blogs

I might use my ancient version of Mac Microsoft Office to communicate with people who still refuse :-) to use blogs, wikis and web apps such as Google Docs but I, like Stowe, won't be storing anything in a Microsoft cloud.

FROM /Message: Nicholas Carr On Ozzie's Pipedream:

QUOTE

The likelihood is that Microsoft will be/is being blindsided by a wave of tiny startups that won't be building anything on the Microsoft cloud. Microsoft may think they will dominate the cloud based on the attractiveness of their own software sitting there.

END QUOTE

UPDATE: For those who are academically "challenged" like myself, you  don't need high grades in school or anything academic like that. It's all about contributions, need, a high quality  blog post, video blog or podcast and diversity!

According to dictionary.com, bursary is "British English"! Is this true? For those who are British English challenged, a bursary is the same as a scholarship. We've received several interesting applications already! Apply today and see you in February!

From Get a Travel Bursary for Northern Voice | Northern Voice 2007:

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This year Northern Voice is offering six travel bursaries of CAN $500 each. The organizing committee will be awarding these bursaries based on a number of criteria, including:

* The contributions you can make to the conference
* Your level of need
* The quality of your submission
* The diversity you might bring to Northern Voice

We’ll announce the recipients of the bursaries on February 2nd, 2007. The bursaries will be paid out via cheque mailed out to recipients or picked up on the day of the conference.

To apply, write a blog post, or record a podcast or video blog post describing why you want to come to Northern Voice. Then submit it via our travel bursaries page.

UNQUOTE

Very cool that Paul has started blogging. Welcome! Love to see you at Northern Voice 2007 blogging conference and I'd love to continue the debate in person. Coffee's on me, Paul!

Paul still thinks static websites and link exchanges are valuable and points out a valid use of meta tags (your meta tags show up underneath your google and other search engine listings).

QUOTE

My SEO article was written for small business owners with simple web sites who want their sites to show up in Google searches. While Tanglao makes some valid rebuttal points, some of his points do not apply to those with static web sites.
...

Tanglao says “Link exchanges are a waste of time…” However, CanadianActor Online, like countless other web sites, has move up the search engine ranks primarily based on link exchanges.

...

Blogging did not make business sense when I was writing for newspapers and magazines. Nor did it make sense when I was writing primarily for corporate markets. My static web site, supplementing my direct mail and other marketing techniques, drove some clients my way. But mostly it was there to act as an extension of my business card and direct mail – so that people who received my marketing material could read more about me on my web site and see samples of my work. Then they could decide if they wanted to ask for a quote.

END QUOTE

I disagree about link exchanges. Better to blog something compelling and leave a permanent link in a blog comment or email that link to somebody who's relevant rather than spamming people to link to your site.

Yes, a static website is much better than no website. But with modern blogging software like WordPress and content management systems like Drupal, Joomla, Plone it's easy to setup static pages as well as blogs and you then get all the advantages of blogs (ease of editing, RSS which leads to higher search engine rank) and traditional static websites. This means you have a system where anybody can update the content without needing a webmaster or FTP which means the site is more likely to be up to date unlike most static websites.

A timely example of static websites being NOT up to date are most of Vancouver's restaurant websites. You would think that they would have their Christmas hours posted on them. Alas most of them don't because they are static websites set up by "technical" people and designers and the restaurant owners and their staff have no idea how to update them. Very frustrating.

If they had a blog or if they used blog software just for static web pages, the owners could easily update the site's static pages and/or blog with their opening hours.

I'll go further. Technical people and web designers who recommend to clients to use static pages with FTP, Front Page, Dreamweaver, etc. are doing their clients a disservice! It's 2006 not 1999!

Better to use WordPress (even though I work for a Drupal company I'll continue to plug WordPress for blogs and simple static sites; use Drupal if you want a comprehensive web presence including a true community site) and just use its static web pages features and make the blog part invisible) than to use some custom or hand coded static site.

