Saturday March 25, 2006

A common question from newcomers to the blogosphere is "how do I get my blog read?" There are all kinds of ways gather attention to yourself but there seems to be a set of best practices that come out whenever this topic comes up. So here's a rough swipe at a blogosphere visibility FAQ.

Post Conversationally

Use links to reply to other blog posts, cite sources and define terms. If you just treat your blog as a pulpit, a soapbox in a silo, your only hope of acquiring attention is to be a celebrity a priori. In other words, Arianna Huffington didn't need any best practices when she started blogging, she was already an attention focuser. So what if you're not famous? Don't be a wallflower, converse with links. If you read a blog post that you want to comment on, you can certainly leave one (if the blog permits comments, I don't since I don't have time to administer spam) or better, post to your blog linking to the permalink of the blog post you're commenting on. I don't bother with trackbacks either, too much spam to be useful to anybody.

Pay Attention To Get Attention

Use a feed reader to keep up with the conversation. I like endo and NetNewsWire but as the readers built into browsers get better and become full featured authoring tools (watch for innovations from Flock and Microsoft IE7), they'll be the read-write tools, the IDEs (integrated development environments) of the web. OK, now make it easy for folks to subscribe to your feed. Set up an account on FeedBurner and dress up your templates with feed-adding URLs (MyYahoo, Bloglines, etc).

Make Sure A Sound Is Heard In The Forest When Your Tree Falls

Most blogging platforms (be it the CMS like Movable Type and/or authoring tool like ecto) support sending an XML-RPC ping when you post, use it! Technorati also has a Ping form that you can bookmark. The benefit is that you'll be indexed by Technorati's real-time search system.

Claim Your Blog

Associate your Technorati profile, picture and tags with your blog by registering and claiming your blog. Your posts will be more visible in Technorati search results (with links to your profile and display of your picture) and with tags assoicated to your blog, the blog directory.

Tag Your Posts

The blogsphere's posts are neatly bound together by topic on Technorati's tag pages. Pick the top 5 or 10 subjects that your post is about and embellish your posts using reltag, Technorati has the tagging quick-start guide. Editing tools such as ecto and MarsEdit make it easy to add tags.

Post Often

The blogosphere's attention is focused on right now, not then. As Seth Godin points out:

Take a look at the top 10 blogs and you'll notice that many of them post dozens of times a day.

No, you don't have to be that prolific but if you have something interesting to say, say it early and often. On the other hand, don't prattle. Frequent posters who talk about nothing aren't doing themselves a favor in the over all data stream.

Be Well Formed and Valid

Your blog is much more palatable to the tools of consumption if they are easily parsable. HTML renderers such as web browsers, indexers like Technorati and feed readers just work better when your output validates. Use the tools at Feed Validator, check your markup and CSS.

technorati   feeds   linking   ping   blogging   tagging   validators   ecto   endo  

Thursday March 16, 2006

Years ago I thought AvantGo was sooo cool. I'd sync up my Palm Pilot, get on the bus and read the web sites I'd subscribed to. Ah, how times have changed. Lately, I'd been using Sage to read feeds in Firefox but the interface has always seemed inconvenient and Firefox is kinda slow and leaky under Mac OS X.

Last week I installed Endo (brought to you by the maker of ecto). While I was a little thrown by the way the feed group bar shifts focus, my feed reading has definitely been enhanced. The floating window notifications when it's updating are cool. The way it shows post tags right at the top (under the blog post title) is also very nice. I could imagine improving the feed focus on the left hand side (I'm hitting the scroll bar too much). I should be able to reorder the feeds so I can read them in order of importance (or if Endo calc'd importance on the fly by watching which feeds I go to first and mapped that against their update rates, better). But really no substantial complaints. It integrates nicely with ecto and has hooks to integrate with mail and chat applications but my favorite thing about Endo is: its cache! I spend a few hours everyday commuting, reading feeds on while I'm on the go is great! I basically left the laptop load up feeds before I hit the road and catch up on stuff while in transit.

Thanks Ado!

endo   ecto   ado   rss   macosx   palm

Sunday March 12, 2006

A few victories to report:

• Technorati wins technical achievement and best of show at SXSW (via Flocker Chris Messina)
• More importantly, my daughter's team took 2nd place in the regional Odyssey of the Mind competition and they're on their way to the state finals in Sacramento
• Finally but not leastly my son scored a big goal in his indoor soccer game

technorati     odysseyofthemind     soccer     sxsw    

I know this is late coming and everybody's already moved on to SXSW. Sometimes I just leave things dangling a little too long but I have some scattered Etech notes and may as well get them out of the way.

