Congratulations to Rajesh Setty on his launch of Suggestica, a new service described thusly:
Suggestica aims to bring the best suggestions (books, audio, video etc.) from the “Trusted Authorities” in their disciplines. Our goal is to create a new kind of web with less clutter and less noise. We are starting with books but will soon expand to other categories.
Read Rahesh’s post about the release. Wishing him and his team a great successtica!
Reuters reported this:
Time Warner Inc.’s CNN plans to standardize how it solicits and handles user-contributed news amid an industry-wide move to let consumers play a more prominent role in the news gathering process.
The cable news network on Tuesday plans to announce it has created a new program to let users send in digital audio and video from breaking news events in their region. Users can e-mail or upload these so-called “I-Reports” directly from CNN’s site.
Contributions are vetted by seasoned editors much in the same way all news tips are followed up, Susan Bunda, senior vice president of news at CNN/U.S. said in an interview.
A natural evolution for news sources, an idea Dave Winer tossed out 6+ years ago in his famous piece How to Make Money on the Internet. What’s in it for the citizen journalists? Jason Calacanis is offering to pay users for their “user generated content” at Netscape. How about CNN?
According to their submission form: Some of the videos, photos and audio submitted may be selected for use on CNN.com, in CNN television programming or other CNN programming services, so by sending information you are agreeing to our terms of use. What does that terms of use state:
…you hereby grant to CNN a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to edit, telecast, rerun, reproduce, use, syndicate, license, print, sublicense, distribute and otherwise exhibit the materials you submit, or any portion thereof, as incorporated in any of CNN’s programming or the promotion thereof, in any manner and in any medium or forum, whether now known or hereafter devised, without payment to you or any third party.
So CNN now makes it easier for you to send them news and not get any compensation for it. Contrast this with a recent move by Nashville NBC affiliate WKRN-TV which announced this month it would begin paying local bloggers for video.
WKRN president and general manager Mike Sechrist told a “meet-up” of local bloggers that he could envision the day when a daily program would be made up entirely of material submitted by the community.
Now that’s a real “citizen journalism initiative”.
Rice University’s Department of Computer Science has been researching the trackback spam problem, and has released a technical report explaining how their “Validator” system can reduce trackback spam:
The TrackBack protocol, conceived as a way to automatically link together web sites which reference one another, has become a new vector for spammers wishing to divert web surfers to their sites. A site which supports TrackBack allows any entity to inject arbitrary HTML code, plus the URL of the sender, into its pages; an attacker need only follow the TrackBack protocol to exploit the system and leverage such a site in a link farm. Current approaches to combating TrackBack spam are limited to content-based filters (of the sort currently used against email and weblog comment spam). In this paper, we propose a way to identify TrackBack spam by considering the relationship between the sender’s URL and the site under attack. In particular, we observe that, for spam TrackBacks, the page at the given URL does not link to the page to which the TrackBack was sent. We have developed software for weblog authors that rejects TrackBacks from sources lacking this reciprocal link. Data collected from our users demonstrates that this test is 100% accurate at identifying and separating spam from legitimate TrackBacks.
This concept, validating a trackback by checking to see if the URL for the sender trackback actually contains the URL of its recipient. Sort of like reverse trackback autodiscovery… It would certainly help to identify trackback spam and spammers. But for larger blog providers or blogs which receive a lot of trackback spam it might be a pretty big job both in terms of CPU and bandwidth to check back on all the incoming links…
An intermediary to handle this kind of thing might be useful… Maybe an API to query a service, feed the service an XML-RPC query with 2 URLs, the permalink and the trackback URL, and the service responds with a response code: 0 means I know that the permalink is not contained at the trackback URL, 1 means I know it is contained at the trackback URL, 2 means I haven’t yet checked the trackback URL but will add it to the queue… TrackbackValidator.com, perhaps? Couldn’t help myself, had to register the domain (as Dave Winer often notes, not all of the good domains are already taken) … Now I just need some help in building it.
