Category: BlogStreet

Scott Johnson and Dave Winer gave links to BlogStreet. Veer describes how it happened and the result:

Had asked Scott Johnson to give it a mention on his blog. It seems the word caught on from there and within 7-8 hrs we even got a mention by Dave Winer on Scripting.com saying “BlogStreet looks interesting”. And then it spread. Its there in Daypop Top 40 http://www.daypop.com/top/

Top refferers:
Scripting.com: 400+
Scott Johnson: 100+
Daypop.com: 75+

Access stats:
Unique visitors: 800+
Blogs Analysed: 1000+
New Blogs Submitted: 45

A good beginning. Need to build upon it now.

Continue reading BlogStreet Initials

DaveNet : Meg Hourihan: What We’re Doing When We Blog:

When we talk about weblogs, we’re talking about a way of organizing information, independent of its topic. What we write about does not define us as bloggers; it’s how we write about it (frequently, ad nauseam, peppered with links).

Weblogs simply provide the framework, as haiku imposes order on words. The structure of the documents we’re creating enable us to build our social networks on top of it — the distributed conversations, the blog-rolling lists, and the friendships that begin online and are solidified over a “bloggers dinner” in the real world.

Today, in our company, we are introducing weblogs to about half the company. We’ve created an internal infrastructure for blogging, using MovableType with support for private, public and group posts, and our self-developed RSS Aggregator. It is going to be an interesting experiment to see how how different people react and absorb this new writing and sharing medium.

Its a question I get asked often. NYTimes provides an answer:

For those who want a simple Weblog and do not have a file server to store it on, several sites offer templates and serve as free hosts, for example, LiveJournal (www .livejournal.com) and Blogger (www.blogger.com). For more complex blogs with more customizable features and fewer advertisements, both sites also offer services for $50 a year or less.

You can also buy desktop software programs to create a Weblog. Radio UserLand sells for $39.95 and works with Windows and Macintosh systems. Users receive 40 megabytes of space to store their blogs on the software company’s servers. A trial version can be downloaded at radio.userland.com, and UserLand Software has a Weblog information site at http://www.weblogs.org, which itself is a Weblog about Weblogs.

For diarists with their own Web server accounts, Movable Type has free software for creating a Weblog at http://www.movabletype.org, and Fog Creek Software has a free version of its CityDesk program for Windows at http://www.fogcreek.com/citydesk.

Newsfactor writes about Google’s The Wonderful Wizards and explains its success:

Google has distinguished itself mainly by adhering to an uncomplicated philosophy: Users come to the site with specific purposes in mind, so the site must work to meet their goals.

“It’s the one thing that we always say companies should do, which is focus on serving user goals,” Forrester Research analyst Harley Manning told NewsFactor. “It seems like such a simple insight, but it’s not one that has been executed by very many sites.”

Something to keep in mind.

I wrote about Google in yesterday’s Tech Talk.

A detailed report on the Blogging software packages and toolsthat are available, by John Hiler. 28 of them are analysed.

We turned a corner last week. We got the Blog Neighbourhood Analyser to work well (and much faster). We also did a very preliminary auto-categorisation of blogs, based on the information that’s available. We may relook at this a little later, but for now that will suffice. Hoping to do a launch of BlogStreet soon (finally).

It will have the following components:
– Blog Neighbourhood Analyser: Given a URL, it gives the related blogs based on the blogrolls. Two options: real-time if the blog URL exists, or offline as an email if the blog does not exist. The latter service would be quite useful for bloggers who want to know which other blogs they shouldbe referring to, given what their blogroll is.
– Top 100: the top 100 blogs listing
– Blog Search: on the home pages of the blogs; simple keyword search; blogs botted daily
– Auto-Categorisation: this may not be great, but am hoping it will improve over time. The objective here is to identify the blog clusters. It is very difficult to actually categorise a blog. Given a blog, it should be possible to navigate through its linkages. Like navigating the universe through galaxies, solar systems and planets. Hub Blogs (the most popular ones) are the equivalent of galaxies.
– Iterations of the BlogBot and Blogroll analysis: so that we can keep growing the number of blogs. We are currently at 1500 blogs.

The next major development is going to be the BlogPost analysis. Given a blog, we need to get its archives, and from those pages, the actual posts. When we do a search, the posts are the ones we should be pointing to, and not the actual pages.

