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“This is an amazing turnaround, from a bipartisan stance against net neutrality, to a bipartisan stance for net neutrality.”
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A great list of the top techie related shared photos on Flickr. Cool stuff.
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“The company said the wireless network will provide Internet access for residents, businesses and visitors in New Orleans. It will offer a free service for a limited time during the city’s rebuilding efforts and a faster paid-for tier service.”
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Free supersaver shipping and Amazon Prime for over 10,000 non-perishable food items.
I spent a couple hours at a
downtown
Minneapolis Panera Bread today sitting outside enjoying the afternoon
weather while drinking a lemonade and catching up on a few emails between
meetings. At one point, I checked up on a few of my favorite RSS feeds in
Bloglines, including
The
Superficial for my daily dose of celebrity dirt so I can speak with
authority on ”important” issues like the latest on Brit & Kevin,
Nick & Jessica, Angelina & Brad, and - of course - Paris Hilton.
But to my surprise, I was denied my celebrity gossip by Panera’s content
filter:
Doesn’t Panera understand that I need to know what’s Paris is up to at
Cannes? What if Brad and Angelina baby pictures were posted and I didn’t
know because of Panera’s filter?
I think this is the first content filter I’ve knowingly encountered in the 13
years I’ve been on the web. With all the news about major search engines
blocking web sites in China that they found unacceptable, I figured The
Superficial must be banned, right? Um, no:
And there is no shortage of Paris Hilton on Google Images China:
So I can keep up on celebrity gossip from China, but not from Panera
Bread in the middle of Minneapolis. Does blocking popular celebrity
gossip web sites lead us down a slippery slope to government suppression of
dissenting opinions? Will I pick a different WiFi hot spot the next time I
find myself in need of some food and Internet in downtown Minneapolis? Only
time will tell.
I first heard about Blogburst when Frank Gruber mentioned it on his site in February, and immediately signed up. Blogburst, a division of the feed reader company, Pluck, syndicates blog content to news sites. Bloggers register their sites with the service and news sites then pick blogs to syndicate as additional content on their sites. Bloggers aren’t paid for their content, but do receive links out of the deal and more exposure for their stories. As far as I can tell, Technology Evangelist hasn’t been picked up by any news sites yet, but I did find an example of a site that has. According to a more recent article by Gruber, Blogburst now has over 1,000 bloggers signed up and deals with the SFGate.com and WashingtonPost.com among other mainstream media companies.
The geek travel blog, fittingly named Geeky Traveller is being syndicated from Blogburst onto the San Francisco Gate . I noticed this in our web logs after receiving some traffic from sfgate.com. It turns out that the Geeky Traveller picked up a Technology Evangelist article written by Brian, wrote about that article, then had the article syndicated onto the SF Gate through Blogburst. A syndicated article about an article:
I don’t know if this is a good example of Blogburst in action or not. It’s simply the first I’ve seen. Does content like this enhance the content published in-house by the SF Gate and syndicated from sources like the AP and national columnists? As I understand it, the SF Gate pays blogburst for this content.
Also, I haven’t figured out why news sites like the SF Gate wouldn’t seek out and work directly with bloggers rather than use Blogburst as an intermediary. Does anyone understand what Blogburst is bringing to the equation other than an editorially reviewed directory of blogs? I’m still trying to understand that side of things.
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“Now, pushpins can be stored permanently by Microsoft if you sign in with your Live.com credentials, and can be categorized into any number of topics. The limit on the number of pushpins has been eliminated as well. Each pushpin can have a title and descr
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“The biggest growth area in gambling is online, through the Internet’s estimated 2,300 gaming sites, which generate around $12 billion a year.”
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“Thanks to a unique partnership between NIKE and Apple, your iPod nano becomes your coach. Your personal trainer. Your favorite workout companion. Introducing Nike+iPod.”
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“The Social Bookmark Link Maker will enable you to add your favorite social bookmark and tagging links to your blog template. Making it easy for your blog visitors to bookmark your better posts, will create more traffic to your blog as well as links.”