One other thing of note in this paper which needs some exploring:
We also considered the textual content of TrackBack spam. Many independent victims often received very similar TrackBacks spams, including similar or identical text and URLs (including typographical errors and other “chaff” designed to thwart content-filters), from disparate IP addresses. This leads us to believe that, just as email spammers do, TrackBack spammers rely on botnets: innocent PCs around the Internet under control of the spammer due to virus infection or other remote security exploit. Attempts to estimate the number of active TrackBack spammers based on these recurring spam profiles are beyond the scope of this paper.
Patterns of trackback spam I’ve seen would lead me to believe that trackback spammers have indeed been using this technique for some time…
Came across 2 pieces today on the topic of real estate blogging, so I had to come out of my own personal blogging hibernation to note them…
In Blogs can create covert real estate marketing, Glenn Roberts Jr. writes:
Russ Cofano, a real estate lawyer and consultant and an avid blogger who maintains the RealtyObjectives.com blog and contributes to other blogs, said real estate professionals miss the boat when they plug property listings into their blogs.
“In my opinion … that is the cardinal sin. People can find listing information anywhere they want to get it on the Internet. Blogging is about opinion and honesty and insight.”
Des Walsh was also talking about real estate blogs today. He noted these examples of realtors blogging:
Des also found a great resource, a downloadable free guide for real estate agents thinking about creating their own blog.
And if you are a local real estate office, why don’t you contact us about the Affinity Blogging program we’re developing… Maybe we can help you get your whole office blogging… 😉
Maybe the greatest benefit I get from running BlogHarbor is that we have such great customers and I have the privelege of meeting with them from time to time. Rajesh Setty is a passionate, intelligent, generous, insightful, and inspirational man who started blogging with us just prior to the release of his book Life Beyond Code. I had the opportunity to meet Rajesh for lunch on a gorgeous afternoon during the fall ISPCon show last year, and learned a lot from him in a very short time.
Rajesh has just released a free 40-page eBook called Personal Branding for Technology Professionals, the subtitle of which is Distinguish Yourself and Thrive!. This book, not only free but released under a Creative Commons license, outlines the 12 personal branding challenges which might be preventing you from developing your personal brand in this increasingly competitive industry. I was struck by this passage in the book:
…I still remember that date. On February 14th, I started blogging at Life Beyond Code. John Keegan at BlogHarbor helped set up the blog, and he continues to provide me with all the support on the technology-front related to the blog, so that I can just focus on my writing.
Thanks for reminding me what a blessing it is to be involved in a business that can have such positive influences on people’s lives. I looked it up, yes it was February 14, 2005…
Read this book!
I did a short email interview last month with Carl Burnham, author of WEB HOSTING, A Complete Strategy on the topic of blogs in the web hosting industry. Carl’s article Blogging for Business was just published in the April 2006 edition of Web Host Industry Review and I am very grateful that some of our exchange appeared in the magazine. One of our very forward looking BlogHarbor customers, Perceptric Media, got a great mention in the article. Here’s some of what I wrote to Carl:
How are you currently utilizing blogs as part of your hosting solutions (especially businesses)?
Absolutely, we’re utilizing blogs as part of our hosting solutions for businesses. Your question in fact brings to mind the approach of one of our more visionary customers, Perceptric Media. This company launched in November 2005 and in their statement here they noted the following:
With a focus on areas where the first tectonic shifts of change are taking place, the Perceptric company website is built entirely as a blog; www.perceptric.com. That’s a change Perceptric is advising every company to implement immediately.
The company decided to forego the traditional static website and implement their site as a blog right from the start. Of course we were there to provide them with the typical ancillary hosting services such as email and DNS to pull it all together, but the real insight here is that they did not view a blog as a supplement to their website, they saw the blog as a way to communicate more directly with their market. One of the founders wrote on that announcement:
“Intimate conversations between companies and markets are accelerating. Every company has to answer a binary question – Do they ignore what is being said about them, or tell their side of the story. The only way to be in the conversation is to use the tools – pods, vlogs, and blogs. Marketing and customer relationships experience deep change because it true transparency emerges.”
