110 posts tagged “blogging”
2009
Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post's purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise "99 Answers to Your Problem That We're Telling You You're Having". Yeah. I'd like to get back to that here.
Meta Is Murder. I hadn’t realised how important MetaTalk was in ensuring high quality discussions on MetaFilter, by ensuring that meta-discussions happened somewhere else. Speaking of which, happy birthday MetaFilter.
I used to think Twitter would never catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. Now I realize I was exactly wrong. Twitter will catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. It’s blogging dumbed down for the masses, and if there’s one surefire way to build something popular, it’s to take something else that is already popular and simplify.
It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again. Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.
— Ryanair
2008
James B. on Pownce (via) James Bennett has started using Pownce for sort of medium-format blog entries, longer than a tweet but shorter than a blog essay and delivered with a healthy dose of snark.
Speechification. “A blog of Radio 4. Not about Radio 4 but of it. We point to the bits we like, the bits you might have missed, the bits that someone might have sneakily recorded. Other speech radio from around the world will no doubt find its way here too.”
2007
Blogmaker, a free blogging app for Django (via) “Blogmaker is a full-featured, production-quality blogging application for Django. It supports trackbacks, ping and comments with moderation and honeypot spam prevention.”
Ideas rot if you don't do something with them. I used to try to hoard them, but they rotted. Now I just blog them or tell people about them. Sometimes they still rot, but sometimes someone finds them useful in one way or another.
How Top Bloggers Earn Money. Interesting numbers on BoingBoing, I can has Cheezburger, TechCrunch and more.
2006
An open letter to Mike Arrington. Former co-editor Mike Butcher’s take on the demise of TechCrunch UK. “Citizen Kane 2.0”.
notes.natbat.net. Nat’s been blogging up a storm recently.
Jeff Maurone blogs about the Times Reader (via) He’s one of the developers. Great to see them blogging; still don’t believe in the product though.
2005
Did you say dogging or blogging? Brits confused. A survey of taxi drivers, pub landlords and hairdressers.
2004
Why MP’s should get blogging. Another MP who gets it.
Keeping up appearances
Wow, I think this is the longest gap in my blogging since I started! I wish I could say I’ve been enjoying the sunshine or taking up a new hobby, but the truth is that the weather’s been horrible and I’ve just been run off my feet readjusting to life in England and at University.
[... 222 words]1000th Blogmark
I just posted my 1000th blogmark. I can’t emphasize enough how much of an impact this 15 minute hack has had on both my browsing and my blogging habits. While I still tend to leave browser windows open for days at a time, I now at least have a procedure for getting rid of the ones that still interest me. More importantly, having blogmarks has eliminated the temptation to write a full blog entry (with quotation) just to share a link. This has dramatically reduced my posting rate, but has meant that when I do post an entry I usually have something moderately interesting to say.
[... 181 words]A French blogger arrested by the Police because of his blogging. They had to let him go.
Microsoft “get” blogging
Who would have thought a year ago that Microsoft would be the company that took corporate blogging to the next level? Say what you like about the company itself, you can’t fault the quality and quantity of bloggers coming out of Redmond at the moment. Yesterday I stumbled across this fascinating blog that provides an insight in to Microsoft’s recruitment techniques. If you’re looking for a job at a high-tech company you can’t afford not to read this—they already have a bunch of resume advice, tips on what to wear to interviews and posts on subjects such as employee referrals, international recriting, phone screening and more.
[... 266 words]Attribution
Via Kevin Fox, Wired are running an article that claims that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often do so without attribution
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Lawrence.com blogging gem. “... I just decked him and broke his nose.”
The dangers of PageRank
A well documented side effect of the weblog format is that it brings Google PageRank in almost absurd quantities. I’m now the 5th result for simon on Google, and I’ve been the top result for simon willison almost since the day I launched. High rankings however are not always a good thing, especially when combined with a comment system. A growing number of bloggers have found themselves at the top position for terms of little or no relevance to the rest of their sites, which in turn can attract truly surreal comments from visitors from search engines who may never have encountered a blog before.
[... 469 words]Blair may blog the next election (via) Unfortunately, spin and blogging just don’t mix.
I’ve sold out!
What can I say—the lure of the mighty dollar proved too much. I’ve just made my first post to my new client-side scripting blog over at SitePoint, as a paid columnist.
[... 244 words]2003
More blogmark tweaks
I’m up to 110 blogmarks now, and from my point of view they’re the single most useful feature I’ve added to this site in a long time. I’ve modified my day archive pages to show the blogmarks added on that day, and I’m considering adding them to individual entry pages as well so that an entry is displayed along with the blogmarks added while that entry was at the top of my blog. The idea there is that I could aim to blogmark “related items” for the top entry, although obviously unrelated sites would end up in there as well.
[... 204 words]Clive Soley MP (via) Another blogging MP—this one’s Labour MP for Ealing Acton & Shepherds Bush
Blogmarks
This entry was going to be another list of links, together with a note about how much I really needed to set up a separate link blog. Then I realised that it would make more sense just to set one up so that’s exactly what I’ve done. I still need to implement the archive but it’s getting dark so I’m posting this and heading home.
[... 211 words]On blogging technique and better tabbed browsing
I’m addicted to tabs. Several times a day, I scan down my blogroll looking for blogs that have updated since I last checked, then middle click each one to open it up in a new tab in the background. I then work my way through each one, reading the earlier ones while the later ones are still loading (tabbed browsing makes being stuck on a modem a lot less painful). If I see anything interesting linked to from a blog entry I’m reading, I’ll middle click that as well. Within a few short minutes I’ll have so many tabs open I’ll be running out of space in my tab bar.
[... 399 words]Signing comments on blogs
Adrian Holovaty has implemented reserved comment names in his blog, a feature that prevents anyone apart from him from using the names “Adrian”, “Adrian H.” or “Adrian Holovaty” when posting a comment. François Nonnenmacher suggests extending the idea to allow people to “confirm” their authorship of comments on any blog using a TrackBack sent to their site that in turn causes them to be sent an alert email, which they can then use to confirm their comment. I like his idea of authentication based on URLs (email addresses are no good; they should not be publically displayed for fear of spam harvesters) but I think I’ve come up with an alternative authentication scheme that removes the need for the user to manually confirm authorship. This is pretty complicated, so bare with me.
[... 762 words]One year of blogging
Today marks the first anniversary of the start of my blog (and, by a slightly contrived coincidence, my thousandth blog entry). It’s been a fun year. Here are my highlights—if you can’t stand lengthy self-congratulatory bullet points, stop reading now.
[... 666 words]Interview with the Blogging MP
Via Tom Watson himself, a short interview with Tom, the UK’s first blogging MP:
[... 220 words]