Blogs and Bloggers

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.

Technorati Tags: google, blogs, techcrunch, zoli erdos

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.

Technorati Tags: performancing for firefox, scribefire, review, blog editor

It looks like there will soon be a new contender in the hosted blog platform sphere. Blogsmith, the engine which was designed to run Weblogs Inc, Jason Calacanis‘ early blog network which was subsequently bought up by AOL.

WordPress seems to be the market leading platform at the moment, certainly among hardcore bloggers. It will be interesting to see whether Blogsmith’s imminent arrival will affect that service at all – especially in terms of the release of the awaited 2.1 release.

Blogsmith.com currently forwards to Brian Alvey’s blog. I’ll keep an eye on it, as it’s likely to change soon.

Technorati Tags: blogsmith, weblogs inc, calacanis, wordpress

I wrote a couple of days ago about the purchase of Performancing Metrics by PayPerPost. The Performancing blog editor and advertising partnership programme were to be continued by the same team under different banners.

Well, the blog editor is now going to be called ScribeFire, which is a nice enough name. You can still download the editor (which is a FireFox plugin) from the Mozilla site, under its previous banner.

Since my switch to Ubuntu, I’m on the lookout for a new editor. I didn’t get on with PfF the first time round – it kept asking me to put my password in all the time which got annoying. I might give it another go now.

[tags]performancing for firefox, scribefire, blog editors[/tags]

PayPerPost, the people who line up advertisers to pay bloggers to write nicely about their products, have bought Performancing.com – specifically the website and the Metrics system. Performancing for FireFox and the Performancing Partners advertising programme will continue under a new banner(s).

Something along these lines has been coming for a while and it’s fair enough that the Metrics project just wasn’t producing the goods for them. They wanted out, and I’m guessing they made some money on it. Fair play to them.

But PayPerPost? There will be plenty of bloggers among the 28,000 that they have ‘purchased’ who won’t want anything more to do with the project. Tris Hussey is one. I’ll be taking Performancing Metrics from my personal blog too.

Why? Because PayPerPost, to my mind, Just Don’t Get It. The notion of influencing bloggers through cash stinks, because it puts into question the validity of the blogosphere, no matter how many disclosures you put in.

Performancing, up to this point, have been considered to be among the good guys. Let’s hope that by selling up to the likes of PayPerPost, they haven’t lose some of the credibility they’ve rightly earned.

[tags]performancing, payperpost[/tags]