Tag: blogs

2005 Canadian Blog Awards

Post ImageIt seems that I have been nominated for the 2005 Canadian Blog Awards in the category of Best Blog, according to my Dad, who has been nominated in the category of Best Photo Blog:

I have been lucky enough to be nominated for the 2005 Canadian Blog Awards in the category of Best Photo Blog. There are many derserving nominations there. Have a look at the awards and give me your vote as the Best Photo Blog if you think that I am deserving.

My son Mack (MasterMaq) has also been nominated in the category of Best Blog. Again, there are many worthy nominations in that category but I think that MasterMaq does an excellent job of giving information and his personal insight on just about anything. While you are over at the Canadian Blog Awards voting for me you might as well vote for him at the same time.

Round one voting is underway now, and round two voting is supposed to start on December 3rd. Even if you don’t want to vote, you should check out the site as you’ll probably discover a great blog you didn’t know existed.

Read: EclecticBlogs

The New Splog

Post ImageBack in April of 2004 I was posting about something I called “splogging“. Basically it was the repeated and never-ending activity of leaving comments on someone’s blog post, essentially, spam comments. At the time, it was funny, because I was using this against friends! Eventually spam comments became a real problem, and it was no longer funny. I first experienced huge amounts of spam on my blog in October of 2004, which forced me to introduce a Human Interaction Proof control, commonplace on the web now.

The term splog is changing though. No longer does it mean spam comments (which, fortunately have declined in numbers). Instead, it refers to fake blogs setup for the sole purpose of creating link farms. Here’s what the sploggers do:

The splogger executed a script that ran searches on blog search engines for specific keywords, said [PubSub’s Bob] Wyman, notably names of some of the A-list bloggers, like Dave Winer and Chris Pirillo. Then the splogger took the results, went to Blogger-BlogSpot and, using the service’s application programming interface, or API, automatically created tens of thousands of blogs that contained text from the bloggers’ real Web sites, Wyman said, along with links to the mortgage and other sites.

People querying the well-known bloggers’ names in blog search engines, and people who track these bloggers and their write-ups via services like PubSub, Technorati and Feedster, then received feeds to the fake blogs, jamming RSS readers with useless links, Wyman said.

I am by no means an A-list blogger, but I have noticed it happening to me too. If you search Google for mastermaq, the results are littered with results for fake blogs. Most of the ones that affect searches for me are not hosted at Blogspot, but some are. And that’s where most of the problem has originated from.

The problem has gotten really bad lately, as described in the CNET News.com article I quoted above. Who knows what will happen, but we need a resolution! To get things started, Chris Pirillo has posted Ten Suggestions for Google’s Blogspot. I particularly like suggestions two and six – no brainers in my opinion.

Read: CNET News.com

AOL Buys Weblogs Inc.

Post ImageNews has been circulating since late last night that AOL has purchased Weblogs Inc. which publishes an entire network of blogs, including the very popular Engadget. Terms of the deal aren’t yet known, but various bloggers have been suggesting anywhere from $25 to $40 million USD, which certainly makes sense as the company makes at least $1 million in annual revenue from Google AdSense alone:

Weblogs, a privately held Santa Monica, Calif.-based company, operates 85 blogs with subjects ranging from parents to technology to film. AOL said Thursday that it will integrate the blogs throughout its network, such as within its television, travel and personal-finance channels.

“This…combination allows our audiences to be able to do a ‘deep-dive’ into a vast array of compelling topics that keep them interested and entertained on our network of properties, day after day,” Jim Bankoff, executive vice president of AOL’s programming and products, said in a statement.

While I think it’s a smart purchase for AOL, I am surprised quite frankly. My thoughts are more in line with Nick Denton’s:

Nick Denton, publisher of blogging site Gawker.com, was skeptical of the deal. “The whole point about blogs is that they’re not part of big media. Consolidation defeats the purpose. It’s way too early,” he said, adding that Gawker is not for sale.

That said, the deal will give AOL a very heavily trafficked collection of content properties, which of course is great for advertising dollars. What does this mean for the rumored Microsoft-AOL deal? My guess is that if anything was on the table, this deal won’t have much of an impact.

The downside to the deal is that Engadget and others will probably be peppered with Netscape and AOL advertisements. Not looking forward to that!

Regardless, as Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calacanis posted:

You’ve got…blogs!

Read: CNET News.com

Google launches Blog Search

Post ImageGoogle today unveiled Blog Search, which as you might expect searches blogs and is in beta:

While Google web search has allowed you to limit results to popular blog file types such as RSS and XML in web search results for some time, and its news search includes some blogs as sources, Google hasn’t had a specialized tool to surface purely blog postings. In fact, while all of the major search engines have been dabbling with blog and feed search, none has done much with blog search until now.

Google’s new service (in beta, naturally) is available both at google.com/blogsearch and search.blogger.com. Google blog search scans content posted to blogs and feeds in virtually real-time, according to Jason Goldman, Google product manager for blog search. “We look for sites that update pinging services, and then we crawl in real-time so that we can serve up search results that are as fresh as we can,” said Goldman.

Google defines blogs as sites that use RSS and other structured feeds and update content on a regular basis.

Yet another entry into the growing list of blog search engines. Unfortunately, Google’s new Blog Search doesn’t seem to do anything special. It looks and acts like Google though, which make it attractive for a quick search. Can’t help but wonder when the MSN and Yahoo versions will come out now.

Read: SearchEngineWatch

Predicting Katrina

Post ImageNow that the blame game is well underway in the United States and especially in New Orleans, it’s interesting to see who predicted Katrina and who did not. Surely someone must have known it was coming right? In fact, lots of people did, including Brendan Loy:

One of the earliest and perhaps clearest alarms about Hurricane Katrina’s potential threat to New Orleans was sounded not by the Weather Channel or a government agency but by a self-described weather nerd sitting on a couch in Indiana with a laptop computer and a remote control.