The speaker submissions are flowing in (submit today, the more the better; all you need is a good abstract on a relevant topic), the organizers are meeting, we're updating the website, and the registrations are coming in. In other words, the sprint to Northern Voice 2007 is on! [Thanks to Darren for the cool graphic; get your own Northern Voice 2007 graphic!]

Some great news about Northern Voice 2007 (which I am one of the organizers of):

1. Speaker Submissions: The Deadline has been extended to December 1st as Lauren wrote. You don't have to be famous or a professional conference presenter: we're looking for both fresh and experienced voices who wish to present or chair a panel on topics related to the blog-o-sphere, videoblogging, podcasting, virtual worlds like Second life, the two way web/read write web/web 2.0, blogging 101, podcasting 101, etc. It's all about the abstract. If it's well written and topical, your chances will be much higher. Submit today!
2. Registration is open now! Pre-register and save $10. That's right it's only $30 for a single day and $50 for both days as opposed to $40 for one day and $60 for both days at the door. I bet we'll sell out like last year so pre-registration is recommended. Register now!

Go Philippines! I wish we had this in Canada.

FROM dailywireless.org - Free Mobile Blog Software (via email from Steph Rieger)

QUOTE

Globe Telecom, the leading telecommunications operator in the Philippines, and Nokia, today announced that Globe is the first operator in the world to offer their customers a fully integrated mobile online sharing experience with Nokia Nseries phones.

Without the need to download or install any additional applications, Globe customers can now upload their photos and video clips directly from their compatible Nokia Nseries device to G-Blogs, Globe's mobile blogging service. The first devices to support this feature are the Nokia N93 and Nokia N73 multimedia computers.

END QUOTE

As I've publicly blogged before, Paul Lima's keyword and link farm strategy is wrong and blogging takes no more time than email. Do you have time to respond to email? Then you have time to blog. The benefits to your search engine rank and public profile (blogging is the best form of conversational internet marketing we have today) greatly exceed the few hours a week it will take to blog.

FROM Confessions of a search-engine optimizer: globeandmail.com : Globe TQ:

QUOTE

To optimize my site, I first determined the keywords people might use when searching for a writer with my expertise. Then I wove those keywords into my website copy. I also associated keywords with images on my site. If you go to my website and place your cursor over my picture, you will see a yellow flag containing some of my keywords.

Those words can be read by web crawlersautomated programs that access websites and follow the links they contain. The web crawlers then index website addresses and associated content in search engine databases. Web crawlers cannot read images. So, if you have an image-based homepage, you have feed textlike the keywords associated with my pictureto the web crawlers. Otherwise your graphics-only homepage will not show up in search results.

I also included my keywords in meta tagsa keyword list, site description and page title. Other than the page title, meta tag information is not seen by regular site visitors. Many SEO experts say using meta tags are a waste of time, because web crawlers tend to ignore them. But, writing meta tags helps you think about your keywords and how you want to describe your site. As well, when a visitor bookmarks your site, a title meta tag makes the site easier for people to find it in their favourites list.

However, all this keyword work won't necessarily get your site listed in search engines. While you can submit your website information to search engines, it can take several months (or longer) for your site to be included in search results. What you should do is make it easy for web crawlers to find your site.

Since web crawlers swing from site to site looking for links, you need to have other websites linked to your site. What you want is quantity and quality. To acquire links to my site, I entered reciprocal arrangements with several writers and other associates. They provide links to my site and I provide links back. As well, I sold several articles and chapters of my e-books to content sites that now link to my own website.

Many SEO experts recommend that you maintain a weblog, also called a blog, or an on-line journal. Bloggers frequently read other people's blogs, and if they find something interesting, they often will comment on it and link to it. This creates links that web crawlers will find. But if you think you can boost your search-engine rank by simply littering thousands of blogs with links to your site, think again. Web crawlers are able to detect this type of "blog spam" and can issue the search engine equivalent of a death sentencethe removal of a site from the search engine database.

While blogs can help with SEO, I don't maintain one because of the time it requires. However, as an alternative, I am looking at generating Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds from my site. RSS is a way of notifying site visitors and search engines of new content on your blog or site. Like blogs, RSS can drive traffic to your website and boost your search engine rank.

