Sunday, 20 March, 2005

Ad(Non)Sense

Buzz Marketing with Blogs discusses Google’s AdSense programme. Am surprised at this: 

I was all set to tell you about Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in New York who just publicly posted his exact Google AdSense revenue figures for the year.  He made $500, he says, and he’s got charts to back it up!

This is notable not because for the grand total, but rather because Google’s AdSense Terms of Service prohibit any discussion of click through rates or payments—a stance that has long aggravated many naturally chatty bloggers.

How the hell did he manage to make that much? I have some AdSense adverts over at Palimpsest and have so far managed to make about 20p.

Saturday, 19 March, 2005

Subscriptions

Just been reordering all my Bloglines feeds in FeedDemon. On Bloglines I had kept them all on the ‘top level’ and not sorted them into folders, but that method makes things far too unwieldy when working offline. So, I have chosen the following categories:

  • Computers & Internet
  • Blogging
  • General
  • News and Sport
  • Politics
  • Books

Obviously the ‘General’ one is a bit of a catch-all, but surprisingly it doesn’t have that much in it at the moment…

Chapter 2 of The Red Couch

The second Chapter of the blogging book being written on a blog is here.It was actually posted 5 days ago, but have only just had the chance to have a look at it.

My first comment is that I’m not sure at all about the title – Souls of the Borg.It sounds like a ghost written Star Trek novel or something. I guess it’s a pretty appropriate title, but for the average executive, a geeky reference like this may well be off-putting.

Still,it’s full of fascinating stuff about life within Microsoft.

If there is a Microsoft blogging policy, it would be those two words: “Blog Smart.” Its author is unknown, but it seems to be the perspective of the bloggers we encountered. There is a general sensethat at least so far, management is trusting bloggers to behave as responsible employees, and employees sense that the longer they can keep an open blogging policy the more unlikely that it will ever be shut down. They argue that by blogging they have an important competitive advantage over companies that don’t allow open employee blogging. What is even more important, they argue, is that blogging lets them get closer with their customers.

It’s all good stuff, except for that damn title…

Comments

During the time I have been ‘away’ from the blog, I haven’t been keeping up with the comment moderating very well. Apologies to anyone who’s comments haven’t appeared yet, I will get it sorted out, at some point…

Fun with FeedDemon and BlogJet

I changed my mind on FeedDemon. It’s just too damn good. Especially now I use BlogJet, too. It’s simply a case of dialling-up (no boradband at the moment šŸ™ ) and downloading all my feeds, then reading them at my lesiure and using BlogJet to comment on them. Then, at the end of the day, I just dial-in again and update this blog.

BlogJet did take me a while to get set up, but now I have I realise it is going to become indispensible. The one criticism I have is that the documentation is pretty lacking – just an online wiki and nothing locally to speak of. This isn’t so much of a problem once you are up and running, but there are a few questions I would like answering. At the moment I save my entries in a folder in My Documents, then upload them and delete them one-by-one. This process must be able to be automated, I would have thought.

Also – it would be nice to be able to include trackback links in posts.

edit: for some reaosn the timings of these posts are wrong. I thought BlogJet was supposed to publish the times that the posts were saved locally. Nadgers. Will have to look into it, at some point.

Joe Wikert – an Average Joe?

Not if his blog is anything to go by. Full of interesting information on getting published.

One recent highlight was In Search of the Perfect Computer Book:

I’m going out on a limb here to say that the “perfect” computer book has yet to be published. Code errors, incorrect steps, typos, etc., somehow manage to infiltrate the book no matter how meticulous the development editor, copy editor and tech editor are. Everyone involved in the project generally works hard to eliminate the problems. It’s human nature to want to do a good job, right? It’s also human nature to make mistakes.

Some publishers don’t like to promote the fact that errata exist – they feel it’s an unnecessary admission of a less than perfect system. I don’t like to see errors in my books any more than the next publisher, but:

  1. I’m willing to admit they happen,
  2. I want to get corrections to customers as quickly/easily as possible, and, most importantly,
  3. I want to continue looking for ways to improve the system.

I think every book page on a publisher’s website should have an errata link. Shouldn’t we go further though and offer errata via RSS feeds so that customers won’t have to hunt for the corrections? Is this something you would like to see? What other suggestions do you have?

Joe has only recently started blogging, but his approach is excellent, offering genuinely useful and informative information and also asking for contributions from readers.

Notes from ā€˜Vaspers the Grateā€™

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 Daithƃ­ ƃ“ 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.