65 posts filed under this category.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. Om and I sat down at his apartment last week to talk about blogs, RSS, and advertising. Om asked most of the questions, focusing the discussion about how to make the right choices in blogging software and services to become a better blogger. Full show notes are available on the Om and Niall PodSessions site. This week’s podcast is 21 minutes in length and a 9.7 MB download. After the podcast I gave Om’s RSS a makeover including switching his feed to FeedBurner, adding more branding by utilizing more…
Too many corporate marketers see a blog as a marketing brochure to spread the same marketing content in multiple formats. Below are three different areas often overlooked by companies considering blogging as a communications strategy. Recruitment Corporate blogs can be a recruiting tool for both active and passive candidates. Job candidates like to know who they will be working with, on what types of projects, and if the company takes good care of its employees. All of this information is best discovered and trusted from individuals within the company. In a larger company the blogs of individuals can be used…
I created a sample product blog to demonstrate how a corporation might engage a potential market in advance of a product launch. I chose iRobot Corporation and their latest product, Scooba the floor washing robot. I created a blog named Scooba Clean to show what a product blog might look like in the six months before the product is released. Corporate marketing teams are often a bit afraid to enter the world of corporate blogging. They read reports of mobs of bloggers attacking CBS or Kryptonite and fear for the lives of their brands in the wild frontier that…
A lot of people think of podcasts as uninteresting audio recordings of someone talking to themselves. Not true! I want to share with you some of my favorite podcasts I subscribe to and listen to at least semi-regularly. I manage my subscriptions and downloads through iTunes. Podcasts is time shifted audio making existing programs available when I want and where I want and enabling new content niches where radio might never go. On the Media, a New York public radio program about the media industry including newspapers, radio, television, and online media such as websites and blogs. On the Media…
Speaker of the House Denny Hastert is now blogging. Hastert is the #3 politician in Washington D.C., second only to Vice President Dick Cheney in the Presidential line of succession. He hopes to provide “some inside access to the Republican playbook.” The internet is changing the way we share information. My office has been talking a lot about some of the conversations going on in blogosphere. So I thought, hey, I should start one and give you unfiltered updates on Capitol Hill. The journal has no comments, not even a list to a congressional e-mail address. The journal does not…
A recent survey by Advertising Age found about 35 million workers in the United States visit blogs and spend an average of 40 minutes a day reading blogs. 25% of blog visits could be considered job-related. Work time spent reading and posting to blogs will consume 2.2% of all labor force hours this year according to Advertising Age. You need an Advertising Age account to view the article. Try BugMeNot for nag-free access. Tags: advertising, adage…
The opening of Engadget Labs has been delayed as the new offices are still being constructed. I previously reported the new office space would open October 15 but Peter Rojas and Ryan Block told me this week the contractors are still working on the new space. Engadget continues to operate out of their own apartments. Tags: engadget…
Michael Graves of VeriSign announced the acquisition of Weblogs.com this evening. SiliconBeat reports Dave Winer sold the service for $2 million. VeriSign plans to maintain the ping beacon in its current form with additional revenue models and ping extensions beyond the current implementation. VeriSign hints at upsell opportunities for ping submission and retrieval and views the weblogs.com ping beacon as a “competing service.” They plan to overhaul the Weblogs.com infrastructure to achieve higher levels of performance and stability. VeriSign also mentions a future statistics service available at Weblogs.com that will display statistics such as total pings received, processed feeds, and…
Jason Calacanis just announced the acquisition of Weblogs Inc. by America OnLine. Weblogs Inc. is a blog network of 90 weblogs employing over 130 bloggers in the consumer, technology, wireless, video games, media & entertainment, business, life sciences, and events. Weblogs Inc. received venture capital funding from Mark Cuban. I have heard terms of the deal are cash and stock with about a $25 million base and $15 million worth of incentives. If true, Weblogs Inc. received a similar valuation to Flickr. Update: Wired News reports the deal was $25 million in cash with no mention of incentives. Some questions…
The popular gadget blog Engadget is moving into new offices in New York and will be launching a testing lab for in-depth product reviews. The Engadget team announced the new venture at their San Francisco Engadget Reader Meetup. Engadget Labs will perform benchmarks and in-depth reviews of products. It sounds like a nice departure from the typical pay-per-article model of weblog networks. Editors Peter Rojas and Ryan Block will work out of their new office in New York with possibly a few other members of the Weblogs Inc. network. The new office space will include a special podcasting room…
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…
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,…
Many people have cold feet when they think about starting a blog. Do I really have anything important to say? Will anyone read what I write? Choose a topic you are passionate about and share it with the world. My favorite coffee spot in San Francisco is Blue Bottle Coffee Company, an artisan small-batch roaster located a few blocks from my house. The company’s San Francisco location serves their own coffee from a small storefront in an alley. The staff even writes their own blog about new equipment, bean comparisons, and other topics that show the passion in their work….
