Both employers and prospective employees are finding that blogging can be useful in the job search process. Check this NY Times article on it...
According to this New York Times report:
“As three dozen bloggers head to the Democratic convention, political blogs have been ablaze over officially covering conventions for the first time.”
It's good to the see bloggers recognized, but some observers are uneasy with how the definition of journalism is being expanded. I personally think we will see a de-centralization of media as we know it, and this of course will be followed by another conglomeration. It will be interesting to look at the media picture a couple of decades from now and see the impacts of technology on it...
The Movable Type 3.0 announcement came about when I was on vacation, so I missed it, but this is interesting development.
Firstly it's interesting to note that the software is not entirely free (which in my opinion is good news.) Most personal bloggers will still be quite satisfied with the free personal version, but with more and more corporate users using blogs, it would mean that the software would require a more exhaustive support network, and so it should not come as a surprise that they are charging for the stuff.
But as all things you pay for, it's best to read a review before plunging in, and this is a real good review to get started with. Personally, I'm playing the waiting game before I actually go in for the upgrade...
I've got MT-Blacklist, but it still is not the answer to eliminating blog spam, and just today, I was hit with another burst. Of course with the Blacklist de-spam feature I was able to get them removed instantly and the keyword and ip address added to my blacklist within hours (today being a Sunday ;)) But I'm sure the spammers will still keep coming back...
So will Six Apart's Typekey be the answer? Let's hope so...
Good to be back on the blogging scene after a bit of a break. First it was the flurry of activity related to the NASSCOM event, after which we had a weeklong training program to attend. And no Internet access during that time period (felt weird, but good.) Now I would be back to posting. Stay tuned…
On the 25th, I completed one year of blogging on enterFrame. And now 410 posts later, I think I'm going to take a small break (at least till the middle of February.) The company I work with is participating at Nasscom 2004 and there is just loads of related work that will keep me busy for a while. I'll catch up on happenings later...
New York times on the personal blogging phenomenon:
“The teenagers who post journals have (depending on your perspective) a degraded or a relaxed sense of privacy; their experiences may be personal, but there's no shame in sharing.”
Hmnn...
Rajesh points to Jim Moore's post on why bloggers will prove to be an influential lot in the time to come. Moore talks about the paradoxical strength of weak social ties. These weak social links are primarily responsible to bringing about social networking connections, and form the prime force behind Kevin Bacon's concept of Six Degrees of Separation.
Social Networking sites like Rhyze and Friendster may be exploiting this phenomenon quite literally, but one of the most interesting applications of using the strength of weak social connections in marketing has been exploited in Seth Godin's new book Purple Cow.
Godin who is a pioneer of direct marketing and an avid blogger himself, puts forward the concept of ‘sneezers’. Sneezers are early adopters who love your product and are willing to voice out their opinion about it. Good products will automatically appeal more to the sneezers and they in turn will let others know about it. One important thing to notice is that most bloggers are in natural sneezers. They are vocal about things they like and things they don't and though few in number they are able to spread their ideas and thoughts amongst like minded people.
To a company looking at effectively spending their marketing budget, this is exactly the kind of people to target. Macromedia has done this quite effectively till now, and the Macromedia Bloggers List is a very efficient way of getting the word out to the right people. Microsoft has also done the same with .NET.
But the marketing vehicle is not one of the most important lessons that Purple Cow is trying to put out. In fact the whole emphasis of the book is on having a remarkable product, which is what the Purple Cow is: A remarkable product that stands out from amongst all the black and brown ones.
After all a remarkable product hardly needs any marketing. The product itself will do the talking, and good old word of mouth will take care of the rest. After all, we are today living in an age of information overload, where the barrage of advertising and spam has left us numb. What still works are the weak social ties.
However, this power of bloggers is not for everybody to exploit their own causes. If you have an unremarkable product, then no amount of sneezers will help. In fact it would be the other way around. Mitch Kapor once was approached by an (un)named company, and the whole incident backfired on the company. One of the main reasons, well the product was not a Purple Cow...
The Purple Cow, by the way is not just a book about marketing products, you can use the concepts in the book to your career too. So even if you're not involved with marketing directly, it makes an excellent read...
Came across this via Phil Wolff's Blog and in fact, the British Awards which are sponsored by the Guardian Unlimited has some pretty famous bloggers for judges, including Jason Kottke, Dan Gillmor and Moby. Where as the Asian Awards are based on user votes...
A great multimedia presentation, made using Macromedia Breeze about using RSS and blogs for distributing and finding Learning Objects in education...
[Via theOTHERblog]
This is the most interesting blog spam I've seen yet on my blog (check the last comment). I'm going to leave it on for a while just for being creative...
