Dave

When is a Blog not a Blog?

Mike Arrington has opened up a storm of a debate over at TechCrunch, criticising the official Google blog for not allowing comments. He’s picking the issue up from a post by Zoli Erdos. He asks

Is a blog really a blog if there are no reader comments?

It’s an interesting question, but the answer is pretty obvious. Yes, of course it’s still a blog.

As Arrington notes, most definitions of a blog is a regularly updated website with content in reverse-chronological order. I reckon that’s about right.

Comments are nice, but not a requirement. John Naughton’s blog, for example, doesn’t have comments open, but that doesn’t make his site into something other than a blog. It’s not something I would personally do, but on a popular blog, the moderating of comments could turn into a serious business. If Google allowed comments on their blog, they’d probably have to employ someone full time just to deal with them.

And people can still comment on the articles, through their own blogs. Such comments will soon be found through Technorati, or Google’s own blog search.

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links for 2006-12-31

Recent Photos

Just had the chance to get some new photos up on my Flickr account.

Here’s a view of the flooding we had in Llansantffraid earlier this month:

Floods in Llansantffraid 2

This is St. Bridget’s church in the village (Llansantffraid means ‘Church of St. Bridget’), where Jnr Briggs performed spectacularly as Joseph in the crib service on Christmas Eve:

St. Bridget's, Llansantffraid

And finally, here’s a shot of the lower part of the immense Pistyll Rhaeadr:

Pistyll Rhaeadr 3

The Blog Train

Hugh McCleod:

I am no longer interested in being a “professional blogger”, whatever that means. I like blogs, blogging and bloggers, but I think we’re in “post-revolution” times now. The train has already left the station. If you managed to get a seat on it, great. If not, it’s not that big a deal, either. There are plenty of other good ways of expressing yourself. Succeeding at that is far more important than what precise method you use.

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PfF/ScribeFire Review

I’ve been using Peformancing for FireFox, shortly to be rebranded as ScribeFire, for my last few posts on hyprtext, and my initial impressions are pretty good. It certainly fills the gap left when my switch to Ubuntu meant I could no longer use my beloved BlogJet.

It works, as I am sure most people know, as an extension to FireFox, that allows you to create blog posts by either clicking the little icon at the bottom right of the browser window, or by using the right-click context menu’s ‘Blog This’ option, which will insert a link to the current site into the editor, along with any text you have selected. Nice.

The Good

  • Setting up blog accounts is very easy, and most settings are automatically detected
  • FTP settings are easy to complete, making the posting of images very simple
  • All the little extras are there when making your post: technorati tagging, automatically adding a post to your del.icio.us bookmarks, trackbacks, etc
  • All the standard formatting is there, and it works very well, unlike quite a few rich text editors I could mention…
  • You can save draft posts as ‘notes’ and finish them off later

The Bad

  • Deleting notes doesn’t seem to require a clarification. I lost the first draft of this post that way.
  • I can’t edit the way some automatic content appears. For example, in my Technorati tags, I’d like the “Technorati Tags: ” bit to appear in bold.
  • The way line breaks are handled is a bit different to others – and the HTML view doesn’t insert <p> tags so it’s a bit tricky to know exactly what’s happening there

The Ugly

  • I can’t add alternate text to images, or text links. This is very bad for accessibility.

In conclusion, I like PfF/ScribeFire and I’ll be using it as my blog editor from now on. Most of my ‘Bads’ were pretty pernickety, but those alternate text issues need sorting out quickly.

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