is apparently working on a stats package called MeasureMap. You might think it a little unfair comparing a preview version of a system against the mature software in these reviews. Thing ...

Spammers now clogging blogs, cell phones: Kalsey got quoted in this AP story about blog spam. Three years ago, Adam Kalsey set up a Web log to share his thoughts about online business and the digital revolution. Like countless other "bloggers," he lets his readers post comments on his ...

Integrated Quicklinks Tutorial: This is a handy thing. I've always been tormented (high drama here) with the disparity between post styles. Some are long manifestos, and some are just a quick link. ...here's a brief tutorial for MoveableType on combining regular weblog entries with quicklinks (basically, entries from two blogs ...

Steal This Book : Slate looks at the burgeoning problem of book piracy. "The old argument that no one likes reading on a computer has pretty much eroded. In the last five years or so, we have all become accustomed to reading newspapers online, not to mention the explosion of ...

There are a few comments in the post about our new deal with FM Publishing about some blogs having too many posts. A while back, I tried to get at least 10 per day. One day I did 25. Joe has always maintained that 10 is the upper limit for ...

The Blogging Scholarship: This is admirable. Is Your Blog Worthy of a $10,000 Scholarship? [ ] Do you maintain a weblog and attend college? Would you like $10,000 to help pay for books, tuition, or other living costs? If so, read on. We re giving away $10,000 this year to a college ...

I found this comment on one of my client s blogs today. hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments , I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post ...

Crap Filter: Entertainment news, reviews and commentary: This blog does something I like -- it has "feature" links at the top of the home page to link to "major" posts ("important" posts? -- don't know how to phrase that). These are posts that are getting a lot of traffic and ...

Are emails private? And should bloggers scoop their interviewers?: I did an email interview recently, and I guess it never occured to me to post the transcript before my interviewer did (I never posted the transcript, in fact). "Mark Glaser, a friend and columnist for the Online Journalism Review, has ...

Localfeeds.com: Cool of an idea as this is, I couldn't find any Sioux Falls blogs. Localfeeds is a new kind of wire service. Sources and headlines are discovered automatically, and organized geographically. What are people writing within 30 miles of you? within 50 miles of Toronto? within 20 miles of ...

OJR article: Local Weblogs Gawk, Stalk But Balk at Minting $$: This is a good article about local, city-centered weblogs and whether they have a viable business model. Mentions some of the A-list blogs in San Francisco and Boston. "Local Weblogs might prove useful for local audiences looking to ...

Blogging: A venue to rant, rave and review: The hometown newspaper in Sioux Falls has an article on blogging today. Blogging is a contact sport, and he said those who post comments "should be ready to be challenged. They should be ready to be inundated with e-mails every time they ...

Tracking Conversations: This coComment thing is going to be somewhat huge, I think, because I'm hearing about it from everyone. Here's an article about the problem -- how hard it is to stay involved in blog comment conversations -- and how coComment can help you fix it. One of the ...

The Long Tail: Here's something entertaining in an odd way. This page will pull a blog entry out of the...void. Click "Next Item" to get another one. They come from blogs all around the world, and are presented with no context or other information (there is a link if you ...

There are a lot of free services on the Web -- we all use one. But which ones would you pay for? Of the free services you use, let's say they all decided to charge $30 per year. Which ones would you go without and which would you shell out ...

Identity2.0: This is video of a presentation at OSCON from Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip Identity, on the future of digital identity. What's interesting is the style of presentation. He talks for about 20 minutes, and goes through about 600 slides (do the math). On top of making a good ...

Official Google Blog: Here comes Measure Map: Google gets Measure Map and Jeff Veen from Adaptive Path in one fell swoop. Bringing Measure Map to Google is an exciting validation of the user experience work I've been doing with my partners at Adaptive Path for years. By opening up the ...

You know something goes mainstream when it has its own goofy awards show. The winners of this year's Bloggie awards have been announced, The Bloggies are a set of 30 publicly-chosen awards given to weblog writers and those related to weblogs. A few of the winners are probably already the ...

