Recently in Blogging Category
Another annoyance fixed: the Archives page is now (mostly) fixed. The Archives had been publishing to the wrong page for the last little while (.html as opposed to .php) but now it's back in the right place. The only thing still missing is the Search function, but one thing at a time.
I'm tidying up some loose bits around here, starting with this blog's RSS feed. It had been inexplicably busted since I migrated to Movable Type 4, but now it's up and running again. You can find it at feed://feeds.feedburner.com/TipOfTheQuill.
For those of you not following my Twitter stream, I have just posted a short essay featuring my (bemusement/excitement/fascination) that Warren Ellis is writing G.I. Joe webisodes over at the C3 blog. The article also features Joss Whedon's new project Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and Seth MacFarlane's upcoming Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy. Check it out.
Jesus, what a waste of a day. After attempting to get FastCGI up and running on this MT install, I spent the rest of the day fixing a broken system. Ugh. I'm just grateful this blog is back at all after that little fiasco.
Word to the wise – don't try to upgrade Movable Type to FastCGI on Dreamhost unless you're absolutely sure you know what you're doing.
Courtesy of James McNally's newly-relaunched Consolation Champs (and c'mon, James, make with the redesign already – standard templates are teh suck) comes this somewhat depressing new look at blogebrity. Kineda used Technorati to reach its new definitions for what makes an "A-list" weblog, a "B-List" weblog, and so on. These new criteria are as follows:
- D-List (Low Authority): 3-9 blogs linking in the last six months
- C-List (Middle Authority): 10-99 blogs linking in the last six months
- B-List (High Authority): 100-499 blogs linking in the last six months
- A-List (Very High Authority): 500+ blogs linking in the last six months
It's probably fair to say that I am not an A-lister. What's kind of sad, however, is how quickly the lists can flip. Of Kaneda's list of blogebrities, there's not a single one that I read regularly, and Kottke isn't even on the list! A few years ago I felt like I knew a pretty decent number of the A-Listers through SXSW and was friends with a solid number of B-Listers and C-Listers, also through SXSW. Now, though, just like media decentralization has resulted in the fragmentation of pop culture, I think we're also seeing the emergence of fractured, uh, blogebrity. Either that or my circle has fallen out of favor, which is admittedly something of a possibility. I'm still mourning the loss of powazek.com, although I know Derek's got more important things on his mind.
I also have to admit to feeling a little bummed about dropping so low on the rankings. I'm lucky to qualify as a D-Lister now – this shouldn't be horribly surprising, actually, since I shuttered Inkblots and moved Tip of the Quill with relatively low fanfare. (A trivia point: Tip of the Quill has always been the name of my editorial at Inkblots, which means I could arguably claim to have been blogging since 1995/1996. Heh.) More to the point, it's driven home that I haven't been blogging as much as I should, that I need to look into syndicating this blog wherever I can, that I should work harder to read and comment on more blogs out in the world, et cetera, et cetera.
Further rumination on the whole decentralization/fragmentation thing: lately I've been wondering exactly how much it would cost to live the way I want to live. If in the future we're not famous for fifteen minutes but to fifteen people, how much do we have to charge those fifteen people for our stuff to survive? How much would it cost Joss Whedon to revive Firefly on a subscription basis? How much would it cost to produce Firefly only for an IPTV channel? How much revenue could be generated by distributing Firefly only through the iTunes store?
Something tells me I'm going to be struggling with these questions long after I get out of here... This spring's project (aside from the thesis and two paper presentations): find somewhere that will pay me to do that!
On my morning run around the blogosphere, I stumbled across Twitter, which is, for lack of a better word, a 'microblogging' service. Basically you send text messages from your phone to the Twitter service and it pops them up on a sort of miniblog. To see mine, swing by http://twitter.com/geoffreylong, and ping me if you sign up!
Hmmm. This is kickstarting some of my mental machines. (Microblogging as narrative engine, as ubicomp, as mobile media, as...?) A good way to start a Monday.
So no sooner do I post my first-ever shill for Threadless than C3 advisor Grant McCracken posts to his own blog with his thoughts on eBay's new MeCommerce initiative. Naturally, I feel inclined to comment.
I don't really have a problem with what eBay's trying to do – in fact, a lot of would-be prospectors have come close to this particular goldmine. When you link up the notions of micropayments, product reviews, and personal collection management, you come pretty dang close to an extremely rich vein. Amazon's been providing kickbacks through their recommendation system for years; when I was regularly producing issues of Inkblots I dutifully linked each and every book, film and CD we reviewed to the Amazon page, but we never generated enough sales to cover our overhead, much less pay our contributors. I imagine that a very large reason for this failure was exactly what eBay is trying to overcome – resistance to leave the site you're currently reading.
