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.

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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."
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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.