Egregious Error

Geez. I called Loeb's Delicatessen "Lloyd's Delicatessen" in a previous post. Inexcusable, but I've corrected the error.

Adams Morgan Restaurant Guides

Adams Morgan is the place to go in Washington, D.C. for its stunning profusion of ethnic restaurants in close proximity. Those looking for African (especially Ethiopian) food are especially in luck. Two good sources for listings are The Washington Post's entertainment guide and DCNet's Adams Morgan restaurants page. The Post has links to its own reviews of the restaurants listed, and puts an "our pick" icon next to the ones it finds especially tasty. DCNet offers a much simpler list organized by cuisine type, with one-sentence descriptions and hours of operation in some cases.

Off to Washington

Leaving tomorrow for a business trip in Washington, D.C.

Get to meet Ari Fleischer. That's exciting, but even more so is eating breakfast and lunch at Loeb's Delicatessen (which, despite being a favorite of both George Stephanopoulos and William Safire, seems to enjoy no links to itself anywhere on the Web). The address is 832 15th St. NW and the telephone number is (202) 371-1150. You'll see me there noshing on an authentic New York bagel (plain, with a slab of plain cream cheese) for breakfast and a Walter's Favorite: hot pastrami, Muenster cheese, Russian dressing and cole slaw on pumpernickel bread. I can feel my arteries hardening already, and it feels good.

Weblogs as Customer-Service Tools

CIO Magazine: Weblogs as Customer-Service Tools

Macromedia, the San Francisco-based developer of Flash and Shockwave software, has been using blogs to share information with its customers since last May. At that time, the company had just released three new software products directly to the Internet, and it wanted to get feedback as quickly as possible in case there were bugs or other problems. The company decided to put a set of blogs on its site, each administered by a single community manager who could communicate directly with customers, answer their questions and direct them to other Web content that might interest them. "Within the space of a couple days we had hundreds of thousands of posts," says Tom Hale, Macromedia's vice president in charge of developer relations. Not only do the blogs help Macromedia quickly troubleshoot its products and respond to customers' concerns, they have spawned little communities where serious users can share advice.

Unlike questions sent via an online feedback form, the blogs enable the company to amass feedback, post information and patches to the site, and reach their user community very quickly. The blogs have also become a valuable marketing tool. The exchanges that occur between the community managers and visitors provide useful content in a personal rather than PR-ish tone and present Macromedia as a trusted information provider to its user community. While it might not feel like a marketing tool, the opt-in nature of the technology makes it an appealing way to establish and maintain low-pressure, high-value relationships with customers.

Credibility of Weblogs as News Sources

FUTURIST: Credibility of Weblogs as News Sources

Readers may find blogs more credible than traditional media because blogs have no corporate interest to serve. They aren't censored by advertisers or constrained by editorial policies, and they are therefore a more democratic publishing medium. In the interest of "moving democratic media to the masses," the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab launched Blogdex, a blog tracking and listing service whose very existence seems to validate blogs as a legitimate trend in journalism.

We have yet to see how the new generation of high-tech journalism will stack up to traditional journalism in terms of quality and objectivity; with new technologies come questions about standards and ethics, warns OJR executive editor Larry Pryor. The publication launched a new "Future of News" section to address these questions and more, keeping an observant eye and an open dialogue on journalism's dynamic, bifurcating future.

Problems with Searching Blogs

ONLINE: Problems with Searching Blogs

Blogs consist of many postings, typically featured prominently in the center of the page. By organizing the postings in reverse chronological order, the most recent entry is displayed at the top. To keep the page manageable, older posts are shuttled off the front page and into an archive section. With some bloggers so active and prolific that they post dozens of entries per day, the posting that was indexed yesterday may now already be at the URL of the archive, even though the search engine still points to the front page. Even if it points to the correct URL, it may be difficult to quickly find exactly where on the page the section of interest is.