PS: Looks like an infinite number of mokeys got together to type the text out. Perfect... ;)
The Sydney Morning Herald takes a look at the world's best blogs. How many of them are on your regular read list?
It's going to be a very busy month, and blogging is going to take a back seat for sometime. However every now and then I come across some nice posts that I want to record for later reference, and for that I'll be using the Post2Blog feature that my aggregator offers. I've been using InfoAggregator for some time as my default aggregator and it is really cool. Integrates with my Outlook Inbox and also allows me to post directly to my blog from Outlook. So anytime you find some posts that are mirrors of posts made by somebody else, it's just me recording the post for my own future reference...
Rajesh writes about Weblogs, Inc. a B2B Web site dedicated to creating niche Weblogs (a.k.a. blogs) across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product...
Personally it looked like just another aggregator to me. Not sure if it is anything more...
Robert Scoble has been spending the past few weeks trying to answer stuff about Microsoft's blogging intentions. Today, he's just come out with a nice article that looks at Microsoft's philosophy behind developing Software for the masses and not for the influencers (connectors as Scoble calls them) and consequentially, why they may not be competing with Six Apart in the blogging market...
The article makes an interesting read...
Adam Gaffin looks at the top ten tech-bloggers...
Found this via Scoble who was sore that he was not featured in the list. I'm not sure if I'd classify Scoble's bolg as a tech-blog. There is just a lot more happening there. If you know what I mean ;)
They also have a list of 53 tech blogs from which the choices were made...
Scoble's blog was not in that list. Neitehr were any MM blogs...
Scoble is playing the referrer game. He wants to send more referrers from his post to Paul Vick’s than Don Box did…
Maybe you’d want to donate to Scoble’s traffic. It’s an interesting enough post to read anyway…
Of course, he's talking about internal bloggers...
Wonder how many Macromedia has, which are the other companies that have active bloggers?
If you're reading this post, you probably belong to an elite 2% of the Internet population who has heard about blogs, and read them regularly.
Clay Shirky points to this article by Jimmy Guterman where he mentions a Forrester online survey of 3,673 people which found that 79 percent of its respondents had never heard of blogs, 98 percent had never read one, and 98 percent said they'd never pay to read or write one.
I wonder how representative the sample was of actual decision makers and influencers. I'm not suggesting that blogging is mainstream in any ways, but it is at a point where the cusp is sure to rise. I'm sure there were some similar shortsighted predictions about the internet (when it used to be spelled with a capital I)
Seems a few of them had to eat their words... (literally)
Dan Gillmor points out to the techdirt post about PR and blogging.
Well here's a thought (an expansion of something that was posted here sometime back):
Advertising is saying you're good.
PR is getting someone else to say you're good.*
Blog based promotion is getting one blogger say you're good and getting 100 more to trackback to the post.
You decide which is better...
And how much longer before the whole concept gets commercialized?
*Quoted by Jean-Louis Gassée.
Finally the indiachi blog is up. For now there are 10 contributers, including Ananthraman Mani, Anshuman Singh, Apala Chavan, Bhavin Turakhia, Manu Sharma, Navin Pangti, Navneet Nair (me ;) ), Saurabh Wadhwa, Shilpa Suresh and Vikram Chauhan...
Keep an eye out for this one...
I always knew this day was not far away. Mitch Kapor was contacted by a WELL KNOW TECH PR FIRM asking if a VP from a WELL KNOWN VALLEY FIRM could make a guest post on the blog...
Is it just a cheeky request or are PR companies taking blogging seriously? Getting noticed on a high-profile blog will not only bring you traffic and credibility, but it will also boost your Google PageRank.
And as of now, it costs next to nothing...
Actually it also goes to show how clueless most corporates are about the intricacies of blogging. The VP could actually start a company blog and trackback to Mitch's blog or simply post intelligent comments. Either way, the results might be the same, maybe not as effective initially as a guest post, but then again PR was never meant to be an easy job...
A very funny list of blogging terms, my favorites include:
I reckon there is more to come...
PS: I reckon, you really have to be a geek to get some of these...
Viswanath Gondi a recent graduate from MDes Digital Media program at Harvard Design School, has a neat blog. Talks a lot about UI, RIAs and Flash...
Dan Gillmor just got a note from Mocrosoft's PR and here's what it says...
So this is the newest RSS aggregator on the blog (sorry block)
Bloglines is a web-based RSS aggregator that will aggregate rss feeds for you and you can read all the feed online on their site.
It even provides blogs with an 'add to bloglines button' that looks like this:
Interesting. But I prefer Info Aggregator which delivers the RSS feeds into Outlook (or any other email client) and also has an optional web access.
