a weblog about weblogging

:: virtually anything is possible ::

Mon Jan, 05 2009

Miscellaneous

very cool tool - CSS SuperScrub

very cool tool to spruce up your sloppy CSS coding, http://isnoop.net/tools/css.php

Posted by: royby on Jan 05, 09 | 11:43 am | Profile

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Tue Dec, 30 2008

Research

Blogging - a book by Dr. Jill Walker Rettburg

Dr Jill Walker Rettburg has been a research blogger since October 2000 and this year saw the release of her latest book which is titled simply, "Blogging". There is no prize for guessing what this book is about, but if you are interested you can visit Amazon and search through the table of contents and some extracts as well.

The book earns glowing reviews from such well known luminaries as Howard Rheingold, "Blogging is a landmark in social cyberspace studies –– and much more than that", Axel Bruns, "Jill Walker′s Blogging is set to be a key text in its field" and danah boyd "Walker′s book brilliantly documents, analyzes, and situates blogging".

I've just ordered a copy and I'm looking forward to reading it when it arrives.

Posted by: royby on Dec 30, 08 | 3:18 pm | Profile

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Mon Dec, 29 2008

Miscellaneous

How Web 2 are you?

Along with all the Web 2.0 start-ups that have emerged over recent times has been a swag of creative logo's, some of which are now highly recognisable. But how many do you know? Take this quiz to find out.

Posted by: royby on Dec 29, 08 | 7:30 pm | Profile

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Mon Nov, 10 2008

What is a Weblog?

new blogging direction

Last month a hacker found a way into royby.com's pMachine control panel, deleted most of the data and left me some cute messages. In it's current form, royby.com is over 6 years old, so that was a lot of data to lose. However, it wasn't really a problem because the data was backed up and it didn't take too much effort to restore it.

What the incident did do though was to remind me that for a long time now I've been meaning to replace the now obsolete pMachine blogging software with something that is supported and still under constant development. I also want to change the overall design, (I'm certainly tired of the old design now), restructure the overall site design and consider the direction that I want royby.com to take.

Every time I consider beginning this project however, I experience a sharp stabbing pain in my forehead accompanied by a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. It's not that I'm not capable of undertaking all of these tasks, it's the amount of time that I know they will take. Time that I just don't have right now.

So I've decided that, rather than embarking on a major overhaul to all the above mentioned areas, baby steps are going to be the order of the day. I'll make small tweaks here and there to the site design until I get time to code a new set of templates and change the CMS. Expression Engine has replaced pMachine as Ellis Labs prime content management tool and I have it installed and under development, but I can see that it will take some time to get it to the point where I can migrate my data from pMachine.

Expression Engine is a natural progression after using pMachine for a number of reasons, but the primary one is the ability to migrate data to the new system. There is no literature about such a migration to the latest version of Wordpress or indeed to a program such as Drupal for instance. Other than that, the support team at Ellis Labs are just so helpful if there is a technical problem. And won't there always be a technical problem when you are working with an application for the first time?

The Expression Engine forum holds a wealth of information as does their Knowledge Base and Wiki. There is a healthy philosophy at Ellis Labs which I recognised when I first began using pMachine and your queries are always answered in a timely fashion by people who know what they're talking about and who take a real interest in ensuring that your technical problems are solved.

So, stay tuned for more information on how I progress with the gradual re-build of royby.com.

Posted by: royby on Nov 10, 08 | 6:54 pm | Profile

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Thu Sep, 29 2005

News Articles

Australian IT - Blogging confuses Britain (Correspondents in London, SEPTEMBER 28, 2005)

Blogging confuses Britain
Correspondents in London
SEPTEMBER 28, 2005

At the risk of being accused of "pommy bashing" I say "so what" to this article. It just doesn't surprise me that people who know all about networking the news if they find a couple having sex in a park or recording their mates bashing some poor innocent victim wouldn't have a clue about anything meaningful that is happening in the world let alone know about blogging.

PROPONENTS of the latest web trends were have been warned that the rest of the world may not have a clue what they are talking about.

A survey of British taxi drivers, pub landlords and hairdressers - often seen as barometers of popular trends - found that nearly 90 per cent had no idea what a podcast is and more than 70 per cent had never heard of blogging.

