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Archives for June 2008

Name That Blog Category

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After the defining a blog post was published, a commenter by the name of SierraK came up with an interesting idea.

Actually I just came up with a completely random idea..Maybe there should be a different word for each kind of blog. Like tech blogs could have a word, self-help a different word, photography another, etc. so that rather than debate whether its a blog or a website we could discuss whether it is in the right category lol. The problem would be educating on what each of the different words stood for rather than what a general word “blog” stood for…and who would come up with the words?

I’ve seen this in action already with technology blogs being called Techlogs while Photography blogs are called Photoblogs.

I thought I would open this idea up to the Performancing community in the form of a game. The rules are, come up with a category name for a blog which pertains to a subject. Let’s see how many different ones we can come up with before we run out of ideas, or they begin to overlap each other. I’ll get us started.

  • Techlog – A blog about technology in any fashion
  • Photoblog – A blog based on photography
  • Audiblog – A blog about music or sounds
  • Autolog – A blog about automobiles and cars
  • Geeklog – A blog about geeky stuff
  • Infoblog – A blog about information, statistics and analysis

Ok, now its your turn.

How Do You Define Blog

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Whenever I tell someone who isn’t as internet savvy as I am that I make money blogging, they always ask me what a blog is. When I stop to think about it, defining the term “blog” has been rather difficult for me and has always resulted in debating with myself what the differences are between a website and a blog. I end up telling this person that a blog is a personal website which is updated frequently, which in most cases it is. But how would that explain sites such as Engadget, ReadWriteWeb or TechCrunch. These are not personal websites, they are online businesses.

Let’s take a trip to Google and make use of the define:blog query and see what happens:

  • A Blog style within Mambo is the listing of records in a summary form. Example: It could be by link only, or showing just the introductory text with a link to the complete text. Often the “News” page is written in Blog style. fman.by.ru/mambo/help/mambo.glossary.html
  • Web LOG is a journal kept on the internet. This journal is often updated daily and contains all information that the person maintaining the BLOG (Blogger) wishes to share with the world. … www.aprompt.co.uk/support/glossary.asp

These were just the first five results with each one being a little bit different. What is a blog to you? Do you find yourself arguing the differences between a blog and a website? Are they not one in the same? Furthermore, what can be constituted as a blog rather than a website?

It’s Kinda Like Regular Blogging, But It’s Live

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Live blogging is the new thing for bloggers to do. It isn’t particularly useful unless you are actually blogging a live event, but if you are, it is an excellent way to generate some buzz around your blog. It is also an excellent way to draw new readers to your blog, and this is especially true if the event is very popular within your niche. The point is, live blogging is a really interesting concept if done correctly.

Most recently, blogs like CNET have dedicated resources to cover the WorldWide Developer’s Conference live. Other places like Engadget, Gizmodo, and Wired also participated by live blogging the conference.

There are several tools you can utilize to start live blogging today. That is what I will be discussing now.

Cover It Live

Cover It Live is a service which allows you to take any existing page and make it into a creative and unique live blogging experience for you and your readers. You sign up for an account (for free), and after filling in some information, you are able to setup a live blogging session.

It requires about a minute to setup your live blogging session—requiring a title, date, time, and time zone—and then you are provided with a small amount of code that can be placed where you want the viewer to see the live blogging take place. It can be placed pretty much anywhere that any normal content can be placed, but this area must support IFrames.

Additional features include the ability to add panelists and producers, allow people to be notified of when the live blogging session begins, have readers leave comments, insert polls, display advertisements, and share other forms of media like images, videos, and audio.

When all is said and done, you are left with a window which represents a chat room. This area is the place where you can, essentially, do your live blogging. There is no refreshing required by the readers, and this is one of the most important features of Cover It Live.

This is certainly one of the more simpler and effective ways to put on a live blogging event.

Check the bottom of this page to see what Cover It Live looks like.

SubEthaEdit

SubEthaEdit, a tool I recently discussed here at Performancing, allows you to edit any document in real-time with collaborators. While, in itself, not being a complete solution for live blogging, it is an excellent tool to collaborate in a live blogging event.

Multiple users could join an editing session and write/edit the document together with ease. The process is easier than you would imagine, but once you see it in action, you quickly realize the true potential. However, as far as live blogging, this is where the tool ends on its usefulness. You could take the document and paste it to a server, and, truth be told, it is better than nothing at all.

SubEthaEdit is only useful for those of you working in a group of people covering the same event. It only solves part of the problem though, and, in many aspects, if you are willing to sacrifice control, Cover It Live might be the better solution.