Have you ever noticed the tiny link at the end of blog posts called “Permalink” and wondered what that was all about? This is a look at where that came from and why it could go away if blogging applications would get their act together.
What is a Permalink? The name pretty much says it all. It’s a link to the permanent location of a blog post. Why do we need them? There are times when a blog post may be read at a location other than it’s permanent home. For example, we currently publish our seven most recent posts to the homepage of Technology Evangelist. If someone was to find a story on the homepage interesting enough to link to, but linked directly to the homepage rather than the specific posts Permalink location, their readers wouldn’t be able to easily find the referenced post.
To address this, blogging platforms publish posts to a permanent location, then provide ways to syndicate the posts, post titles and summaries onto other pages within the site. For example, a new blog post will appear on an individual web page, the homepage, the appropriate monthly archive and in any category archives the post has been associated with. Wikipedia has a thorough entry on permalinks here.
A Permalink, therefore, is a link to the hyperlink from a page within a blog other than the permanent location that links to the Permalink location. Each blogging platform has created a slightly different Permalink linking system. Here are a few examples:
TypePad creates a link called “Permalink” in the footer of the homepage and archives linking to the post’s permanent URL:
Blogger generally links using the date of the post . . .
. . . or the time stamp depending on the blog’s configuration. . .
And Movable Type blogs seem to use either time stamps . . .
. . . or “Permalink” links. . .
Why don’t we need Permalink links?
Permalinks serve a purpose that’s better addressed by hyperlinking post titles. None of the above blogging platforms - Movable Type, TypePad, or Blogger - do this by default, but they should. Wordpress is the only blogging platform I’ve found that does this out of the box:
What’s gained by doing this?
People expect headlines to be hyperlinked. They are everywhere else on the web. Show a little consistency.
The anchor text of your headlines helps search engines determine what your posts are about. Chances are pretty good that most of them are NOT about Permalinks.
Should Permalink Links be Banished?
Well, not quite. There may be some value in providing a Permalink for people who read your entire post and decide it’s so brilliant that they want to blog about it, e-mail it to all their friends and submit it to their favorite online bookmarking sites. They shouldn’t have to scroll all the way back up to your headline to find the post’s permanent URL.
Have you ever noticed the tiny link at the end of blog posts called “Permalink” and wondered what that was all about? This is a look at where that came from and why it could go away if blogging applications would get their act together.
What is a Permalink? The name pretty much says it all. It’s a link to the permanent location of a blog post. Why do we need them? There are times when a blog post may be read at a location other than it’s permanent home. For example, we currently publish our seven most recent posts to the homepage of Technology Evangelist. If someone was to find a story on the homepage interesting enough to link to, but linked directly to the homepage rather than the specific posts Permalink location, their readers wouldn’t be able to easily find the referenced post.
To address this, blogging platforms publish posts to a permanent location, then provide ways to syndicate the posts, post titles and summaries onto other pages within the site. For example, a new blog post will appear on an individual web page, the homepage, the appropriate monthly archive and in any category archives the post has been associated with. Wikipedia has a thorough entry on permalinks here.
A Permalink, therefore, is a link to the hyperlink from a page within a blog other than the permanent location that links to the Permalink location. Each blogging platform has created a slightly different Permalink linking system. Here are a few examples:
TypePad creates a link called “Permalink” in the footer of the homepage and archives linking to the post’s permanent URL:
Blogger generally links using the date of the post . . .
. . . or the time stamp depending on the blog’s configuration. . .
And Movable Type blogs seem to use either time stamps . . .
. . . or “Permalink” links. . .
Why don’t we need Permalink links?
Permalinks serve a purpose that’s better addressed by hyperlinking post titles. None of the above blogging platforms - Movable Type, TypePad, or Blogger - do this by default, but they should. Wordpress is the only blogging platform I’ve found that does this out of the box:
What’s gained by doing this?
People expect headlines to be hyperlinked. They are everywhere else on the web. Show a little consistency.
The anchor text of your headlines helps search engines determine what your posts are about. Chances are pretty good that most of them are NOT about Permalinks.
Should Permalink Links be Banished?
