Blogging

I Ruined Blogging for the St. Augustine Record

Peter Ellis, the editor of the St. Augustine Record, recently began a blog with an angry post that suggests he is starting his new site under duress: My first encounter with a blogger was a miserable experience. He reported stuff on his blog about The Record that was wrong and then urged bloggers across the country to write me to complain. Many of them did, even though most of them had never heard of the St. Augustine Record. That left a bad taste in my mouth about bloggers. Since then, I've ... (read more)

2009/11/25

Gawker Takes Shots at Company's Early Skeptics

In a post bragging about how great Gawker Media is doing, company marketing strategist Erin Pettigrew takes shots at a few bloggers who were skeptical seven years ago that a professional weblog network would make money: ... when the controversial Gizmodo launched (laying the foundation for Gawker Media), the self-important digital punditocracy debated this 'commercial experiment' in blogging as a viable, interesting, useful, or scalable business: Dave Winer: It's such a stale idea. The Web is ... (read more)

2009/09/03

Scott Rosenberg's 'Say Everything' Covers Blogs and 9/11

I'm currently reading Scott Rosenberg's Say Everything, his new history of blogging that digs deeply into the origins of the medium and why it has become so successful. Rosenberg, a founder of Salon.Com and an online acquaintance of mine for many years, has written a fascinating book that begins with chapters on early web diarists and bloggers such as Justin Hall, Jorn Barger and Joshua Marshall. The introduction to Rosenberg's book centers on how bloggers covered the 9/11 attacks, an important ... (read more)

2009/08/14

Conservative Blogs Doing Better Under Obama

Blogger Simon Owens is tracking the traffic of the 20 largest liberal and conservative blogs to see how they've fared since the election. The blogs have collectively dropped 109 million unique visitors from October 2008 to May 2009: Right of center blogs weathered the post-election season a little better, falling only 37%, while blogs that were left-of-center fell by 64%. Some blogs did better than others. Instapundit, for instance, was the only blog to show a slight increase in page views ... (read more)

2009/06/14

Disclosing Paid Placements on a Blog

Mel Cooley: "I didn't come here to be insulted!" Buddy Sorrell: "Oh, where do you usually go to be insulted?" Last month I called out Dave Winer for selling a paid placement in Radio UserLand that was never disclosed to his users. This sparked a tempest in a TechMeme in which Mike Arrington dropped the hammer on Winer, declaring that his credibility was permanently shot by the secret deal. I am now obligated, under enemy of my enemy is my friend rules, to extend to Arrington my warm hand of ... (read more)

2009/04/12

LemonYellow's Heather Anne Halpert is Back

Warning: In order to find this blog entry exciting, you must have been on the web for at least 81 Internet years (nine in human reckoning). A decade ago this July, the New York Times published a profile of Heather Anne Halpert, a charmingly offbeat writer sharing her stray thoughts and experiences on a blog. But nobody called them blogs back then, so reporter Katie Hafner had trouble explaining Halpert's site, which she described as an "intellectual layer cake." (If that name had caught on, ... (read more)

2009/03/30

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

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