Would this give blogs street cred?:
Marketing Magazine. Jim Carroll. Corporate weblogs.[John Robb's Radio Weblog]It likely won't be too long before we see an official Harley-Davidson blog that features ongoing commentary, news and updates from an "evangelist" within the Harley organization. Featured within the main Harley-Davidson site, the effort will emerge as a powerful means by which the company can further cement its digital relationship with its customers. Harley has a new model coming out? It's reported directly to Harley fans through the blog. Someone is doing a cross-country bike ride on a Harley with the monies collected going to a charity? Write it into the blog. A new Harley ad is released? Link it in the blog, and viewers will follow.
6:18:45 PM 
say what []
Google loves blogs. Blogs loves Google. But is there trouble in paradise? When items slip of the front page of most blogs, there is an anecdotal two- to three-week delay before archived items are reindexed. As Dylan Tweney points out this is an artifact of the fact that Google's basic unit of indexing is the web page URL and blogs are more fine-grained: the post as the basic unit, usually multiple posts on a single page.
Permalinks arose to address this same issue, allowing post-level targetting of links to web posts. This is generally implemented with named anchors within pages, although it's also possible to assign each entry its own page in the archives, even if several entries are aggregated at any one time on the blog's index page.
Dylan has a suggestion, though, to help the Googlesphere catch up with the blogosphere:
As it turns out, we do have a couple of data formats that understand the difference between a post and a page, include useful summary data, and even include handy pointers back to the exact archive location of a post. They're called RSS and RDF.It seems that the same approach would work when indexing an intranet or enterprise portal. Maybe part of the solution for turning k-logs into a true knowledge sharing system is to make sure the search implementation indexes RSS feeds from k-logs, making knowledge retrieval possible without discontinuities.
These syndication formats are used to aggregate news, but they could be useful indexing tools too. What if Google (or Daypop, once they can afford to buy a few new hard drives) collected RSS and RDF feeds — and then archived them in a searchable index?
Instead of news stories scrolling off into oblivion when they get to the bottom of a feed, they'd enter a permanent index where they could be used for information retrieval later.
3:31:08 PM say what []
Blogging News (thanks for the recent links, Hylton) quotes The Weigh In on the limited effectiveness of punditoblogging (compare the Tom Tomorrow cartoon in the back of the most recent New Yorker on "diminishing returns"), writing "Blogging's not enough."
Reading the entry, I was struck by the resonance with Rebecca Blood's concern about bloggers writing to each other in small echo chambers. Dave Copeland describes himself in this extended excerpt as a warblogger and expresses frustration about not being able to reach out and change the minds of "The people who we need to influence, whose minds need to be changed" at the same time communicating a clear in-group subtext through use of warblogger jargon:
[B]logging is not enough anymore for me. It's no secret that I (and many other bloggers) started doing this as a result of 9/11. We wanted to do something. Anything. Since we couldn't pick up weapons and physically pound all those radical Islamic scumbags into dust, we had to settle for more civilized ways to contribute. So information dissemination is what we chose, mostly on the conservative, pro-America side of the debate. And now blogging's all growns up, the tipping point has been reached, it's everywhere.
I have learned so much in the last year, crossed paths with so many memorable, literate, loyal, patriotic, anti-idiotarian people, from all over the world. Blogging has done me irreversible good. But I feel that I must at some point move beyond wide-ranging news stories and analysis. I'm not sure what that means... outright commitment to a political party or candidate in my region, a very-focused group blog that seeks to be an expert on a specific topic or issue, contributing somehow to the Iraq war effort, joining the military (just kidding Lindsey, but not by that much), going to law school (which is my primary intent for next fall). I feel the need to do more. I'm not doing enough. Blogging's not enough. Not enough to shut up Susan Sontag, or Gnome Chomsky, or Bill Clinton, or Yassir Arafat.
Also think on this: most of the bloggers whom I read are conservative and libertarian, and are warbloggers. We pretty much all believe in the same basic principles. We all link to and comment on the same news stories. We all cross-link and reference each other's posts. You see where I'm heading? ... down the path to groupthink. The people who we need to influence, whose minds need to be changed, those people are not reading my blog. Although I'm amazed at how much new information I am learning to support and counter my beliefs on a daily basis, I feel that I need to somehow start connecting with the people who don't agree with me. I need to sharpen my chops through more debate, more conflict, more exposure to the idiotarians and the anointed, if you will.
categories: metablog
3:20:54 PM say what []
MLK News: Out and Back describes itself as "San Francisco's first student-published newsBlog." (via John Robb)
categories: metablog
12:14:27 PM say what []
Well, I already have SBC DSL and I'm paying $20 more than that a month. I wonder if I can switch to the new service? Odds are they'd make me kill my e-mail address and free e-mail aliases in the switchover.
(SBC, or rather Pacbell from my perspective, has a ridiculous policy on e-mail addresses, killing forwever any address once an account is closed—I helped beta test Pacbell's dial up service years ago and unwittingly put an "xian" account there forever beyond my reach by using it during the beta.)
Still, if I can save $240 a year I should look into it.
Update: A little research (meaning, I read the ads at Yahoo) suggests that the introductory price is only for six months at which point it reverts to the price I'm paying now, $49.95/mo. Still, it beats ISDN, which was metered!
categories:
11:12:53 AM say what []
The site search feature of Google's free custom search offering works by default only for sites whose addresses are root-level URLs (so, for example, you can use it out-of-the-box to search jrobb.userland.com or blogs.salon.com but not blogs.salon.com/0001111/).
With the help of Ian Landsman and a few other readers over the weekend, I've come up with code that produces a custom Google search of just this blog. I've in fact replaced my calendar with it (well, I've moved the calendar to the bottom of my masthead column anyway, on the theory that robots may still find it useful).
I want to offer the code to anyone to copy and tweak, but I've learned that posting code (even escaped-out code) to a blog entry tends to upset news aggregators, so instead I've written up the learning process with a few code samples as a story.
categories: salonika knowhow metablog radioactive
10:45:07 AM say what []
One question, the guy who played Cypher (who betrays the heroes), is he the same guy who plays Ralph Cifaretti on the Sopranos? Same nose and voice, but bald instead of lanky blond hair. Hard to be sure.
categories: x-pollen
8:18:09 AM say what []