So we do see that more businesses are choosing to implement blogs for a variety of reasons.
What are the most popular features/functions requested by customers?
We like to say that weblogs are the “content management systems for the rest of us.” So when it comes to weblogs, there are a pretty standard set of CMS-like features that our customers are looking for: easy to use rich text editing, categories, file uploads, photo albums, RSS syndication, disk space, design customizability, etc. But when they learn that in this price range there is multiple author support, restricted categories, and a user- and group-based permissions system, that is really the big surprise, especially for businesses. The ability for users to create intranet and extranet style websites based on weblogging technology really changes the web hosting landscape.
Dave Winer, the creator of RSS, today released the preliminary spec for OPML 2.0 today. OPML, which stands for Outline Processor Markup Language, is a format which allows the creation of outlines, one function of which is to facilitate the portability of lists of RSS feeds among RSS newsreaders. Dave himself defines OPML as “an XML-based format that allows exchange of outline-structured information between applications running on different operating systems and environments.”
One application of OPML is as a reading list, which Dave defines as follows:
A reading list is an OPML document that contains a list of feeds. The NewsRiver aggregator, which runs as a Tool inside the OPML Editor, has been extended so that users can subscribe to reading lists. When the editor of a reading list adds a feed, subscribers to the list will automatically read that feed in every scan. Likewise, when a feed is removed, it will no longer be read in a scan. It’s a way for readers to delegate the act of subscribing to experts in subjects they are interested in.
Steven Cohen posted More on OPML and Reading Lists yesterday. Steven wrote:
…Another potential use for Reading Lists, this time in education. Many professors are assigning blogs as required reading. If they want to add blogs during the course of the semester (or if the students want to add others), theyt could create a Reading List and update as needed. The students’ aggregators (they would have to be compatible with Reading Lists of course) will automatically update with the new blogs. No excuse for not reading assignments (“I totally forgot to add that feed to my aggregator”).
I responded:
There is a problem with using OPML source files as something that the end users aggregator is expected to consume… Assume your reading list has 25 sources on it, you’re asking the reader to check 25 RSS feeds to find updates. There’s a lot of inefficiency in that approach; you can look at it from a number of angles and see that it doesn’t scale well.
The solution is that OPML files need to be able to be used as the source for aggregated RSS feeds. The professor doesn’t assign an OPML as a reading list, except perhaps to note the source OPML file as a kind of bibliography, she assigns an RSS feed… The RSS feed is the aggregate of the RSS feeds in the OPML reading list.
Now the students, and their end user RSS readers, check one source for the “River of News” derived from the sources defined in the OPML list. The professor is free to update sources as he or she sees fit, and the RSS feed derived from that source list will automatically see the changes.
In this manner, there’s no need for student’s aggregators to be “compatible with Reading Lists”. The question becomes: How can the professor create an aggregated RSS feed from a source list of feeds contained in an OPML file?
Hopefully, the RSS search and aggregation web services will create services which allow users to specify an OPML file, preferably a remote one so you can simply keep your OPML file on your own server, and have an RSS feed created which is the aggregate of all of the RSS feeds specified in that OPML. These services are already tracking the majority of RSS feeds in the blogosphere, so they are the best candidates for being able to create such aggregated feeds…
We already do see some movement in this direction. Technorati now offers their Favorites feature, which creates aggregated feeds from OPML source files. Blogdigger offers Blogdigger Groups. The killer features for such a service, from my perspective of course, would be:
Oh, and while we’re at it, shouldn’t there be a new namespace for RSS where we can indicate the source URL for an OPML file from which an aggregated feed is generated? I can see lots of uses for that; it essentially becomes the bibliography or credits list…
Des Walsh has just released his 7 Step Business Blog book and website. I got to read an advance copy and provided Des with some feedback prior to publication. I am quoted:
This excellent introduction to business blogging explains to business owners how blogs can benefit their business, and does it in plain English without getting bogged down in insider-only jargon. If your business is not blogging, then you need to read this book to find out how your competitors are already adopting blogs and blogging technologies to grow their businesses.
