As soon as I can connected again I'll upload my first impressions with probably more comprehensive comments on the panel tomorrow.
categories: metablog
5:05:03 PM 
say what []
As Dori know, timing is tough in the tech-book racket. She rounds up the best known blog books in the works:
I pitched a book on weblogs in late 1999 or early 2000. It was probably a good thing that it didn't happen, as it was way too early in the game for a good book. No books on weblogs came out in 1999, or 2000, or 2001. According to a recent check on Amazon, though, there are seven books coming this year focused on weblogs.If I missed any, let me know. Can you say "critical mass?" I knew you could.
- We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs by Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey, Meg Hourihan (Wiley)
- The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog by Rebecca Blood (Perseus)
- We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture edited by Rebecca Blood (Perseus)
- Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content by Biz Stone (New Riders)
- Running Weblogs with Slash by Chromatic, Brian Aker, David Krieger (O'Reilly)
- Essential Blogging by Shelley Powers, Cory Doctorow, J. Scott Johnson, Mena Trott, Ben Trott, Rael Dornfest (O'Reilly)
- Blog On: Building Online Communities with Web Logs by Todd Stauffer (Osborne McGraw-Hill)
I stole the kickback links above by the way.
Now I think we can stop listing the Slash book because yes, community weblogs are weblogs, etc., but they're not really blogs in the sense that most readers think, I think. Or are they?
Meanwhile, I've had ideas of my own about a book since last spring most recently and have had feelers out through my own network and through my agent. Bill Quick wrote in my comments somewhere that his agent had shopped a book and "everyone was waiting to see how the first books do." There's always this hokey-pokey with publishers waiting to see who puts their right foot in first. Then everybody shakes it all about.
What the above doesn't capture is a next wave of books, coming more from the tech-computer-book manual-how-to-tutorial explainifier market. Osborne's book looks to be the first of that wave (unless O'Reilly's was, depending on how you classify them) if its October date is for real.
I can't disclose details told to me by publishers in confidence but I know that at least three other publishers have books in the works, possibly as many as five, including at least one killer brand.
categories: metablog
3:32:54 PM say what []
Looks like we won't see so many repeated items in our news aggregators if RSS 2.0 catches on:
Now, for 2.0 feeds, we check if the item has a guid, and use that as the identifier, assuming it won't change even if some of the properties of the item change. This is true of the 2.0 feeds that Radio produces, and of Scripting News in RSS. We welcome other aggregator developers to use this new feature in RSS 2.0 feeds.[Scripting News]
To quote Sgt. Schulz, "I know nothing" about RDF, 0.9x vs. 1.0 vs. 2.0, namespaces, and modules. I'm a writer, damnit.
categories: metablog radioactive
3:25:56 PM say what []
Mirror Pix Up. Got the notification yesterday that my Mirror Project submissions were accepted. I think they look even better with the gray background at the site, a subtle framing.
They're still not as good as the toasters, eyeshades, and other found reflections, but for what they are, they're OK.
The first has a kind of Kilroy was Here feel. In the second my eyes go to the rolled cuff, forearm, and hand. The spots on the mirror surface and the Leonardo hands grab my eye in the third one although it was the cropped-off expanse of stucco wall that I liked best when I grabbed it. A zoomed out version would have shown more but the details would have been tiny. It's a tradeoff. In the first two I wanted the inset images to be at least slightly visible.
I did all the editing in Fireworks. The blurb for the last one gave out a variation on the URL for the alternate images, so I had to put in a symbolic link to the real root and gave the index of the gallery of alternates a base href so that the relative links would still work even if you come in via the variant address.
[bodega]
categories: x-pollen
3:18:58 PM say what []
Though my my.yahoo.com referrer was from a bookmark (as Dave Winer pointed out in my comments), reverse cowgirl is getting some action today from her new listing on Yahoo's weblogs page (full name: Yahoo! Social Science > Communications > Writing > Journals and Diaries > Online Journals and Diaries > Web Logs).