This is a problem banner ads have had since the Web's early days; while they're great for building exposure to a brand, the idea of tracking their value on click-throughs alone is as ridiculous as saying that any Pizza Hut TV ad that didn't make a viewer drop what they were doing to order a pizza while the commercial was still running was a failure. I like to think that lots of people picked up a copy of the stuff we critiqued, but since very few people bought their copies from Amazon through our links, I have no quantifiable numbers. I'll never know how many went on to pick up copies at Borders, Barnes and Noble, Best Buy... As a content producer, I didn't mind that – I wanted our content to be compelling enough to keep people clicking through our site. As the guy paying the hosting bill, I wanted those people to get their butts over to Amazon as quickly (and as often!) as possible. If eBay can figure out a way to "make impulse purchases without leaving the blog", I'm all ears.
Personally, I suspect this system will need the following to succeed:
- a running tally of how much you're purchasing through this blogger (like a cart)
- a running tally of how much of your purchase goes to this blogger (like a tip jar)
- Flickr-esque integration with blogging tool APIs for dead-simple "post this" links
A lot of businesses are, as I said, getting close to this goldmine – Threadless does a decent job, for instance, but they still need good, solid API integration in order for it to really take off. Both the content producer and the bill-payer sides of me are hoping that MeCommerce hits the motherload.
Update. I just swung by the McCommerce site, and I gotta say, their implementation is definitely on the right tack. I think it still has a way to go – it doesn't seem to integrate the three things on my wishlist yet, and I wish there was some cookie-based persistence across pages within the site – but it's definite progress.
Update update. Well, hot dog – I've just been pinged by the MeCommerce people to beta-test their new project and they say my three wishes have been granted. I'll let you know how this goes!
Since it's raining – again – here in Boston, I've elected to stay in this morning/afternoon and continue to hammer on the TOTQ integration here at geoffreylong.com. This morning I imported all my old entries from Inkblots, cleaned up the comments (removing something like 7000+ spam comments and putting some new antispam measures into effect) and tweaked the individual archives a little. Cool new feature: if you're in an individual archive entry (click the 'permalink' text below to get to the individual archive entry for this post), hold down control and hit A or D. Boom! Instant forward-and-backness. Accesskey tip courtesy of Rstevens at Diesel Sweeties.
Let's see, what else? I've also updated my Technorati Profile, so as to move some of these blog claims around. I'll probably do some more work with this as the new Movable Type 3.3 beta continues to evolve; I've whacked TrackBacks (which didn't seem to be offering me much more than 7000+ spam links) and am now looking for better ways to engage in conversations.
The hammering continues.
Update: I've also just routed my RSS feed through Feedburner. Please point your RSS readers here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TipOfTheQuill. Thanks!
Update 2: The Revenge: Visitors that came poking around late on Saturday night/Sunday morning may have noticed that I'm now one good step closer to having scheduled posts and podcasts up and running, thanks to some quality time learning how pico and cron jobs work. Thanks to my old brother Nick for the technical support!
I might get into trouble for this, but this kind of thing bugs me. Steve Garfield is a videoblogger (or 'vlogger') who's another member of the Blogging at Berkman group over at Harvard. A couple of weeks ago, Steve was interviewed by E-Media, "Austria's leading magazine about internet, high-tech and multimedia", and the interview went like this. Most of it's pretty decent, but then you get to this part:
Why - in your opinion - are vlogs the next big thing on the internet?Vlogs give people a voice. Vlogging gives people a distribution method that isn't controlled by others. Vlogging allows people to get feedback on their productions. Vlogging brings people together. Vlogging makes the world smaller.
Vlogging is the next big thing on the internet because it promotes the ability to get to know people in other countries on a personal level.
Vlogging brings pen pal corresponding to a whole new level, and allows the whole world to join in on the conversation.
Now, what bothers me so much about this is that it's essentially a stock answer ripped from a generic blogging fluff piece circa 2002. Swap off one little letter and you get this:
Why - in your opinion - are blogs the next big thing on the internet?Blogs give people a voice. Blogging gives people a distribution method that isn't controlled by others. Blogging allows people to get feedback on their productions. Blogging brings people together. Blogging makes the world smaller.
Blogging is the next big thing on the internet because it promotes the ability to get to know people in other countries on a personal level.
Blogging brings pen pal corresponding to a whole new level, and allows the whole world to join in on the conversation.
See what I mean? Where's the deep insight on the psychological impact of being able to actually see and hear the person doing the reporting? Where's the discussion on how vlogging is bringing weblogging to other media formats that were previously ill-suited to textual weblogging (like phones or TVs)? Where's, you know, the thought and analysis?
There are two sentences earlier in the interview that provide a little of this, but only a little: "Video allows others to really get to know you. The intimacy of video gives you a glimpse into our lives." Aside from that, he spends the rest of the interview talking about the revolutionary fields of commenting and international community-building. Oooooo. Again, how does that differ from what weblogs have been doing for the last couple of years?
C'mon, Richard. You tout your weblog as being "seen in TIME, BusinessWeek and the NY Times", but is the only reason you've garnered so much attention that you've mastered the art of providing easily-accessible predictable sound bites?