END QUOTE

Lots of thought provoking and interesting questions at today's VFS DIY Podcasting session (presentation: PDF, Powerpoint, Keynote organized by New Media BC which I co-presented with the most excellent Robert Ouimet. We learned a lot from the questions. Great crowd! Here is the list of links (if you know how to use del.icio.us, please add your own):

http://del.icio.us/tag/vfsdiypodcasting

And then afterwards, I wandered over to the excellent Blogs and Wikis at the VPL. It was great hearing Brian Lamb and Mark Schneider discuss blogs and wikis. Can't comment much more since I missed their presentations!

For those who were at the Bowen Island Blogging Intro today, thank-you! I learned that single sign on/identity is really an issue for real people. Watching them endure the process of giving their first and last name, think of a screen name and email address multiple times as well as going through the email verification dance for flickr, Bloglines and WordPress. Nothing against these services, it's just the gruesome reality of coming up with multiple userids on multiple systems today. Give the people what they want and need: Identity 2.0!

Anyways, attached is the presentation in PDF and Keynote form and the outline of the presentation notes is below.

As well I will tag any links we mentioned using an online bookmark service called del.icio.us with the tag: bowenblogintro. You can can get all the links on the bowenblogintro tag page as well as subscribe to the bowenblogintro tag RSS feed for updates.

• What is a blog (Roland's flickr photoblog, bmannconsulting, darrenbarefoot screenshots)
  • The unedited voice of a person
  • anatomy: permanent links, reverse chronological, subscribe via RSS (RSS diagram), comments
  • works for podcasts and videoblogs too, RSS is the carrier
  • subscription helps conversation
  • Bloglines demo
• Why should I blog
  • Why should you email? blogging or having a personal/corporate/org conversational space TODAY is where email was 5-10 years ago
  • Unless you want to be an online hermit which is a valid choice, need to have a strategy eventually for your personal online conversational space including blogging (early adopters get pain and benefit)
  • promotes personal brand, business brand, passions
  • BLOG = better listings on Google = $ indirectly and directly
• How do I Blog
  • The Program
    • Listen for a few days/weeks
      • Use Bloglines (or NetNewsWireLite for Mac OS X or FeedDemon for Windows)
    • Play with free services (e.g. create a free blog at WordPress.com and free photoblog at flickr)
      • create half a dozen or so posts
    • Come up with strategy (or not, playing is good)
      • own your own domain name
      • put all your stuff there, or aggregate it
      • may want non free services if your org or business depends on it
• Hands on
  • create your own domain name
  • create your own free blog at WordPress
  • create your first post
  • create flickr account
  • post a photograph
  • subscribe using Bloglines to your flickr blog and your WordPress blog

For those who were at the Bowen Island Blogging Intro today, thank-you! I learned that single sign on/identity is really an issue for real people. Watching them endure the process of giving their first and last name, think of a screen name and email address multiple times as well as going through the email verification dance for flickr, Bloglines and WordPress. Nothing against these services, it's just the gruesome reality of coming up with multiple userids on multiple systems today. Give the people what they want and need: Identity 2.0!

Anyways, attached is the presentation in PDF and Keynote (for Mac people) form and the outline of the presentation notes is below.

As well I will tag any links we mentioned using an online bookmark service called del.icio.us with the tag: bowenblogintro. You can can get all the links on the bowenblogintro tag page as well as subscribe to the bowenblogintro tag RSS feed for updates.

