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Archives for June 2008

Hundreds Of New Domain Names On The Way

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This is big news for anyone playing within the domain arena. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has announced that they will loosen their grip on domain registration rules which will permit hundreds or thousands of brand new domain names in addition to .com.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers unanimously approved the new guidelines as weeklong meetings in Paris concluded. ICANN also voted unanimously to open public comment on a separate proposal to permit addresses entirely in non-English languages for the first time.

The new domain names won’t make their presence known until at least next year.

Do you find this to be good news? Do we really need more domain names?

Blogger To Undergo Overhaul

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The Googlesystem blog has an awesome write up covering the onslaught of new features found within the experimental version of Blogger. One of the new features which will surely benefit user’s as well as commenter’s is the new inline commenting system. I browse to a variety of different blogs every day, leaving comments as I go. But when I end up on a Blogger powered blog, I don’t even bother to comment because the comment system is so out of whack. Now, with an inline commenting system, I don’t have to open a new tab or window to leave a comment and I can actually see the content as I’m writing the comment.

Other new features include:

  • Importing and Exporting of your posts/content
  • A brand new post editor
  • Star rating system for posts
  • Integration with Google Webmaster Central

All of these features can be found within the experimental version and if things go well, will end up in the standard production version soon.

Are you looking forward to these changes? Does anyone still use Blogger?

5 Events The Blogosphere Influenced

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According to an entry within Wikipedia, the term was first coined by Brad L. Graham on September 10, 1999 as a joke. It was then later coined by William Quick in 2002. The term was then quickly adopted and its use today describes the large number of blogs who pack an influential punch. Here is a little more history in regards to the word. The term resembles the older word logosphere (from Greek logos meaning word, and sphere, interpreted as world), the “the world of words”, the universe of discourse.

This article will highlight various events which have taken place online and off where the blogosphere has played a major role in the outcome. Although a single blogger such as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com can wield a significant amount of influence, no one thus far has been able to stand up to the enormous amount of influence the blogosphere can have as a single entity.

  1. Dunkin Donuts Pulls Ad – After Dunkin donuts aired a television commercial featuring Rachel Ray wearing a black and white fringed scarf, bloggers took offense as the scarf was commonly known to be worn by Muslim extremists. After thousands of bloggers made their thoughts known and hundreds of comments posted on the Dunkin Donuts website condemning the ad, it was pulled off the air.
  2. Sony Labeled Epic Fail – On Oct. 31, 2005 Mark Russinovich broke the story on his blog, describing how Sony BMG Music Entertainment distributed a copy-protection scheme with music CDs that secretly installed a rootkit on computers. Afterwards, the story spread like wildfire to what seemed like every tech blog on the net. The outcry from the blogosphere was so great, Sony stopped producing the copy-protection scheme and then recalled all of the cds which contained the copy protection. Lawsuits were then filed against the company. Sony’s reputation will never be able to clean itself of this stain.
  3. The A.P. thinks they can charge for quotations – After word got out about how the A.P. sent a letter to The Drudge Retort website claiming that they were excerpting too much of their articles, the blogosphere blew up and gave the A.P. a lesson on Fair Use. With heavy hitting blogs going against the A.P. along with many other bloggers following suit, the A.P. eventually settled the claim and drew back it’s proposal to penalize those who quote their content in a meaningful way.
  4. Snakes On A Plane – Before this movie was even released, it gained a huge following with fan sites emerging all over the web. After Josh Friedman’s blog entry the movie was then discussed on a number of other internet portals which then lead to bloggers creating songs, apparel, post art, pages of fan fiction, parody films, and mock movie trailers. In fact, the response from the blogosphere prompted New Line Cinema to go back and add five days of reshooting.
  5. Dan Rather urged into retirement – After Dan Rather reported on a phony memo on CBS purported to show that President George W. Bush received preferential treatment and failed to fulfill his National Guard duty 30 years prior, the blogosphere erupted into a CSI like investigation. Blogs like Free Republic, Little Green Footballs and Power Line raised questions about the documents’ authenticity. This caused other conservative blogs to also investigate the matter. In the end, the blogosphere played a major role in showing how CBS had been duped and how Dan Rather had reported on a phony story. This lead to Dan Rather being urged into retirement by CBS

These five events are proof that the blogosphere as a single entity can play a significant role.  The web is filled with noise, but when a large number of people tune into the same frequency, the noise becomes overwhelming to the point where an action needs to be taken. This action is usually in favor of the blogosphere.