Well, not quite. There may be some value in providing a Permalink for people who read your entire post and decide it’s so brilliant that they want to blog about it, e-mail it to all their friends and submit it to their favorite online bookmarking sites. They shouldn’t have to scroll all the way back up to your headline to find the post’s permanent URL.
Have you ever noticed the tiny link at the end of blog posts called “Permalink” and wondered what that was all about? This is a look at where that came from and why it could go away if blogging applications would get their act together.
What is a Permalink? The name pretty much says it all. It’s a link to the permanent location of a blog post. Why do we need them? There are times when a blog post may be read at a location other than it’s permanent home. For example, we currently publish our seven most recent posts to the homepage of Technology Evangelist. If someone was to find a story on the homepage interesting enough to link to, but linked directly to the homepage rather than the specific posts Permalink location, their readers wouldn’t be able to easily find the referenced post.
To address this, blogging platforms publish posts to a permanent location, then provide ways to syndicate the posts, post titles and summaries onto other pages within the site. For example, a new blog post will appear on an individual web page, the homepage, the appropriate monthly archive and in any category archives the post has been associated with. Wikipedia has a thorough entry on permalinks here.
A Permalink, therefore, is a link to the hyperlink from a page within a blog other than the permanent location that links to the Permalink location. Each blogging platform has created a slightly different Permalink linking system. Here are a few examples:
TypePad creates a link called “Permalink” in the footer of the homepage and archives linking to the post’s permanent URL:
Blogger generally links using the date of the post . . .
. . . or the time stamp depending on the blog’s configuration. . .
And Movable Type blogs seem to use either time stamps . . .
. . . or “Permalink” links. . .
Why don’t we need Permalink links?
Permalinks serve a purpose that’s better addressed by hyperlinking post titles. None of the above blogging platforms - Movable Type, TypePad, or Blogger - do this by default, but they should. Wordpress is the only blogging platform I’ve found that does this out of the box:
What’s gained by doing this?
People expect headlines to be hyperlinked. They are everywhere else on the web. Show a little consistency.
The anchor text of your headlines helps search engines determine what your posts are about. Chances are pretty good that most of them are NOT about Permalinks.
Should Permalink Links be Banished?
Well, not quite. There may be some value in providing a Permalink for people who read your entire post and decide it’s so brilliant that they want to blog about it, e-mail it to all their friends and submit it to their favorite online bookmarking sites. They shouldn’t have to scroll all the way back up to your headline to find the post’s permanent URL.
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“We’re very excited to announce the release of click-to-play video ads on the content network.”
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“Wouldn’t it be nice to control noise in a condo as one does the heating and cooling — by moving a control on the wall? Mark Dziuk thinks so. The Minneapolis developer is building condominiums that will allow residents to do just that.”
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“Here are the secret numbers and tips to bypass 108 IVR phone menus to get to a human.”
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A VoIP client for the Palm operating system.
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“Wavion is a San Jose-based start-up (with offices in Israel) that says it has a better technology to provide metropolitan area WiFi access points for the outdoors.”
We launched the Technology Evangelist blog six months ago this past Friday, and have learned a lot about blogging over the past 180+ days. Here are ten things we learned and/or wish we knew before we started:
- Setting a Schedule is Critical: It would be easy to let a day or two slip by between posts, but once visitors start checking back on a daily basis we want to keep fresh content coming for our regular readers. We decided to publish once a day and work hard to stick to that schedule. In the past month, we’ve added an occasional second post a day of interesting links using a del.icio.us daily digest, so we’re averaging a bit over a post a day at this point.
- Burn that feed: If you can’t measure it, did it happen? We burned our site feed, comments feed, and feeds for our video and audio feeds through Feedburner so we can track each feed’s circulation. It’s easier to do this if you do it right away.
- Search Engine Optimizing Blogging Platform: Today’s popular blogging applications are fairly search engine friendly, but making a few adjustments to the way pages are served can lead to higher rankings for your blog’s content. Some changes we’ve made include adjusting the serving of post title tags, changing the choice of tags used for some HTML markup, and hyperlinking post titles to individual posts.
