Blogging

How Bloggers Fared at the Newseum

While on a trip to Washington D.C. last weekend I made my first visit to the Newseum, the museum of journalism that moved to Pennsylvania Avenue in 2008 after an extensive $450 million upgrade. The museum's $20 ticket is a lot when you can walk across the street to visit the Smithsonian for free, but as a J-school grad I spent around five hours engrossed in the six-story facility. Highlights include an emotional Pulitzer Prize photography exhibit, an exhibit on the Berlin Wall that features ... (read more)

2009/02/16

Hosting Unlimited Blogs with TypePad Premium

Matt Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter and one of the pioneers of blogging, recently moved his self-hosted personal blog to TypePad: I really like Typepad and though I'm giving up things like custom .htaccess redirects for old posts and my old permalink URLs, I'm gaining things like the easiest to use posting UI available and most importantly, I'll never need to update any software by hand ever again. It's been a long, frustrating week with several days spent trying to move off Wordpress (I ... (read more)

2008/10/21

How to Deal With Obnoxious Blog Comments

Matt Asay, an executive who writes CNET's Open Road open source blog, got so mad at commenters on his site yesterday that he began hunting them down: ... most people are not jerks. They just become losers when cloaked in anonymity. They say things they'd never say if confronted with the people they flame on discussion boards, in comments sections, etc. They're probably nice people "in real life." It's just on the web that they let it all hang out, to the detriment of the web and intelligent ... (read more)

2008/07/04

Importing a Multiple-Author Blog to TypePad

I'm paying Six Apart $300 a year for a premium subscription to TypePad, which gives me an unlimited number of multiple-author weblogs that can be hosted on my own domains. I recently decided to move Watching the Watchers to TypePad, because I'd like the site's writers to have a more friendly user interface, but I've run into a dealbreaker -- the software doesn't import the authors of blog entries. All 1,400 articles on the site are stored in my name. TypePad supports multiple authors and Six ... (read more)

2008/05/31

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

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