Posts from September 2005

Six Apart demonstrated TypePad 2.0 at the DEMOfall conference yesterday and announced new discounted pricing. Mena Trott's mom won the coveted DEMOgod award for showing that TypePad 2.0 is so easy even your mother can do it. TypePad 2.0 is a "significant re-engineering" of TypePad. You can now apply multiple group privacy settings to a single blog to allow various visitors to see only the posts intended for their group. TypePad is also supposed to have increased media abilities, but I have not seen the product or any detailed reviews. TypePad also lowered its yearly subscription prices across all three...

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Today I visited Google to talk about web spam. I had never been on the Google campus so although I was busy I did make a point to note many details. Just about every meeting room I saw was video enabled. The spam summit met in a medium-sized room with array microphones hanging from the ceiling tiles, three video cameras in the back of the room, and one video camera in the front of the room for crowd shots. Smaller meeting rooms had phones with eye-level cameras. Lunch was really good. I had a chicken breast pesto panini with roasted...

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The latest issue of Time magazine introduces readers to blogs and blog search engines. The layout of the online version is a bit confusing but perhaps the print version is better arranged. Time describes Technorati as "long the best blog-search option on the Web." Thanks! Tags: technorati, timemagazine...

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Earlier this week DaimlerChrysler introduced The Firehouse, a blog authored by company executives and created as a continuing conversation with professional journalists between periods of typical briefings such as auto shows. DaimlerChrysler has a tradition of turning an old Detroit firehouse, Chrysler Firehouse, into a press-only gathering spot every year during the North American International Auto Show. DaimlerChrysler is expanding this communication event through weblogs and other tools to answer questions year-round in a semi-public forum. I contacted Jason Vines, DaimlerChrysler's Vice President of Communications, and was told that The Firehouse is a place for reporters to relax and mingle,...

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I have been reading through some of the posts about Google Blog Search and have some new thoughts on possible infrastructure although nothing has been officially stated by Google. I've read about how fast Google's results come back. I would hope so, their entire index covers only about 90 days. Powered by Google Fusion? We already know that Google Blog Search is indexing only feeds, and the index does appear to separate from the main Google index. We also know that Google's feed search index only contains posts since June 2005. We also know that Google plans to add a...

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When writing help pages and other documentation aimed at informing a user there are choices to be made about how much information is too much information and what exactly is the correct information to note. Dave Winer feels a bit slighted by not being recognized for his contributions to the community allowing blog and RSS services such as Technorati to index data in a more timely manner. I wrote Dave an e-mail about six months ago thanking him for his contributions and detailing some of the ways Technorati uses technologies he has dedicated time, effort, and money to produce, but...

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Google Blog Search is now live. I spent some time clicking around and searching for terms and phrases where I expected a certain result. Some early thoughts: Query time is very fast, at around half a second for most queries. The database only goes back two months, so a quick response is to be expected. The related blogs search for "George Bush" suggests "George Bush doesn't care about ugly hoes" which cracks me up. No advertisements. Is this another "mistake" like Google claimed for Google News? I don't think so. Google exposes results as RSS and Atom feeds in...

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Google is launching a feed-specific search interface tonight for both all feed producers as well as a search interface specific to Blogger. It's important to note that from what I have read on Search Engine Watch and others Google is specifically restricting its search to feeds, and not using the HTML of the blog. Why? Googlebot is designed to swallow a page whole and not break the page up into individual entries or items. Feeds come prepackaged as individual items or entries allowing for easy digestion by parsers and indexers. Google would need to overhaul its indexer or design a...

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I noticed something new and interesting in the NewsFire release notes today: NewsFire now blocks advertisements from Google and FeedBurner. NewsFire is the first aggregator I know of to block advertisements in the default installation and not a custom user-supplied CSS stylesheet. I tested the new feature with Brad Feld's feed and Engadget's feed and both display advertisements in the source but not when displayed in NewsFire. I cannot find any way to enable advertisements at the application or feed level. Is NewsFire the first of what may be many aggregators to block advertisements in feeds? Will products tout this...

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A large portion of Los Angeles lost power today as thousands of geeks converge on the city for Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference. Coincidence? Suggested headlines: Windows Vista takes so much it brings down an entire power grid. Microsoft opens a portal to Hell, sending Los Angeles into darkness. 12,000 geeks charge their laptops at once, cripple local power grid. Totally joking, but a strange coincidence. Tags: pdc05...

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