As you may or may not be aware, Typepad has been experiencing some troubles as of late.

Since I run BlogHarbor, a hosted weblogging service, and our service is in roughly the same space as Typepad, I thought I’d take a few moments to run down my reaction, as one excellent customer of our BlogHarbor service asked me privately – jokingly – if I would want to gloat over the troubles they are having…

I would not want to gloat over the troubles, not merely because we’ve had our own performance issues in the past, and I certainly know how difficult it can be to solve them quickly and provide timely information to our customers during such times.

In fact, we’re currently in a development cycle aimed at increasing the performance, scalability, and reliability of our service for this very reason: individuals and businesses depend on their sites. These are not vanity weblogs; they are run by people who are serious and passionate about their weblogs, regardless of whether they are for personal or business use.

But I would not want to gloat mainly for the reason that I think some bloggers are drawing the wrong conclusions from this situation.

Some Typepad users are asking if Typepad is the wrong tool for business bloggers. I think these folks are asking the wrong question.

First, the alternative that some people here are proposing is that business bloggers should switch to WordPress… And they do in fact mean WordPress the “find a hosting company to host it and then download it and install it and make sure you maintain it” WordPress, not the hosted version.

That really doesn’t make sense at all.

I’ve been a web developer for over a decade and doing all the downloading and installing and debugging and maintaining would certainly be within the realm of my expertise.

But how about the typical small or medium sized business that simply wants a reliable blogsite: the do it yourself WordPress may be free as in speech, but not free as in beer. It will still cost you money to host your blog.

It will now cost someone some time – and that someone will likely be billing for their time – to do the downloading and installing. When a vulnerability is discovered or a bug found and that Word Press install needs an upgrade, someone is going to have to do that maintenance.

Don’t forget most Word Press installs will be on a shared hosting server. Any of the other users of that shared server start hogging CPU time and the performance of your site will suffer. Are you sure you would want to take that risk? Isn’t that why you claimed leaving a hosted blogging service was necessary for your business?

On a hosted platform like ours which is built to handle thousands of simultaneous sessions for hundreds of thousands (or more!) of blogs, your blog will not be affected by someone else’s sudden popularity.

If another user of your shared server affecting your site’s performance or availability is not something you want to risk, then you should probably get yourself a dedicated server, right? ServerBeach, EV1 Servers, Rackspace are all great companies which can lease you a dedicated server. Expect to pay $150/month for a small server or $300 to $400 a month and up for something with lots of RAM and a redundant RAID drive array. I mean, it is your business, right? You’re not going to skimp here. That RAID controller is a necessity in the event of a drive failure!

And if you’re not already experienced in managing a dedicated server, don’t forget to factor in the cost of having a professional Linux admin manage that server! Wait until you have to wake them up in the middle of the night because the server is getting flaky. You’re going to love that bill.

Our administrators are already monitoring your site around the clock.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many folks for whom WordPress (or any other download-and-install-it software) will be a perfect fit. It’s a great product. I met Matt, the Word Press lead developer, at Gnomedex this year and I was amazed at his commitment to doing the right thing for his users and the net in general. But just because WordPress is right for some people doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right for you.

Typepad burped for a few days, but that is not a reason to dismiss hosted blogging for your business out of hand. If you’re a very large company that is already paying an IT staff to be on call 24/7 and manage hardware and software, then very little of this applies to you. Your business has already made the investment and can amortize it accordingly. Word Press or Movable Type may be right for you.

But chances are a good managed hosting provider is going to be able to give your blog far more attention and work harder to keep it online and performing well than you personally would be able to, and for orders of magnitude less money per month.

And if your provider can’t do that, then look around for another managed hosting provider who can… Our BlogHarbor service can import your Typepad content. 😉

Technorati Tags: BlogHarbor, Typepad

“Multitentacled giant jellyfish of up to 200 kilograms and with diameters of up to 2 meters” are invading Japan. Seriously.

Coming out of my blog hibernation to link to this article from the Asbury Park Press, explaining how students at Pope John XIII Regional High School in Sparta, NJ were told to remove their “Myspace.com accounts or similar sites with personal profiles and blogs” or their they would face suspension.

An attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks that “the real motivation for school officials was to suppress negative comments about the school posted by students.”