She was added along with the Homeless Guy blog they've been discussing on Metafilter recently. I am nowhere to be seen. Boo hoo.
I'm reminded of a story around one of the Grateful Dead's incessant post-Jerry Garcia reunions, when hapless latter-day ex-Tubes ex-Rundgren ex-Dead keybist Vince Welnick asked on the air "Who do I have to blow to get on this tour."
After blogging and Metafiltering Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp I was pleased when the author showed me that Yahoo had featured the site as a pick with a great review in the Yahoo! Picks blog.
Only later did I realize that this means of course that his site has been added to Yahoo's directory, something commercial sites have been reduced for paying for help with, attempts to game the system, and other signs of frustration. Cool to get listed on merit.
For now, Google has been bery bery good to me.
2:09:48 PM say what []
Regarding seeing 'my.yahoo.com' in your referrers, that may have been me. The "My Yahoo" portal has a feature to store bookmarks on your homepage, and link directly to them from there. I just added you to my bookmarks today, so every time I fire up my browser and click over to your site, you should get a 'my.yahoo.com' referrer.I have a number of links that appear in my logs once each day. It's sort of charming, seeing what is most likely a single reader, checking in frequently. I've also liked the personal aspect of publishing online, the two-way flow.
I've always liked playing little rooms. My bestselling books have sold in the tens and even hundreds of thousands (well, one book anyway), but you get precious little feedback, relatively speaking, from an audience of that size.
categories: metablog
1:32:08 PM say what []
Lest we get into Notorious Tupac territory here, let's keep the rivalries friendly. I'd be most interested these days in blogs from off the beaten track (Prague '90s nostalgia is still too close), more work from nonurban, nonuniversity, non-US sources.
I have a friend in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. With the way things are, I don't think he'd feel safe publishing a weblog, but I wish some of the things he and I discuss in e-mail had a wider audience. He's given me permission to quote him here, but I think it really deserves it's own place, and we have to see how the current crisis plays out first.
This reminds me of when we published Milorad Pavic's first hypertext for computer. Not long after that the U.S. was bombing Serbia (belatedly, as far as intervention goes, and remotely). I contacted Dr. Pavic by e-mail to ask if there was anything he needed, anything I could do to help. He said, "Yes. Stop the bombing!" He wanted me to protest, campaign, etc. My first thought was This is an intellectual, liberal, anti-Milosevich Serb—doesn't he understand why we have to stop the rape of Kosovo?. But the bombs were dropping on him. Who was I to say?
Weird digression, but I guess the point is LA vs. NY vs. SF is fun but I'd like to be reading more blogs from Macedonia, Pakistan, and Lagos.
categories: metablog
1:09:47 PM say what []
I'll be in the audience at the panel tonight at Berkeley (at 6:30). I was going to bring my laptop and try to blog it live, but Scot told me that there was no wireless and no easy way to get me ethernet (the only access is directly under the dais as I understand it).
So maybe just a notebook and digital camera will do the trick. Wish I'd learned shorthand! I'll jot my impressions and blog them tonight. I hope others do the same, so that we can get a multifaceted view of the discussion, which is mainly about the interaction between journalism and weblogs.
I may even get to meet Scott Rosenberg in the flesh!
11:36:14 AM say what []
Strangest of places department: Megan Morrone's LJ blog talks about her move to Movable Type, and her comments there discuss this move as a trend, recapitulate the "it's hard too install" meme (Megan's last post is that she has MT up and running but hasn't had time to customize the look and feel yet, so it's still not public), move on to talking about her radio appearance and other fan matters.
In the midst of that, some de facto sales rep posts something derogatory about Movable Type and recomends Nucleus CMS instead.
Naturally, I checked out the website:
Nucleus allows you to easily maintain your own weblog(s) on your own server. It offers a system that is easy to install, but still offers maximum flexibility.Looks like one more product I'll have to learn and test as this market sorts itself out. Great shortcut: Would any current Nucleus CMS users care to explain its pros and cons?