Sudden Closure of Weblogs.com Strands Bloggers: Three thousand blogs hosted at weblogs.com have gone offline because Dave Winer decided to shut the server down. ...some users protested that they had no warning of the shutdown, and thus were unable to download copies of their sites, including user comments. Winer said ...

Question: do any of you subsribe to blogs that don't publish the entire post in RSS? USA Today just added Kevin Maney to their new blog lineup. I subscribed, but he just has the first two sentences or something in RSS and you have to click-through for the rest. That ...

300 Images From 1800 Sites: This guy went icon shopping at major sites. If you want to know what people are using for a "printer friendly" icon, here's your site. I roughly estimate that for every six web sites I scoured, I was able to acquire one graphic image. I ...

The Blogging Church: Really interesting idea for a book. The Blogging Church offers church leaders a field manual for using the social phenomenon of blogs to connect people and build communities in a whole new way. Inside you will find the why, what, and how of blogging in the local ...

Blogging Solutions for Business - Movable Type Enterprise: I guess the only big differences I'm seeing from the standard version are LDAP integration and Oracle as a possible data backend. Of course, these are both huge for a lot of companies. The most popular platform for business blogging now offers ...

BlogPac.org :: Waging Politics Online: Bloggers now have their own politcal action committee. Now gimme some soft money, 'cause I need to meet with my advisors in Cancun. riting a blog post is not enough. Reading a blog post is not enough. Commenting on a blog is not enough. The ...

Buying Blogs: The Blog Buying Checklist: Interesting discussion and story about buying a blog -- a poker blog, in this case. He doesn't reveal how much he paid, only that was less than $3,240 and that it makes $135 a month. I always start with a frame of reference: 12 ...

Yahoo offers Movable Type for bloggers: Good for Yahoo -- instead of building their own blogging software, they just partnered with Six Apart to offer Movable Type to all their hosting clients who want to blog. Pre-installed, even. Yahoo will effectively act as the preferred provider of Movable Type for ...

Where do you go to read good content? I got to thinking the other day that most Web content is ephemeral short bits of content you can read in 30 seconds or less (like blogs) or news articles written in inverted pyramid format which encourages you to stop reading ...

Megaphone desktop tool: Pro-Israel Web surfers can use this software to instantly be notified of things they need to comment or vote on. The Megaphone desktop tool is a Microsoft Windows application distributed by the World Union of Jewish Students and other pro-Israel organizations, [ ] it delivers real-time alerts about ...

Dean for America: Web Community Kits: Do you support Howard Dean for president? Then you too can have your own Web site. "These kits create fully featured campaign web community sites, such as Upper Valley for Dean and Seniors for Dean and Connecticut for Dean. These kits provide their members ...

Are Bloggers Narcissists?: I've thought this exact thing for years. I am a narcissist when it comes to blogging -- there's no other way to describe it. When it comes down to it, most blogs have sometype of self serving or self promoting interest. The company does it to inform ...

WiFi - SM: feel the global pain: Like I said, stop surfing all the blogs or someone will tape this to your neck without you knowing about it. "WiFi-SM is an Internet connected wireless device that you can fix on any part of your body. It automatically detects the information ...

The Raw Feed is one of my favorite blogs. Mark Elgan has a great rant on email hoaxes over there that's pure genius. He doesn't just whine about the problem, though. He provides a great solution to your relatives that forward you hoax emails: The Anti-Email-Hoax Email Hoax Please be ...

Lifehacker: I'm not real quick to add things to my aggregator. I only have about 20 feeds in Bloglines. But this new addition to the Gawker family of blogs is really top-notch. If you like Gadgetopia, you'll love Lifehacker. Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the downloads, ...

USB Floppy Disk Drive RAID: This one is all over the tech blogs today. Someone hooked five USB floppies up to a Mac, and using some software RAID driver, got them to appear as a single drive. When you drag something to the drive, it stripes across all five floppies. ...