What do you think? Do schools have a right to ban students from blogging?

(Saw this link via Blogging Baby. Yes. What can I say, I want to be a good dad.)

I’ve been asked a few times now by journalists about the NOFOLLOW attribute and whether it has had any effect on blog spam… For the record, here’s my opinion…

There seems to be a general misconception about the NOFOLLOW attribute, that implementing it would somehow reduce comment or trackback spam.

The sole purpose of the NOFOLLOW attribute is to let search engines know not to follow and index a given link. It lets the search engine know that the link is not trustworthy, so don’t give it any extra “PageRank” as a result of being here. So a link tagged with NOFOLLOW on the comment section of a blog with a high ranking at Google does not bestow any extra status to the target of that link. The theory was that if spammers or abuser knew that the comment would not help them gain ranking at google, they would simply stop spamming…

Google had a problem – it’s search engine results were being thrown off by the commenting system on blogs. Comments were being spammed, and this was throwing off their ranking system. So they got the bloggers to fix it by effectively deleting those links from the page (at least as far as the search engine sees it) through the use of NOFOLLOW…

NOFOLLOW will not significantly reduce comment or trackback spam.

Some of the “a list” bloggers talk about NOFOLLOW being of benefit to them since they can now link to sites without necessarily helping them increase their ranking in Google, but the typical blogger won’t be affected by this at all. The average blogger doesn’t really care about giving his so-called “Googlejuice” to an undeserving linker, he doesn’t have much to begin with.

That typical blogger just wants to know if using NOFOLLOW will reduce the amount of spam heaped on his blog. Unfortunately, the answer is no. Won’t help at all…

Woah. I’ve been trying to be more of a thinkblogger than a linkblogger but saw this post where Rubel throws down the gauntlet at Microsoft.

Dear Microsoft, I am Dumping You:

Today, the Web is where the action is. It’s the new OS. This means I can safely return to my old flame – the Mac – and yet still experience most, if not all of the hot new applications that are being built on AJAX on my new 15″ G4 PowerBook. In addition, I don’t have to put up with patches, viruses, spyware, slowdowns, bloated registries anymore. And if I need to have a one night stand with you, I always have that option. You’re on call.

This may just be a post for the ages. Steve Rubel clearly makes the statement that Web 2.0 is where it’s at, the appliance you use to get at Web 2.0 no longer matters…

This is a defining moment, my friends. Let’s have fun and don’t forget to enjoy the ride!

I attended a lively discussion on Friday night 6/24/2005 at Gnomedex on the subject of the FeedMesh. There were some questions and concerns raised at the get-together, as well as the feeling that there were other parties interested in the concept besides the developers of blog search engines and aggregators who might wish to know a little bit more about this project, so I decided to write a little piece about what I know about FeedMesh with the hope that anyone who can provide additional information or clarification will do so by commenting or trackbacking. I hope that this article provides a little background for both developers and content creators and I am very much looking forward to hearing from anyone who can clarify any of the points in this article. Perhaps some of the FeedMesh members who are more active with the technical details will post on their blogs and send a trackback if they can provide further details about the workings of the FeedMesh.

To be clear, I am not sure if you would say that I am a member (though I did get a nice t-shirt – thanks Bob!) or our company is a member of FeedMesh; though we do contribute pings by the nature of being a blogging service and also consume them for business processes. Better to describe us as supporters of the idea and volunteers to help facilitate its success as we feel that the idea behind FeedMesh has the potential to be of great benefit to the entire blogging community.

Introduction

Bloggers inform the various blog search and aggregation services that their blog has been updated by sending these services a ping, a simple form of notification that says, essentially and quite simply, Hey! I just updated my blog. Check it out! Once a service has received a ping, it can access the blog and index any updated content it discovers.

The process of pinging alleviates the need for blog search engines to regularly visit blogs to discover changes; Pings allow the blogger to notify the search engines when changes have occurred. This helps search engines be more efficient, as they can distribute their resources to index blogs in a more timely fashion.

It didn’t always work this way. Back in the beginning of blogging history, Dave Winer’s Weblogs.Com began compiling a publicly accessible list of updated weblogs. He allowed bloggers to register their weblog, and the Weblogs.Com server would periodically check the blogs which had registered for updates to their RSS feeds.

