Blogging

April 24, 2006

Evangelizing a Blog

Guy Kawasaki has some tips for evangelizing a blog. I’ve added the link to my piece on How to Start a Blog. The number one piece of advice for getting your blog recognized from almost every where you look will be the same: write things people want to read. In the end, there’s no substitute for that. That said, there are things you can do to promote your blog and build an audience.

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April 15, 2006

Redirecting a Blog Domain

Jordy Gunderson moved Paul Allen’s blog to a new domain and put together some information about how to do that with minimal loss of search engine traffic. There’s some other tips in the sheet I put together when I moved my blog from one system to another.

One of the things Jordy mentions that is easy to forget is being sure to redirect example.com to www.example.com. People expect that and often just don’t type the www.

Jordy also points to a free link checker. That’s a good thing to run over your site periodically whether you’re moving or not.

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April 03, 2006

At the IT Conversations Helm

Doug Kaye has asked me to be the Executive Producer of IT Conversations, one of the real pioneers in podcasting. Doug’s not moving on, he’s moving up. As the audience has expanded, the range of topics that could be covered goes well beyond infotech. Doug has started the Conversations Network to cover a broader range of topics. IT Conversations is one of the channels in that network. Soon there will be others, but I’ll leave those announcements for Doug.

I’m not leaving BYU. In fact, I see this as a great compliment to my professorial duties—akin to being editor of a major journal. One of the things that professors are supposed to do is influence thinking and I hope that my choices about what’s on IT Conversations and how it’s produced and distributed will be a positive influence in the world of information technology.

One of the things I’ve added to my blog is an “Favorites from IT Conversations” column in the right hand column. As I add things to my queue, they show up here. I actually don’t use the queue as a place to store things I want to listen to, but a place to put things I’ve listened to and really enjoyed. If you subscribe to the feed (orange square), you’ll get my picks downloaded onto your machine.

I’m honored and humbled that Doug has entrusted his baby to my care. He’s done a great job of building it into a significant and viable distribution channel for quality information about infotech. I’ll be certain to maintain his high standards of quality in both production and programming. If there’s anything you think we could do better, please let me know.

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April 01, 2006

TechNewsRadio Interview

Steve Holden interviewed me at ETech for TechNewsRadio. We talked about ETech, attention, and digital identity.

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March 18, 2006

Blogging 101 Panel

The Utah Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators & Public Relations Society of America is having their spring conference May 9 at the Hotel Monaco in Salt Lake. I’ve been asked to lead a panel called “Blogging 101.” I’m looking for three other people to fill out the panel. If you’d like to be on the panel contact me. If I don’t know you, please give me some idea of your blogging experience and what you’d like to contribute to the panel (i.e. what needs to be said). Even if you don’t want to be on the panel, I’d love to get your ideas about how to start blogging—feel free to leave a comment below.

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March 14, 2006

Tag Cloud For My Blog

This morning’s entry on categories got me thinking and I decided to try generating a tag cloud based on the keywords I put on entries. Here is the result. I like it because it gives an immediate feel for which topics I spend the most time on. The cloud doesn’t show tags I used just once. To create the page, I followed Al-Muhajabah’s instructions with a few modifications.

• I’m careful to separate my tags by commas or whitespace, so I replaced

  $wordlist = preg_split(
    '/\s*[\s+\.|\?|,|(|)|\-+|\'|\"|=|;|×|\$|\/|:|{|}]\s*/i', 
    $string);
  

  with

  $wordlist = preg_split('/\s+|,/i',$string);
  

  The longer regexp was breaking things up more than I wanted and I was ending up with tags that weren’t tags I’d created.
• I modified some the font sizes to make them 25 points bigger all around. The smallest font wasn’t readable, at least in Firefox.
• I changed if ($count >= 1) to if ($count >= 2) on the grounds that if I’ve only used a tag once, it’s probably not all that important.
• Al-Muhajabah uses a SearchFields option in the search URL that doesn’t appear to be supported by MovableType. As an alternate, I used the SearchElement option which is supported, but not for keywords. I modified the _search_hit function in $MTHOME/lib/MT/App/Search.pm to support the keyword field like so:

  sub _search_hit {
    my($app, $entry) = @_;
    my @text_elements;
    if ($app->{searchparam}{SearchElement} ne 'comments') {
        @text_elements = 
            ($entry->title, $entry->text, $entry->text_more,
             $entry->keywords);
    }
    if ($app->{searchparam}{SearchElement} ne 'entries') {
        my $comments = $entry->comments;
        for my $comment (@$comments) {
            push @text_elements, 
                   $comment->text, $comment->author,
                   $comment->url;
        }
    }
    if ($app->{searchparam}{SearchElement} eq 'keywords') {
        @text_elements = ($entry->keywords);
    }
    return 1 
       if $app->is_a_match(
              join("\n", map $_ || '', @text_elements));
  }
  

