The weblog industry and its major events.
I am featured in today's bLaugh comic (pictured above) playing soccer for France's national team, or at least wearing their latest kit. I'm kicking a 70's style Adidas Telstar ball.
I have not been in a caricature since high school (prom or sober grad party, I forget which one). Chris told me I beat out Joe Lieberman for today's spot.
The latest popular blogger to step out on their own is Amanda Congdon of popular video blog Rocketboom. According to a video post on her personal blog Amanda was kicked out by majority shareholder Andrew Baron.
My guess as to what happened? Rocketboom was looking to expand into a video blog network and restructuring the company and ownership in preparation for the new move. Amanda has one of the most popular faces in video blogging so expect her to have a new job or startup soon.
Andrew Baron is director and producer of Rocketboom.
A statement on Rocketboom says Amanda "has decided to move to L.A. to pursue opportunities that have arisen for her in Hollywood."
Reports are coming in from the Vloggercon conference about Robert Scoble's latest career move. According to Beet.TV and a few other verbal sources who were at the conference Scoble will publicly announce he is leaving Microsoft within the next few days and joining Silicon Valley startup PodTech.net as a videoblogger. Scoble has been at Microsoft for about three years and plans to move back to the Bay Area.
Robert Scoble was employed as a videoblogger at Microsoft's Channel 9 developer center, interviewing teams across Microsoft on their latest releases and features. Later in his Microsoft career Scoble's popular blog became a part of his job as well, connecting his readers to Microsoft teams, announcements, and people and company using Microsoft products. He was originally hired as a developer evangelist for what was then Longhorn, now known as Windows Vista.
The news does not surprise me, as Scoble's tour of corporate campuses and PR firms over the past year undoubtedly yielded some lucrative job offers. Working at PodTech allows Scoble to continue chatting about technology every day with executive clients of the corporate communication network. Scoble's readership in the blogosphere will be a selling point for new clients, allowing them to have an amplified message in this new communication medium. PodTech is early stage and I'm sure Scoble has a good sized equity participation.
What does the news mean for Microsoft? More people in large companies now realize the value of an information aggregator for internal and external communication. In a 60,000 person company you need some internal connectors to help keep teams and projects working together and benefitting from the work and knowledge of others. If Microsoft does not already have a team or teams dedicated to internal corporate development, hopefully they'll realize the value and create such a team.
Microsoft's TechEd conference kicks off this week, and executives will talk about new developer programs and outreach efforts. Windows Live Messenger is rumored as the first Windows Live product to leave beta, and it's also the first big application I know of to have a link to the team blog as a menu item. Expect more applications to connect directly with their user active base through the application. The Windows Live Dev also just launched to help connect more people with information about products and to collect feedback.
Many companies have bloggers among their ranks who want to be the next Scoble. I'm sure a few people within Microsoft envision themselves in the position of a PR blogger. The world of corporate communications is changing, and the good news is that you are now able to get closer to the teams developing the products and features you use every day. Yesterday Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon was able to get an annoying bug fixed within the Windows networking stack just by blogging about it. A few people responsible for the file causing him some grief were able to jump into the comments, get the information they needed, and hopefully patch the issue before the next release.
Best of luck to Robert Scoble on his new venture.
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft but the words and thoughts above are my own.
Your gadgets are blogging. Every time you take a picture, listen to a song, or play a video game you might also be blogging. Our shoes log and share our every step, our scales analyze our weight and body fat, and our cars let the world know it's been too long since your last oil change. The creation and exposure of data from our daily lives is creating new data available for search and subscription. It's time to rethink what we call a blog.
The availability of this new data will cause us to rethink what we want to share with the world, and where we want to access this personal information. Our gadgets are talking, but who should be listening?
One thing is for certain. Search companies will continue to tout their latest index size in terms of total pages, posts, feeds, blogs, and domains.
How many blogs will you produce in 5 years? What sort of feeds will be in your multiple feed aggregators?
Two years ago Dave Winer created feeds.scripting.com to help people share lists of feeds and discover other members of the community with similar interests. Winer just relaunched the site at a new URL, share.opml.org, to connect a new community and raise awareness of the OPML file format. The new site was based on Manila and the new site is built on top of WordPress.