As the number of blogs became too numerous for this approach to continue, a new design was needed. Dave defined the concept of a ping in September 2001 and on October 23, 2001 redesigned Weblogs.Com to use pings in order to learn which weblogs had been updated. So it was now the blog/blogger’s responsibility to send notification via pings that it had been updated rather than wait for a service like Weblogs.Com to visit them for updates.

Changes.xml

In addition to receiving ping notifications that blogs had been updated and publishing them on the Weblogs.Com site, Dave Winer also created an XML specification and published a list of the changes he had received in XML format; that file is still being published to this day at http://www.weblogs.com/changes.xml. The file is updated at regular intervals and lists recently updated weblogs and the time that their ping was received

Another service called blo.gs was created by Jim Winstead in 2002 as a directory of recently updated weblogs. This service was also pingable, and thousands of blogs began notifying this service when they updated. Blo.gs also began publishing a changes.xml file listing blogs which had been updated.

Many services began using the data in these changes.xml files to determine which weblogs to add to their search indexes and aggregation services, and other services such as Blogrolling.com also started publishing changes.xml files. The distribution of update notifications via changes.xml files provided the initial data for companies like Feedster and Technorati to create their services.

The Cloud interface

Blo.gs later created an alternative to the changes.xml format which allowed them to pass along real-time notifications of the pings they had received. Blo.gs called this their cloud interface and published some sample code for receiving that data in November 2004. At the same time, they announced that they would no longer publish updates via their changes.xml file; updates would only be sent through the cloud interface in 2005.

PubSub also began deploying the cloud interface in December 2004 and released open source software for both reception from and transmission into the cloud interface. In January 2005 they began working with blo.gs to share information about blog updates.

PubSub currently maintains a publically accessible streaming list of notifications via the cloud interface. Blo.gs’ cloud interface was publically accessible until June 14, 2005 when it was officially announced that the service was purchased by Yahoo; access to their cloud interface now requires submission of a form requesting the ability to access this stream.

Enter Feedmesh

Unfortunately, as more services are created which can benefit by ping notification, and since bloggers also welcome these new services for the benefits they provide, it becomes increasingly unrealistic to expect that individual blogs will ping tens or hundreds of services as they create new content. What is needed is a way for new and existing services to share with each other the update notifications they receive.

The concept of the Feedmesh apparently originated at an event called Foo Camp in September 2004. Sam Ruby was a participant, and he called the FeedMesh a “peering network” for decentralized web(site|log) update notifications and content distribution. The initial description for such a service posted by Sam called for a single URI for people to ping (feedmesh.org?) which would be backed by the members of the “peering network” via round robin DNS.

Current discussions seem to center around the concept of peering arrangements, where services who become FeedMesh members share the pings they receive with other members. This would allow bloggers to ping one service, and be assured that their ping would be passed on to all the FeedMesh members.

Ping-o-matic debuted on April 20, 2004 as a way to solve these same problems that the FeedMesh tries to solve, but to solve them from the users perspective rather than the aggregator’s. Ping-o-matic could be described as a “repinger”, as they will receive a ping notification from an end user and use that notification to ping dozens of other services on that user’s behalf.

So what is the FeedMesh?

I don’t believe that question has been fully answered yet. That seems to be what is being determined right now on the FeedMesh discussion list.

It may be safe to say however, that services which publish data via changes.xml or more likely the cloud interface going forward exhibit the characteristics of FeedMesh services. Whenever blog search or aggregator services share updates, it seems to me that is a FeedMesh…

• Is Ping-o-matic a member of FeedMesh? I won’t speak for them, but it does appear they are sharing update notifications, and are in fact dedicated to doing so.
• Is Weblogs.com a FeedMesh member? I doubt that Dave Winer would say that it is, but it does receive update notifications and pass them along for any service or individual who wants them… It walks like a duck…
• Is PubSub a FeedMesh member? I would have to say that by words and actions they are; they receive pings and make them available to anyone who wants them.

I choose these services only as an example, not to imply anything at all about who might or might not in fact be a FeedMesh member.

It appears that the goal of FeedMesh is to provide a more efficient method for users and developers to distribute ping notifications. Ping-o-matic on the user side and the cloud interface on the developer side look to be the first steps at creating a more efficient ping process.