Marble Sportswear of Beverly Hills, California recently applied for a trademark and service mark for the word “blog.” Is there a new line of blog-specific clothing on the way or are they just squatting? Small Business Blog is also an applied service mark the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council and their “virtual destination where small business owners and entrepreneurs can communicate about issues impacting their enterprises and the economy.” Both trademarks seem pointless but maybe pushing the government papers really does pay off. Tags: trademark…
Tom Foremski wrote this morning about a presentation that included some possible future products from Technorati. I won’t comment on future products, but it’s interesting to take a look at some of the underlying issues some bloggers are worried about. Commercial Use Can another company make money off of your content? I currently receive a lot of referral traffic from a variety of search services such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Each search company sells advertisements alongside an excerpt of my content. I have no problem with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN making money off of my content because they also…
Blo.gs is currently down, indicating an announcement is imminent. Whois records show Jim Winstead is still the domain contact and resource, but Jim previously announced the domain and its assets would change hands on or after Monday, June 13.Tags: blo.gs…
CNN reports that Country Music Television has just signed Christopher Nelson to a $100,000 contract to watch Dukes of Hazzard and blog about it. Nelson emerged from almost 2,000 applicants by creating a website for a fictional character called Slick. No news on whether a 1969 Dodge Charger comes with the job.Tags: dukesofhazard…
The Wall Street Journal published some good quotes from this week’s sessions at the D conference in Carlsbad. Mena Trott of Six Apart has a new self-described title of “chief egotist.” Anna Marie Cox of Wonkette mentioned that people at the top will get commercialized but “there is always someone in the garage.” Donald Graham of The Washington Post described the self-publishing nature of the blogging world as “one person who’s Ben Franklin and 100,000 people who think they’re Ben Franklin.” Peter Kahn of Dow Jones thinks publishers in general have underpriced their products. “I don’t think we were particularly…
I received an invitation from KRON-TV, a local San Francisco Bay Area news station, to attend a blogger gathering on June 11 at their television studio in San Francisco. From the open invitation: We recognize the significance of the personal media revolution, and we want to listen to what you’re saying. We think this is a good way to start. Sounds great! KRON is a local TV channel that was approached by NBC a few years ago but did not sell. They are still alive and kicking with local programming from parades or the back roads of local parks. The…
Dana Stevens, television critic for Slate, recently wrote about how television media chooses to cite blogs in their news coverage. I have yet to see the blog coverage on CNN or MSNBC, but it seems like they have the wrong approach to including this new medium. We witness cross-media citations all the time. News organizations care about who broke the news and who had the best commentary and the best sources are usually cited multiple times on big stories. Newspapers or radio stations often break stories and CNN reports on these breaking stories just as they would their own original…
Next Monday The New York Times will introduce a new Business Day section with a regular feature about the world of blogs written by David Carr. On Mondays, Business Day will focus on media and marketing news, with technology included as it relates to those industries. David Carr will write a column on new media; the world of blogs will be covered as a regular feature.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has some new statistics available from its survey of 2,871 internet users from January 2005 through March 2005. 9% of internet users now say they have created blogs. 6% of the entire U.S. adult population have created blogs. 25% of internet users say they read blogs. The number of adult readers of blogs is about 40% of the size of the talk radio audience. The blog-reading audience is about 20% of the size of the newspaper-reading population. I will comment more once the full report is available….
John Battelle recently announced his new company named FM Publishing to act as a publisher for more authors in similar ways to his role as band manager at Boing Boing. I plan to partner with site authors, acting as a platform which provides important services to them – revenue (in the form of advertising), back end support, and the like.
Intelliseek and Edelman partnered to create a white paper on weblogs.