“At the risk of being alarmist, we could be 3-4 days away from an unprecedented cataclysm that could kill as many as 100,000 people in New Orleans,” Brendan Loy, who is 23 and has no formal meteorological training, wrote on Aug. 26 in his blog, irishtrojan.com. “If I were in New Orleans, I would seriously consider getting the hell out of Dodge right now, just in case.”

I think it’s pretty interesting that in 2005, someone can make a prediction like that and post it to the Internet for all to see. Unfortunately, this also highlights a current shortcoming of the blogosphere – finding interesting and meaningful posts as soon as they are created is still difficult at best.

Read: New York Times

Upgraded to CS 1.1

I upgraded my blog to the new version of Community Server this afternoon. If you encounter any problems, let me know. Also, if you’re upgrading your own CS installation from 1.0 to 1.1, and you use the MetaBlog API, here is the download. For some reason, the CS and Telligent sites still link to the old version.

Read: Community Server

Pinging with Pingoat

Post ImageSpeaking of web feeds, how about spreading the word about your web feed? One of the best ways is to use a pinging service. I came across a new one tonight called Pingoat (hat tip to Mark Evans) and I quite like it – it’s so fast! What in the world is Pingoat?

Pingoat is a service that pings or notifies a number of services that keep track of weblogs and publish them. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog has been updated and hence, they crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents, thus increasing your blog’s popularity.

The other cool thing about Pingoat is that it supports a huge list of pinging services – far larger than Pingomatic. Check it out!

Read: Pingoat

Better Blog Search

Post ImageReporting on a Blogspotting interview with Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher, Mark Evans thinks that the blog search market is “ripe for Google to steal the business”:

Fletcher’s hitting exactly on what I’ve been harping on for months that there has to be a better mousetrap for blog search. Despite all the attention it receives, Technorati – with all due respect – is being overwhelmed by its willingness to post everything and anything. Someone really smart is going to come up with an algorith/methodology that combines a blog’s traffic, relevancy and high ratings to product superior and effective blog search results.

I disagree.

One of the greatest features of Technorati is that it shows what everyone is saying right now (ignoring their growing pains). Why should my search results or the tag page only show content from the so-called A-Listers (that’s what you’re getting at with traffic, “ratings”, and to a lesser extent “relevancy”)? Their content should not be given priority over anyone elses. It’s not like PubSub only watches the A-List feeds, nor does Weblogs.com only show when the A-Listers have updated their blogs.

I’ve talked about the definiton of blogs before (via Jeff Jarvis): Blogs are the voices of citizens in conversation.

Why should the conversation be limited to or enhanced for a select few? The so-called A-Listers already have problems with including everyone else, we don’t need a search engine to make things worse.

Perhaps what’s required is not better search results, but better ways of viewing and interacting with those results so that they are more meaningful and can be processed more efficiently.

Read: Mark Evans

Talking about Technorati

Post ImageLots of discussion going on right now about Technorati. This piece by Doc Searls does a very good job of bringing you up to speed on what has been said in the last few days. What kind of blogger would I be if I didn’t add my two cents?

One thing I like about Technorati is that they are not afraid to setup special sites, like they did for both Live 8 and the London attacks. I think that bringing all of that information onto a single aggregated page is useful. However, like Jeremy, I find that Technorati really lags behind the other services in terms of accuracy. I subscribe to keyword feeds from Feedster, Technorati, Pubsub and BlogPulse, and I would honestly rank Technorati at the bottom of those services. The others find more items, and they generally find them much faster. Actually I am somewhat amazed at how one service can find a post and the others won’t. Happens more often than you’d think.

I have also been disappointed with the service provided by Technorati. My site has not shown up in their Tags feature for a long time, so I sent a couple of support emails. I never heard back though. The only thing I got was an automated response, and nothing further. It’s frustrating. Note the date:

I sent one more recently too, but never heard back from that one either.

I like Technorati, and I have long been a user, I just think that whether they mean to or not, they create far too many opportunities for improvement for themselves.

Read: Technorati

Huffington Post Update

When I last wrote about the Huffington Post, I expressed that it seemed like a very cool experiment. It has now been just over a week since the site launched, and I thought it would be good to take another look.

I’ve been subscribed ever since it started, and let me tell you, there’s never a shortage of content. There are always new items popping up in my aggregator, so I rather like that. There are a few things I don’t like about the feed however:

  • On the newswire posts, you have to click through to the website to get the link to the story. Major pain! Link to the story from within the post please!
  • The posts come down into my aggregator with the Author name, so including that name again before the content of the post seems redundant. Might be required for online aggregators though?
  • I subscribe to the raw feed, so I get blog posts and news items. It would be nice if they appeared different somehow.

I suppose I haven’t really decided whether or not I like the content. I have found a few interesting posts, but I find you have to dig a bit. I’m not the only one with comments on the site though! Larry Borsato notes:

Let’s face it though, the Huffington Post isn’t much of a blog; they don’t have comments or trackbacks, so they aren’t really trying to engage in a conversation. They have a user agreement, and they are protectionist about copyright, though they do acknowledge fair use (since they expect to use the content of others). It’s more like a celebrities-only op-ed page, and the don’t accept letters from readers.

Good point. Blogging is all about the conversation, and it’s a shame that the Huffington Post is doing such a good job of stifling that. The problem is noted on the Neo Warmonger blog too.

Actually most of the comments I have seen so far have been negative. But I suppose we’re still talking about the site, and that’s all Arianna and her friends can ask for. How does the saying go? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Is there a similar saying for parody? Check out Huffington’s Toast. Ah that made me laugh 🙂

Read: Huffington Post