Perhaps the next steps will be to more concretely define what it means for developers to participate in the FeedMesh, and subsequently to make users aware of the benefits of pinging FeedMesh member services.

Where to learn more about the FeedMesh?

The group discusses the future of FeedMesh via a Yahoo discussion group, and one member has created a Wiki.

Some posts arising from the FeedMesh meeting at Gnomedex on 6/24/2005 include:

• Gnomedex – FeedMesh by Dave Hodson
• FeedMesh 101 by Jason McCabe Calacanis
• FeedMesh Initiative Aims to Streamline RSS Updating by Podcasting News

Kathy Gill from the Communications Department at the University of Washington presented on Blogs in the Classroom at Gnomedex. Her slides are very useful for educators.

Chris Pirillo has posted some new bios for folks attending Gnomedex:

David Sifry – Technorati founder

Scott Gatz – Responsible for Yahoo!’s content syndication / RSS initiatives

Bob Wyman – CTO and co-founder of PubSub

Jason McCabe Calacanis – co-founder and CEO of Weblogs, Inc.

Scott Rafer – President and CEO of Feedster

Dean Hachamovitch – General Manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team

I’m also posting this to test out a method to implement Technorati tags on BlogHarbor weblogs…

I’ll be going to Gnomedex in 10 days and I am very much looking forward to it. It should be an exciting event, and I hope to learn a lot from the very smart folks who will be attending. Bob Wyman will be there, and I’m hoping to learn more about the Feedmesh from him; also looking forward to meeting Eric Rice, Roland Tanglao, Steve Garfield, and so many of the other folks will be at this event.

And if there are any BlogHarbor bloggers there, you know the first drink’s on me…

Please let me know if you would like to get together for any after hours sessions. 😉 日本語を話せる皆さん、いっしょに飲みませんか？

I’ve seen a number of articles recently (like this and this) about why Yahoo, MSN, Google et. al. will crush companies like Six Apart and services like our BlogHarbor and I think the idea is ludicrous.

Will those companies be bigger than us? Pretty likely. Have more customers? Sure. But there’s not a reason in the world to think that they would crush us as in put us out of business.

Remember back five years ago this month (wow – has it been that long?) when NTT bought Verio for $5.5 billion? That was supposed to be the beginning of the end for the small web hosting companies. A watershed event – the takeover of web hosting by the bigcos.

Well, it never happened. Today there are thousands of thriving web hosting businesses. And there are great and profitable web hosting companies that have been created just in the last few years, when conventional wisdom would have told you that this had already become a commodity business and that creating a new web hosting company was insanity.

If you think Yahoo, MSN, and Google will suddenly become industry leaders at:

• Answering the phone when you want to know why your account isn’t working the way it should
• Replying to your email where you asked about some CSS code you can’t get working on your blog
• Helping you understand your billing options
• Creating a custom solution for you that isn’t “on the menu”
• Going the extra mile in helping you with an issue that is technically outside the “sphere of support”

then maybe you’re right, the bug guys will take over this industry. But I don’t think anyone would tell you that these are things that are viewed as the bigco’s strengths. When was the last time you called Google and asked them to explain to you why your site wasn’t ranked so well in their search engine? To help you fix your Blogger posting? Got a prompt reply from Microsoft about how to format a table on your MSN Spaces blog?

Why then, would you expect any of those companies to crush any company that can provide a comparable product or service with far better support?

You get what you pay for. There’s a reason that MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360, and Blogger are free: the companies that provide those services do not want to get into the support business. And web hosting – and its subset blog hosting – is inherently and primarily a support business, not a technology business. It’s much easier to create a scalable blogging platform than to support it. You only have to create it once, you’ll need to support it every day. Now that’s hard.

Hosting companies who understand this have nothing to fear from the big guys getting into blogging in a big way. Let them spend their marketing dollars convincing the public to get themselves and their businesses a blog. And when you or your family or friends or your business is feeling a little frustrated with the lack of support from your free blog provider, or are in need of something not on their menu (maybe a blog with a splash of domain name and a side order of email?), check us out: www.blogharbor.com.

I was looking for podcast icons today and came across this source listing a bunch of options. If you’re looking to jazz up your blog layout with icons denoting your podcast feed and files, [blog.forret.com]has a great listing of icons you can use.