And I really did say that. 😉 It’s a great book for small business owners who are lookin for an answer to the question, So what is this blog thing all about anyway? If you’re already blogging, you “get it” already so you’re probably not the market for this book, but if you’re running a business, group, or organization and are not yet clear on what the benefits to blogging are, then you should probably take a look at Des’ ebook.
Des wrote an interesting post yeasterday called Why My 7 Step Business Blog Book Recommends BlogHarbor. Des says he “raised a few eyebrows among blogging colleagues by making Blogware, as provided by BlogHarbor, the recommended platform for business bloggers in the book.” Apparently, some of his colleagues felt it was curious that Des recommended BlogHarbor and not one of the other platforms that a higher proportion of the blogosphere uses… Perhaps the reason was something that Des said later in his post:
I’m also providing some bonuses with the book, including a secure, book purchasers only, section (category) on the new 7 Step Business Blog blogsite, where members will be able to get more information and leave questions.
That statement should give some clue to Des’ blogging colleagues about what makes BlogHarbor different, and yes, much better for some needs, than those other platforms. I don’t even think Des realized that not all blogging platforms offer things like:
So Des can offer exclusive access to content on private categories via his blog, with a full User/Group permission model which allows him to not only provide access to restricted categories but to provide authorship privileges to any user or group. If you’re interested in reading more about this powerful security model, check out some of our help pages:
Or maybe it’s for none of those reasons. Des himself says it was just about the great support…
Audioblog, which is not just for audio, announced unmetered bandwidth pricing last week.
This is a really great service for podcasters and video bloggers. Audioblog makes it easy for your visitors to consume your audio and video content by wrapping it up in a customizable player that can be embedded right into your blog content. You can record to your Audioblog account right through a web browser, or upload files you created on your own. Even cooler is the fact that you can call a special telephone number and create recordings that will be automatically posted to your blog – podcasts on the go! It's easy to use and compatible with almost all major blog platforms; we first documented how to use Audioblog on BlogHarbor back in May 2004.
So the big news here is that Audioblog is offering pricing based on unmetered bandwidth plans from at $9.95 per month with 500 MB of disk space storage. This is a fantastic value for podcasters or videocasters who were concerned about the affordability of popularity. Highly recommended, free trials are available.
Yeah, this reads like an ad. It's not, I'm just a fan and we have lots of podcasters at BlogHarbor who have been looking for something like this for a long time. They're creating podcasts but are hesitant to get serious about it out of concerns that they can't afford the cost of bandwidth of even a moderately popular podcast or video blog, and are hesitant to use one of the free file downloading services, since they understand there's probably a legitimate reason that the phrase You get what you pay for was coined. Now there's a real player out there, one that knows this space better than any other, that has a solution for them.
News about Edgeio is trickling out, Business Week says the following about this upcoming service:
…Edgeio is doing just what its tagline says: gathering “listings from the edge”–classified-ad listings in blogs, and even online product content in newspapers and Web stores, and creating a new metasite that organizes those items for potential buyers.
The way Edgeio works is that bloggers would post items they want to sell right on their blogs, tagging them with the word “listing” (and eventually other descriptive tags). Then, Edgeio will pluck them as it constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the “listing” tag and index them on Edgeio.com.
Sounds great. Exciting and cool in fact. But reread that last line there: constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the “listing” tag. When will the weight of all these search engines indexing blogs start to affect the price of blogging?
Yesterday on this obscure blog 15% of the access was from RSS readers and aggregators, 28% from search engine robots. 18 different crawlers visited yesterday alone. There are more than a few of these robots that come in daily and hit 60-80 pages whether anything’s been updated or not, and I’m sure there are bloggers who are seeing higher ratios of access from robots and crawlers.
If as Dave Sifry of Technorati says, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5-6 months, will services requiring blog indexing grow at the same rate? Will 70+ crawlers be visiting this site daily in a year’s time? 300 crawlers a day 2 years from now?
