Entries Tagged 'Blogging' ↓

Darren Barefoot is giving a talk at the Northern Voice conference at the end of February, and he’s asking people to fill out a survey: Why Do You Blog? So go over there and give him a hand.

How to keep blogs from scaring the hell out of people. I guess the question for people trying to sell blog services to companies is whether they’re out to impress their client or actually sell something.

is still a fascinating subject, though if anything the newspapers appear to be moving even further away from “getting it” than ever. Alan Rusbridger is the editor of The Guardian and has some important thoughts on the subject that he delivered in a speech on the 16th of March in London. Jeff Jarvis has posted a detailed summary with quotes on his blog, BuzzMachine.

Six Apart is pumping up its Blogging Solutions for Business. For some time now large-scale integration issues have been handled (and it seems pretty well) by a growing and capable group of consultants and developers. While it’s certainly great news that Six Apart is adding features that will make integration in corporate environments easier, I hope they don’t cut the developers’ grass in the process. I highly doubt they would do that - after some missteps early on, Six Apart seems pretty good about both improving their service while also energizing and nurturing the developer community.

and busy or high-profile websites: High volume flow. This is a problem with weblogs in general. Everyone has been touting them as the next generation in online community, which is true, but not because of the comments sections, though ironically this is the feature that most resembles traditional online communities such as the Well or Cafe Utne. The weblog world is community-like because of the give-and-take between and among “peer” weblogs via links-and-commentary posts, and it is in that respect that the weblog world is and encourages online community. The existence or not of the ability to comment has little to do, in my opinion, with the community-ness of weblogs.

The solution to the problem is simple and has existed for much longer than weblogs have existed: old-school online communities such as those mentioned above, with mandatory registration, active, consistent moderation, and persistent membership over time such that individuals have a social motivation to behave.

on the table related to TopTenSources.com that is also very instructive in the context of copyright legalities and such. There is evidence of questionable faith on the part of the company (Newsilike Media Group) in that they do not seem to respect CC licenses. Considering their Original Bloggers page, I noted that they re-publish the feed from Matt Haughey’s blog, which is published under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. That license clearly states that “If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.” Well, TopTenSources has done exactly that, but have not published the resulting work (the entire site) under the same license - they assert copyright.

I agree with John Palfrey and the other experts who write on this field that this is a critically important issue. But it’s never going to be solved when even companies like the Newsilike Media Group with such expert and well-regarded supporters as Palfrey don’t take it seriously. Actions speak louder than words. Or blog posts.

Update: You know this if you read the comments here, but if you don’t I think it bears mentioning on the index pages of this blog. John Palfrey noted the issue I raised in this post and asked the company to address it, and so they have done. I think that’s a good demonstration of the kind of leadership that will serve us all well as Web 2.0 is invented.