Wondiring

Beware of the BHC

Getting caught up on my feeds at Pluck and Rojo today I read both of Hornik's short-story length posts on the life and death politics of Little League in Palo Alto. When I saw the length of the posts at SaysMe I was afraid to commit the time, as I'm an embarrissingly slow reader (and David warned me in advance), but once I started reading them the story of his kid's team was actually quite gripping and hard to put down (well, hard not to scroll down, to be precise). The cast includes BHCs, RNs and "Desperate Coaches' Wives," as his son called them. Got a half hour? Read his posts here and here. It's worth it, even if you just want to know what BHC and RN stand for (and the latter isn't registered nurse) :)
 

Blogging _________ (you name it)

This is just the kind of thing I think that is going to break wide open. In the beginning, people were just blogging their thoughts. Blogging was about online diaries, personal commentary. Sort of like "the home page" when the Web just started out- then it broke wide open, and I think the same is starting to happen with blogs-- blogging entire books like Dracula, blogging classifieds, blogging questions, blogging event announcements, blogging _____ (fill in the blank).  People seeing blogging as less of a specific type of content (such as personal commentary) and more as a medium (together with RSS), a platform for publishing and broadcasting ANY type of communicative content instantly.

Tags: blogging, RSS

Voice of the Unsung

Pete has my vote for the coolest blog template. Who's that girl, man?  Anyway, he did all of us unsung bloggers a favor today by listing the relatively link-loveless bloggers he thought deserved to be nominated for THE LIST.  Thanks for the mention, Pete. I'm going to scrounge around and see if I can come up with my own list of unsung bloggers, but too afraid of forgetting any to improvise a list here and now.

Tags: vanity, alpha bloggers

Blog?sphere

I've been spelling it "blogosphere" for a long time, but I saw an ad for the Daily Show doing a piece on "the Blogisphere" last night. Okay, it's John Stewart, but what would be funny about spelling "blogosphere" wrong?  Didn't see the show, so maybe they mentioned it or played off it there, not sure. Anyway, what's the proper spelling? Have I been spelling it wrong, or is the Daily Show spelling it wrong, or is there no correct spelling? Dave Sifry, who I consider perhaps the authority on the blog?sphere spells it "blogosphere," so I'll keep using that for now :)

Tags: blogosphere, blogisphere

Closing the comments loop

A real loophole, at least for me, in the blogging virtuous circle is the comments section. How do you effectively close the loop when someone comments to your post. You can add a follow-up comment, but will they get it (or read it)? Not necessarily. They can subscribe to the comments-feed, if you have that functionality, but will they really make that commitment (a whole feed just to see a possible response)? Probably not. You can email them, but then the public aspect is lost. Here's a good thread about it at PomeRantz:

Stephen Francoeur, in a post a couple of days ago, poses this really excellent question about blog-iquette:

I’m not quite sure of the best way to reply to comments left at the end of postings. If I post my reply as a comment, will the original commenter think to go back to see if I’ve written my reply there? Or should I respond by doing an entirely new post, which the original commenter is more likely to see? My messier solution for now: post a new message mentioning the comment and noting my own follow-up comment.

Wordpress has the feature that you can subscribe to an RSS feed for comments on individual posts. Do other blog apps have that functionality? And does anyone actually use it anyway? Paul, the few times I’ve commented on his blog, has emailed me in reply, & following his lead I’ve taken to doing that with my own commenters sometimes. But the problem with that is, my reply then isn’t public. Scott comments on his own blog, & has managed to get some actual conversations going from time to time, so clearly his readers are avid enough to check back.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to handle this situation?

Tags: comments, feeds

 

MSN Spaces

Anyone tried it? I started a blog there the first day and although it was interesting, it seemed to be on a newbie level, great for people who'd never tried blogging before, but lacking the functionality I like to have, and wasn't very customizable, although they do syndicate by RSS, which is a nice basic perk that even Blogger doesn't have (I think, don't they just do Atom). But I heard they've gotten several million bloggers signed up in just a couple of months. Is that right? Do they have a more advanced platform for more advanced users as well?

Anyway, I found the first MSN Spacer to blog about Wondir here. It was posted over a week ago, but didn't show up in my Technorati search results until today, unless I somehow missed it. I wonder if MSN Spaces blogs are optimized for the near-real time blog-engines are not. I believe Technorati can technically pick up a new post within 7 minutes, thus the "world live web."

Tags: Technorati, RSS, MSN Spaces

29 Snowballs

Chris Allen has posted a very well-thought out list of 29 topics he's interested in pursuing in the following year. "Wiki editing dichotomy" is one that I immediately want to write about. The list of topics also makes for a list of candidates for persistent memery, or as snowballs (in the sense of Doc's snowblogging idea) growing while rolling downhill, propelled by link-love. There are a number of terms in his list of topics that I'm going to be adding to my growing mini-dictionary of social media lexicon terms/memes, such as "groupthink." Hope to make this mini-dictionary public as a wiki (if someone hasn't already made one) as there's no way I can keep track of this list myself for long.

[Technorati Tags: groupthink, snowblogging, wiki ]

Neighblogging?

Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but I can see this catching on (found at Scobleizer today). Couldn't get the links to work on the feedmap page, otherwise would've signed up. Either way, this is very cool and hopefully Keyhole will hook up with them or a similar service so you can see who's blogging at what house down the street using their super-zoom satellite imagery. I'm sure there must be some tagging/meta-data movement going on with Keywole or some other mapping service, but haven't seen any.

Btw, just saw Jeff Clavier has been blogging about BlogMaps too today, and in much more detail.

[Technorati Tags: Feedmap, Neighblog, Keyhole ]

Our Media, Google's Media

I signed up with OurMedia, as did a lot of us, recently. As much as I like Google getting into amateur video-search, I hope they don't steal too much of the attention from OurMedia, as Marc and JD's approach is as bold and unprecented as it is grass-roots and would be nice to see it thrive, much as Wikipedia now thrives, despite initial worries that it was an impossibly altruistic and open model (too good to be true/successful). Anyway, as JD points out, maybe Google will only intensify the spotlight on all-things grassroots media, which can only help OurMedia.

On a more personal and quasi-corporate note, this reminds me a bit of how other current or former Google Labs projects, such as Google Answers and Google Q&A, have only brought more attention to the Q&A space and thus have helped Wondir thrive (in our own small way).

[Technorati Tags: OurMedia, Google Video, Wikipedia ]

MyDensity, Your Density

Gave Mitch Ratcliffe's cool new invention MyDensity.com another spin today. It's a URL-relationship graphing engine that seems to be gaining traction. You just type in the URL you want to relationship-map and click "Show Graph" and it just creates it, no sign-ins or memberships or anything. Anyway, it works perfectly for me the first time I enter a URL, but when I try to enter another URL at a later time, it creates a map of the first URL I entered earlier. I think I'm having a cookie-problem or setting problem or something. Is anyone else experiencing this? I'm reasonably certain it's just me. Either way, very cool site, haven't seen anything else like this that I can think of.

[Technorati Tags: MyDensity, Persuadio, Mitch Ratcliffe ]