In writing this post, a few questions crossed my mind. Can the blogosphere in general be considered a democracy? Is it a play on Majority rules Minority rights? Do you think it’s a good or bad thing that the blogosphere can influence anything, whether it be a critical decision, a law or an action made by a company?

I’m also interested in any other events which the blogosphere may have played a role in, minus things within a political nature.

Special thanks to those who helped me come up with this list via Twitter.
geoffmanning
arickmann
OnkelSchark

Research Resources and Tips for Truly Unique Articles

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If you want to create original content, you are going to have to do some old fashioned original research. It is a time consuming work, but if you want to write a great article, it must be done. It also helps to prepare for writing lengthy articles—you don’t want to continually break away from the creative process.

There are three phases to how I do research. Each phase has a different purpose, and I do it this way because it is very effective. This is not rocket science, but it helps to develop a rhythm for your work process.

Gathering

The gathering phase, for lack of a better name, is the time spent gathering content. The sources I use will heavily affect the contents of my article. Here are a few places to begin your search for your next great article:

Search engines:

Books:

Videos:

Newspapers:

News Agencies:

Encyclopedias:

Along with those, you could also use a blog as a source—shocking, right?

Regardless, your sources should be legitimate. This is also true if you are making bold claims against a person or company. You want to get praise—not lawsuits—for your hard work. Bloggers are not immune to the judicial system.

Evaluation

After I have gathered my content, it is time to evaluate it. I will quickly evaluate content to see if it is of any use to me. I’m a fast reader, and I can tell if an article is going to be any good pretty fast. I will discard any content that isn’t useful, and, if needed, I’ll go back to find additional content.

In-Depth Research

With all the preparation (which, as always, is very important) out of the way, it is time to study everything I have gathered. Thus begins the most time consuming process of writing a truly unique and original article. Using an application that allows me to keep notes (or even a simple notepad) is always ideal (this topic is for another article entirely), but every person is unique.

Regardless, this article is aimed at those who really put in a lot of effort into their research. These types of articles are the ones that receive notice and respect.

Admittedly, it is hard work—it certainly isn’t the most exciting thing someone could be doing. You will only feel great to have put all that time and effort when your content is found and appreciated by readers. But that is a decision you have to make. If you are going to be the best, you better put in the hard work—otherwise you could just be like every other blogger within the blogosphere.

Brief Rundown Of Multiple Blog Editors

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Monika Mundell of EasyWordPress.com has published an excellent article ( A Snapshot of several blog editors ) that briefly highlights the cream of the crop in terms of free blog editors. External blog editors are perfect to use if you are a mobile blogger or are having serious issues with TinyMCE. What ever the case may be, Monika has provided the information you’ll need to know to choose a blog editor that suits your tastes. Also, if you feel like paying some coin, the article also highlights a few different PAID FOR solutions.

So far, I’ve really enjoyed using the Scribefire Firefox Extension. This is one of the blog editors that Monika talks about in her post and it’s been a real time saver for me, especially when it’s tied directly into my WordPress powered blog through the awesome XML-RPC feature.

Do you use a third party blog editor? If so, which one is it and why do you prefer to use that program over the built in publisher?

WordPress Disabling XML-RPC By Default With 2.6—Good or Bad?

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XML-RPC is a protocol that allows third-party applications like Windows Live Writer and Ecto to post to a system supporting it. In this case, WordPress is the application that supports XML-RPC, but the WordPress development team has decided that they will disable XML-RPC by default starting with WordPress 2.6.

Daniel Jalkut, founder of Red Sweater Software, LLC., believes that it might help with reducing security risks, but it might have adverse effects for those who use applications that depend on XML-RPC:

But in my opinion, there are also good arguments to be made for rejecting the change as a damaging and misguided solution.

First, and obviously near to my heart, is the fact that this marginalizes remote clients. For users who would find value in a remote client, this decision will put one more roadblock in their way. Historically, the remote editor interface is already compromised such that remote editors do not have access to all the same functionality as the web interface. With this change in place, things get even worse. While a screen-scraping application will easily log in and authenticate a fragile WordPress session via the web interface, the well-behaved API clients will be refused access by default. All in the name of improving security.

Second, and probably most important, is that this is not a fundamental security improvement.

As a user who personally likes to make use of the XML-RPC system, I must say that I am disappointed with this decision. I am not exactly sure of the security implications, but I do agree that the system should be fixed, not simply disabled by default.