A few other ideas:
– provide an RSS-ifier
– think about using IM for notifications
– how to apply these ideas on blog analysis within the enterprise
– how can we open source this
– providing a neighbourhood service

Big Picture

Lets divide the world into Bloggers (B) and Non-Bloggers are of two types: the famous ones (1% of the Bs) and the rest of us (99%). The rest of us bloggers have a URL for our blog. One of things we’d like to know is our blog neighbourhood. This gives us the cluster of blogs which become our frame of reference. We want to use the cluster to discover new items of interest, new people we want to interact, etc.

NBs are 1000x the number of Bs. NBs want to find interesting ideas/people in the world of blogs. The starting point for them into the world of blogs are (a) the Top 100 blogs (b) search, which points them to a list of blogs. NBs can then set up their own “cluster” of blogs which they like and want to track. They can do two things: (a) use this cluster as the defined search space for keywords (b) create a n RSS aggregator and a private blog, where they can save relevant posts with their comments.

In both cases, given a set of blogs, the system can also do the following:
– provide a “what’s hot” among them – links, keywords
– show newcomers in my neighbourhood
– track for new search results on pre-defined phrases / keywords
– show Amazon books which my cluster likes

The idea is to use a “trusted set of bloggers” (as Steven Johnson has called them) as information filters. This is the foundation for a knowledge sharing system, and a personal information management system.

A few questions to ponder:
– How many people would be interested in a service like this. Few people are interested in reading and fewer still in writing.
– This process calls for changes in the way people have been working.
– Will people post items? Most people still prefer to keep information to themselves.

Jeremy Wagstaff on how to begin: “I’d plump for Weblogger or Blogger, I had teething problems with both. Blogger wouldn’t let me set up archives of old postings on anything but one of its own hosted sites, despite promises to the contrary, and I couldn’t get my brain around tweaking the background images on Weblogger. That said, both are intuitive and user-friendly without being twee. Xanga, while fiddly for setting colors and other layout preferences, also offers great extras, such as a live news feed from the king of news feeds, Moreover.”

Also see: Jeremy’s Weblog

DJ Adams has built on the BlogToaster idea (real-time IM-based notification when one’s favourite blogs are updated):

I put together an experimental bit of code which reflects this mechanism out into Jabber plasma. It’s a pubsub concentrator that sits in front of Simon’s Subscriber Interface and allows any app that can send and receive simple Jabber packets to request and receive weblogs.com-based update pings via this subscriber interface.

This new mechanism abstracts the Subscriber Interface out and allows many subscribers to share one subscription connection. Publish/Subscribe. One publisher, many subscribers. The publisher, in this case the Subscriber Interface, only has to send out one SOAPy ping per updated weblog URL to reach potentially many notification recipients (subscribers).

So rather than reproduce a blogToaster-like mechanism, I thought I’d have a go at putting together a mini-infrastructure on top of which lots of different blogToaster-like mechanisms could be built.

DJ Adams is the author of O’Reilly’s “Programming Jabber” book.

We definitely need to look at this and see how it can be integrated into BlogStreet.

Writes Clay Shriky in his monthly email newsletter:

Good lists (
http://www.truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.shtml) and image (
http://www.iwatch.org/Blogosphere.JPG) of the blogosphere from N.Z. Bear.

The lists of inbound links are particularly interesting, as the the number of sites with a decreasing amount of inbound links outnumbers those with an increasing amount of links of not quite 2 to 1. However, (as you’d expect) the most linked-to sites have a decreasing-to-increasing ratio 1::2, while the least linked to sites have a decreasing-to-increasing ratio of over 3::1.

This exactly matches Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s model for networks where preferential connectivity drives topology — the link-rich get richer. With these lists, you can see the blogosphere resolving itself into a power law distribution, which will almost certainly distrupt the egalitarian rhetoric surrounding the blogging enterprise today, by doing things like making the current daypop statistics irrelevant (daypop counts number of blogs linking to a story, rather than traffic-per-blog which, other than daypop statistics, is the bigger determinant of exposure.)

Glenn Reynolds, InstaPundit.com, has another proposal that may also accelerate this process: open hit counters. Rather than making traffic numbers a private matter, Reynolds is proposing that blogs host open, third-party counters. (Check this Instapundit post.) The effect of this, of course, would be to accelerate the existing trend separating the few extremely opular blogs from the moderate number of moderately successful ones and the vast number of very low traffic blogs.

Economist has an article on Weblogging and traditional media: “Blogging suggests that the web works best as a link to other people – and a way of finding and raiding their content.”