Off to the SuperNova Conference Blogger Party, digital camera in hand (well, more like “in pocket,” but you get the drift).
Pray that it doesn’t rain again, because I have no umbrella with me today.
Dave Sifry has written a web service for pinging Technorati to let it know you’ve updated your weblog.
Technorati, of course, is a useful service that lets you know what weblogs have linked to each other, as well as other nifty functionality like hottest links in the blogosphere. For example, here is a list of weblogs referring to us here at 10RW. (FYI, that was the “royal us.”)
Of course, right now Technorati says this weblog was last updated 8 hours and 15 minutes ago, because it doesn’t get scanned on posting, but on some other timeframe. Now with the pinger, Technorati can be notified at the time I make a post. Yay!
So I’m watching the conversation go by in the #joiito IRC channel, and Robert Ivanc (Clarity3650) is chatting on IRC from his mobile phone while in a movie theater, waiting for Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle to start. Except when the movie starts, he not only continues to chat but is sending still photos of the moview screen from his phone to his mobile blog.
Mind-boggling!
The weblog world always wondered when the sleeping giants would wake up and take notice. Well, at least one giant has awakened: AOL is rolling out weblogs. Jeff Jarvis writes about “AOL Journals” in BuzzMachine. Jarvis was one of a few A-List bloggers invited to preview AOL Journals (others were Meg Hourihan, Anil Dash, Nick Denton, and Clay Shirky. Highlighted features of the “AOL Journals” include blogging from AIM and support for RSS 2.0. The general consensus: “It doesn’t suck.”
Both Jarvis and Shirky (writing about AOL Journals in Corante’s Many-to-many social software weblog) make note of the challenge that faces AOL: will AOL Journals be a community tool (a la LiveJournal) or a lightweight publishing tool (a la Movable Type). Shirky has a spot-on analysis of this in his post. He says, in part:
Community conversation vs Lightweight publishing platform is not a zero-sum set of choices, but there is a spectrum of offerings, from LiveJournal’s hyper-sociability, to Blogger, which still doesn’t support comments, and the choice of features has a significant effect on patterns of use.
LiveJournal simply isn’t much fun, unless your friends are using it, too. I suspect, as Shirky suggests, that AOL will lean more toward the LiveJournal model than an independent weblog model — AOL’s insularity is part and parcel of its success.
If that turns out to be the case, I expect AOL Journals to have little significant impact on the world of weblogs that I imagine you and I participate in, dear reader. I mean, how many LiveJournal sites do you read regularly?
Update at 9:27am: Oh, and one more thing — how long now before MSN incorporates a weblog tool? :-)
This is a test of the Zempt blog client for Movable Type. The client runs on your local machine and posts directly to MT (I hope — this post is the test of it).
The dandy thing about it for me is that because (a) I use Mozilla and (b) no one has implemented the Mozilla Midas specification for rich-text editing in MT (yet), Zempt gives me a WYSIWYG editing environment in which to write (and edit?) MT posts.
Here goes.. . . we’re trying to post.
Update: Hey, whaddayaknow! It worked!. And it’s gonna make my XHTML a lot more valid, probably.
Yay! Back in May, I suggested to Joi Ito that he organize a blogger party around the Supernova Conference here in Washington.
Looks like he thought it was a good idea: Blogger Party in DC!!
The Daring Fireball weblog complains about TrackBack:
“[T]here are ways to track links that are much simpler than TrackBack. Referrers, for one. When you follow a link from one web page to another, your browser includes referrer information in the HTTP headers of the request. The referrer should be the URL of the page from which you came; if you click on any of the links in this article, for example, the web site you’re heading to will get a referrer from this page at daringfireball.net. ” [link via Scripting News]
TrackBack of course, is the notification technology created by Six Apart. Daring Fireball has created his own referrers script that list referring websites. In doing so he illustrates the fault of his logic.
Ah, looks like Stephen Downes is getting on board with my loathing of the “everything is a weblog and weblogs are everything” hype. ;-) Stephen’s dead-on right: the “Online Learning 2003 Weblogue” is just a discussion board masquerading as a weblog…and it’s not even a good costume!
As Stephen points in his post, attempts to define “weblog” continue to bounce around, so it’s high time someone put a stop to that with the definitive definition (is that redundant?).
That time is now, and that person is me. :-)
UPDATE (06/05/03, 5:20pm): Bitten by draft mode in MT again. Hit Publish by accident. When I switched it back to Draft, it was removed from the index page, but not the archives or RSS feed. Sigh. Seems you have to rebuild those to make that Publish/Draft change happen everyplace. Oh well. Learn something new every day.
Anyway, imagine my surprise when Stephen Downes picked up on this post. I had some changes I wanted to make to it, so I will add those as an addendum at the bottom of the post. However, since it already squeaked out of the cage, there’s no option but to let it loose.
Fly, little post! Be free!
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article titled Scholars Who Blog:
Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio?
[link via Gallowglass]
Great lead. :-) But the story seems to focus on wannabe talking heads, the *pundits of the world, those scholarly few who salivate at the idea of being a guest commentator for CNN or FoxNews. Nary a mention of using weblogs for actual teaching and learning.