Teen sued by Apple gains legal help: This is good news, because I think everyone deserves good representation and I love a legal soap opera. A lawyer specializing in freedom of speech and the Internet said Wednesday he will defend free of charge a 19-year-old publisher of a Web site ...

A Line in the Sand: Here's a good, level-headed opinion on why the Movable Type 3.0 controversy shouldn't be one. People feel like they have been betrayed… with all this talk of people jumping ship. Half of you would still fall into the free release category! Doesn’t anyone realize what ...

Zap Your PRAM: The guys over at silverorange were kind enough to invite me to their conference coming up in October: "The Zap Your PRAM Conference is a gathering of creative professionals, academics, and intriguing people from around the world interested in design, the web, and emerging technologies. It's a ...

Blogging systems have always confused "posts" and "pages." We've talked about this before: what is the difference between a time-sensitive "post" and an "eternal" page? At what point does a "post" get re-visited and revised enough that it should become a page? We wrote about this at length almost two ...

Six Apart released a Developer Edition of Movable Type 3.0 today. While I haven't been able to find a detailed feature list of what's new in 3.0 it looks like they've made significant changes to their licensing scheme. Apparently one of the big improvements over previous versions is an improved ...

Has anyone else visited PostSecret? This is an interesting blog. People send this guy sometimes elaborate postcards explaining some secret they have. (And when I write "send," I mean "postal mail.") He scans and blogs them. It's really compelling. Sometimes disturbing. And -- everytime I visit -- I see something ...

Six Apart Professional Network Overview: This looks like a bribe to get you on a mailing list. The Six Apart Professional Network consists of a number of benefits designed to help you get the most out of Six Apart's Movable Type, TypePad, and TypeKey platforms. Whether you're a consultant, designer, ...

Google's AdSense a bonanza for some Web sites: An article about AdSense that states numbers, which is rare: Tales of AdSense riches range from a few hundred dollars a month to $50,000 or more a year, though high-dollar paydays are rare. They require a Web site with tons of traffic ...

CustomFields: Here's a plugin for Movable Type that may address some (all?) of my "open vs closed content management" ranting. CustomFields is a plugin that allows you to define custom fields that will appear on the entry editing screen and author profile screens. This allows you to store far more ...

What's the difference between a blog post and an "article" or a "story"? By those terms, I mean content that isn't as ephemeral as posts that hit the site every 15 minutes. Blogs are, by definition, transient they're time-based, and items get essentially dropped into a stampede that tramples ...

The Dawn of the MicroPubs: Actually, I thought this was an article about small bars, but it turned out to be good nonetheless. It's about the rise of "micro publications" sites, usually blogs, that are narrow to one particular topic. "Micro-pubs have a narrow and extreme focus on one ...

Last year, I theorized that since blogs allowed people other than the site owner to enter hyperlinks (by adding a comment), this fundamentally hosed the concept of PageRank. Remember that the entire point behind PageRank is that a link from Site A to Site B is a "vote" for the ...

You may have heard of THOMAS, a service of the Library of Congress that provides an up-to-date online database of all of the legislative activities of your congressfolk. You may also have noticed that THOMAS was apparently created by consulting a team of usability experts on the best way to ...

Stealing My Content... Again: Shirley's got a problem with a certain Web site. "One of the things that hits me the wrong way is to continue to find people blatantly stealing website designs, content, and anything else. Many of us have had our hard work and efforts stolen, unfortunately. ... ...

WriteTheWeb - What is a k-log?: John Robb is one of the founders of UserLand (I still think I'm missing out). This is an article from last year where he discusses "K-logs" essentially the use of blogs for knowledge management: "...K-Log features like subscriptions let you as an employee ...

I'm about to admit something odd, and perhaps career-threatening: I'm sick of learning. There, I said it, and I feel better. It's true: learning about new technologies and new ways of doing things is something that plays on an addiction of mine and of many other geeks, I'm sure. We ...