So here we go. This years Etech Conference in San Diego was a real treat. The speaker sessions, the usual running into friends of past and present and the sunny reprieve last Wednesday were overlaid by a recognition of how much the technology world has changed in the last year. As the novelty of tags, AJAX and Ruby On Rails are wearing thin, people are getting down to business building real applications. The hype wake that's followed Yahoo!'s Web 2.0 acquisitions last year has spun up a lot of innovation -- a lot of tinkering projects are growing up and some are getting funding. Yes, a treat; albeit at times in a scary too-sweet-like-bubblicious way; see Building to flip is building to flop (via Marc Hedlund's excellent session Coder to Co-Founder). I can't do justice to the whole conference (see the Technorati Etech06 post stream) but heres a review of my highlights.

The Live Clipboard demo at Ray Ozzie's Tuesday keynote was truly awesome. Microsoft is vivificating data out of web pages that can interact with other services and applications. Contact information embedded in web pages as hCards will transparently be manifested as vCards. Events expressed as hCalendars will be manifested as iCals. With the potential for microformat expressions of the basic building blocks of many import human-centered entities being conjured up by Microsoft Internet Explorer, the web becomes a much more valuable medium.

Chatting with Tantek about it the next evening, I wondered if Microsoft's commitment to the technology might extend as far as making contributions to Mozilla so that Firefox and Thunderbird users can enjoy benefits comparable to those promised to MSIE users. Tantek seemed confident that the Mozilla community will soon enough implement the same capabilities. On Thursday, Bart Decrem seemed to imply as much; when Flock loads a page it recognizes microformats and can conjure the data so that it may be sent to other sites and applications. As Decrem put it, it's part of Flocks support for "roundtrip attention." He demonstrated Flock in that session (with Chris Messina) dragging web entities (inline images, highlighted blocks of text for citation, etc) to Flock's "shelf" and incorporating it into blog post authoring. And Flock does the right thing; text cited is marked up in the blog post as <blockquote /> tag with a cite attribute. Flock is an IDE (integrated development environment) for micropublishing and remixing on the web.

Also at Tuesday's keynote (2006-03-07), Jeff Han showed off a tactile multi-input touchscreen device. Tablet PC's are nothing new but these applications weren't your garden variety touchscreen tricks where you use a stylus to doodle and scribble (hoping that the handwriting recognition mistake rate is tolerable). He used his hands, his finger tips were employed as multiple styli that could manipulate data gesturally. There was an incredible playdough-with-pixels application programmed with fluid physics. He grabbed globules of stuff, squished it, pulled it apart, mushed it together and rolled it around while creating currents and eddies within a virtual oil-and-water lava-lampscape.

For years, starting with Windows 95, I've longed to see the replacement for the traditional desktop metaphors that operating systems use. Accessing data as files, via folders, dragging to trashcans, clicking on notepads and cutting/pasting to ethereal clipboards... we've trained ourselves to think within the confines of deficient interfaces. No doubt there's rhyme and reason to these metaphors but as humans we're always conforming to their constraints. Instead of us training ourselves to think that way, the computers should be taught to accept input and provide output that agrees with how we already think. Children don't need to be taught how to fingerpaint, they stick their hands in the goo and do what comes naturally. We should all go back to preschool from time to time, lest we forget how.

Han's other application was photo browsing. On a plane that served as a virtual light board, he used his fingers to zoom in and out, slid them around the board, stretched and shrunk pictures and arranged them manually. This was drag and drop without starting and ending points, without mouse pointers or mouse-downs.

It was truly awe inspiring to see him gesture his way through the data. OK, enough real and proverbial gushing, check this out.

Bradley Horowitz discussed Yahoo!'s embrace of user generated content (nothing really new there, right) and the epiphanous embrace of user distributed content. The beauty of Flickr isn't just in the community's folksonomic organization of the content it generates, it's in how widespread it's distribution reach is through mashups (like Technorati's tag pages, though he didn't cite us specifically) and blog post embedding. Yahoo! is clearly on a roll with the fabric of feeds that they produce, consume and remix.

Another highlight for me of course was my preso at the Data Dump. I showed that "Web Pages Lie But The Numbers Don't" by demonstrating how blog spammers reveal themselves when you watch their publishing metrics. Normal publishing operations have consistent characteristics, there are baselines to measure against, as far as their blog creation rates (in the case of domains that host blogs), post creation rates, link creation rates, tags and so forth. After my swim through the data underlying SEO dirty business, David Hornik provided a humorous wade into what VC's really do: email about schmoozes and meetings, shmooze about email and meetings and meet about emails and schmoozes. Such grueling duties, the object of which oftentimes boiling down to an email with "Introduction" as the Subject:, requires taking frequent breaks (Hawaii, Cabo, Hannukah, Aspen, etc) but provides fodder for other email Subjects.