Also note that unlike traditional online news databases, the search engines and Daypop do not index each entry separately. Instead, the words on the page are indexed as they appear at the time the search engine visits the page. So be prepared for a bit of digging to get from the search engine link to the content you want. One way around this problem at Daypop is to choose to search the RSS headlines that do provide entry-level indexing; unfortunately, the RSS headlines are not as complete as the other kinds of searching.

(Emphasis added)

Daypop for Searching Blogs

ONLINE: Daypop for Searching Blogs

Daypop is a specialty search engine that just crawls and indexes Weblogs and news sites. It does not try to get every blog out there. Instead it focuses on what it calls the best of the blogs and news sites. It does cover over 7,500 and refreshes its entire index once or more per day. The news sites include both English and non-English language
sources.

Daypop is a great search engine for getting news from beyond the traditional media. While it does not have sophisticated advanced search features, it does offer a few important options. Its search defaults to a Boolean AND and supports phrase searching with quotation marks. Use a to force a stop word search or the ­ to exclude terms. No full Boolean searching or OR searching is available.

Daypop has an advanced search page, but both the basic and advanced offer four content-type limits: the default news and blogs, just news, just blogs, or RSS headlines. The advanced search also has language limits, country limits, and the choice of how many results to display.

Daypop takes after Google in several ways. The search results use a keyword-in-context display, have a link to a cached copy of the page, and include the size of the page. The results are labeled with an N for the news sources and a W for Weblogs. The blog hits also have a link to "citations," which then finds other blogs that link to the original hit.

The ability to browse sideways with the "citations" link to see which other blogs are providing commentary is one way to use Daypop to get more than a single blog's viewpoint. Daypop also has a couple of special pages that use their own link analysis to identify top interests in the indexed blogging community. Their "Top 40" page is a ranked list of links that are most frequently linked by bloggers in their daily section (not just anywhere on their Web pages). The page even offers graphic depictions of the rise and decline of each link's popularity. A similar "Top News" page shows the most-linked-to news stories.

InfoToday: Rich Site Summaries (RSS)

InfoToday: Rich Site Summaries (RSS) Explained

The whole idea of Rich Site Summaries (RSS) came from Netscape back in its glory days. But the capability of RSS has been combined and expanded with the rise of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to create the Internet's version of a news wire.

RSS is a way of creating a broadcast version of a blog or news page. Anyone who has frequently updated content and is willing to let others republish it can create the RSS file. Typically called syndication, the RSS file is an XML formatted file that can be used at other sites or by other intermediary software such as news aggregators. The original incarnation was to use RSS to include several headlines on a personalized portal page. But an RSS feed can also be easily pulled into other functions, such as an aggregator.

Sites that offer an RSS file will often display a small icon with either RSS or, more commonly now, XML in a small box, usually orange. An RSS feed can just have headlines, or it can have headlines and summaries. Due to varying formats of the RSS file, publisher vagaries, and the capabilities of the specific news aggregator, summaries may or may not be displayed.

Nerd Persecution Explained

Nerd Persecution Explained

Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.

Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask. How could things be any other way? But they could be. Adults don't normally persecute nerds. Why do teenage kids do it?

Partly it's because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.


Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

(Emphasis added)

Off-topic, but valuable.

Wonder what would happen to a nerd's unpopularity index if he/she published a weblog?

Blogging Goes Mobile

BBC NEWS: Blogging goes mobile

The latest trend is moblogging - updating your blog with a mobile phone.

Programs like FoneBlog, Manywhere Moblogger and Wapblog allow bloggers to post details about their lives from anywhere, not just from a computer

There are an estimated 500,000 people who run blogs and analysts say a quarter of them may eventually update their sites on the go.

So how do you pronounce that -- MOB-logging or MO-blogging?

Trying w.bloggar v3.00

Just downloaded and installed w.bloggar v3.00, a posting tool that works with Blogger. I'm comfortable with coding my posts on the fly using Blogger's Web interface, but w.bloggar offers automatic Weblogs.com pinging. That's the killer feature for me.

Blake Carver's Weblog Bibliography

On Blake Carver's Weblog Bibliography, Blake is annotating from the bottom up this list of articles about weblogs. A worthy effort. Says Blake: "I'm starting at the bottom, with mostly the older stories. I'm not sure I'll ever make it to the top."