Bloggers pay the cost for the bandwidth consumed by all of this search engine indexing either directly or indirectly. Bandwidth is not free, a blog hosting provider has to pay for it and must recoup the cost of bandwidth (and the other costs associated with blog hosting) either by subscription fees or by placing advertising on their blogs.
Doesn’t it seem inevitable that the explosion of blog indexing services will eventually have an effect on the price of blog hosting services?
Maybe there’s a better way to do this… Bob Wyman said the following last year on this post:
I’m hoping that Yahoo!’s support for the FeedMesh will convince folk that services that might otherwise compete can see clear advantage in cooperating to ensure that the task of discovering blogs and updates to blogs is shared among all parties. We’ll still compete… It’s just that we’ll compete based on the quality of the services we provide rather than just on how many blogs we monitor.
If this idea was extended to not only the discovery of blogs and updates, but the nature of those updates, perhaps the bandwidth pressure on blogs can be alleviated? What if there were a mirroring service, a Blog Cacher, that monitored the FeedMesh for update notfications and stored a copy of the blog pages and feeds for use exclusively by the blog search services?
Access to the cached or mirrored copy would be restricted to blog indexing services, ensuring that the general public only sees the “original”. Make it opt-in, let the blog owner choose to request that search engines access the cached copy, maybe via a simple file uploaded to the root directory of the blog, a robots.txt style service.
And how would this Blog Cacher service pay for itself… How would it monetize itself? Hmmm… That’s a good question, I can see a few different models… And I’m sure you can too… I’d be surprised if we didn’t see such a service by the end of the year.
Update: Blog Cacher sounded pretty cool, I couldn’t resist registering blogcacher.com. 😉
Update 2005/02/24: Looks like there’s been some work done on an API called the RSS Cloud interface, which would allow updates to an RSS feed to be sent to “interested parties.” Would be a great place to start for blog caching service…
There you have it, my Super Bowl prediction: Seahawks will win 31-28. I am not predicting any major wardrobe malfunctions.
Update 2/6: Good thing I didn’t put any money on the game. One thing: Is it just me or has there been an outbreak in the use of the phrase “perfect storm”?
Via the Blog Herald, I came across this article Imagining the Google Future on CNNMoney:
U.S. companies still devote more ad dollars to the Yellow Pages than to the Internet (which accounts for less than 5 percent of overall ad spending). Yet Americans now spend more than 30 percent of their media-consuming time surfing the Web. When the ad dollars catch up to the trend, a mountain of cash awaits, and Google is positioned like no one else to scoop it up.
Hmmm… According to this research, total US spending on advertising in 2006 is expected to be around $152 billion, with Internet ads taking about 9.1% of that which would be around $14 billion.
Online: Where The Growth Is from BusinessWeek on Dec. 26, 2005 called the Yellow Pages market “among the hottest media bets” and noted it was $15 billion a year market. The article noted:
Analysts at Kelsey Group forecast that $5 billion of locally targeted, small-business advertising will move online by 2009. But Yellow Pages companies have two things Web companies like: Internet-like margins of 40% or more and armies of local sales reps — which portals don’t have — to sell advertising to small companies that lack tech savvy.
So it looks like the market size of the two is similar at this point in time, with Yellow Pages having a slight edge. Will the presence of sales reps be enough to transform Yellow Pages into a gateway to online advertising?
Performancing for Firefox is a Firefox extension which builds a blogging client right into your web browser. Version 1.1 was just released, which fixed some bugs with the MetaWeblog API support so now the extension can post to BlogHarbor weblogs. The software is described by the company:
Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right in your Firefox browser and lets you post to your blog easiy. You can drag and drop formatted text from the page you happen to be browsing, and take notes as well as post to your blog.
I’m posting this using the Performancing for Firefox extension… Works well, though I’d love to see them replace their rich text editor with the far superior Xinha (check out an example of the Xinha web-based HTML editor here).
Technorati Tags: Performancing, BlogHarbor, Firefox, Xinha
There are lots of fields and parks along the river in Fuji, Japan.
A stroll through the neighborhood back in November.