Microformats and Flickr seemed to be the big winners at this Etech. Between people jazzed by Cal Henderson's geek out How We Built Flickr tutorial on Monday, to Antonio Rodriguez showing off Tabblo to passers-by, to Bradley Horowitz' singing the praises of Flickr and the emergence of Yahoo!'s FUSE vision (find, use, share, expand) and countless other cites in various sessions -- Flickr was ubiquitously on the lips of Etech speakers and attendees. Ray Ozzie really energized the interest in microformats with his morning keynote, by the time the evening rolled around, the microformats session had a packed house. The audience wasn't just listening, they were participating; observed all around were people creating hCards, reading about hCals and whispering to each other about the application potential.

Enough speaking of Flickr@Etech (again), see it. James Duncan Davidson's Etech Flickr stream is a good photographic chronicle of this years conference. Doc's is good too. That was my week.

etech06     etech2006     etech     flickr     yahoo     microformats     oreilly     technorati    

Tuesday February 28, 2006

Last week we had the early taste of spring, with cherry blossoms blooming. Warm weather was asserting itself but clearly winter won't leave, at least not without a fight. Right now, it we have sunny skies in the east, and cracking thunder, and torrential rain and hail. The rain gutters are over flowed, rain water shooting off of the roof. The dog is freaked out.

They fight. And fight. And fight. And fight. And fight.

Minutes later: it stops. All is quiet. The dog is sleeping, again.

It's a lot like life.

weather 94549

Sunday February 26, 2006

I don't know these folks, but having read the Dear Elena postings, I know them well enough. I'm hugging my little ones a little extra.

This evening, the kids were off having fun with their friends at a birthday party, so we watched Nobody Knows. I thought I'd seize an opportunity to try a quick hReview:

0.2

Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai)

Feb 25, 2006 by Ian Kallen product Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai)

A moving, disturbing and excellent film (Japanese, english subtitles)

Based on a true story in Japan, this makes the New Years Home Alone Case look like a blip of a parental lapse. A young mother leaves her four kids alone for months on end in a small urban apartment. The eldest son, Akira, in an intense portrayal by adolescent Yûya Yagira, grows up real fast to look after his younger siblings. Despite a deliberate pace, the predicament that the kids were in, the sweetness of young Yuki (Momoko Shimizu) and the gritty inner-city ambience of Japan keep you rivetted to the story.

★★★★★

I've been meaning to take it for a spin for a while, this hReview was built with hReview Creator and then fiddled with a bit. I think I'll have muck with my stylesheets to give hReviews any kind of a reasonable display.

hreview japanese cinema microformats movies japan

Wednesday February 22, 2006

I'd never dug into where velocity's annoying messages were coming from but I decided enough is enough already. These tiresome messages from velocity were showing up on every page load:

2006-02-22 12:08:02 StandardContext[/webapp] Velocity   [info] ResourceManager : found /path/to/resource.vm with loader org.apache.velocity.tools.view.servlet.WebappLoader

resource.manager.logwhenfound = false

They shoulda named that property resource.manager.cmon.feel.the.noise, seriously.

java velocity logging

Tuesday February 21, 2006

Today, Technorati launched a feature that enables you to identify and collect a few of your favorite things. You can select items as you browse search results, tags and so forth or you can identify them en masse by uploading an OPML file. I started mine by grabbing sixteen blogs that variously talk about the San Francisco Giants (it's almost the Good time of year, baseball time), here they are. As the baseball season gets underway, I expect I'll be refining this a bit. When opening day comes, I hope to have a truly browsable, searchable Giants blog portal of my very own. Hum baby!

Go to Technorati Favorites to start your own collection and put one of these on your blog:

technorati favorites baseball San Francisco Giants

Monday February 20, 2006

There's been recent much-ado about Krugle that I just don't get. The website isn't even open, yet folks are salivating as if they've never heard of such a thing as a code search engine. Not that I'm invested in anyway in Koders, Codase or Codefetch but they're providing a credible story already for that kind of specialized search. I'll be happy to try Krugle when they open their doors but the level of excitement in the posts about them seems really odd. Wired has some screenshots in their article about it. Let's see the web site live and then get all frothy about it, please! This just smells like more web 2.0 over-hype; people: control yourselves!