Students at Proctor High School in Vermont can no longer write weblog posts at school. School officials are concerned for the safety of the children posting personal data online that could be used by an Internet predator.
Much to my surprise, Dare Obasanjo came up to me and told me, after some fairly vitriolic complaining from me to him about this earlier state of affairs, that he wished I’d continue to post. I thought about this over the weekend and decided that to some degree, you have to take your chances in this environment rather than just hide when you don’t like the behavior and that perhaps I was being over sensitive anyway.
The commentary expressed on this weblog is my point of view and may not necessarily represent the point of view of Technorati.
Jim Winstead officially placed blo.gs up for sale today.
and Flickr are still in negotiations over purchase price and no final agreement has been reached. A high level source within Yahoo told SiliconValleyWatcher that the two companies are in negotiations over the purchase price and that as of late Friday night Pacific Time, no final agreement had yet been reached.
Jason Kottke just announced he is going to run kottke.org full-time supported — he hopes — by user donations. “This is me taking online personal publishing seriously because I feel it deserves as much.”
I just uploaded the full audio of the February 15, 2005 episode of The Charlie Rose Show.
The mayor of Oakland, Jerry Brown, has started a weblog on TypePad to discuss the issues of interest to Oakland and to provide a direct voice. His first post currently has 54 comments.
I just started playing around with Picasa 2 and I noticed they have a “Read the Picasa Blog” option in their help menu linking to a new Blogger weblog. Picasa is the first product that I have seen link to a weblog within the application and it is especially interesting to see the link appear in the help section and not in a more generic about section….
I just came across RSS Submit, a $25 piece of software that will ping RSS search engines with your feed URL. (via Danny Sullivan) Hilarious! It’s like Ping-o-Matic but for $25!…
Dan Gillmor has a new TypePad weblog. Grab your RDF feed or Atom feed if you would like to keep track of Dan’s new citizen journalism projects and other technology insights….
I tried to leave a comment on Marc Canter’s weblog in response to his post reacting to requests for reasonably priced geek dinners, but his weblog is not setup correctly. If you want to use TypeKey you have to edit your Movable Type weblog preferences and add your TypeKey token. You’re not enabling a conversation! I was motivated enough to post here since Marc unfairly targeted some people trying to make the event work for everyone. Tantek’s idea was to try somewhere new and to make the event as inclusionary as possible. He’s been to geek dinners all around the…
FeedBurner announced new features today FeedCount, an image displaying the total number of readers of a FeedCount enabled FeedBurner feed. You can choose your own background and foreground color and choose an animated version. FeedBurner also claims 1 in 5 podcasts listed on audio.weblogs.com is provided by a FeedBurner feed….
As an economics nerd I have a lot of thoughts about weblogs and theories of incentive. Weblogs share some social and economic motivations with the world of open source software yet I struggle to quantify the economic effects on an individual publisher level. The key overlooked metric of the blogosphere is the society of the underemployed. People with full-time jobs and a paycheck who rather be doing something else on a full or part-time basis utilize weblog tools in an attempt to gain notoriety or possibly a new job. Weblogs are the karaoke night of online journalism where many participants…
Jason Kottke’s recent experience with Sony has him reconsidering his role as a publisher. Is the hassle worth it? Only big publishers have the budgets to deal with any hint of legal issues. I raised this issue at Lawrence Lessig’s Law & Blogging session at BloggerCon. Regardless of fair use, being on the right side of the law, it is difficult to gather the resources to respond to legal harassment. Lessig differentiated between a “nastygram” and an actual legal filing. Jason has demonstrated good judgment and community building in the past. I received an e-mail from Jason before he pointed…
AlwaysOn will introduce a quarterly print magazine. Over “50 percent of the content in the issues come either from AO members or will be posts that our members considered the most valuable. In this way, our community is both transparent and plays an active editorial role in the content we publish.” AlwaysOn is the first weblog site to spin into a magazine….
Researchers at UC Berkeley researched the environmental impact of reading a newspaper on a PDA versus in reading the paper form. [I]f just a quarter of newspaper readers around the country switched to reading the news on their PDA, they’d generate just two to three percent of the carbon dioxide that would have resulted from the 14 million print newspapers they no longer need. A good argument for syndicated feeds!…
Red Herring has an article about Joyce Park’s termination by Friendster for blogging. In just five business days, Ms. Park estimates that at least two dozen Silicon Valley employers – including Friendster’s most prominent competitors – deluged her with job offers. Good to see things worked out well for Joyce. She definitely received a lot of help sending the word out to employers that she is looking for a new job….