BlogBib

BlogBib offers "[a]n annotated bibliography on weblogs & blogging." The first link under "Articles & Interviews About Blogs" is:

100+ Stories On Blogging from Blake Carver's LISNews: "I keep this as up to date as possible. Let me know if I missed anything. It's like a blogging bibliography, not annotated yet though, and in no real order either."

Looks like a weblog to visit frequently.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog is an annotated bibliography that seems mostly to concern intellectual property issues. Updated weekly. I'll watch it occasionally to see if some weblog-related material pops up.

Google Web Directory: Technology Weblogs

Take a look at Google Web Directory's list of Technology Weblogs. One hundred and eighty listed, and the top one, as you'd expect, is Slashdot.
Tenth on the list is Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog, which will earn a look from me based on its title.

By the way, four more of the Top 10 weblogs on technology have similarly descriptive titles. In my opinion, bloggers are shooting themselves in the feet with the mysterious and meaningless (except to them) titles they seem to favor. Seven of the Top 10 News and Media Weblogs also have what I'd call descriptive titles.

Google Web Directory: News and Media Weblogs

Take a look at Google Web Directory's list of News and Media Weblogs.
There are 49 listed. Could a normal person wanting to stay up on the latest thinking about weblogs and journalism hope to review even just the Top 10 (by Google PageRank) daily?
What I'd like to see is an RSS feed of the Top 10 PageRanked weblogs in each of Google Directory's categories.

Sources Publish Full Text of Media Interviews on Own Weblogs

In Every Last Word, American Journalism Review reports on interview sources who use their own weblogs to publish the full text of interviews they do with reporters.
Says one interviewee:

"It seemed natural for me to publish 'the rest of the story' online for readers who might be interested."

The article goes on:

More and more, the exchanges that precede news stories are making it onto the Web. This is different from a news organization publishing an article in Q&A style, or offering a broadcast transcript online. It's a decision, usually by the reporter or the source, to share parts of conversations that didn't make the cut.

Sheila Lennon, the interviewee mentioned above, offers another thought:

"Not every traditional reporter will feel this way, but I don't think supplying a transcript undercuts the writer at all," Lennon says. "The reporter creates the backbone of the report, mulching all the facts into a story people will want to read. Then you throw up links to the rest of the photos, the interviews, the principals' Web sites--primary sources, for those interested in a fuller report.
. . . "Traditional reporters who think of the Web as just another way to publish the same story they'd write for print are the ones most likely to be rattled by the source putting up the conversation," says Lennon. "Online journalists are more likely to understand the freewheeling nature of the Web--the synergy that comes when their story stands on its own and the source's transcript sends more people to the reporter's story. . . ."

I agree. I tend to look at reporters and editors as filters. They take the information available and turn it into a coherent entry point for the topic at hand. Not even a magazine-length article can cover the waters, as it were. The full texts of interviews, whether posted by the reporter or the source, are an important part of "the whole story."
The American Journalism Review writer keeps her article intellectually honest by posting her interview with Lennon. It contains some great thoughts that didn't make it into the story, space limitations being what they are:

I'm so used to working this way on the Web that when I read a roundup story in the paper these days -- 3 new CDs, 3 people running for state rep, 4 bloggers -- it often seems to me to need links. This was the promise of hypertext: The net offers an unlimited news hole, with audio and video and everybody else's offerings to boot.
The Web is a terrific editor's medium. Web-savvy copy editors -- curious, widely informed on a lot of topics, interested in "the whole package" -- are natural bloggers and could, when we're all finally wired, shift quickly from making news pages to hunting down the best related links.

Random thought: Does this concept extend to in-person interviews, instead of just e-mail interviews where the transcript already exists? With the source wanting to record the interview (presumably on microcassette recorders) do reporters start carrying extra AA batteries to ensure the interview happens? Kind of a role-reversal from the one embarrassing time when, in my reporting days, my pen died and I had to borrow a writing utensil from the city clerk. I've carried two pens ever since.

