AOL launches Red blogs

AOL introduced a new weblog service with advanced privacy features aimed at teens.

The Red blogs home page contains a search box for keyword search of the Red blogs community, editors’ picks, and a daily top five weblogs listing.

According to the new AOL(R) RED(TM)/Digital Marketing Services survey, when teens are asked to choose whether they prefer to share their innermost feelings with their parents or a blog, they are split with roughly half (51%) selecting their parents and 49% choosing a blog.

It seems very odd to me to name a parental control service a “red” service. I have no idea how they arrived at that name, but when I see the word “red” mixed with controlling features I think of communist strong-arm regimes such as those led by Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao. (not the opinion of Technorati)

It is also interesting that AOL is now using the term “blog” instead of “journal” at least in this use case.

High school bans blogging

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. (via Weblogs Tools Collection)

The article only mentions one site as banned (MySpace? LiveJournal?) but this school of less than 200 students at the middle school and high school level was worried enough enough risk to students in rural Vermont that they blocked access to the site or sites.

Technorati nears one billion links tracked

Doctor Evil

One billllion…

Technorati is currently less than nine million links away from reaching the one billion links tracked threshold. One billion links is a pretty big milestone, so we put together a contest for our members who would like to guess when Technorati will cross the one billion links tracked threshold.

Five minutes could win you a 1 GB iPod shuffle. I am ineligible to enter, but you can read all the details over at Dave Sifry’s weblog.

Remember as a kid when you tried to guess how many pieces of candy are in the jar? The same fun, but now we are geeky and count links instead.

So many variables to weigh!

There is no telling what will happen between now and a billion links tracked. You can follow all the action at the one billion links tag page.

Technorati User Salon this Thursday

This Thursday, March 31, Technorati will host a user salon to bring together Technorati staff and users for face-to-face discussions. The event will take place at Chevys at 3rd St. and Howard St. in San Francisco.

We will deliver short presentations about what is new at Technorati. The world of weblogs has been through a lot of change in the ten months since our last user salon last May. We would like to bring together the community to reflect on the last few months in the world of weblogs and discuss how Technorati may be of service in the future.

What
Technorati User Salon
When
Thursday, March 31, 2005 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Where
Chevys Restaurant, 201 3rd St., San Francisco, CA 94103
Google Maps
Yahoo! Maps

Thursday is the seven year anniversary of the release of Netscape Communicator 5.0 source code and the creation of the Mozilla project. In celebration of this milestone Chevys will donate 20% of all event proceeds to the Mozilla Foundation.

Technorati will provide appetizers and drinks for approximately 50 people. Please RSVP to salon-sf@technorati.com and let us know how many people you are bringing so we can plan the event space, food, and drink.

Adam Bosworth is blogging again

Adam Bosworth updated his weblog for the first time in almost three months. Adam publishes one of my favorite weblogs, but stopped posting because people saw his words as the words of Google and attacked the company. Adam is Google’s VP of Engineering.

I haven’t posted for quite a while because my last posts caused unfair attacks on Google by twisting the words I’d used in my posts and attributing my posts to Google. I want to be really clear about something. The opinions I express in this Blog are my own. They have nothing to do with Google’s opinions. Google only asks that I not leak information about future products. Period. But despite that, recent blog posts of mine were used to attack Google and this upset me deeply. 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. There are too many interesting things going on right now anyway.

Adam is where he is at today because he has a huge amount of domain knowledge about the issues that are important to the infrastructure of the web. He is also a Google executive.

Can Adam’s weblog have its own voice or is he always speaking for Google? There are many industry issues out there that need to be intelligently discussed and there has been a lot of negative energy creating a culture of risk-averse weblogs (see cheese sandwich).

I am very glad to see Adam’s voice rejoining the conversation.

WordPress Inc.

Later today Matt Mullenweg will announce WordPress Inc., a company created to develop WordPress solutions for paying customers. Jonas Luster is one developer involved with the new company.

They have developed some new WordPress plugins to accompany the announcement. Congratulations and I hope to see great things!

RSS your way with more options

My weblog now has a RSS feed for every category and individual entry. If you subscribe to a category you will receive a new item for every entry in the category as well as every entry in the subcategory. If you subscribe to a individual entry feed you will receive a new item for each approved comment and TrackBack related to the main entry.

Each RSS feed is exposed as a link alternate. In most cases you should be able to replace “html” with “xml” in the URL to access the corresponding RSS file.

You can now subscribe to only specific categories on my weblog or track comments and TrackBacks for an entry from your favorite feed aggregator. Hopefully this enriches your experience on my weblog!