Blogging

Kathy Sierra and the Mean Kids Controversy

There's more than one side to the story about threats made against technologist Kathy Sierra, as an article by Dan Fost in today's San Francisco Chronicle does a good job of explaining. I strongly sympathize with Sierra, because it sucks to be the target of somebody's rage on the Internet. I imagine it's considerably worse for women, for whom misogynistic threats from men are depressingly common, as my Java book coauthor Laura Lemay relates. But Sierra's weblog post made the publishers of the ... (read more)

Toronto Star: Only 100 Blogs Make Money

A story on the business side of blogging in today's Toronto Star makes a wildly inaccurate claim -- only the top 100 blogs make money. Many blogs do make money but a vast majority of them don't, according to Derek Gordon, vice-president of marketing for Technorati, a San Francisco-based Internet search engine for blogs. The site tracks about 65 million blogs. It also ranks them. "Typically, the top 100 blogs do some form of monetization," says Gordon. There's money being made in blogging beyond ... (read more)

Was the First Blog a .Plan File?

The 10th birthday of Scripting News April 1 is likely to usher in a bunch of "blogging turns 10" press coverage, since Dave Winer hasn't been shy about staking his claim as an originator of the medium. Though he didn't call the site a weblog until February 1999, Scripting News employed a link-heavy, short take, reverse chronological style adopted by hundreds of web publishers, especially after UserLand Software began free hosting on EditThisPage.Com later that year. The first blog I recognized ... (read more)

Media Takes a Pass on the Convention

After reading Charles Cooper shred the convention bloggers as hayseeds and "cybertourists," I'm officially revoking his credentials to be a self-proclaimed fan of weblogging. Cooper demonstrates in his piece that he doesn't understand the medium he calls "one of the most exciting developments of the last five years." In a CNET commentary that doesn't link to a single subject he's talking about -- can't risk losing those eyeballs -- Cooper defines the success of webloggers by what the pro ... (read more)

Weblogger Beauty Contest Winner

The results are in for the second half of the Weblogger Beauty Contest. A correspondent who requests anonymity provided these photos of Jon Gales: Gales is, of course, the closely shorn young man whose parents should have sprung for the sports coat when they bought the shirt and tie for his high school graduation. A word of advice from someone who made this mistake many times in his youth: A button-down shirt and tie do not meet the minimum standards of "formal attire." Without a jacket, you ... (read more)

Weblogger Beauty Contest Winner

The results are in for one half of the Weblogger Beauty Contest. Scott Roberts submitted a photo of himself and Alexander Payne enjoying Hooters: Hooter Lovin' Alex Payne is pictured at center, recoiling from the reflective glow of his waitperson's low-cut bodice. Though other pictures were submitted, this one most strongly demonstrates that he is a beautiful person. Note how Payne preserves the dignity of this woman by averting his gaze and leaning into his friend. I think we can all learn ... (read more)

Weblogger Beauty Contest

On his weblog today, Jon Gales fishes through a BloggerCon photo album and declares that "bloggers are ugly," using several people as examples: Check out some highlights of the BloggerCon photos... Eek. Alexander Payne agrees, calling Gales' assessment "harsh but true." Neither Gales nor Payne makes their photos a prominent part of their Web sites. I couldn't find them elsewhere either. This is a shame, because anyone who would make observations about the ugliness of their fellow webloggers ... (read more)

Extending the MetaWeblog API

Dave Winer is proposing a new version of the MetaWeblog API, an XML-RPC interface for weblog publishing that's supported by Archipelago, Blojsom, Radio Userland, Manila, Moveable Type, NetNewsWire, Python Desktop Server, and Zoe. In addition to incorporating some omitted methods from the Blogger API, I'd like to suggest that the MetaWeblog API implement some of the features of XmlStorageSystem, the XML-RPC API used to publish a weblog on a community server such as the Radio Community Server or ... (read more)