"When I asked the panel whether people were talking about blogging, they thought I meant dogging," said Sarah Carter, the planning director at ad firm DDB London.

Dogging is the phenomenon of watching couples have sex in semi-secluded places such as out-of-town car parks. News of such events are often spread on web sites or by using mobile phone text messages.

Article
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More people (56 per cent) understood the phrase "happy slapping" - a teenage craze that involves assaulting people while capturing it on video with their mobile phones - than podcasting (12 per cent) or blogging (28 per cent).

"Our research not only shows that there is no buzz about blogging and podcasting outside of our media industry bubble, but also that people have no understanding of what the words mean," Ms Carter said. "It's a real wake-up call."

DDB, a unit of New York-based advertising group Omnicom, said the survey results indicate that agencies may be pushing their clients to use new technology - that is, to advertise on the new media formats - too quickly.

"We spend too much time talking to ourselves in this industry, rather than getting out there and finding out what's really going on in the world," DDB's chief strategy officer David Hackworthy said.

Agence France-Presse

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Posted by: royby on Sep 29, 05 | 3:54 pm | Profile

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Thu Jun, 09 2005

Photoblogs

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Uses: A Mundane Shot? If It's on a Photoblog, Someone's Interested

BLOGS are great for those who like to write and wonderful for those who like to read, but what about people who don't like to do either?

They are expressing themselves through photoblogs, Web sites that are part visual diary, part photo gallery, where in recent years anyone with a digital camera and Internet connection can take part. Many sites have made it easier than ever to share photographs, including Fotolog.net and Flickr.com, which was recently bought by Yahoo.
Among the most interesting photoblogs to peruse are group oriented, where many people post pictures, all of them around a central theme. You will find abandoned bicycles, subway scenes, pets. Group sites celebrate the ordinary, the mundane, the ephemeral, things that everyone can understand.

Article available here

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The Mirror Project

The Mirror Project, mirrorproject.com, gathers self-portraits reflected in different surfaces: windows, bodies of water, shiny balloons and rearview mirrors. More than 29,000 photos have been submitted from all seven continents since the project began in October 1999.

It began as "Friends of Jezebel's Mirror," or FOJM, a spinoff site to Jezebel's Mirror, where a Web designer named Heather Champ posted 250 of her own self-portraits after the death of her parents, who had been the primary documenters of her life.
For the Mirror Project, Ms. Champ invites guest curators to sift through the submissions and collect photos around themes, some of these have been Ikea, Sept. 11 and books.
The value of the self-portraits, from supermodel-esque poses to corner-of-the-eye glimpses, is that people are less likely to put on airs when they are photographing themselves.
Guess Where
New York photobloggers have created a group photoblog game called "GuessWhere" on Flickr.com, where people post photos from specific cities and others have to guess where they were taken (often with hints).
The original, and most vibrant, is Guess Where NYC, with a hundred or so members. That inspired Guess Where DC, Guess Where San Francisco and Guess Where Tokyo. (At Flickr.com, type in "guesswhere.") In New York, all five boroughs qualify. And the photos are sometimes well-recognized places with a twist - in a reflection, say, or close up.
Those posting photos have learned never to underestimate people's intimacy with the city. One challenger posted a shot of a round street sign that read "Guardians of Hydrocephalus Research Foundation - Water on the Brain." Within a day, a person identified it as a sign at Sackett Street and Court Street in Brooklyn.
Challenge
A number of photoblogs pose one-word themes as a challenge for photographers. Wordphoto, at word photo.org, often poses words that have multiple definitions. The interpretation of the word can express as much of the photographer's personality as the actual photo. "Slide," for example, was expressed both as a child on a playground and a professor with an overhead projector.
Photo Friday, photofriday.com, and Thursday Challenge, spunwithtears.com/thursday.html, each pose a weekly theme, where people can then submit links to photos.
Sadness
Digital photography makes it cheap to take photos of things that are otherwise ignored in daily life - like broken umbrellas, discarded bicycles or abandoned televisions.
But vibrant collections along such ordinary themes have shown up on Fotolog.net, a popular photoblogging site. The hundreds upon hundreds of photos from around the world reinforce a sense of universality.
Jason Wilson developed a fascination for the carcasses of mutilated and destroyed bicycles and started a group photoblog on Fotolog.net that quickly attracted contributors. "It turned out that many people had one, two or 40 of these pics sitting around looking for a context to thrive in," Mr. Wilson said.
Europeans, who commonly use bicycles to get around rural areas and some cities, have contributed many of the most provocative photos.
"Sad Umbrellas" got its start with Eric Brown, who moved to New York from Los Angeles six years ago and became fascinated with the number of abandoned umbrellas on the street. He wanted to save the graceful, broken umbrellas, but that was impractical. Inspired by the "Sad Bikes" group, he found a home for his infatuation on Fotolog.net. Now there is also a "Sad TV's" and "Sad Carts" (for shopping carts).
The Anonymous Archives
Almost all photoblogs have a contemporary feel - a product of the instant digital photography age. By contrast, bighappyfunhouse.com has the feel of a group photoblog that pulls the past into the present, with a jarring voyeuristic effect.
For years, Ron Slattery, a 40-year-old entrepreneur from Chicago, has scoured flea markets, garage sales and trash bins for old photos. Last year, he started putting them onto the Internet: vacation photos from the beach, snapshots of pets, family portraits at birthday parties.
The photos are anonymous, both the subjects and the photographers. At a time when we routinely browse photo albums on Snapfish and Kodak's gallery, there is something disquieting to see photos that were never meant to be public. His photos span from the late 1800's to almost the present - a mishmash of hairdos, fashions and photo quality throughout the decades. So far, he has put up more than 900 photos. He often wonders about the people shown, smiling and not, and where their lives took them after that instantaneous meeting with a lens.
In May, he received an e-mail message from a man who had found a picture of himself and a friend, who was wearing a Hello Kitty costume, on his site. The picture was taken in 1982 in Houston when the two men, then teenagers, were hired by someone to pass out balloons at the grand opening of an office supply store. "What is driving me CRAZY is this. ... How did you come across that photo?" the man wrote.