This seems to work pretty well, giving the right results in the search. I’m going to monitor it for a while and eventually remove categories from my blog.

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Speeding Up MovableType

Movabletype can be slow. One reason for that is categories. Movabletype’s default templates create one big huge index with all of the entries from the category. I’ve got one category with almost 1000 posts. I found this bit of wisdom from Tom Sherman on optimizing your templates.

The basic idea is to annotate the MTEntries tag with a lastn=”10” attribute and then add another MTEntries block that just puts the title and permalink for the rest. I decided to test a few options.

• The first option was to do nothing. Use the default templates.
• The second option was Tom’s method. The only change was I put 20 full entries instead of 10.
• The third option was to add excerpts in addition to the titles in Tom’s method. This makes for a more helpful page, but you have to calculate the excerpts (unless you add them for every entry).
• The fourth option is to just put the last 20 entries and forget about the rest. That’s what the search box is for, after all.

I timed how long it took to rebuild all of my category pages with each option. Here are the results:

• default - 65 seconds
• Tom’s method - 40 seconds
• excerpts - 58 seconds
• last 20 entries - 27 seconds

So, you can shave 39% off the rebuild time with Tom’s method. Using excerpts is not significantly better. In the end though, I went for speed because I’m not convinced how useful category pages are on my blog. They don’t get many page views.

I’ve actually been thinking of doing away with them all together and just using keywords (which I add to each entry) to create tags for my blog. As an aside, to make adding keywords easier and ensure I don’t forget, I modified $MTHOME/tmpl/cms/edit_entry.tmpl to move the keywords box right under the title box. That helps a lot. I use George Hotelling’s Technorati tag plugin to generate tags at the bottom of my individual archive pages that have the right Technorati links.

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March 13, 2006

Kinetic Energy and the Web

Just finished a nice little article at A List Apart on Flywheels, Kinetic Energy, and Friction by Nick Usborne. The premise of the piece is pretty simple: when you make a call to action on the Web (ask someone to do something) you’re transferring kinetic energy to them that carries them through the friction of doing whatever you want them to do: fill out a form, check out a shopping cart, etc. Here are some key points:

• Maximize the transfer of energy with words and design
• The bigger the task, the more energy you need
• Reduce friction where ever you can by simplifying the process.

This reminds me of something Ron Kohavi said few weeks ago at the CS Colloquium about shopping cart abandonment. They discovered that adding a “enter coupon code” field to a checkout page significantly increased abandonment. Everyone stops and thinks “I must not be getting the best deal I could!” Friction.

I was wondering how this applies to blogging. Do I want anything from you? Your attention, I supposed in the form of comments and links.

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March 08, 2006

reBlog (ETech 2006)

Michael Frumin and Michal Migurski, the development team behind reBlog are showing it off. At first glance, reBlog looks like an online feedreader (with a nice interface). The difference is that reBlog is aimed at using the information in feeds rather than just reading it. You can easily republish information, archive it, tag it, add comments, and so on.

In addition, a plugin architecture let’s programmers and developers add new features to the RSS processing chain and customize it to specific uses. For example, you could subscribe to a feed that contains items from eBay and then use the plugin to connect to eBay and pull down additional information about the item (not included in the feed) using the eBay API.

reBlog is in PHP and can be loaded on your own server. There are Wordpress and Movabletype plugins that interface with reBlog. This allows easy reuse of content in feeds. GardenVoices from iVillage is an example of a reBlog.

There are questions of copyright and re-use that the tool doesn’t answer. Still this is not splogging software that just republishes content without attribution. In the end, there’s a human in the loop; making editorial choices, as it were.