What I'd really find useful is code search built into proprietary projects. After reading Using Lucene to Search Java Source Code, I'm imagining building a Lucene full text index of a project at build time, as a maven plug-in or an ant task. The current tools out there to make source code and docs browsable would benefit so much from making them searchable; there's already a Jetty plugin, run your build, start your webserver and search the code base whenever you want to find a particular method call (or something. That would be cool!

krugle web 2.0 hype lucene koders codase codefetch ant maven

Sunday February 19, 2006

For once in a great while we have a political todo with a real smoking gun and it has been some of the most entertaining political hoopla the blogosphere has ever seen. It's like we're under an attack of laugh bombs from the QLGF (doncha know about the Quail Liberation Guerilla Front?). I posted about the I got shot by Dick Cheney page but the conversation fodder keeps on a-coming:

Zazzle

Cheney's Got A Gun (Aerosmith spoof) provides the video and soundtrack

The Bob Rivers Show - 102.5 KZOK Seattle (grr... packaging flash as a windows executable)

Dick Cheney Quail Hunt action packed game

Canned Hunting at its Cannedest

Dave Letterman's Top Ten

• Top Ten Dick Cheney Excuses
• Top Ten Surprises In The Dick Cheney Interview

And no shortage of hardy hars from Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien and so forth.

I've been following this Technorati search for the blogosphere's yucks and the posts from About.com's Political Humor feed for most everything else:

• Cheney Shooting Humor Roundup
  Dick Cheney jokes are flying fast and furious in the wake of his shooting accident. Here are a few quick highlights to keep you in the humor loop: Cheney Cartoons and Parodies View a series of cartoons, doctored photos, and... ...
  ( Feb 17 2006, 07:40:08 AM PST )
• Late-Night Comics Declare Open Season on Cheney
  The late-night comedians took their first round of shots at Vice President Cheney in the wake of his shooting accident: "Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a quail hunt ... making 78-year-old Harry Whittington the first person... ...
  ( Feb 13 2006, 11:38:05 PM PST )
• Cheney Hunting T-Shirts & Bumper Stickers
  Dick Cheney's hunting accident has sparked a cottage industry for political bumper sticker and T-shirt sellers. Here's a sampling of popular Cheney hunting-related slogans available on various products at CafePress: Duck! It's Dick! I'd rather hunt with Dick Cheney than... ...
  ( Feb 13 2006, 02:52:01 PM PST )
• Dick Cheney Shoots Guy in Hunting Mishap
  In what is sure to trigger a fusillade of comic barbs for weeks to come, Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man while on a hunting expedition in Texas. Cheney apparently mistook his friend, Austin lawyer Harry Whittington,... ...
  ( Feb 13 2006, 07:58:02 AM PST )

And of course, there are the products:

In addition to the Ready... Fire... Aim t-shirt above, there's Dick Cheney: Reducing the burden on social security one old bird at a time and other stuff

Zazzle

I'd Rather Hunt With Dick Cheney Than Ride With Ted Kennedy and such bumper stickers, t-shirts, yadda yadda

CafePress

cheney humor quail letterman technorati zazzle cafepress political humor

Saturday February 18, 2006

The man is on a veritable rampage. It seems as though everybody is getting "mistaken" for quails, republican donors and other kinds of terrorists and paying for it big time. Here's the news on me:

Beware, Dick might be after you next. Check it out at WHAT SUCKER GOT SHOT BY THE VEEP? Fill in the form to get a keepsake of your very own.

cheney humor

Thursday February 16, 2006

Yahoo! has feeds, lot's of them. And they have a lot of sports feeds: NFL, NBA, NHL ... they have NASCAR but they don't have MLB? Sure, they have NCAA baseball but that doesn't count. Full coverage of baseball requires major league news. it's time for spring training to resume and they don't have MLB. What's up with that? Sure, too much hot dogs and cracker jacks are bad for you but c'mon. Are they communists or something? I bet they don't like apple pie, either.

Update
Well, they weren't apparent from those pages I looked on. But as some kind readers have advised me, there is a feed for MLB at [XML]. Thanks!

yahoo baseball hotdogs applepie

Tuesday February 14, 2006

Wow, Jeffrey Veen posted to Google Blog, the GOOG is now the proud owner of Measure Map. Congrats to the Adaptive Path folks!

google measuremap

Five months after scooping up InnoDB, a major technology provider to MySQL AB, it looks like Larry is borging them further. MySQL users who depend on InnoDB for transaction support were no doubt shaken by that announcement but, since MySQL has other backends, there's at least some assurance there that transactional capabilities won't be completely chopped into little pieces, wrapped in a carpet and tossed into a Redwood Shores swamp; there's always other vendors, like Sleepycat and their BerkeleyDB product, right?

Bwah hah hah! Larry's got a Bloody Valentine for you now! Seems as though an undisclosed sum has been passed and another one bites the dust. This article suggests that Oracle's also set its sites on JBoss and Zend (the latter of which currently has BD2 support front and center on their home page). Mark Fluery and Larry Ellison ... that has a ring to it!

I think it's time to solve the PostgreSQL database replication problem (no, Slony is not a good answer) for once and for all, lest Larry's bloodthirst vaporize MySQL.

borg oracle mysql sleepycat innodb jboss zend