Matthew Thomas shows you how to recognize a Weblog tool by its permalinks and goes on to suggest ways to make the permalink URI more usable. The truth is, if URIs were usable Google will be out of business...
Reading Clay Shirky's article titled A Group is its Own Worst Enemy got a lot of mental threads running. This is an excellent look at Group Software and Behavioral Patterns that emerge from its usage. It's a long read, but worth it, especially if you're developing FlashComm applications...
[via Joel on Software]
David Hornik has an excellent article on VentureBlog:
Was just going through David Hornik's post on VentureBlog, where he emphasizes on the importance of networking in getting Venture funding for your startup. This is true, but it seems that if you're not from an Ivy League institution, your chances of building the network might crash before it even takes off...
But there is a way out. These days, virtual networks work almost as well as real world networks. And I believe respected bloggers can leverage their authority to secure funding if they wish to launch initiatives of their own (Don't know if David agrees about this though...)
Maybe this is another reason to start a blog of your own...
Catherine Greenman in this New York Times article, explores what extents bloggers go to make their blogs more popular.
Some of the methods mentioned there include:
Not to be outdone, Robert Scoble has a unique (read Microsoft)way to spike traffic on his site: He poses naked
But one sure fire way of getting at least 5000 visitors is to get picked up by Slashdot like this post on Micah Alpern's blog (check the Nedstats link on the bottom.)
Of course, most of the methods mentioned above are only short term solutions to increasing traffic. What really matters is the content on your site. There is no substitute to quality...
BTW I'm seeing a lot of blogging related articles on NY Times lately, are they trying to use bloggers to get their online readership numbers up? Anybody else feel the same?
I've been using this service for a little under a month now and it has already become indispensable. Info Aggregator is an RSS to IMAP service that lets you receive posts from your favorite blogs right into your Email Inbox.
This helps me keep track of a lot more blogs than ever possible before, give it a try yourself...
Was going through Micah's blog and came across this post that suggests 'paid book review' that will help you get a review done for a book from somebody whose opinion you respect. Interesting concept. One of the things I found was that on searching for a blog's neighborhood information on Blogstreet was a list of books mentioned on a blog you like. Most bloggers mention books along with a note or two about it, so this might be an alternative (and free) way for Micah to get what he's looking for
The Boston Globe has this report about the ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies 2003 Conference & Expo...
In fact, I'm not at all surprised that blogs are fast becoming an important knowledge retention and evangelism tool...
[via JD on MX]
How many blogs separate yours from mine? Find out the answer here.
[via Bruce Landon]
So if you used RSSify to generate RSS for your blog and have been struck by their recent rude behavior, here is an alternative.
You can use a similar service at Blogstreet. BlogStreet is run by Rajesh Jain and knowing him, he won't be that rude.
And while you're there also check out the Info Aggregator it's a cool RSS aggregator...
MXNA has started a cool new feature whereby it ranks posts on the basis of number of clicks it receives. If you use MXNA a lot that is a good way to quickly find out if the post is relevant to other flashers (as there could be number of 'OT' posts on flash blogs). Now a sort by ranking feature might be useful as some important posts might have been pushed to the end when you visit the site. What say?
I just got myself an account with Info Aggregator. I had seen Rajesh use this application when I met him last.
Unlike Newsgator, there is no install involved here. You register for an account and use it like a normal email account. Rajesh's post mentions that it's an IMAP account, but I could not set it up using IMAP on Outllook. It works fine as a POP account.
There are a few problems like effectively setting filters for Outlook. Though there is the ability to use a server side filter using seive, I did not try it. The challenge with using Outlook filters is that all the emails come from the same email ID, so it becomes difficult to add filters. My current Outlook filters use a content based filtering which is the least reliable of all filtering mechanisms. Also it does not allow you to subscribe to feeds that do not use the rdf/xml extension (example)
Anyway, I do see a lot of potential in it if some of these interaction related issues are ironed out...
Good work Rajesh and Co.
According to this post Google might soon stop indexing blogs. I had the same thought some time back. Looks like it's time for a new section on Google for blogs...
Don't know about you, but it makes sense to me to track blogs separately...
Time flies. It seems like just yesterday that I had posted my first review on Flazoom, today three years have gone by...
According to CHris' post there have been around 1800 posts on Flazoom, of which a mere 60 odd have been posted by me. So that goes to show the great variety and enthusiasm amongst the rest of the editors.
Although very few editors still post there (many might have got their own blogs like me) CHris still updates the site regularly and it makes very good reading...
Scott Manning had recently posted his discontentment with Flash Blogs making personal posts, now this NY Times article explores how blogging can wreck personal relationships too...