• What is a blog (Roland's flickr photoblog, bmannconsulting, darrenbarefoot screenshots)?
  • The unedited voice of a person
  • anatomy: permanent links, reverse chronological, subscribe via RSS (RSS diagram), comments
  • works for podcasts and videoblogs too, RSS is the carrier
  • subscription helps conversation
  • Bloglines demo
• Why should I blog?
  • Why should you email? blogging or having a personal/corporate/org conversational space TODAY is where email was 5-10 years ago
  • Unless you want to be an online hermit which is a valid choice, need to have a strategy eventually for your personal online conversational space including blogging (early adopters get pain and benefit)
  • promotes personal brand, business brand, passions
  • BLOG = better listings on Google = $ indirectly and directly
• How do I Blog?
  • The Program
    • Listen for a few days/weeks
      • Use Bloglines (or NetNewsWireLite for Mac OS X or FeedDemon for Windows)
    • Play with free services (e.g. create a free blog at WordPress.com and free photoblog at flickr)
      • create half a dozen or so posts
    • Come up with strategy (or not, playing is good)
      • own your own domain name
      • put all your stuff there, or aggregate it
      • may want non free services if your org or business depends on it
• Hands on
  • create your own domain name
  • create your own free blog at WordPress
  • create your first post
  • create flickr account
  • post a photograph
  • subscribe using Bloglines to your flickr blog and your WordPress blog

Help us out please! Edit the wiki page and give us your ideas on what we should discuss in our "Getting Started with Blogging" panel!

From Getting Started with Blogging Panel Ideas | Northern Voice 2006.:

QUOTE

Okay, here's our space for discussing ideas for the Getting Started With Blogging panel.

UNQUOTE

Finally, Salim is blogging. Welcome! What took you so long. More please! Disclosure blah blah blah!

From Evolution of the Internet.:

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After the rollout of messaging and request/response, we are now entering the third wave of the internet, the publish/subscribe decade. The web has been phenomonally successful and the amount of information available on it is overwhelming. However, (as Bill rightly points out), that information is largely passive - you must look it up with a browser. Clearly the next step in that evolution is for the information to become active and tell you when something happens.

Blogs and RSS are the first general manifestation of publish/subscribe. The real reason for the explosion of RSS/blogging is the ability to "subscribe" to a blog or feed and be told "whenever". We can expect this theme to dominate the next several years of the internet.

What Bill refers to as the "active web", or Doc as the "live" web, we refer to as the pubsub web (ok, so we"re not the greatest marketers). Our whinge would be that it"s the implementation of publish/subscribe on the internet that will make the web active. People often talk about PointCast as the first major effort to "live" up the web. It was an effort, but not very well implemented.

UNQUOTE

Go PubSub go! Disclosure: Salim and I went to high school together, we went to the same university (but different engineering programs so not the same class!) and we are friends!

From PubSub's speed unmatched on the Internet.:

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"We are the other half of Google, and we complement them. Google is retrospective search and we are prospective search. In other words, Google searches the past and we search the future," Salim said in an interview at a recent Harvard conference.

Google news alerts and eBay auction alerts are similar but glacial; sometimes taking days to notify users, in comparison to Pubsub's split-second matching capability. "No one can match our speed of three billion matches per second. We have a unique algorithm, and as far as we know, nobody has ever been able to do what we've done," Salim said. "It makes information active rather than passive."

The "engine" is based on Wyman's expertise and experience. He is the chief technology officer at PubSub and an Internet pioneer who developed predecessors to Lotus Notes and the first known wide-area-network hypertext system, among other innovations.

Salim, Pubsub's chairman, is a University of Waterloo graduate in theoretical physics who gravitated toward business and computers.

UNQUOTE

Love to see you no matter whether you are a blogger or not! RSVP: roland AT rolandtanglao.com OR call 604 729 7924

From Intro to Blogging on Bowen Island | Bryght.:

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Interested in blogging? Or perhaps you are already a blogger, podcaster, or videoblogger. Come to beautiful Bowen Island, meet other bloggers including Bowen blogger Richard Smith and learn how to start a blog or take your existing blog, podcast or videoblog to the next level from Vancouver bloggers, podcasters and videobloggers Boris Mann and Roland Tanglao . All this and more for only $10 at the Bowen Island Community School from 11p.m.-3p.m. on Saturday January 21st.

Afterwards, join us for an informal (and FREE) Blog Walk (4-5:30p.m.) and Evening Pizza Blogging Event (6p.m.) at the Seven Hills B and B.

UNQUOTE

Go Chris go! I want to believe. I want a read/write fully integrated read/write browser for blogging, podcasting and videoblogging whether it's called flock or something else. I want to believe and I still believe.... If flock doesn't build it somebody else will because the current crappy (but good enough for millions) tool situation will not hold!