- Create an Syndication Options Page: Most people don’t necessarily understand what the RSS icon is doing on so many sites. However, they understand concepts like “Add to My Yahoo!” so using chicklets can help build circulation. However, publishing the chicklets on site templates can become a maintenance nightmare. We chose to create a RSS Feeds Page where we provide information on how to subscribe to each of our site’s feeds via most common feed readers.
- Create About Pages: We like to learn something about the authors of blogs we read, and figured our readers would like to do the same, so we created an About Us page, and bios for each our our site’s authors.
- Add Photos to Posts: Photos help personalize the site, and helps regular readers quickly determine who they’re reading on any given day.
- Add Bookmarking Options: Just this past weekend, we had our first trip to the homepage of Digg. In fact, Ben’s post, “Ubuntu Linux, Dapper Drake Flight 7 - How Linux is getting very close to mass adoption” went all the way to #1 on Digg.com. Providing a “Digg This” link at the bottom of the post makes it easy for people to share content they like. Reddit and del.icio.us have also delivered significant traffic to posts that have caught on with those two audiences.
- Add Comments Notifier: We love it when people leave comments, but what’s really great is when we’re able to enable a conversation between readers on topics that interest all of us. Notifier automatically sends an email to commenters letting them know someone has responded to their post, making it easy for visitors to keep up to date on what people are saying. Also, we publish a comments RSS feed where visitors can receive the latest comments from our site in their favorite feed reader.
- Add Recent Comments List: We generally focus on writing posts that have a life longer than a day or two, so they tend to draw comments not only on the they they’re posted, but for months after the post is published. Publishing a recent comments list helps visitors find
- Stay on Top of Spam: I can’t stress this one enough. Spam is the graffiti of blogs. Bloggers who don’t prevent or quickly clean up spam on their sites are in effect contributing to the blog spam problem. In fact, you can #’s 8 or 9 without addressing comment spam first. We’ve experimented with various options on how to make this work for our visitors
- Bonus: Claim Your Blog on Technorati: Technorati is a great site for tracking what’s going on in the blogosphere, but for bloggers, it’s the measuring stick for relevancy of your blog. Technology Evangelist, like all blogs, started at dead last out of the ~32 million blogs tracked by Technorati when the site went live six months ago. By December 1st, we broke into the top 1,000,000. By the end of 2005, we had moved up to ~100,000. Top 35,000 at the middle of Jan. Top 20,000 at the start of Feb. Top 7,500 at the end of March. We broke 6,000 near the end of April, moved to the top-5000 last week, and currently hold 4,379th place out of 40.6 million blogs, putting us within striking distance of the top one hundredth of 1% of blogs tracked by Technorati. Since our blog’s link acquisition rate has increased over the past six months, we should continue to climb in the rankings. How high will Technology Evangelist go? Only time will tell. Don’t hesitate to link to us if you want to throw a little link love our way.
While we’ve learned a few tricks to making sure we rank as high as we can on Technorati, the real key to high rankings is receiving unsolicited links from other blogs based on the quality of your site’s content. While we’ll miss watching our rankings jump tens of thousands of places overnight, it’s great to see our site rewarded in such a measurable way by this 3rd party measure. Once you claim your blog, you’ll likely become addicted to your Technorati ranking too.
What do you wish you knew before you started blogging? Are there any tricks, tools or tactics that you find invaluable? Let’s help bloggers focus on creating valuable content rather than messing around with technical issues like those outlined above.
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“Veteran politicians more familiar with turntables and typewriters are enlisting twentysomething computer whiz kids to help them brave the digital world of blogs, podcasts and the Web as they look to connect directly with voters.”
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“Put another way, being first in the demand chain is the most valuable place to be in any value network.”
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“With this in mind, the me2revolution team at Edelman, which I am part of, has formed a relationship with Technorati to fast-track the development of localized versions of their offering in German, Korean, Italian, French and Chinese. “
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“In 2003 AT&T built “secret rooms” hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company’s popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations
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But Google continues to dominate search. Amazingly, MySpace has almost caught Hotmail among email services. And MapQuest continues to dominate the mapping arena.
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