Category: Weblog Concepts

  • Accommodating email subscribers with bloglet.com

    At the Berkeley J-school weblog panel* an audience member asked if most blogs used email to send reminders or even as an alternative mode for reading. A discussion ensued about how common, desirable, or easy this might be. My personal view is that I’d like to make anything I publish for free online available in…

  • We're number two

    Dave is obsessing on Google pagerank, trying to get Google to associate his page more rankfully with the search term weblog. He also got me thinking about this thing of being the top Dave or Adam or Jeremy or Jason on Google: Adam Curry is the number three Adam on Google today, ahead of Adam…

  • Spartaneity: Without Permalinks, Is It a Weblog?

    The Spartaneity Project furthers the conversation about whether permalinks are an essential element of weblogs: Much of what makes weblogs different from websites of old is structural. … [W]e’re inclined to believe that those which do not include permalinks through which the rest of us can refer directly to individual posts are not quite fully…

  • Blog for hogs?

    Would this give blogs street cred?: Marketing Magazine. Jim Carroll. Corporate weblogs. It likely won’t be too long before we see an official Harley-Davidson blog that features ongoing commentary, news and updates from an “evangelist” within the Harley organization. Featured within the main Harley-Davidson site, the effort will emerge as a powerful means by which the…

  • Tweney: Google should index blog RSS feeds

    Google loves blogs. Blogs loves Google. But is there trouble in paradise? When items slip of the front page of most blogs, there is an anecdotal two- to three-week delay before archived items are reindexed. As Dylan Tweney points out this is an artifact of the fact that Google’s basic unit of indexing is the…

  • Those people are not reading my blog

    Blogging News (thanks for the recent links, Hylton) quotes The Weigh In on the limited effectiveness of punditoblogging (compare the Tom Tomorrow cartoon in the back of the most recent New Yorker on “diminishing returns”), writing “Blogging’s not enough.” Reading the entry, I was struck by the resonance with Rebecca Blood‘s concern about bloggers writing…

  • MLK, San Francisco student-published newsblog

    MLK News: Out and Back describes itself as “San Francisco’s first student-published newsBlog.” (via John Robb)

  • Sample code for focused custom Google search

    The site search feature of Google’s free custom search offering works by default only for sites whose addresses are root-level URLs (so, for example, you can use it out-of-the-box to search jrobb.userland.com or blogs.salon.com but not blogs.salon.com/0001111/). With the help of Ian Landsman and a few other readers over the weekend, I’ve come up with…

  • Blogroll feature wishlist

    Because I like it when things work automagically… I was wishing today for a widget that would make note of whenever I add someone to my blogroll and possibly post a little summary (linktext, hovertext if any, with link of course) that I could annotate. I keep thinking that blogroll links would be more valuable…

  • School board campaign blogging

    Is anyone keeping track of campaign blogs? Everyone knows about Tara Grubb (thanks to Dave and others). Here is an example of a more local-level campaign. I haven’t read the site in detail but it appears well organized and thought out (look at the links down the left side.

  • One solution to Google site search

    Have I mentioned lately that I love the Internet? Cast a question on the waters and the answer (or an answer) generally comes back within 24 hours. Ian Landsman sent me a solution in the comments to my previous post. I’d paste the code in here but even when escaped out it will cause problems…

  • Still working on a search form

    Well, here’s the thing: To limit custom Google searches to just content from the root of this specific blog, I need to pass the string inurl:0001111 (that’s my Radio usernum) to the form handler on the Google end. I think I need to go back to web forms school, because I’m stymied. As I see…

  • Searching subdomains with a Google search box

    Aha! I asked the question about non-root level addresses in the Google search box code in the comments on John Robb’s blog and Brian Buck supplied part of the answer: site:blogs.salon.com inurl:0001111 rss This will do a search on Radio Free Blogistan for the keyword rss. P.S.: The google search operators page — I’ve got…

  • Add a Google search box to any site?

    John Robb posts the code for adding a Google search widget to your blog (or any site, really). However, as I read it, it seems to work with entire domains (for example, jrobb.userland.com). Sites like this whose root address is a subdirectory of a root domain (this site’s address is currently blogs.salon.com/0001111/) may not benefit…

  • Blog watching 'cyberjournalists' and 'j-bloggers'

    Catching up with Spartaneity this morning leads me to the Weblog Blog at CyberJournalist.net. The site is for and about journalist bloggers (referred to there as J-bloggers). Hey, if enough of these blogging about blogging sites appear, I think I can put my feet up and just let everyone else do this work! So, there…

  • Havrilesky on the fate of all fads

    Thanks to RevCow, I procrastinated for ten minutes reading an interview with Heather Havrilesky in the L.A. Weekly. She sounds remarkably sensible and I bet her novel will rock. Here is her take on viewing blogging as a trend: I think the popularity of blogging has grown an incredible amount, so there’ll be articles saying…

  • 'Twas ever thus

    Cracking down on a thing just makes it more desirable. How many readers would have have slogged through Ulysses if it hadn’t have been banned as obscene? It looks like BEACHtechie is getting his day in the sun, following the school suspension re-reported here earlier. (“Yesterday I had more unique visitors to my blog than…

  • Perspective on the Panel

    Glenn Fleishman follows up on J.D.’s partial transcipt of the Berkeley panel: One of the points that I come away with from this discussion is that the real crux of the difference between journalism and personal blogging is a very fine amount of intermediation. Instead of the heavy intermediation that happens between a newspaper journalist…

  • Expelled for blogging

    Metafilter is all over the “blogger expelled from school” story. Quoting Danelope: This is all due to every paranoid school administrator’s fear that their school will be the next Columbine. Harris and Klebold had a Web site where they posted their hate-filled screeds against, well, just about everything, and as a result, any site the…

  • RSS 2.0 template for Movable Type

    (via Scripting News) Dive into Mark has developed an RSS 2.0 template for Movable Type. Besides demonstrating how to implement RSS 2.0 feeds, it also takes some steps towards showing how namespace innovations derived for RSS 1.0 can be utilized in this (other fork) version of the “standard” (can we still call it that?).

  • Blogs a half-baked KM solution?

    In Network Computing’s BuzzCut column, Mike DeMaria talks about blogs as an improvement over e-mail for project updating but as an imperfect solution, at best, for archiving and retrieving links: Until blog developers address the issues of archive classification and sorting, blogs can’t possibly live up to their potential.