In what may be another first, blogger Jessica Cutler, “The Washingtonienne,” is featured in Playboy’s Cyber Club starting today. There is a safe-for-work interview with Jessica on the Playboy site as well….
Ed Schrock, United States Congressman for Virginia’s 2nd District, announced yesterday he would not seek a third term in November. He faced homosexual allegations that surfaced on weblogs such as Michael Rogers’ blogACTIVE. He received a 100 percent rating from the Christian Coalition in 2002 and was one of 233 lawmakers who supported the Marriage Protection Act. The 63-year-old Schrock is married and has one son. Ed Shrock not seeking a third term is the first instance I know of where webloggers have pushed someone out of federal office. Trent Lott is often cited as an example of the power…
The Wall Street Journal profiles the 15 official webloggers attending next week’s Republican national convention. “Asked what they learned from Boston, some of the New York bloggers characterized the Boston coverage as self-absorbed and overly preoccupied with celebrity sightings. The Republican bloggers said they’d stay more focused on the issues and the convention itself — a chance they’ll get next week.”…
O’Reilly Media published the entire text of Dan Gillmor’s new book, We the Media,under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. Chapter PDF files are available for download….
Users of Kazaa 2.7 (currently in beta) can promote their weblog or Web site within search result and traffic panes. Once you enter your Web address through the options menu your user name will be hyperlinked in the search results and traffic display. Interesting feature and it adds accountability. I am guessing this feature will be more useful to distributors than end-users. Independent music distributors can direct users to their Web site for more bands or a rich media presentation. Vendors can offer sample clips on Kazaa and link to their sites where a full-length clip is available for purchase….
Daniel Terdiman of Wired News reports on Bakersfield’s The Northwest Voice newspaper giving its readers control of its content through online article posting. “36 percent of the content is photographs, while 13 percent is school news, 11 percent is community events, 7 percent is youth sports and 2 percent is church news. Ten percent of coverage is columns written by locals selected by Fulton for their expertise on things like horses, cars, schools and outdoor life.”…
Jason Cook wrote a optimization guide for Atom and RSS and it is now available on Webmonkey. GZip compress, use conditional gets, and validate your feeds. A good use of statistics to drive the point home….
News.com now has descriptions (not just headlines) in its RSS feeds….
Nike now has a weblog published by Nick Denton’s Gawker Media. “Nike commissioned 15 talented young filmmakers to interpret the idea of speed. Over the course of 20 days, this weblog will introduce these innovative directors, their short films, and the digital technology behind the scenes.” (via Scoble)…
Steven Levy writes about Nick Denton and Gawker Media in Wired magazine. Writers are typically paid $1500 a month (contract, not full time) and build a reputation good enough for a traditional publisher. Levy estimates Gawker Media nets $80,000 per blog per year. “Denton’s move to professionalize blogs bestowed instant credibility on an unknown single-writer Web site.”…
Andy Raskin of Business 2.0: “Creative Commons encourages artists to share and distribute their work for free. And that could be the key to a new multibillion-dollar industry.”…
Jena McGreggor discusses corporate weblogs in the April issue of Fast Company. Some of the uses mentioned, such as project status, seem like candidates for a wiki instead of a weblog. The article makes Scoble seem like a marketing arm of Microsoft, in the same class as Macromedia blogs. I would have liked to see mention of Scoble having a Userland weblog and not a MSDN weblog. Robert Scoble may well be one of the most powerful people in Redmond right now. A trusted group of employees started blogs to answer users’ questions, and the blogs have grown into online…
Pew Internet and American Life Project’s latest survey covers content creation online. Some interesting findings from a phone survey conducted between March 12 and May 20, 2003. 13% maintain their own Web sites 7% have Web cams running on their computers 2% maintain Weblogs, 11% read weblogs, and about a third of readers have left comments. 10% of bloggers update daily. Power creators, average age of 25, are most likely to be blogging. It is interesting to note what has happened since May 20, 2003 that has most likely increased those numbers. AOL launched its AOL Journals service. TypePad launched….