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Posted by: royby on Jun 09, 05 | 8:52 am | Profile

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News Articles

Multiblogging

Back in January 2004, I was wondering whether I had time outside my job as a print journalist to maintain even one blog. With the launch of this blog on technologyreview.com, I now have three.

I know I'm not alone. Technorati tracks just over 11 million blogs worldwide, but the actual number of bloggers is probably much lower, given that many people maintain multiple blogs under a single blog hosting account, or have blogs at several locations such as LiveJournal, TypePad, and Blogger. My blog count of three doesn't even include the pseudo-blogs that go along with my accounts at places like Bloglines and Wallop.

Why on earth would anyone need three blogs, let alone one? (It's important to remember that many people, if they know about blogs at all, still see bloggers as suffering from a peculiar blend of folly, arrogance, and narcissism.) I think the logic comes down to this: blogs are inherently personal, and we inhabit more than one persona as we move through our days. To the extent that blogging is becoming an important mode of self-expression and social interaction, therefore, we need a separate blog for each of our personae.

My first blog, Travels with Rhody, started out as a catch-all site where I wrote about "science, technology, the Internet, and life with a dog." Most of the stuff related to my hobbies and miscellaneous interests, but I also blogged pretty frequently about technology stories that seemed too time-sensitive, too specialized, or too weird to write about in Technology Review.

Once a group technology blog was launched on technologyreview.com, I started doing most of my technology-related blogging there, and reserved Travels with Rhody for non-work stuff. But posting there didn't feel all that rewarding to me. It's a group blog, which means it's rich with variety, but on the other hand it can't be shaped to anyone's personality, style, or particular interests.

This spring, my assignments for the magazine brought me to the point where I felt like I needed a one-man blog where I could air a single subject: social computing, the theme of a feature article I've written for TR's August issue. The interface for THIS blog (the one you're reading right now) wasn't ready yet, so I launched the social-computing blog as a satellite site, the Continuous Computing Blog, using TypePad as a platform. We decided to use that blog to make the August article into an experiment in participatory journalism. The experiment involved a bit of JavaScripting that would have been difficult using the main TR site, which turned out to be another good reason to start a satellite blog. And if things go right, the August article will grow into a book. So Continuous Computing is a sort of hybrid work/personal blog where discussions on social computing can continue well past August, and where I can organize my thoughts for the bigger project.