American Journalism Review Articles on Weblogs

My Mass Communications Theory final is to write a literature review on my topic of interest, which in this case is weblogs. My professor wants a mix of academic and professional publications, leaning more toward the academic. Confession: In all my undergraduate years, I didn't touch an academic journal on mass communications. We learned by doing, which is about the only way to learn the practice of journalism. Now that I'm in my graduate years, I'll have to head in a more "scholarly" direction. I certainly hope ThesisBlog readers don't turn up their noses at American Journalism Review like this page on Washington & Lee University's web site did:

Obviously . . . American Journalism Review and the like are not scholarly titles.
Even such sources as the Gallup Poll and Public Opinion do not qualify for inclusion in the two-article requirement because they merely report findings without developing a literature review or purposefully testing an hypothesis.

Scholarly or not, here are the eight articles their internal search engine says American Journalism Review has written on weblogs. I may write separate posts on some or all of them.

Every Last Word: Sources who publish transcripts of their interviews? It's becoming more common.
-- Extensive mentions of weblogs. Will have to write a separate piece on this one.

Tough Calls: Deciding when a suicide is newsworthy and what details to include are among journalism's more sensitive decisions.
-- Just mentions Jim Romenesko's weblog.

The Metamorphosis: The past 25 years have brought vast changes in the technology and corporate structure of journalism.
-- Lots of interesting thoughts, but with just one glancing mention of weblogs.

Et Tu, St. Pete?: Media ethicists are appalled by a venerable newspaper's deal to get its name on a Tampa arena.
-- Just mentions Jim Romenesko's weblog.

Scribe's Secret: The Houston Chronicle fires reporter Steve Olafson after learning he was the author of a local Weblog.
-- Will have to write a separate piece.

Journalistic Blogging: Mainstream news organizations could steal an idea or two from blogs.
-- Separate piece on the way.

Online Uprising: Many in the mainstream media dismiss the screeds of bloggers--people who post their views on their own Web logs--as so much blather. But to this Los Angeles writer, these maverick sites are well worth exploring.
-- Can you guess?

Not So Bad: The performance of online news sites on September 11 was better than the early reviews suggest.
-- That's right.

By the way, does American Journalism Review have the world's longest subheads? In two of the above links, that's not even the entire subhead.

Why Did Google Want Blogger?

Wired News: Why Did Google Want Blogger?
Wired News offers an understated reference to the explosion of Google-buys-Blogger commentary on the Web recently:

SAN FRANCISCO -- Forget war and strife, the only news that mattered on the Web this week was Google's acquisition of Pyra Labs, the scrappy San Francisco startup behind the Blogger weblogging tool.

Trying to answer the question in its headline, Wired talks to Chris Cleveland, CEO of a search-engine company.

"We worked on this project for a couple of months and everything seemed to be going pretty well until about January when communication stopped," said Cleveland. "Now I know why."
Cleveland said Google's acquisition of Pyra would, quite simply, help Google create a more accurate search engine by adding rich new sources of data gleaned from weblogs.

Wired reminds us of one reason why <Flame War Provocation>Google is the best search engine</Flame War Provocation> with this history lesson:

Google became the preeminent search engine by exploiting the structure of hyperlinks that make up the Web. Instead of using a simple keyword search, which is how most early search engines found their results, the company developed a proprietary system, called PageRank, which looks at hyperlinks as well as keywords to determine which pages are most popular on the Web.

Now the meat of the argument:

The PageRank system combines keyword searches with a method of ranking the popularity of a target Web page based on the number of inbound links from other highly ranked pages.
That's where Blogger comes in. Weblogs are a rich source of links, which are posted in a fast, timely manner. Not only that, many weblogs are readable in RSS, or rich site summary, a standard syndication format that is easily parsed and indexed by search engine spiders, the bots that search engines use to crawl and index the Web.
"Web pages are hard to index without a standard structure," said Cleveland. "But Google can easily index RSS feeds."

CyberJournalist.net

CyberJournalist.net: The Weblog Blog
At least it's not eJournalist or iJournalist. This weblog from the American Press Institute aims to offer "reports on weblogging as journalism."