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March 07, 2006

Tim Bray on Atom (ETech 2006)

Tim Bray is speaking on Atom as a case study. RSS is the most successful use of XML in existence. If it’s that successful, why replace it?

Tim outlines some problems with RSS as specified:

The RSS specification says “one only”, but many podcasts use multiple enclosures. Clients vary unpredictably in how they support them.

There is silent data loss. In a title element doing AT&T or AT&T or fails silently. The only predictable way to do it is AT&T and that just sucks.

Links sometimes don’t work. In an RSS <description>, putting a link to an image doesn’t work with relative paths. You have to have absolute paths.

IRIs (international resource identifiers) cause problems. The RSS spec says you can’t have anything but ASCII.

The RSS related APIs (MetaWeblog and Blogger APIs) are under specified, under secured, poorly debugged, offer little interoperability, and omit many important authoring features.

HTML has been successively and successfully revised over the years. HTTP and XML are other examples. RSS is fixed and can’t be changed. The RSS roadmap suggests that big projects be done in a separate project with a different name. So, if you want to fix them, that’s what you do.

There’s also a “syndication culture” Tim launches a slide show that features the Cry of the Valkaries as the background music and various pictures of people fighting, nuclear bombs, wars, and so on. “At the end of the day, is this just kittens fighting under the toilet?”

The Atom specification requires over 17,000 email messages to debug. Why so many? These are hard problems and take a lot of work to get right.

Atom is going through the IETF process. All decisions are made by email/wiki. Consensus is decreed by the chair and may be appealed. The IETF process is long and hard, but prevents any one person from taking control of the spec and using it to their own end.

Atom is like RSS2, except that feeds and entries must have unique IDs, timestamps, and human readable labels. This is important when feeds are aggregated to form other feeds. Text can be provided in plain, HTML, or XHTML, with clear signaling. Atom can provide both summary and full-content. Namespaces and extensibility are clean because of the “must ignore” rule.

Atom is the general purpose collection idiom that XML has never had before. XML has been about trees, not collections. There are lots of hacks on how to do collections, but no standards. Atom can be that standard.

The Atom publishing protocol uses a trick to avoid the problems WebDAV has had with clients having to know about and manage the URL space on the server. In Atom, the clients gives the feed something to POST and the server returns the URL where it put the post in the HTTP response header. Good idea.

The Atom publish protocol is the missing infrastructure link in making the Web writable by everyone.

If you’re doing blogs and news feeds, RSS2 is good enough. “RSS2 won’t be displaced. It’s going to be with us for a long, long time.” If you’re doing more technical feeds where there’s a premium on not losing data, then you need Atom. Implementors should probably support reading RSS2 and Atom 1.0.

The protocol is a different story—potentially a game changer.

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February 21, 2006

Legislative Live Blogging

Yesterday Steve Urquhart live blogged a day of the Utah Legislature from his chair as Majority Whip. This is likely the very first live blog of a session by a sitting legislator. Interesting and informative to see a whole day from his perspective.

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February 11, 2006

Fifty Writing Tools

Poynter, an online resource for journalists, has fifty tips for writing better. These are worth reading and practicing.

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February 09, 2006

Bagley on McBride

Fellow Utahn Judd Bagley has posted a podcast with SCO’s controversial CEO Darl McBride on Business Jive. He has some other interesting podcasts there as well.

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February 07, 2006

Rivers of Information and Social Media

I just finished speaking at the Enterprise Software Summit on rivers of information. The idea basically comes down to the fact that blogs, RSS, and other Web 2.0 technology is changing the dominant metaphor we have for the ‘Net from “place” to “flow.” Jeff Nolan took some notes.

Jeff’s speaking now on how he uses social media at SAP to try to get SAP’s message out. He mentions a study that indicates CEOs are among the least trusted spokespeople. This has interesting implications or the rise of the blogging CEO. Jeff says it’s more important to get others blogging than to get your CEO blogging. I think this is certainly true, but I also think that blogging, done right, will change the CEO. This may not get the message out, but it will help the company.

Jeff is talking about how SAP is changing the way information is created and distributed. Whereas information was formerly created in discrete, static chunks and distributed in a one-way manner via email, information now needs to be boundariless and received through subscription. The latter methods enables conversations to start.

Most confidential information at large companies isn’t. It’s labeled “confidential” to make the writer feel more important. Start with the assumption that nothing is confidential and then categorize appropriately.

