Month: March 2005

Notes from ‘Vaspers the Grate’

Still catching up. Couple of linked and interesting posts on the Vaspers the Grate blog.

Firstly: You are not a Blog.

The problem is that some bloggers think a blog is a means of self-expression, that a blog is a mirror that can reflect their moods and minutiae.

“Minutiae” means little unimportant details. Mundane trivia. Random drivel. Boring chatter. In short: self-expression for the sake of self-expression.

Some bloggers think they are a blog. They think whatever they are, this is what should go into their blogs. They are a blog and their blog is them. Wrong.

Blogs may have been perverted into exhibitionistic, narcissistic, monotonous accounts of feelings, opinions, and ideas.

The blog began as a web log. Log means list. A blog was originally just a list of web site URLs and other internet resources, with only enough commentary to clarify the nature or value of the listed items.

In the beginning, the blog was impersonal, cold, dry, unemotional. And this was good.

Original bloggers did not write about the movie they saw last night, their favorite music, or how they felt about anything. They were not seeking to reveal their inner selves or personal lives.

The early blogs were guides, not to the blogger’s private thoughts and feelings, but to the online realm.

This is good advice, and which I really could do with heeding sometimes. Hell, I’m doing it now, dammit. Still, I may as well carry on. I don’t blog anything to do with my personal life, I wouldn’t want to and I really don’t think anyone would be interested. But I would make the point here that just because a blog doesn’t do this:

A successful blog will share information with others.

It will be personal primarily in the sense of “Here’s what I discovered in my research” or “Here’s what my opinion is about this topic, based on my long experience or technical training or professional expertise.”

it doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t informative or, indeed, interesting and therefore worth blogging.

Still, this point was expanded upon in another post, Dangers of Personal Blogging. 3 such dangers are provided:

  • Alienating Employers
  • Attracting Stalkers
  • Enabling Identity Theft

Scary stuff indeed! Both these posts are well worth reading in full – even if you don’t agree with them, the style is very engaging and plenty of supporting and useful links are provided. Good stuff indeed.

Yahoo! 360

Yahoo! are set to enter the blogging market with a tool called 360. Looks like it will be pretty fully featured. Tony Gentile covers the issue thoroughly:

Yahoo! Blogging Tool To Integrate Social Networking

UPDATE: Yahoo 360 Product Page here

So, a day early due to leaks, early word is just coming out on Yahoo!’s new blog publishing tool.

Codename? “Mingle”, an obvious tip of the hat to the integration of social networking functionality. As I said in Daithí Ó hAnluain‘s OJR article (wow, talk about serendipity!):

“The question is … is it already too late? Content distribution is gravitating toward feeds, and feed readers are integrating social networking. Newspaper sites might be able to integrate SN via FOAF, or similar open frameworks, but the likelihood of a consumer inviting 30 friends to a newspaper site seems… remote.”

The new tool, officially named Yahoo! 360 and due March 29th, 2005, takes the MSN Spaces approach of exposing existing data that Yahoo! members might already have on the platform, such as pictures from Yahoo! Photo (and my $10 says Flickr too), Messenger, Address Book and eventually MSFT Outlook.

Will this move force smaller companies that don’t have 165MM users, from sites like Tribe.net, to aggregator companies like Newsgator (and of course, SixApart) to cooperate via FOAF (even if Seth Godin doesn’t get it), XFN, or some other standard? Pincus is calling for cooperation, just as he (and I) did at the last Kelsey conf. I’ll be on a panel around social networking and local with the folks from Judy’s Book and InsiderPages at the next show in April; should be timely and interesting.

There’s that other question in my mind too. You know, the one that asks just how much of our Attention.xml‘esq data Yahoo! (et al.) will be motivated to share with us. (Let alone the Reviews, Lists, etc.) Perhaps this is an issue we can all come together on?

Congratulations to all of the Yahoo! teams involved with this; and an even bigger congrats for being the first to complete the (first of a variety of) microcontent stack(s).

Now, where’s that Beta sign-up?!

I have been playing a bit with MSN Spaces (think I got the link right – am writing this offline…) recently, and it is a pretty nice system. I think the Yahoo! one will be just as good as the other services they offer, like the excellent calendar (again – not sure about this link). Perhaps this competition will make Google sort Blogger out, which is in danger of being left behind, certainly in terms of the functionality offered.

Blogger Struggling?

From Buzz Marketing with Blogs:

Google’s Blogger Stumbles

InfoWorld’s reporting that Google’s Blogger faces performance problems.  Interestingly, Infoworld got the story how? Because Blogger blogged about it.

We have a client who uses Blogger, and has been having issues updating her site for the past several weeks, on and off, especially during peak times.

If you host your own blog, you may not have the redundancy and capacity of the bigger hosted blog solutions.  But as the recent outages at LiveJournal and Typepad show, hosted services often have problems, too.

Bottom line: you’ll have better control if you host it yourself, but there’s no guarantees in life.

I got profoundly irritatated with Blogger when I used it. I would slways recommend hosting your own site, preferably using a system hosted there, too, like WordPress.

Improbable Research

From The Guardian:

The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck pushed out the boundaries of knowledge in a rather improbable way when it was recorded by Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker.

It may have ruffled a few feathers, but it earned him the coveted Ig Nobel prize for biology awarded for improbable research, and next week he will be recounting his findings to UK audiences on the Ig Nobel tour.

Ducks behave pretty badly, it seems. It is not so much that up to one in 10 of mallard couples are homosexual – no one would raise an eyebrow in the liberal Netherlands – but they regularly indulge in “attempted rape flights” when they pursue other ducks with a view to forcible mating. “Rape is a normal reproductive strategy in mallards,” explains Mr Moeliker.

As he recounts in his seminal paper, The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos, he was in his office in the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, when he was alerted by a bang to the fact a bird had crashed into the glass facade of the building. “I went downstairs immediately to see if the window was damaged, and saw a drake mallard (anas platyrhynchos) lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two metres outside the facade. The unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of about three metres from the ground. Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present. He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head.

“Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 hours during which time (75 minutes) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener. He dismounted only twice, stayed near the dead duck and picked the neck and the side of the head before mounting again. The first break (at 18.29 hours) lasted three minutes and the second break (at 18.45 hours) lasted less than a minute. At 19.12 hours, I disturbed this cruel scene. The necrophilic mallard only reluctantly left his ‘mate’: when I had approached him to about five metres, he did not fly away but simply walked off a few metres, weakly uttering a series of two-note ‘raeb-raeb’ calls (the ‘conversation-call’ of Lorentz 1953). I secured the dead duck and left the museum at 19.25 hours. The mallard was still present at the site, calling ‘raeb-raeb’ and apparently looking for his victim (who, by then, was in the freezer).”

Mr Moeliker suggests the pair were engaged in a rape flight attempt. “When one died the other one just went for it and didn’t get any negative feedback – well, didn’t get any feedback,” he said.

His findings have provoked a lot of interest – especially in Britain for some reason – but no other recorded cases of duck necrophilia. However, Mr Moeliker was informed of an American case involving a squirrel and a dead partner, although in this case it is not known whether the necrophilia observed was homosexual or not as the victim had been run over by a truck shortly before the incident.

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