Technical Problems

I'm making major changes to ThesisBlog's template, and not doing a very good job of it. Please bear with me as links appear and disappear.

Live from the Blogosphere

A major weblogging event happened Feb. 15, 2003 in Los Angeles and I, like many non-Californians, missed it. But avantbard recorded most of the event, and you can find the 18.5MB MP3 on archive.org via http and ftp.
The main Live from the Blogosphere page has links to weblog and news coverage and biographies of the panelists and hosts.

Glossary of Blogging Terms

Here you'll find a list, updated as needed, of weblogging terms.
Blog: 1. (n.) Short for weblog. 2. (v.) To add an entry to a weblog.
Blogging: The act of maintaining a weblog.
Blogosphere: (n.) A collective term for all the weblogs in existence.
Weblog: (n.) A form of communication in which individuals or groups post thoughts for personal satisfaction and/or use by others. Weblogs often are characterized by brief commentaries posted in reverse chronological order (that is, the most recent posts are at the top and older posts are below them), heavy use of links, and quotations from other weblogs or web sites.

______
Home

Defining the Weblog

Dan Gillmor's blog offers a useful addition to efforts to define weblogging in this post.

Blogs are manifestly a new kind of communications tool. They are conversational -- at least the best ones are -- and they help spread information because they are absolutely reliant on linking. That's key, the linking notion. Without links it's a journal. With links it's a blog.

Dan Gillmor: Google Buys Pyra

Dan Gillmor: Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time
Dan Gillmor had the original weblog post with news of Google buying Blogger. In it, Gillmor gives a good definition of weblogs:

Weblogs are frequently updated, with items appearing in reverse chronological order (the most recent postings appear first). Typically they include links to other pages on the Internet, and the topics range from technology to politics to just about anything you can name. Many weblogs invite feedback through discussion postings, and weblogs often point to other weblogs in an ecosystem of news, opinions and ideas.

Gillmor also succinctly notes weblogs' growing influence:

Blogging was moving mainstream even before this buyout. Several weblogs draw a large readership, and bloggers demonstrated their collective power to keep an issue alive even when the traditional media miss the story, as former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott discovered to his dismay late last year.

After posting the Google-Blogger news, Gillmor added a valuable list of links to commentary on the purchase. Gillmor's list:

First and foremost, here's Evan's posting about the deal on his personal blog.

Cory Doctorow's analysis (thanks for the kind words, Cory...blush) strikes me as dead-on.

Weblog pioneer Dave Winer hints (I think) about more such deals and hopes Google will do the right thing by the overall blog community. Me, too.

Ben and Mena Trott, of Movable Type fame, offer some ideas on what Google hopes to gain from the deal.

Meg Hourihan has kind words.

Nick Denton asks: "Will Google use weblog links to improve Google News?" I asked Google's spokesman roughly the same question, but got no answer. Stay tuned, he said, because the company is just starting to figure out how it's going to use this stuff.

Anil Dash doubts that it's a good fit.

Rick Bruner calls it an excellent fit.

Azeem Azhar envisions (among other things) an interesting media play.

Shelley Powers sees centralization of data, not just search.

Jeff Jarvis thinks Google is too smart to play favorites in blog searches. Note: Jeff's company was an investor in Pyra; smart folks.

David Weinberger suggests that Google must now show it isn't a stupid big company. Yes.

Matt Webb thinks Google is building Memex.

Chinese bloggers discuss the news, in Chinese, of course.

Jonathan Peterson suspects VCs are getting hungry about now.

Metafilter thread.

Slashdot thread.

Henry Copeland is sure Dave Winer will win this Long Bet.

Mitch Ratcliffe remembers a conversation last fall when Google's Sergey Brin asked all kinds of good questions about blogging. I have a feeling that lunch table will be a footnote in the official history of blogging; it'll certainly be in the book I'm working on...

To emphasize again: The above list is Dan Gillmor's work, not mine.

