Category: Radio Free Blogistan

  • Blog to the future

    David Weinberger has some predictions about what will happen as blogs become more popular: While there are a hell of a lot of blogs and blog readers, blogs aren’t even close to being a mainstream phenomenon the way email is. It’ll happen. And here are some guesses (note: guesses) about what they’ll look like when…

  • Google 'disappearing' UserLand?

    A while back I took Dave Winer to task when he complained that Ev Williams was “disappearing” UserLand by not citing Radio as a major competitor to Blogger. In that context, I didn’t feel that Evan was obliged to rattle off an exhaustive list. However, today Dave is pointing to some evidence that Google is…

  • What's more important than blogging?

    David Neiwert discusses a blogger’s hiatus and the kinds of things in life that are more important than blogging. He also talks about how blogging fits into his current writer/father life. His blog, Orcinus, is essential reading and I think he should know that it’s not at all maddening for him to be updating the…

  • Traditional weblog values

    Jay Rosen of NYU’s J-school follows up his recent post delineating what’s radical about the weblog form (for journalism) with one listing ten ways (I won’t call them commandments) in which the weblog form in journalism is conservative.

  • Robert Scoble, human aggregrator

    Have you been Scobleized? Tristan Cartony: “I no longer require any news aggregators because I found an all purpose one called Scoble.” Heh, who said I’m not customizable? Want me to watch a feed for you? Let me know. Also, if you don’t see your weblog on the sidebar to the right, let me know…

  • Where are the bloggers over 50?

    Janet of out of my mind asks, “Where are the blogs by persons over 50?” In reply, I’d suggest checking out the ageless project. Currently, the first 23 people listed give birthdays over 50 years before today. Janet, if you read this, one that jumps out from the list is wood s lot, born only…

  • Journalist fired for blog post

    It looks like Gregg Easterbrook’s recent blog column (“Tuesday Morning Quarterback”) that singled out the executives behind Kill Bill as Jews, holding them to a higher moral standard than Christian executives has resulted in him losing his job. Atrios is covering the story from the political angle: It appears that Easterbrook’s TMQ column has been…

  • Combatting linkrot in MT

    Brad DeLong quotes Kevin Drum (“What a mess. A combination of host problems and Movable Type fragility wiped out my site for the entire day. I’d bore you with all the details, but I’m too pissed off right now to write about it. … Also, all my permalinks changed during the reconstruction process, so if…

  • Joho the scribe

    David Weinberger is blogging the PopTech conference and doing a mighty fine job of it. (I’ve linked to one arbitrary post but he is cranking them out as he goes.) [POPTECH] Second Industrial Rev … Michael Braungart is a biomaterials engineer. … Biology will not get out of the 21st century alive, he says. (He…

  • John Markoff doesn't get it

    I relish this opportunity to agree 100% with something Dave Winer wrote: OJR interviews John Markoff from the NY Times. “It sometimes seems we have a world full of bloggers and that blogging is the future of journalism, or at least that’s what the bloggers argue, and to my mind, it’s not clear yet whether…

  • Contribute to RFB

    I would like to make Radio Free Blogistan a more inclusive resource and less of a one-man show. There are a few ways that people can contribute. Anyone with a weblog- or metablog-related category in their own blog can set up an RSS feed for the category and tell me about it. If the information…

  • The Weblog form radical for journalism

    Jay Rosen at NYU’s j-school has been writing a fantastic weblog lately. His most recent entry there lists ten answers to this question: What’s Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism?

  • Inline trackbacks better than pop-ups

    Responding to Andrew “I hate blogs and obsess about little else” Orlowski’s latest screed at the Register, which blamed Six Apart for ruining Google by inventing Trackback, Mena writes in Six Log that it’s a better practice to include trackbacks (and comments) on the same page as the weblog entry they refer to than to…

  • What the world needs now is blog, sweet blog

    Dave Pollard updates his findings on what blog readers want to see more of what blog writers would like to get back in return. For example, he has learned that blog readers want to see more original research, surveys etc. original, well-crafted fiction great finds: resources, blogs, essays, artistic works news not found anywhere else…

  • DoD weblogs?

    Clay Shirky writes in Many-to-Many that the Department of Defense is looking into using weblogs for procurement. It’s not clear to me how this would work, and they offer a strange definition of weblogs, saying that a “BLOG” is similar to a community-of-interest (COI) but with role-based security. Huh?

  • Radio Kick Start coming soonly

    Rogers Cadenhead writes: I’ve received a few e-mails from readers wondering when they’ll be getting Radio UserLand Kick Start, which comes out this month. I checked with my publisher, and it appears they’ll be shipped from the Sams Publishing warehouse to Amazon.Com this week. [Workbench] I’m looking forward to it! Radio is crying out for…

  • this is the Web, so I can update it later, right?

    Tim Bray reports from

  • Best way to delete old Radio posts wholesale?

    I’ve been using Radio to run my Mediajunkie page after migrating this weblog to Movable Type, and I recently added Adsense ads from Google to the pages. I’d like to republish the whole site to get the ads on to the archive pages, but the problems is that the first 1000 or so posts are…

  • AmphetaDesk-to-MT hack details

    Ask and ye shall receive (thank you, o lazyweb): Andrew Bayer provides the first draft of his AmphetaDesk-to-MT hack in a post responding to my previous entry (which he, yes, saw in his aggregrator and cross-posted to his blog). I think the blockquoting convention Andrew added is an improvement! I wish Radio used something similar…

  • Hooking up AmphetaDesk to Movable Type

    Salon blogger Andrew Bayer has recently migrated his weblog from Radio to Movable Type, which lacks a built-in posting aggregrator. To remedy this, he has figured out a way to hook up Amphetadesk to MT. Very nice. Andrew, did you have to hack AmphetaDesk or MT or both? Either way, please share what you’ve learned…

  • Talking Points Memo joins the syndixphere

    Joshua Micah Marshall’s essential broadsheet, Talking Points Memo, has retooled its back end with Movable Type 2.64. The design is about the same, although the column width is thankfully a tad wider. Naturally, the site now has an RSS feed (featuring excerpts, which is the default in MT’s templates), in plain and peanut. UPDATE: TPM…