Blogging

Hugh MacLeod Ages Like Fine South African Wine

It's funny what people reveal about themselves online. Read my blog for any length of time and you can probably figure out my uneasy Michael Corleone-like relationship with journalism, the field I majored in and subsequently escaped. I can't decide what to think about my long absence from the profession or the fact that I don't seem to be missed. Read online marketing guru Hugh MacLeod, the guy who plies bloggers with a South African wine in the expectation they'll sing its praises, and you ... (read more)

2007/12/06

Techmeme: We Find the Sites You Already Visit

Tim Bray on Techmeme: I go there and see the same stories about the RIAA and Paul Graham's latest essay and what Apple might be doing, the same stories that are on Slashdot and Ars Technica and boring old ZDnet too. Plus a smattering of whatever Scoble & Winer & Arrington & Calcanis and their posses are up to. For all of the attention paid to the Techmeme leaderboard this week, the latest popularity contest for self-fascinated, high-traffic techbloggers, there hasn't been much scrutiny of the ... (read more)

2007/10/11

BlogRush Offers Link Sharing Service for Blogs

As an experiment, I added a BlogRush widget to the sidebar of Workbench and several other sites this morning. BlogRush is a new JavaScript-based blog headline exchange driven by RSS. Here's how it works: Headlines that might be of interest to readers appear in a box like this one, headlines from my site appear on other member sites, and we all get an enormous boost in traffic, a slobbery cover story in Wired and obscene wealth we can lord over others. Or at least the BlogRush founders do. ... (read more)

2007/09/21

Five of My Favorite Blogs

Bored with what his RSS reader has been feeding him, Kent Newsome is rebuilding his reading list from scratch using the recommendations of others. He's asked me to suggest five blogs, which is a good excuse to pimp some sites I follow that deserve a bigger audience. Retrospectacle, a blog by neuroscience postgraduate student Shelley Batts, consistently finds great stories in science before the mainstream media. She won a blogging scholarship last year and answers questions I didn't realize I ... (read more)

2007/09/20

Cluetrain Derails in Blacksburg, Virginia

One of the best-known techbloggers was embarrassed Monday when he sent the following private e-mail and it was published by the recipient: From what I gather so far (and info is incomplete), most of the cell phones in use by students at Virginia Tech, and the system they used as well (much more feature-rich than phones provided by big carriers, and user-programmable to boot) were provided by a company in New York run by my friend ... . I think what they're doing is critically important: helping ... (read more)

2007/04/19

The Internet's Chorus of Calumny

Frank Paynter's getting his groove back after the Internet's long tail knocked him around like a stegosaurus. For all of the talk about how bad it is to be the focus of an angry mob, an angry Internet mob gums its prey rather than biting. Once you get used to the slobber it's not so bad. Now that the horde's moved on to Tim O'Reilly and his stinking badges, Paynter's mocking the outrage brigade by quoting Karl Marx: All this chorus of calumny, which the party of order never fail, in their ... (read more)

2007/04/11

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)

2007/03/29

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)

2007/02/26

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)

2007/02/22

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)

2004/07/30

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