Choosing a Content Management System

opensourceCMS.com has a useful five-page primer (Acrobat PDF, 88KB) on choosing a content management system. Some people use these to publish weblogs.

Try Before You Download

opensourceCMS.com has done technically minded webloggers a favor. The site lets you use open-source content management systems (some people use these for weblogs) before downloading them and installing them on your server.

From opensourceCMS's front page:

This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to "try out" some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs. The administrator username and password is given for every system here and each system is refreshed on the hour, every hour. This allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any software system here with no fear of messing anything up.

New York Times: Google Deal Ties Company to Weblogs

New York Times: Google Deal Ties Company to Weblogs

. . . the move was hailed by users of Weblogs, commonly called blogs, as a watershed moment for the fledgling communications medium, sometimes dismissed as too narrowband and self-involved to have a significant cultural impact.
"People will start taking it seriously," said Matthew Haughey, creator of Metafilter, a widely read Weblog, and a former employee of Pyra. "If it's linked to off of Google, you're not going to have to explain what a Weblog is to people anymore."
. . .
News of the deal was first reported Saturday by Dan Gillmor, a columnist for The San Jose Mercury News, who has his own blog. [Pyra Labs CEO] Williams heard about it when a colleague called him as he was sitting on a panel discussing blogs at a conference in Los Angeles on Saturday. With his laptop wirelessly connected to the Internet, he added a link to Mr. Gillmor's column to his own Weblog, Evhead.

Let's Annotate Weblog Links

Bloggers like to post long lists of links to their favorite weblogs and Web sites.

The lists are, in my opinion, useless without annotation.

It's not difficult to annotate links using the approach in ThesisBlog's left navigation bar. Looking at the coding I use, you can tell my HTML knowledge is limited. If anyone knows how to use style sheets to achieve the same effect, please e-mail me (mailto: link. Delete "NOSPAM" to reach me).

Google Snaps Up Weblog Pioneer Blogger

Internet search leader Google has bought a startup that helped popularize online journals, giving a boost to the steadily spreading format known as Weblogs, or "blogs."
. . .
Blogs are frequently updated online journals that often attract a faithful audience among the Internet cognoscenti. They offer an alternative to the outlets controlled by mainstream media giants.
. . .
Many reporters regularly read blogs, and the views expressed in them helped focus the media's attention on the remarks that eventually led to Trent Lott's resignation as Senate majority leader.
. . .
More than 1 million people use Blogger's Web publishing tools, Google said. About 200,000 of those users are running active Weblogs . . .

. . . including me on ThesisBlog and Fulwider's Travel Tales.

Books on Weblogs

Here are the dead-tree-edition books I've found so far on weblogs:

Bausch, Paul, Matthew Haughey and Meg Hourihan. We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs.
Blood, Rebecca. The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog.

Word "Bursts" and Weblogs

New Scientist has a piece on a Cornell University researcher using computer algorithms to find "bursts" of word use in historical documents. Jon Kleinberg studied State of the Union addresses given by U.S. presidents since 1790 and found certain words show "burstiness" in certain time periods -- like "atomic" from 1949 to 1959, and "Soviet" later in the 20th Century.

Kleinberg suggests that the method could be applied to weblogs to track new social trends. For example, identifying word bursts in the hundreds of thousands of personal diaries now on the web could help advertisers quickly spot an emerging craze.

Paying for Airline Food?

Airlines are on the right track testing whether customers will pay for in-flight food.

Delta is the latest to try this concept, following America West and Northwest. The airlines should have done this long ago. Long gone are the days when air travel was a luxury, and passengers dressed in their Sunday best. Airplanes are flying buses. But they do make much longer trips, so some concession to the traveling public's collective growling stomach is necessary. One hopes they can turn a profit off their overpriced "Mrs. Fields cookies, Entenmann's cinnamon rolls and Pizzeria Uno sandwiches" and funnel the money into smoothing out their fare structures into something like Southwest's excellent $299 maximum one-way fare.

There's a drawback, though, to eliminating or sharply cutting back full meals on airlines: Less material for the hilarious AirlineMeals.net, global repository of photographic proof that airline meals stink.