WordPress, Drupal, and most other CMSs

For most of us, WordPress, Drupal, Blogger, Movable Type, and other various content management systems will be what we have to work with. While each of these systems should support Cover It Live, it might be in your best interest to cover an event by constantly editing a dedicated page/post within the CMS. It certainly isn’t the prettiest or most efficient way to handle this—it makes collaboration fairly difficult—but you work with what you are given; no one can doubt you for that.

Live Blogging on Performancing

I decided to create a live blogging session for Performancing with Cover It Live. Check back here around 1:00 PM EST. I don’t really have a topic, but I’ll try to make it somewhat interesting!

If you have any experience with live blogging, please let everyone know how it went. Any problems? Did it help drive traffic to your blog?

Violet Blue Is Now A 404

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Violet Blue, a blogger known for her expertise in the realm of sex education discovered today that all of her posts with the exception of one had been deleted from BoingBoing, a big name blog. Violet has no idea why her posts were removed and neither does anyone else, considering BoingBoing has published controversial content before. Some are speculating that the deletion was caused by a software upgrade. So far, BoingBoing has not commented on the allegations.

Why do I bring this up? Because for those of us trying to make it to the top of the (mobosphere) as an author, an event like this can be crushing in terms of the future career of a blogger. Since BoingBoing is one of those top tier blogs, being removed from their system virtually takes away the opportunity to put them on a resume. Also, think of the nice Google juice and the expanded audience that disappears along with the content.

If what happened to Violet was a mistake, I really hope BoingBoing takes the proper actions of restoring her content. If it’s not an accident, then I hope Violet receives a clear and concise reason as to why they decided to delete her off of the blog.

Now it’s question time. Would you ever delete an author from your blog? For instance, Performancing has gone through a ton of authors over the years, with all of their content pretty much in tact. Does what happened to Violet over at BoingBoing worry you as a blog author, trying to make a living?

Are Blogs Old School

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I don’t know about you, but I’ve begun to notice a trend. Some of us who are familiar with the term “blog” and who consider ourselves to be internet savvy are starting to claim that the term “blog” is old fashioned. However, if we take a look around, mass media is still on the cusp of embracing this wonderful thing called blogs. Part of the problem (if you want to call it that) lies in the fact that the early adopter crowd who went crazy with blogs has now moved on to something else. Blogs appear stale as if they were no big deal to this crowd. Meanwhile, there is a large section of people who are just now jumping on board the blogging bandwagon and having a great time doing so. To them, this is brand new.

Are you noticing the same trend? Do you think blogging has reached its peak and is now on the other side of the bell curve?

A Step Closer To Real Time Ads

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According to an article in the NY Times, Google is finally taking steps to use some of the massive amounts of data it’s collected on users online behaviour to serve up ads. Instead of relying on data that is a few days or perhaps a month old, Google is now stepping it up a notch by serving ads which are relevant to the last 3-5 search queries a user has submitted.

For example, if I performed a Google search for “Caribbean”, then 5 minutes later, performed a search for “scuba gear” Google would begin to display ads related to vacations in the Caribbean or for scuba diving equipment. Cookies need not apply here as the browser usually contains data related to previous search queries as well as previously browsed websites during it’s session which is the data Google is tapping into.

This is certainly one way of showing relevant ads, but its kind of creepy if you ask me. It’s only a matter of time before we go to Google.com, begin typing a search string into Google and in real-time, advertising pops up based on keywords and the entire search string.

What do you folks think about this experimental new way of advertising? I don’t use Google Adsense so I’d like to know, does the technology Google use to increase its ad revenue trickle down into Adense and Adwords? If so, wouldn’t this increase your revenue?

Clearing Some Of The Confusion

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For whatever reason, there appears to be some confusion as to what is going to take place with WordPress 2.6 and the XML-RPC feature. Although James brought the issue to light ( read
WordPress Disabling XML-RPC By Default With 2.6—Good or Bad? ) the confusion needs to be addressed in a seperate post. So here is the real deal.

  • New installations of WordPress from 2.6 on will have XML-RPC disabled by default
  • Those of you upgrading any previous version of WordPress to version 2.6 will not have XML-RPC disabled as part of the upgrade process.
  • The feature is not disappearing nor is it being disabled indefinitely.

Thanks to Joseph Scott in the comments, I’ve learned that the team has changed the way in which this feature was implemented. Read more about it here.

Monday’s poll will ask the question, Which 3rd party blog publishing tool do you use? The results should give us a very rough estimate as to how popular using a third party blogging application is when compared to the built in publishing system.