10:40:13 AM say what []
I am using namespace figuratively. I've noticed that the linktext for links to this site usually take one of several forms, roughly (unscientifically) in order of frequency:
- Radio Free Blogistan
- Blogistan
- Radio-Free Blogistan
- RFB
- xian
- Christian Crumlish
These are all fine with me, though no hyphen is needed. I realized that the best of these is probably Blogistan, as it's short and to the point, if a bit presumptuous. I'm not the Sultan of Blogistan and even if I were (or the Khan, or whatever, I do imagine a sort of Khanate of Greater Blogistan out there), l'etat ce n'est-pas moi, right? (Pardon my French.)
Looking into my.yahoo.com referrer, I figured it was a google search in the personal-portal context, so I went to my.yahoo.com and searched for blogistan.
This site and its Blogger mirror show up as results 2 and 3. First is still Slotman's Insolvent Republic of Blogistan, which he hasn't updated since July 19, within a few days of my starting this blog. Spooky.
10:35:23 AM say what []
Thanks to our feedback loop, Michel Vuijlsteke has cleared up the feeding frenzy around Ms. De Cock and her now-famous natural breasts (go directly to his entry to follow the many hyperlinked keywords)
Veronique De Cock is a 24 year old model, former Miss Belgium (1995), sometime singer and TV presenter, organiser of Miss Antwerp beauty pageants.... has nice breasts.... a rumour going around that she has implants.... denies the rumour.... ever more insistent cries that she has ... ever more categorical denials that she did nothing of the sort.... decided to have her breasts x-rayed ... put the nasty rumour to bed ... then ... irritating interview. No matter what Veronique said, ... kept going on about x-rays not proving anything ... that if they were saline implants they wouldn't show up on the x-rays, and that she couldn't really prove those x-rays were of her chest anyway, etc. etc. ... Veronique was livid.... went to a competing TV programme ... took the entire crew to a clinic ... had her bosom ultrasounded.... no implants of any kind in Veronique De Cock breasts, saline or otherwise.... then suddenly last week ... photos of Veronique De Cock without bra, naked ... in monokini ... on the beach ... on the Internet.... the entire Belgian internet world ... the papers ... radio programmes ... legal action against the phtotographer and any sites that hosted the pictures.Michel links to the pictures too, you fleshhounds, you!
And also by then, I was about the only site on the Internet in Dutch that rated highly on Google (.be and .com) and that mentioned Vernoique De Cock, St. Tropez, her breasts, the fact that they were naked, and that I had the photos in my posession.
And the hits started rolling in.
For myself, I'm glad I understand what this memespike is all about, I guess.
His previous entry appears to be a notice of my link to him from yesterday, but Babelfish doesn't speak Dutch. I wish I did. During a brief two weeks in the Netherlands I got the hang of pronunciation, especially all the diphthongs. (A lot of sounds familiar from German spelled differently.) You have to love a language with the word "blerg" in it.
Oh, and looking at the beach pix, I can understand the incredulity of Veronique's critics—a touch of plasticity to her high, round breasts, which just happen to resemble a good boob job, small waist, and so on. I guess that skepticism is the price she pays for nature giving her something usually only created in the lab these days Sounds like she's made a career at least partly on her looks, so I imagine the give and take has balanced out.
categories: salonika memewatch metablog
10:06:34 AM say what []
I couldn't help noticing in my referrer logs some incoming links from http://my.yahoo.com/. Since when does that "portal" link to blogs? Just curious.
categories: metablog
9:26:31 AM say what []
Matt Welch notes a nice feature of the Myelin Blogging Ecosystem:
If you're like me, you don't put much stock in the various blog-ranking schemes, since none of them, I guess, can claim anything approaching scientific usefulness. But this system has the real added bonus of providing a long list of people who link to you, which introduces you to sites you've never heard of, and reminds you of those you've inadvertently forgot.Welch also ran a long screed about the (apparently lame) L.A. Times article on blogging.
categories: metablog
12:26:37 AM say what []
