Category: BlogStreet

Ryan Stewart has a review. “News readers are becoming more and more indispensable as people turn to blogs for their news – and even major news sites are making increasing use of RSS feeds. Being able to take that content wherever you go – online or offline, is going to become very important. The explosion of mobile devices and the coming of the living room entertainment system are going to provide new ways for users to consume RSS. The solutions that are going to get the most attention are those that can deploy on any of these platforms and also provide the ‘2.0’ functionality that has changed the web.”

[via Vinu] Mobile Community Design has an interview with Jeff Axup.

Communities are defined by sociologists as networks of people who share strong social ties which provide informational and physical resources. Traditionally these were geographically bounded neighbourhoods. However, with the advent of modern communication and transportation technologies, they are increasingly mobile and dispersed. A tourism research paper recently noted that “Society as a whole is becoming more restless and mobile, in contrast to the relatively rigid patterns of modernity. One of the cultural symbols of this increasingly mobile world is the backpacker” (Richards & Wilson, 2004). As we become increasingly more mobile, it is likely that we will adopt behaviours similar to existing mobile communities such as backpackers, truckers, and travelling business people.

Mobile device manufacturers already want to support “anytime, anywhere” access, and they may be able to benefit from a better understanding of how these communities operate and what their needs are.

The Washington Post writes:

The Net radically shifts principles of news distribution as all sites become equidistant from the reader.
…
What’s the most amazing thing about the new media world? Its low barriers to entry. Thanks to the Internet, it is cheap and simple to launch a site that, theoretically, the whole world could be watching.

Yesterday there were a few dozen providers; today news, views and attitudes stream through millions of gates. And the Web accepts all kinds of gatekeepers, each with unique rules for what matters, rather than the rules adopted by a class of professionals with set journalistic principles. For the old gatekeepers that’s a big disruption.

From the site:

Microformats are tiny bits of markup in web pages that label contacts, events, reviews, addresses, geo-locations, and other commonly published chunks of information. Microformats are often published on blogs and in feeds, but are increasingly published on other types of web pages as well such as event databases, social network profiles, reviews sites, and contact information pages. Traditional ping services only handle blog or feed updates, so we’ve set up Pingerati to handle microformat updates on any web page.

Pingerati is also a ping router (multiplexer). Pingerati receives updates of pages with microformats from numerous sources, and sends those pings to services that support microformats.

Sadagopan picks a few ideas from a Seth Godin post and also has a few good things to say about me.

– Be topical… write posts that need to be read right now.
– Learn enough to become the expert in your field.
– Be timeless… write posts that will be readable in a year.
– Be among the first with a great blog on your topic, then encourage others to
blog on the same topic.
– Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you.
– Write long, definitive posts
– Assume that every day is the beginning, because you always have new readers.
– Write about blogging.
– Digest the good ideas of other people, all day, every day.
– Write stuff that people want to read and share

WSJ writes:

Blog search engines have existed for years as a way to conduct keyword searches among the vast array of content from professionals, pundits and couch potatoes. A blog search is ideal for searching product reviews, the fallout from news events and celebrity gossip because it can take the pulse of what people are talking about during a small window of time. A search on Ask.com’s standard Web search engine for Palm’s Treo 600, for instance, pulls up links to the official Palm Treo site and those of other merchants. But in Ask.com’s new blog search, most of the top results are reviews and help pages featuring advice such as where to buy batteries for the device.

Ask.com uses its search technology and the popularity of feeds in Bloglines to help rank the results, which users can filter by posts, feeds and news and sort by relevance, most recent and popularity. The site also lets searchers easily subscribe to the feeds and blogs featured in the results in Bloglines and other feed readers offered by companies like Yahoo and Google through drop-down menus.

800-CEO-READ Blog blogs a talk given by Chris Anderson, who is coming out with a book on “The Long Tail” later this year. Chris outlined the reasons he started a blog:

1. To Own the Meme – he wanted “The Long Tail” to be associated with him
2. Feed the Meme – He believe that the blog allows the discussion to continue after the initial Wired article. He show this chart from Google Trends and how the blog’s launch boosted search query. I agreed with this idea wholeheartedly, but I am not sure I buy the causation he was selling.
3. Fill The Dead Space between Article and Book – I can think of a zillion books that have started as articles and become books and this idea of keeping the idea alive and evolving is huge.
4. Tap Into Distributed Intelligence and Research – Anderson says his blog readers made the book better.
5. Beta Test/Peer Review – Anderson comes from the sciences and he says it is unheard of that you would not challenge an idea before publication. Companies don’t release software with beta testing. He felt vetting ideas on the blog was important part of the process.
6. Generate Book Buzz – He knows he has a core audience and believes they will buy the book and lead others to do the same.

Jeremy Wagstaff recommends BlogBridge:

On one level it’s just another (free) news reader. It lets you collect and organize RSS feeds into folders according to theme (Technology, Sport, Squirrel Waterskiing, etc.). But BlogBridge goes further.

First off, BlogBridge calls its folders “Guides” or “Reading Lists.” These aren’t just static collections of feeds, but are lists carefully collated by experts in the relevant fields, whose credentials you can read on the site. Instead of subscribing to a single feed, you subscribe to an expert’s Guide or Reading List. Conversely, if you felt you were an expert on Squirrel Waterskiing, you could share your list of exciting blogs and other feeds on the subject as a Reading List, allowing other Squirrel Waterskiing enthusiasts to download it into their BlogBridge program.

Nothing too revolutionary here, since it is already possible to share groups of feeds, although only really for the seriously nerdy fringe. But one of the neat tricks with BlogBridge is that any Reading List you subscribe to can be dynamically updated.

Mark Cuban writes:

A blog is media. Its a platform to communicate that can reach anyone within reach of an internet connection. Ive been writing this blog for more than 2 years and that time has allowed me to recognize the difference between a blog and traditional media and why the two will never successfully meet.

In traditional media, you are first defined by your medium. There is some constraint to the physical or digital definition of the medium the content is delivered on or by, that for the most part determines how you are perceived.

There is a cost vs time vs interest vs access series of constraints that determines who your audience is, how you reach them and what they expect of you. Over time, that has evolved our media into very defined roles.

Blogs are different. There really isnt a cost constraint. It costs nothing to create a blog. There are time constraints, but less so than traditional media. Bloggers dont have to publish or show on a schedule. In a nutshell, blogging is personal. Which is really where the paths of blogging and traditonal media diverge. Traditional media has become almost exclusively corporate while blogging remains almost exclusively personal.

News.com writes:

Blogging is booming in China with the number of bloggers expected to hit 60 million by the end of this year.

China is the world’s second-largest Internet market after the United States with more than 110 million users. A survey by Chinese search engine Baidu.com put the current number of blog, or Web log, sites at 36.82 million which are kept by 16 million people, the official Xinhua news agency said on Saturday.
…
A recent report by the Internet Society of China showed nine percent of bloggers write every day, 29 percent write once to three times a week, while 35 percent write four to six times a week, Xinhua said.