The Share Your OPML site collects lists of feed subscription URLs from its members and presents lists of most popular feeds, individual feed subscribers, and a peek into the lists of other members with similar reading tastes.
The new site launch comes less than a week after Dave reached a settlement with former contractor Rogers Cadenhead over previous plans to relaunch the same features. Hopefully the site is here to stay and isn't just a political move.
I always liked the Share Your OPML pages. The public exposure of browsable feed lists introduced me to many new sources of information. Robert Scoble started subscribing to as many feeds as he could find just to be on top of the list, spawning a link blog and a Bloggercon session as people started to wonder if anyone could really keep up with 1300+ feeds.
I'd like to see lots more features on the new site. Members should be able to subscribe to all of someone else's feeds at once, cloning their reading list. The server should continually poll hosted files for the latest subscription list updates from personal servers as well as large aggregators such as Bloglines or NewsGator. I'd also like to see the unique feeds of someone with a reading list like mine. I might find one or two new sources of information.
MC Hammer is now a blogger and podcaster. He signs off each post with "--Hammertime."
Video on demand will allow you to see my art, my life and work on demand and without the infection of those who have hidden agendas. This is the revolution and it is on demand. There is no stopping this movement and you can't contain it. The music was built from the vibrations and the call of the people.
We will dance.
Hammer talks about his huge dance pants and plans to launch instructional dance videos.
The videos and blog posts had me laughing in disbelief for a few minutes. Hope you enjoy.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office rejected a trademark application last September for the term "podcast." Attached to the rejection letter is a complete printout of the podcasting entry on Wikipedia, citing the previous history of the term and its use describing a characteristic or feature of a product.
A few searches in the trademark database found entries for "podcast ready" audio players and a rejected application for vidcast, both citing blog entries. The accuracy of the podcast entry on Wikipedia has been under dispute and depending when the trademark office took a look at the entry the examining attorney would have seen a different view of history.
Tags: podcasting, uspto, wikipedia
Popular blogger Jason Kottke recently posted an entry criticizing blog search companies for the incompleteness of their results compared to his internal search tool powered by Movable Type. I happen to know both Movable Type and blog search pretty well, so I decided to dig into the data and see where search engines might have missed the mark in the interest of improving quality. I found that Jason's criticisms where a bit unfounded yet still may alter the perceptions of many people who are heavily influenced by what they read on his blog.
Jason found more results searching his installation of Movable Type 3.15 than he was able to find using many search engines. I manually checked every page on Jason Kottke's Movable Type install for mention of the word "Freakanomics" and found some disconnects between what was presented to Jason in his Movable Type search results page and what is presented to the world at large, including search engines.
Jason's installation of Movable Type is located at Yoink.org. I searched all blogs on his Movable Type installation for "Freakonomics" over the past 6 months Update: Jason has since deactivated public search. I chose 6 months because has only been indexing feeds since June and I wanted a good base for comparison.
Movable Type returned Jason's most recent blog post as well as 9 posts from his link blog.
4 out of the 9 posts surfaced by Movable Type's search functionality contained no mention of "Freakonomics" anywhere in the outputted post. The word "Freakonomics" may occur somewhere in a field not outputted to the final page such as keywords, excerpt, extended entry, or something else, but there is no content that anyone could expect a search engine to match for the desired query. Jay Allen wrote the search engine built-in to Movable Type and I'm sure he could answer any questions about your individual install.
5 out of the 9 posts contain a link URL partially represented by the search term. A search engine could pull out "freakonomics" from the URL if it chooses and a query term contained in a URL is one factor used to rank queries in large search engines such as Google. Technorati tries to optimize its various search indexes available to user queries by limiting search possibilities. If you are searching for a link a query analyzer should only look through a list of available links and not keywords. If you are looking for a keyword a query analyzer should throw away any link data and search only against the words in a post.
I am not sure where The New York Times sourced its data but it didn't come through me.
