Category: Required Reading

  • Disclosing blog sponsors

    Now that Marc Canter is spearheading a kind of transparent blog-payola system for compensating bloggers, the issue of full disclosure of one’s sponsors and or influences seems all the more important. For example, here is the disclosure about the ZeroDegrees sponsorship of the new Operating Manual for Social Tools weblog: About The Project: ZeroDegrees has…

  • Diego Doval's introduction to weblogs

    Diego Doval has come up with one of the better (succinct, insightful) primers on weblogging and syndication in his d2r: an introduction to weblogs in two parts (so far). They’re canonical!

  • 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…

  • Weblog strategies for nonprofits

    One of the students in my weblogs class at Seybold last month was the web administrator of the Community Technology Foundation of California (zerodivide.org). They use a sophisticated CMS to maintain the site but are experimenting with weblogs and wanted to see whether they might be more easily customizable, because – we agreed – different…

  • Robb's Law

    NEVER (under any circumstances) publish a weblog to a domain that you don’t control. – John Robb I hereby christen the above quotation Robb’s Law or Robb’s Law of Weblog Hosting in full. I suppose it could be broadeneed to web publishing in general. I certainly think owning your own domains and when possible running…

  • metageneric antiblog spot

    Heading making clever pun on ‘blog’: i’m a journalist. see my daring posture vis-a-vis blogs: they are too influential to too small a group of people. popular bloggers are bad and the taste of the blogosphere is incorrect or corrupted. google is making things worse. it’s giving me opinions when i expect primary sources. me…

  • 'I get it' meme update

    We’ve recently started an independent blog conference on the Well, and Salon blogger Bruce Umbaugh reminded me of a klog-related epiphany I wrote about in an entry back in August called I get it. At time I asked people to link to it as “xian gets it” but while I was correcting the permalink and…

  • Shirky on blogging and inequality

    Internet pundit Clay Shirky writes about power-law distributions and the popularity of certain blogs. He disputes the idea that there’s a specific “A-List” but says that unequal distribution of readership is inevitable. Mark Pilgrim mostly agrees. Dave Winer mostly disagrees and thinks that Clay needs to start a blog himself to truly understand the medium.…

  • Some personal guidelines for web writing

    Paul Ford publishes a list of exhortations to himself about writing for the web (at his incredible Ftrain site): This list takes the form of a set of personal, first-person statements (“I do this,” “I do that”) rather than a set of injunctions (“Do this!”, “Do that!”) because these are my guidelines, a set of…

  • Have your tickets out and ready

    I’m so out of it. After returning from a week and a half in New York I’m still reading The Gawker but without that same sense of immediacy (not that it matters where you are when you read about New York, and not that that prevents me from reading the Times, the Nation, the New…

  • Journalism is harder work than blogging

    A week has passed since the J-school panel and I’ve just now completed my subjective transcript of the panel (in two parts). [Note: At the moment Radio is unable to upstream my story files for some reason so the above links aren’t working. I’ll remove this notice when they do work and post another update.]…

  • QuickTime webcast of the Panel

    Scot Hacker posts at the birdhouse that he’s “just finished titling and encoding Weblogs — Challenging Mass Media and Society in QuickTime format for our Darwin Streaming Server. Posted both Sorenson3 and MPEG-4 versions (but no modem-friendly version, sorry).”

  • Crash Course in RSS Development

    Dive into Mark today is a great place to start for anyone trying to get up to speed on the weblog-mediated RSS development collaboration.

  • Reports of the Death of Publishing Greatly Exaggerated

    Don Park responds to Ray Ozzie’s obituary for publishing, saying “Publishing is not dead.” I would tend to agree. Publishing is definitely sick, buffeted by unfamiliar pressures, in disarray, due for some changes, racing to keep up with technology changes, slow to adopt technology. Publishing is many things. (I feel mildly qualified to comment myself…

  • The Legacy of Eve Andersson

    Adam Barr takes to task the insider-y side of the blogosphere’s hypocracy in this article posted to kuro5hin: Back then you had to be able to write pure HTML to put up a site like that. With modern blogging has come authoring tools that free you from that restriction. So is this the huge breakthrough…

  • Small Business Blogging

    Rereading Bricklin’s Aug 12 article on small business blogging, I realized that his first example is a pretty close fit for the intangibles I get from doing this blog: One type of small business is the “consultant”. This covers a wide range of areas, from engineers, to marketers, to event planners, to freelance writers and…

  • Deep Roots of Hypertext Journaling

    Believe it or not, I’m still sorting out what I’ve learned about Traction Software, sifting and trying to digest what I’ve learned. Traction was heavily influenced by Doug Engelbart and his ideas about

  • Mining Udell on Radio and the Two-Way Web

    I should have known I’d get sucked in. I remember reading Jon’s columns as he continually documented what he was learning about web servers, content managemenet, database-backed websites, and so on. From the link mentioned in my previous entry I’ve now read Udell’s review of Radio 8 and a three-part article on the writeable web,…

  • New Forms of Journalism

    I’m still mining the J-School resources here. This is a link to J.D. Lasica’s weblog/journalism resource: Journalism’s new life forms: The following links provide information about new forms of personal journalism — including weblogs, collaborative news sites, personal broadcasting, and more — as well as pointers to examples of each genre. Naturally, you’ll start seeing…

  • Link List from Blood's 'Weblog Handbook'

    Just noticed that Rebecca Blood has put all the links from her book online at her site. This is a good practice, as it enables her to update links as they change from their printed version in the book (as some already have).

  • Required (Remedial) Reading

    Anyone trying to get caught up on weblogs, history of weblogs, what makes a good weblog, history of what people have thought makes a good weblog, and so on, should probably go back and ready CamWorld’s rant from January 26, 1999. I have to admit that I used to think CamWorld was a nudie webcame…