From Revving a classic cliché.:

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The point is this. These technologies have become second nature vehicles for communication and expression. And blogging, podcasting, vlogging and the whole lot of recent "mecasting" technologies aren't as integrated, aren't as easy, aren't as accessible as they need to be for them to be picked up and made as commonplace as the telephone (or cellphone, if you prefer). Point Four Percent of the population is nothing (that's 23.6 million blogs as a percentage of the world population by the way). And yet another extension is not the answer. I don't even know if another browser is. But we need something that works to solve this problem - or at least to make it better.

Yep, we've got a vision for how a browser with a different understanding of the web can help. We wouldn't be building it otherwise. This is what drives us to make Flock the best possible, most easy-to-use and most useful tool it can be, because we're experiencing all the same problems that everyone else is.

UNQUOTE

I know I've drunk too much Nokia and Apple Kool-Aid but I thought Nokia was still the market leader in the mobile space and not Microsoft so I kind of thought ComVu would support Nokia Series 60 phones like my 7610 but I was wrong! Oh well, and I also grow weary of companies that claim to serve bloggers and videobloggers but don't actually have a blog themselves. It's not as if it's 1999 and blogging is a novelty. Next!

From ComVu - Welcome to Mobile Webcasting.:

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ComVu has created the world's first live video broadcast solution from a mobile device to a global audience. With the push of a button on a camera phone bloggers, citizen reporters, family members, friends and corporate professionals can broadcast live events to their communities - simply and inexpensively.

UNQUOTE

Oh well, I guess the web was bad and didn't deserve a cool modern web site from Canada.com like I asked for nicely :-) ! I bet this wasn't a technical decision; I bet not offering RSS feeds falls out from not wanting to (or being afraid to) move from their really bad, not-modern content management system to a modern web infrastructure (like Drupal, Plone, Joomla or h*ck even WordPress or Movable Type could have been used if all they wanted to add was blogs).

To any other organization contemplating such a move: it's really easy, you don't have to junk your old system. Just add blogging, videoblogging and podcasting on new servers running more modern systems as a complement to your existing web presence on your old servers.

I hope we hear from the techies on this one but I doubt it since they don't use RSS and their stuff disappears behind a paywall so even if they do, it probably won't show up on Google!

From Canada.com Redesigns Without RSS Feeds | Darren Barefoot.:

QUOTE

Canada.com recently launched a long-overdue redesign of their website. I'll let you decide what you think on your own, but I find it way too busy, deeply unusable and just plain ugly. As somebody (I think it was on here, but I can't find it now) recently remarked, they went from looking like an early-nineties website to a late-nineties one.

One particularly laughable navigation element is the 'share it' section. This teases with the prospect of citizen journalism and reader engagement, but turns out to be the bucket for stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else. What do obituaries (new user-generated content, every day!), personals and e-cards (speaking of the nineties) have in common? They do have a discussion group, but they managed to select the ugliest, least user-friendly forum software I've seen in years.

What's the worst offense (aside from the subscription walled gardens)? No RSS feeds. C'mon, it's nearly 2006. Nearly every media outlet in the world offers RSS feeds. CanWest is among the largest media conglomerates in Canada. What possible reason could they have for not implementing them?

UNQUOTE

Anybody try this out? Haven't had time to try it yet and figure it out.

From ContentVote.com - let visitors vote on your content.:

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With ContentVote you can: » get useful information about the value of content on your website » compare value of items with each other » let visitors determine what they like... and what not » get ratings for any item: a blog entry, a news story, or any type of page

UNQUOTE

Blogsledding at Blogs n Dogs was fabulous: friendly dogs and beautiful Alberta wilderness. Follow the action over at the Blogs n Dogs site as well as the blogs n Dogs flickr tag!

Off to Banff land of coldness (Banff weather is high -10 tomorrow, -14 Monday and -9 Tuesday) to help teach at Blogs n Dogs! And I am sure, as always, that I will learn just as much from the "students" as they learn from me.