Daniel also brought up made an excellent point about the security of WordPress:

Also worth considering: if a service is disabled by default for security considerations, what message does that send to people who choose to, or who are encouraged to turn the service back on? It sets up a perception of insecurity which may not even be warranted. If the remote publishing interfaces are insecure, they should be fixed, not merely disabled!

Well, all that reflects my thoughts exactly.

Daniel does benefit from having the XML-RPC system enabled—he is the founder of the company that develops MarsEdit. It is in his company’s best interest for this feature to be enabled by default. So, there is a conflict of interest, but even though there is a conflict, I believe his points to be valid and his words to be truthful.

Of course, you could always just enable the XML-RPC option. It is fine for those who run their own blog, but in other instances, it could cause some serious issues and confusion.

What do you think about all this? Many of you who use desktop, browser, or any other third-party application to post content to WordPress will be affected. Voice your opinion!

Summize The Web 2.0 Version Of Summarize

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There are thousands of conversations happening on twitter every day of the year. In fact, hundreds of them take place every minute of the day and keeping track of all of those different conversations can be a pain. Summize is a search engine for Twitter which gives users a way to search and discover topics being expressed from within the community.

Summize monitors recommendations, opinions, and buzz. Summize then indexes Twitter’s public timeline in realtime, threads together associated tweets, and gives you the search tools to dig in. For example, the front page of Summize shows the following trending topics: Obama, Symbian, McCain and of course, Carlin which is most likely George Carlin.

Using FireFox3 or FF3 as a search query produced an abundant amount of results. Not surprising considering it was recently released to the public just a few days ago. The search results are presented in almost the same fashion as the Twitter public timeline. On the right hand sidebar of the search results page, there are options to Twitter the search results or to Subscribe to that search query via RSS. This is a handy feature if you would like to get a birds eye view as to what people specifically on Twitter are saying in regards to a particular topic. Also a handy function in the sidebar is the translation drop down menu. You can translate the tweets in over 10 different languages.

As you can see from this image of a search result, there is a link called Show Conversation. When you click on this link, an ajaxy drop down will display the tweets in which people responding to the original tweet. That alone is a cool feature as Twitter doesn’t particularly have a great interface for following conversations.

Like other web based services/applications, Summize does provide a few different ways to access the service without actually being on the site itself. For starters, you can add Summize.com to the list of search engines to use within FireFox. Also, Summize has a list of applications that have been created which utilize their search engine. This list can be accessed here. Popular apps which have already been created include the love hate think believe feel app, StrawPoll, and Addict-o-matic.

Conclusion:

Summize makes it as easy as pie to get a top down perspective as to what the majority of users on Twitter are talking about. I would like to see a way for me to subscribe to the trends being discussed without having to manually subscribe to individual keywords. Other than that, it’s a cool service that alot of people are using to stay up to date with trends in the Twittersphere.

To Sponsor Or Not To Sponsor

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Steven Hodson of WinExtra.com discussed an interesting issue over the weekend regarding blogging and hypocrisy.

It seems that unless you are a part of a blog network or some big name blogger the idea that you would even think of stepping beyond the bounds of ad networks and god forbid go looking for deals of your own then you are stepping beyond your pay grade and need to be put back in your place. The most common method of slapping forward looking independent bloggers back into place is by calling their ethics into question.

Being an up and coming blogger myself, my opinion has been that if a blogger is going to monetize their blog through the use of sponsored posts, they should always give out a disclaimer. Many of the resources out on the web which help you to become a better blogger have stated that once your readers lose trust in what you write, it’s incredibly difficult to get that trust back and I agree. Therefor, if you remain transparent and clearly label a sponsored post as being one, I have no qualms with bloggers creating sponsored posts.

Here is one example of where there are potential problems with sponsorship.

Let’s say a blogger writes a number of reviews about a particular product and or service and most of those reviews are in a positive spotlight. It’s then later discovered that the blogger was being paid for those reviews by the same company in which he/she was reviewing calling not only to question the ethics of the blogger, but also question their trust. This situation would of been easily solved had the blogger publicly identified as being paid to write a particular post.

This idea of blog sponsorships is still a sticky subject. On one hand, bloggers need to make money and sponsorships are one way of doing so. On the other hand, independent bloggers have the freedom to say whatever it is they want without the influence of cash. It’s like one of those situations where you can’t have your cake and eat it to.

So my question to you is, how have you handled sponsorships either through posts or paid reviews? Have you had to deal with an onslaught of negativity from your readership because of the way you handled sponsored posts either presently or in the past?