I found this nice whitepaper from BusinessLogs called Writing for the Web that talks about writing a business blog. It covers: writing style, content & style, knowing your audience, length, voice, scanability and humour. Worth a read if you are considering blogging for business.
I’ve just registered for the Online Social Networking 2005 conference. This is a wholly online conference running for a couple of weeks discussing all aspects of online social networking.
It should be really interesting, both for the discussions of social networking and the experience of an online conference.
OSN2005 will be a summit for all those interested in working with social networking processes, tools, and media. In addition to attending many workshops, panels, and presentations by leading experts and practitioners, attendees will have the opportunity to be part of a community with a significant role in defining the future direction of online social networking. If you want to help shape this industry, come to OSN2005!
During the OSN2005 summit we will co-create and publish a manifesto describing what we want and need from online social networking tools. What are the key criteria for choosing and assessing OSN products and services? What gaps exist in currently available software and related tools? What needs to happen before it’s common knowledge that OSN products and services can deliver significant value? What are the most promising developments in the OSN industry?
There’s a bunch of folk moaning about the implementation of the rel=”nofollow” attribute on the NoNoFollow site. They argue that for standards and other reasons the rel=”nofollow” is a bad idea.
Seems to me these folk are being very conservative, in their thinking.
These convervatives seem to be a bit stuck on the idea that a link from one page to another is something sacred, that the web will never change, that page rank is some gift of god or something. Grow up.
In my reality, page rank is something that the search engines developed for themselves in secret and change at will to make their searches perform the way they want them to.
I say that any extra information we can add to a link is a good thing. The more (optional) stuff we can add to a link to indicate the intent of the author of the link the better. This gives more traction for the search engines.
Also, we have to do something. If we just left page rank and links as they were, we would slowly fill up the web with page-rank-seeking spam. And then the value of all links would be diminished until links become mostly useless. Then we’d have to start again with a new linking system and come up with something nofollow-like.
Scoble had a good go at answering the 13 reasons against nofollow. What he said. Let’s not be conservative about this. Let’s change things. Let’s experiment.
According to the Australian, Creative Commons licenses for Australia were launched this week and will be available later this month from the creative commons website.
This is great news. It is the first good thing to happen to copyrights in Australia for some time. It feels like a little bit of an antidote to the Free Trade Sellout Agreement,
Here’s a first hand report of the launch from David Jacobson. See also his highlights of the Creative Commons and Open Content Licensing conference proceedings. Thanks for putting them up, David. I really wanted to get to the conference and just couldn’t get there.
Scoble gives more info on the rel=”nofollow” standard and how the search engine & blog tools folk are moving quickly and working together to implement it:
Thanks Google (and MSN and Yahoo).
Oh, and, did anyone notice how Google got its competitors to do something without needing to get a standards committee involved? All within hours?
Hmm, why doesn’t everything in the industry work like this?
This is a win all around. It slows down the spammers, allows bloggers and others to point to things without increasing page rank. And that is like having another kind of pointing.
Here’s the next step: Let’s have an attribute where we can give a qualitative or quantitative description of how much whuffie we want to give or not give to a link. A bit more work in the search engine, but not much. I’d like something like that to have more than one dimension and I’d love to see it qualitative, emotional even. How about an attribute like rel=”opinion:good but too expensive” or rel=”opinion:i love it” or more boringly: rel=”opinion:5/10″ (half good) or: rel=”opinion:-5/10″ (half bad). I like using words to describe this stuff, other wise you need to come up with multi-dimensional measurements. Maybe google would even let us write python expressions as opinions.
But really, the idea is to make sure that we can give our feelings about a link. This helps humanize the web even more. And the search engines will need these sort of clues to make the web smarter, easier to use and more human. How about it?
Google has just implemented something new that is really going to stop comment spam:
Any link with a rel=”nofollow” attribute included will not be used in page rank calculations. So adding this attribute to any hyperlinks given in blog comments will stop the comment spammers because they won’t get page rank from it any more.
Hooray. SixApart has already announced support for MovableType and TypePad and say support for LiveJournal is coming soon.
No word about WordPress yet. I’m sure we’ll see something in the next 24 hours.
Wonderful news. The comment spam has really been getting me down.
thanks Joi
I’ve just changed from using wp-blacklist to keep the comment spam in control over to WP Hashcash. wp-blacklist was having hassles with comment spammers leaving (intentionally?) bad urls, which were getting put in the blacklist and then causing wp-blacklist to choke on any comment input.
Wp Hashcash looks great so far. I’ll report after a couple of weeks.
But don’t get me wrong. wp-blacklist did a great job for a long time on my three blogs. I might well end up going back. Who knows? But we have to try out new things….
[Update 16/1/05: I've reverted to wp-blacklist. Something in WP-Hashcash was causing some looping in php, leading to apache processes on the server eating up all the CPU time. More on this when I work out why....]
[Update 29/1/05: I tried a manual installation of WP-Hashcash and it works without running the CPU into the ground. Good. ]
Golly, another 2 week gap between entries. It intrigues me why I get stuck sometimes and blog entries don’t come easily.
So, here’s two weeks worth of blogs in one:
New Years happened. Doesn’t that seem like a century ago. A big party, lot of fun, people, lots of talking. From a week or two weeks later it seemed a bit empty somehow. Perhaps I was looking for something a bit more soulful, a bit more of a ritual. I’m glad to be in the new year. 2004 sucked a lot in many ways.
I had a great time down south after new years, catching up with good friends and having a holiday for a couple of days. Everybody was in a holiday mood.
Look, every time I go fishing I catch absolutely nothing. This has been going on for a while. What god have I offended? Or is it really true, as Kimmy claims, that I don’t really want to catch a fish anyway?