And that brings us to this blog, Tech Coast. Here, I'll blog about all things technological except ideas that relate directly to social computing, which will go to the Continuous Computing blog. I feel like I've got all the bases covered (at least for now): my home life, my work-related professional life, and my non-work-related professional life. Each of these personae has different things to say, to different audiences, and there's no reason the readers of my TR blogs should have to suffer through my musings about macro photography and doggie day care.

Now that blogging tools have become so inexpensive and so easy to use, maintaining multiple blogs is almost as easy as having just one -- at least from an administrative point of view. Of course, you still need to have something different to say in each blog. But I think multiblogging will grow in popularity as people realize that blogs are far more than online diaries. They're channels for one-to-many and many-to-many interactions, on subjects that can be personal, professional, social, political, religious, or what-have-you. If we have 500 channels on our TVs, why not have two or three Internet channels for ourselves?

Article was available here

Posted by: royby on Jun 09, 05 | 8:41 am | Profile

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Sun Mar, 20 2005

Research

Sifry's Alerts: State of The Blogosphere, March 2005, Part 2: Posting Volume

Possibly a more interesting set of stat's than in my previous posting as it relates to the number of postings that Technorati track each day. According to Sifry they are currently tracking about 500,00 posts per day or 5.8 post every second. This is compared to about 400,000 posts per day in October of 2004.

The "event spikes" are particularly revealing.

http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000299.html

Posted by: royby on Mar 20, 05 | 11:09 am | Profile

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Research

Sifry's Alerts: State of The Blogosphere, March 2005, Part 1: Growth of Blogs

In September of 2003 I noted in my thesis on blogging that Technorati, an independent weblog tracking service, were watching over 900,000 weblogs and tracking almost 78 million links. Now, according to this report from David Sifry, the founder and CEO of Technorati, his company is tracking over 7.8 million weblogs and 937 million links. The Technorati data shows that the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 months, something that it has done four times in the last 20 months.

According to Sifry, this growth rate appears set to continue with the significant growth of popular popular blogging and journaling tools like Google's Blogger, SixApart's LiveJournal, AOL Journals, the proliferation of software like WordPress, Expression Engine and Movable Type and the launch of MSN spaces.

I wonder if there is there an increase in the amount of "meaningful" dialogue that is commensurate with this phenomenal growth rate or is there simply an increase in the amount of babble that is repeated endlessly over and over (as I am doing in my reporting of Sifry's log right now)??? Does this increase in the amount of "authors" and "points of view" just mean that it becomes increasingly more difficult to disseminate all of this data? I think so.

http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000298.html

Posted by: royby on Mar 20, 05 | 10:39 am | Profile

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Tue Jan, 25 2005

News Articles

So what are you reading these days?

With more and more people blogging and news services offering subscriptions to their RSS feeds there are more RSS feed aggreagotrs appearing every week it seems. Rojo Networks offers to help users find information more efficiently and also to help consumers share dynamic content. This article is from MIT's Technology Review.

So what are you reading these days?
By Corie Lok Febuary 2005

These days it seems everyone’s blogging. Combine this newest source of information with more traditional online news sources, and you could spend your whole day slogging through lists of bookmarked Web pages just to keep up. Rojo Networks is one of the latest of a bevy of startups trying to help Web users make better sense of this content explosion. The year-and-a-half-old startup’s approach is to help users home in on the most relevant and interesting news and blogs by finding out what others in their online social networks are reading.

in enabling users to draw on the insights of friends, family, colleagues, and others in their social networks, Rojo departs from most of the competition. Rojo users can invite others to sign up for Rojo accounts; those accounts are linked, much like the accounts on the popular website Friendster. Rojo users can see what RSS feeds the members of their networks are reading and which stories they are flagging. Network popularity also affects the ranking of results when the user searches RSS feeds. “We all depend on our community for content discovery,” says Chris Alden, Rojo’s cofounder and CEO. “Any successful media service has to tap into that.”

read article here

Posted by: royby on Jan 25, 05 | 5:14 pm | Profile

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