Are there RSS feeds you can't keep up with? I have a few that I just can't stay on top of due to posting volume. A friend of mine called it "drinking from a fire hose." They are: DZone (yes, I know I love it, but I just can't keep ...

TypeKey: Here's a pretty extensive FAQ on TypeKey the Microsoft Passport-ish blog comment authentication service from Six Apart. It's a central authentication service which allows you to log in to TypeKey and use that identitiy to post to multiple blogs. They provide a good example: Alice visits Bob's weblog ...

Today in the sky: Here's another interesting example of a USA Today blog. It's about air travel, of all things. Ben Mutzabaugh posts at least a dozen things a day about airlines. He seems awfully well informed. Now, I'm not interested in the subject, but I'm curious about the evolution ...

Intranets: what staff really want: This is a really good survey from Gerry McGovern s company that answers a pretty important question that I see a lot of confusion about: what should we put on our intranet? They asked a bunch of people to pick what they wanted their intranet to ...

Ars Technica has an interesting blog roundup article this morning with quotes from a number of MS employees who are questioning the wisdom of keeping IE around without improving it. The saga of Internet Explorer, the piece of software that once brought the Department of Justice to the brink of ...

I opined a few months ago on the beauty and joy of the command line, but I had another experience today that really illustrated the fact that GUI s aren t the best tool for everything. I have both the privilege and burden of dealing with Rational Clearcase for some version control ...

Court says blogs can't be sued for postings: This is some good news...or bad, I guess, depending on if you've been defamed or not. Bloggers and website owners cannot be sued for posting libelous or defamatory comments written by third parties, the California Supreme Court has ruled. The court said ...

Word docs from Movable Type: I have to say that Microsoft is doing some great things with the new underlying XML format in Office 2003 and up. Using that functionality, the guys at Movable Type's Pronet published a simple template that outputs Word ML, and thus creates what's essentially a ...

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes: My boy Jakob Nielsen takes on blogs in this version of the "10 Biggest Mistakes" list. He has some good advice. Here are the 10 and what we have done or plan to do about them: No Author Biographies I want to do ...

So you want to give blogging a go at your company, but you dread the thought of getting sign off on new software, setting everything up, handling permissions issues, etc. What a huge pain, especially when you have no idea if anyone is going to even like the concept. Never ...

When Blobjects Rule the Earth: This is a really interesting concept, buried under a long-winded, rambling speech. This speech was delivered by Bruce Sterling at a conference in late 2004. In it, he reveals the concepts of a "Spime," which is a thing that carries a history with it. You ...

Rob left a comment on a previous entry about the site Pocket PC Thoughts. This site is doing something I've been thinking about for a while: running a blog-type site off of discussion board software. I first investigated the idea in this posting to the Movable Type support forum where ...

On PHP: There have been a lot of blogs jumping around on PHP in the last few days, and I've finally tracked it back to its source. Tim Bray -- one of the "pillars of the Web," if I can be so bold -- posted about PHP a week ago. ...

Gay Marriage Poll Gets Annulled: Here's a example of why Web polls are silly. The American Family Association put a poll on their Web site asking people if they were opposed to or in favor of gay marriage with ultimate plans to take the results to Congress. Of course, they ...

I was browsing through Google Video last night (that's where the Duron post came from), and I got to thinking that there's so much good stuff in there, but there's a bunch of crap too. And none of it is really organized beyond the general search that comes with it. ...

The Woolamaloo Gazette: This guy got fired for his personal blog. He worked at a bookstore in the U.K. and, as he puts it: Anyone who has been a regular reader of the Gazette will know that I do occasionally mention my work life, although it accounts for a fraction ...

I've been looking for a small project to test out the Rails framework, so I've decided to combine that with exploring ways to reduce the time and complexity involved in creating a blog entry. This will be an ongoing series of articles, but this is a low-priority project, so each ...

Here s a fact: intranets don t have to be crazy-complicated. Intranets are fundamentally about sharing simple information, which is not as hard as some people make it out to be. As simple as this is, most organizations either have no intranet, or a smattering of HTML pages someone threw together ...