Jeff set up an internal multi-author blog internally called “The Daily Oracle.” Whenever anyone sees some news item that has to do with Oracle, they post it. This is more effective than the clipping service that SAP pays for. SAP uses this and other topic specific blogs to respond to Oracle. Powerpoints, etc. get created or changed within minutes or hours for field people to respond to Oracle’s actions.

Jeff thinks RSS will absolutely change the way companies communicate internally. Wikis are essential to capturing institutional knowledge and improving productivity. SAP uses SocialText (Ross Mayfield’s here today as well). Blogs and wikis can be combined to form effective project management tools.

How do you use social media in your company? Here’s Jeff’s ideas:

• Lay down core building blocks, including a management commitment to be involved and guide the use. Install software (blogging and wiki). Support RSS/Atom distribution.
• Develop external relations. Form community groups and create a federation of interested 3rd party bloggers, citizen journalists, and so on.
• Drive content avenues. This can come from executive and employee blogs. Don’t forget podcasts.

Trying to manage external bloggers like you do the media isn’t effective. Find the influencer in the blogosphere. Jeff points out that Technorati shows that 241 sites link to his blog whereas only 61 sites link to sap.com. There’s more to influence than incoming links, but it’s a powerful indicator. SAP called up influential bloggers on enterprise software and asked if they’d like to talk more and better access to information about SAP. They don’t try to manage the content, just send information. SAP will make executives available to bloggers to talk. Jeff will comment on blogs that are critical of SAP to engage in the conversation. When the criticism is valid, fix the problem rather than covering it up.

Changing the direction of the battleship takes time. There are legal challenges (your corporate code of conduct might not allow blogging). The message is not longer a top-down, managed message, but a distributed, more confrontational market communication strategy. You probably need software that isn’t currently supported by your IT team. If you manage the message you’ll be ignored.

C-level blogs are largely a waste of time. The untapped gold mine are the people who are direct reports to C-level people. They are smart, tactical, and have things to say.

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January 20, 2006

CIO Magazine Goes Podcast

CIO Magazine has a podcast which is the content of the magazine, or at least some of it, read out loud. Interesting feature for people who commute and want to get to articles they just don’t have time to read at the office.

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January 10, 2006

Most Popular Posts for Fourth Quarter

Here are the most popular articles from Technometria in the fourth quarter of 2005 and the percentage of all page views they accounted for:

• Video iPod and Tivo - 6.41%
• How to Start a Blog - 5.25%
• Using VLC to Create iPod Ready Video - 3.77%
• Did You Know? DVD-R vs. DVD+R - 3.32%
• Ruby on Rails (OSCON 2005 Tutorial) - 2.57%

Two of these, the one on starting a blog and the Ruby tutorial, were in August’s most popular posts as well. As you’d expect all of these are fairly well placed on Google.

Browser statistics for Technometria for 4th quarter 2005 (click to enlarge)

Also, Internet Explorer continues to see a steady decline in market share, at least among readers of Technometria. As you can see in the graph to the right, IE garners 56% of the visits and Firefox has passed 30%. During the first few months of 2005, IE had 58% and Firefox was edging toward 28%. A 2% point gain may not be the end of the world, but the steady erosion is interesting.

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IT Conversations Is Branching Out

My favorite podcast network, IT Conversations, is growing up and becoming The Conversations Network (TCN). IT Conversations will be one of, eventually, many channels in TCN. Doug Kaye discusses the logic behind this move and it’s implications on his blog. Good luck to Doug on this new move—his efforts to build IT Conversations have changed how I get information and enriched my life. I’m grateful.

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January 04, 2006

Vlogging in Utah

Phil Burns and his vlogging tool, Blastyx, are featured in a Salt Lake City Weekly editorial (of all places) on vlogs. Maybe CW is branching out into high tech. Applying their unique style of vicious mudslinging and blatant disregard for the truth to high tech reporting would certainly liven things up.

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December 19, 2005

Best Blog Posts of 2005

Mr. Snitch is looking for nominations for the best blog posts of 2005. Send a nomination his way, if you have one.

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December 01, 2005

What Kind of Blogger Are You?

Mister Snitch identifies seven different styles of blogging that can result in high traffic. What kind are you?

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