Hmnn... I better be careful with what I put up here.
There was a time when content management was an expensive solution and publishing regular updates was an option available only to websites willing to invest in an expensive CMS. Enter blogs, and today, the power to publish is in the hands of everybody (including nobodies like me.) It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to manage content (or ‘microcontent’ as people like to call it) on your site with such ease and at the same time have access to an online repository of all your thoughts and findings. If you have been keeping a blog, sooner or later you’ll find yourself checking your own archives for that nice tidbit you posted a few months back, but can’t summon up anymore.
There have been a number of developments in the blogging scene. Pyra Labs was bought by Google and Sixapart have found some serious money coming their way via Neoteny. Does this mean that blogging is going to be next big wave? Or is this going to be the start of a ‘blog bubble’? Nothing can be said for sure but there definitely is a great potential that exists here. One of the most promising opportunities I see is the arrival of a new breed of blogs – The Enterprise Blog.
Imagine giving knowledge workers/domain experts within an organization the ability to publish their know-how without actually having any web-publishing know-how! And consequently imagine another employee within the organization with the need for the particular piece of information actually being able to retrieve the information without even having to get in touch with the domain expert. What is more important though, is the fact that the knowledge remains within the enterprise, even if knowledge worker does not.
Apart from being an enterprise knowledge repository, I’ve seen a number of software evangelists use blogs (Macromedia and Microsoft being amongst them.) Guy Kawasaki would probably would have really loved it if MacWorld was a blog (is it?)
And finally there is an ocean of personal blogs on the net that may contain information that is very relevant to an enterprise, and thus giving them the ability to leverage knowledge and talent from outside the enterprise, at little or no cost!
Whatever the motivation, it does make sense for enterprises to leverage blogging as a productivity tool or a supplement to their existing IS infrastructure. As to how exactly these tools will be adopted by enterprises remain to be seen.
Meanwhile, I really see an opportunity here to come up with some interesting Flash based visualization that will help analyze linkages and even geographical distribution of knowledge (a la ‘world as a blog’.)
Here are some related readings:
Emergic
Padwan
IT-director - via Emergic
John Lawlor on Business Blogging
Jon Udell - The conversational Enterprise
Jon Udell - Publishing a project Weblog
Jumping the corporate blog wagon
Sacramento Bee
Man gets sacked for blogging
I had a wonderful meeting yesterday with Rajesh Jain who is running Netcore these days. Most of the talk revolved around what Netcore was up to. Which is a lot. After all, Rajesh is a person brimming with ideas.
Affordable computing is a wonderful idea that Netcore is focusing upon, and it has a lot of potential in a country like India. The concept is a simple extension of Moore’s Law. Given that processor speeds are expected to double every 18 to 24 months, you can gain access to old computers for almost throw away prices (the monitor costing the bigger portion.) Now this relatively slow computer is used as a thin client while a much better computer acts as the thick server, and does all the number crunching. This is a bit like of combining Larry Ellison’s ‘Network Computer’ with Jeff Raskin's original dream of the Macintosh. And what Ellison will really like about this, is that it runs a non-Microsoft OS.
In fact, the entire system leverages Open Source technologies to the maximum. It runs on Linux, uses openOffice and similar open source applications. So for around Rs. 20,000 ($400) Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) can have an completely integrated solution.
But Rajesh sees the main potential in delivering this technology to India's large rural population. There have been a number of initiatives aimed at rural India (a lot of them conducted by Media Lab Asia) but none have really made the difference. Could this be the one to?
The other thing that Rajesh is passionate about is blogging. We talked a bit about developments at sixapart and shared our favorite blogs. Rajesh also runs blogstreet, a site that keeps a track of blogs and links to and from it. It uses this information to rank blogs and create blog neighborhood information. So when you search for a blog on blogstreet, you’ll also get information on all the people who blog-roll it. There is also a visual view to all this information, which is really cool.
And finally there was the Linux based, blog aggregator. Very cool stuff. I’ve put Rajesh’s Blog on my must read list, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what he’s up to next…
Get a ‘God’s eye view' on the world of blogging. The ‘World as a blog’ is a Flash app that scans the world for updates and displays new posts neat little dots, located exactly where the post originated…
How does it do it? As a blogger, there are three things you need to do on your end to make it work: First make your blog geoURL enabled by adding geoTags. Then makes sure you have the RSS tags. And finally make sure you ping weblogs.com every time you post a new entry.
Once you done that, Weblogs.com updates its server up to a minute after you've pinged it, then geo-blog poller checks that, and the flash map finally checks in with the server about once per minute. It could take up to three minutes for your entry to show…
I’ll let you know how long this one took ;)
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