Bill Gates said silly things, calling us free culture creative commons folk communists. Now we are creative commies. Thanks for the meme, Bill. I’ve got a T-shirt on order.
I’ve got lots of new innovation going on in my work life. A couple of interesting new highly secret projects that might be really big one day :-) haha. We’ll see.
Apple are beating up on mac websites that publish rumours of upcoming products. The EFF jumps in to help the websites. Silly Apple.
Then Apple releases new products at Macworld. Gizmodo shows off a couple of cool fake Apple ads that are funny. Despite Apple’s litigious behaviour which deep in my creative commie heart I should punish them for, I immediately order an iPod shuffle.
The wiki spam has been accumulating on the Perth Blogs wiki for ages. Every couple of weeks I’d spend an idle half and hour reverting pages back to what they were before getting filled with poxy spammer links. And thanks to all of you out there that have also been deleting the spam and reverting pages as well.
Well, enough. I’ve knocked off all the spam and made the wiki read-only as the first step on the way to a brave perthblogs future where we have something database-driven in place of the wiki so you can add new feeds youself (like we discussed in this post).
So, until then, if you need to change or update a blog or feed address, email me at gra [at] barkingowl [dot] com. Ok?
And thanks to Shu for emailing me and stirring me into action on this. I’d just been moaning about the spam and putting up with it.
Fortune has an interesting article about blogs from a business perspective as a part of their Top Ten Tech Trends to Watch For. Say that three times fast.
I seem to get a lot of people asking me the good old “What is a weblog?” question.
The best answer I’ve found so far is the entry for weblog in wikipedia. Says it all, in a few different levels of detail.
Another wave of comment spam has started this morning. Funny how it comes in waves. So far wp-blacklist is doing a great job getting rid of it.
Is anybody else getting hit again?
It has happened — as Mark pointed out:
Perthblogs has turned from a peaceful little community page into a freaking torrent of text that I can no longer read in its entirety.
I’m feeling the same way. Just too much material in the perth blog feed now. So, the community that we are aggregating has gone beyond some point where there is just too much stuff to read, too many lives to keep up with. And for me, that feels like a really scratchy radio signal. Can’t find the signal above the noise.
So.. what are we going to do about it? I’ve suggested I’ll automate the subscription process, but that will just add more blogs more often, which means the feed will get even less readable.
I’m looking for ideas: given we are going to automate something, shall we have multiple feeds, with different focusses? Or allow people to make their own custom feeds and share them with others? Or what? I need your thoughts on what we are going to do. Comments would be welcome here – then I’ll summarise the ideas into the wiki and we can work on the design of this thing togther. Start with comments here, though, or blog about it with trackbacks.
Looking forward to your ideas… What do we want the perth blogs feeds to be? How do they currently work for you? What could make it better?
Another burst of comment spam came in over night, but this time the wp-blacklist caught and deleted it all, thankfully. I highly recommend wp-blacklist if you are using wordpress for your blog.
And that’s not all the spam. Apart from the ongoing email spam, we now get regular spam attacks in the perth blogs wiki. There are another twenty or so modified pages this morning, and that requires manual intervention to remove the spam :-( This is going to make me automate things in the wiki and aggregated feed fairly soon, but more on that later.
For now, I’m off to delete the wiki spam and then take my daughter Bea to the Scitech Discovery Centre for some science fun. Ciao.
Who said that blogs don’t influence anything:
Reuters: Blogs Send Stocks Into Reverse
blognite was excellent. It was a full night of presentations, questions, discussions and laughs. I had a great time MCing the whole show, though it was pretty hard to keep presenters to time when there was a lot of interesting content and questions. But we had to start with something, and the one night format meant it was easy for people to come along.
A couple of thoughts for the next one:
* We really needed to have a proper intermission where people got up and moved around, with nothing scheduled, so the presenters get heard, and we all have a chance to have a chat with each other.
* We needed more time for the presenters. Ten minutes plus ten minutes of questions is a very hard thing to prepare for and present. I think the presenters did so well with the time they had.
I guess I can imagine the next one being a full-day conference. Might be harder to get people to come, but there would be some space and time for presentations, tutorial how-to sessions, and informal gatherings.
What a great local blogging community we have. Congrats to the organisers for making it happen, and the presenters for standing up and doing their thing.
I’ve just gone through the list on the wiki and added a whole lot of new blogs to the Perth Blogs Feeds.
Welcome new blogs!
And there went another Blogger Meetup, this time in a warm, humid Fremantle, just before the rain.
Our Perth Meetups have reached a gentle kind of maturity. There are familiar faces and friends, and a shared history of meetups now.
I’m not going to name and link to everybody — you know who you were, and for those that weren’t there, you are going to have to come along next time and find out.
There’s a bit of excitement in the air about the blognite next Wednesday. Come and see the local blogstars tell it like it is.
Eight speakers, 10 minutes each. Food. Questions. Register here. Be a part of Australia’s first blogging conference.
Perth blog maestro Richard Giles of has started a new gadget blog called Gadget Lounge. Amazingly, this is a gadget blog about gadgets available in Australia, with Australian prices and availability. Fantastic. I enjoy the global Gizmodo, but I get frustrated when all of the devices are available in the US or Japan, and never Australia.
So, well done Rich, and good luck with it.
From the home page:
Gadget Lounge is dedicated to bringing the latest news of gadgets available in Australia. If it’s available in Australia, draining the power grid, filling the wireless airwaves or maintaining the bit state, we’ll report it.
Thanks to this post from taking the red pill, I now have ecto image uploads working with WordPress. Thanks heaps to jr for the patch.
This photo comes from a weekend camping trip at Mudaring Weir. It was one of those quiet, misty days with soft English rain. The kids ran and walked a huge distance from our campsite to the weir and back again.