If you have any questions about "what they are telling us is actually true" and would like some answers for your own posts or research you can contact me to find out more about how search works. I'm a big fan of researched blog posts and adding more original and thoughtful content into the world.
Update 12/22: Jason updated his post based on this new information. I e-mailed him last night with a link to the post, an alert that his search interface was showing, and inviting further conversation. He wishes I had just stuck to an e-mail instead of a full post, but I don't see it as "airing dirty laundry." Thousands of people would read his post while he was asleep and I had a chance to TrackBack and provide some extra information for people viewing the web page and believing all search engines suck.
Tags: kottke
As more and more companies create business models around "consumer generated media" individual publishers are beginning to wonder when they might see a slice of the revenue. I believe there are opportunities for bloggers to be paid for their content without compromising editorial integrity and also rewarding the tool builders.
Profiting from consumer generated media is not a new thing. Shopping sites such as Amazon.com or PriceGrabber have been doing it for years, asking an author to turn over the rights to their content in exchange for the author's work being featured alongside a product. At PriceGrabber we paid anywhere from $5 to $25 for many of these reviews realizing that more information about a product helped drive clicks and completed the buying decision. I think bloggers can be similarly paid for syndicating their content to larger sites to assist in the buying process as one small example.
Most people are familiar with the Amazon Associates program where registered affiliates receive a percentage of the final purchase basket for each sale initiated from another site. Review a DVD, provide a special link, and receive a few dollars for your lead generation. Yahoo! plans to pay individuals for generating successful leads through its Shoposphere Pick Lists. In existing cases such as Amazon or Yahoo! if you feature some content on your blog you receive a small percentage of the purchase and both sides are happy.
What if there were tools available that made it a lot easier to post reviews to your site in a well-styled format with extra features such as an updated price or how other people have bought the same product after reading about it on your blog. Should the toolmaker receive a small percentage of that revenue?
Browsing tools such as Mozilla Firefox or Opera currently receive tens of millions of dollars a year from web searches generated using their tools. The tools are offered for free and people enjoy the experience.
The same partner agreements should exist for specialized blogging tools that help generate a sale or a profitable benefit for another company. If Byrne Reese makes it really easy to blog product reviews with Media Manager shouldn't he be rewarded a few cents for every sale? I think so, and some of the details for paying toolmakers still need to be worked out by affiliate sites.
What if instead of linking only to Amazon, your content was available for republication to any aggregation sites willing to pay a bounty? Shopping comparison sites, individual merchants, and buying guides could supplement existing information with a network of reviews and first-person accounts. There may some matching and distribution service in the middle connecting the content creators with multiple sites such as Amazon, Buy.com, Overstock, eBay, etc. The matching and distribution service helps the individual blogger make more money and reach a broader audience than they had before.
Reviews are currently rated on sites such as Amazon for their level of helpfulness. These rankings provide a way to rank multiple reviews and reward authors that positively contribute to a purchase even when the research and purchase decision takes place on a site such as Amazon.
Submitting your content to a distributed network or aggregator requires some standardized data format to express key elements of your review for redistribution to interested consumers. The format should be standardized to lower a publisher's switching cost and allow for the highest possible number of consuming services.
I believe some of this ecosystem is starting to come together. E-commerce sites are establishing partner and developer relationships as well as affiliate programs. Toolmakers such as FeedBurner and Six Apart are establishing relationships with advertisers on behalf of users. Formats such as hReview bring together a group of coauthors representing hundreds of millions of users across web properties such as AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo!.
These are developing thoughts, business models, and code, but there may be an ecosystem forming around improved online content for everyone.
I was walking home tonight when I came across a very different form of lamppost advertising. Someone had posted two of their latest blog posts at a busy street corner in San Francisco. The top post introduces weblogs and the topics they cover, encouraging people to read more weblogs for the latest news about their community and the topics they care about. The bottom post talks about comments by radio host Rush Limbaugh against homosexuals.
Someone came by and added their own Xanga blog URL to the post about Limbaugh, possibly as a way to supplement the existing 88 comments on the site.
Spotted at the southwest corner of 8th Street and Market Street in San Francisco. A pretty clever way to get more readers.
Tags: advertising
Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »
