Category: Weblogging

Bb here, reporting live from Jonathon Delacour’s Comment SpamFest. I can see that we have a few early birds among the festival attendees, including that mad man of the weblog airways, the master of the One Word Weblog, Steve Himmer. Steve’s comment is, well, urh, “No comment”. What can I say, folks — the man is a master of understatement.

(As a side note, folks, Steve is sporting a new look, these days, based on a move to Movable Type. It’s sort of retro Arizona wasteland – very stylish, and not what one would expect from a man who lives by the sea. Very chic with those accents of rust and dust.)

Folks, while we’re waiting on other arrivals at the SpamFest, I want to regale you with some Tips for Living, compiled from my own experiences.

Tip 1: When going to a county government building to register your car, never slam shut the cover of the hard glasscase holder for your sunglasses. It has a distinctive gun sound when echoing in larger buildings. Doing so may attract unwanted attention, including several country police officers with hands strategically placed on gun holsters.

More from Comment SpamFest:

It was back in the early weeks of his weblog that Jonathon turned on comments. The first person to add one was Jeff Cheney who wrote:

I wonder if Jonathon will notice this comment….

To which Jonathon responded:

Thanks for commenting, Jeff. I did find your comment — but only by chance…

No, no! Don’t run off. It gets better. Really!

And now, for another Tips for Living:

Tip 3 (Tip 2, having to do with the FBI, is in comments of previous post): remove the cardboard from the pizza before placing it in oven. We have this tip directly from Jeneane Sessum, reporting on secret experimentation being conducted at Professor Chris Locke’s Colorado-based laboratory.

(No, not that laboratory, the other one.)

Though Professor Locke reports on improved flavor and texture, the hazards associated with baking cardboard at 475 degrees outweigh the benefits gained, in our learned opinion. In fact, while conducting an investigation into why Professor Locke’s pizza didn’t spontaneously combust, we found that the melted plastic of the pizza covering most likely prevented the cardboard from catching fire. Said plastic may also account for additional crunchiness of pizza.

These findings will be reported to Professor Locke after he completes the process of dealing with all of that extra roughage in his diet.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. 

B!x posted a link to my previous posting, Weblogging Consortiums, at Blogroots. I recommend that you read the comments attached to the posting.

In particular, Matt of MetaFilter fame believes that the concept of weblogging consortiums is too idealistic, and too based on trust. Pulling one entire comment;

burningbird, what you describe is ambitious, but far too idealistic. I too want the world to sing and have a coke on their low-cost blogs, but you’ve outlined a tremendous amount of work, risk, and trust.

When something looks like a lot of work, the natural question is to ask: why not get paid to do all that work, take all that risk, and trust people you’ve never met? You’re proposing a team of people unconnected collectively create the equivalent of their own geocities, out of the goodness of their hearts.

As for the people that can’t afford 13 bucks a month, how can they afford a computer in the first place?

Cornerhost is a service “by webloggers, for webloggers” as well as a few others (there’s one called blogmania or blogorama, but I forget the exact title and URL) and presents plans that are lower cost than traditional ISPs. I think that’s as close to someone creating something useful to newbies as you can get.

Matt does have good points, and the the reference to Corner Host is a good one. However, I think that Matt, and others, sell webloggers short. Or does he?

Something such as a Consortium would require a great deal of work, though the reliance on trust could be aided by good organizational structure and accounting practices. However, the assumption that people would require pay for this kind of work disregards all the effort that has ever been accomplished without pay within the open source movement, including Perl, Python, Apache, Linux, FreeBSD, PHP, and so on. If all the people associated with these efforts only worked for pay, you wouldn’t be reading this weblog now. Most likely you wouldn’t be accessing the Internet now.

But can we ask for this same level of involvement from webloggers? Don’t webloggers just want to have fun?

We keep saying that webloggers are a community, that combined we can make a difference in politics, to journalism, to business, to society as a whole. Well, if this is true, then we must establish more discipline than is demonstrated in Daypop and Blogdex. Really, at times it seems as if webloggers have no more focus than a 13 year old heterosexual boy learning calculus in a room full of Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders — easily sidetracked by tantalizing glimpses of Something Interesting.

For any long term effort, webloggers are either dependent on a company — such as Userland and weblogs.com; or we’re dependent on individuals, such as Mark Pilgrim and his “Dive into …” online books. How can we channel the connectivity and energy and intelligence and interest that make up the weblogging world and focus it into something practical? Something like a Weblogging Consortium?

Perhaps I am too ideal. I’ve been told in the past that I’m too ideal. And I know that with my current effort on both the RDF book and ThreadNeedle (yes, this is currently in development, but more slowly then expected) makes it difficult for me to take on something new.

However, once both ThreadNeedle and the RDF book are finished, I would be willing to explore the concept of a Consortium more fully, and work on same. But I won’t do it alone. If the interest isn’t there, I’ll assume it’s another one of my more idealistic but impractical ideas and let it die.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. 

This afternoon I was visiting Mike Golby and Jeneane Sessum when I realized that Blogspot was down. Again.

I am not unmindful of what Blogger has provided to the community these last few years — a free and easy way for webloggers, especially new webloggers, to get their voices online. However, I do believe it’s time for the community of webloggers to take some of this burden away from Blogger. Before we lose a whole lot of webloggers when Blogspot goes down for the count.

An effective approach would be to create Weblogging Consortiums — groups of webloggers who band together to lease a server for an entire year, thereby sharing the costs of the server among themselves. In particular, webloggers wanting to move to Movable Type 2.2 with MySql support have been faced with increased costs, especially if they’re using Windows-based systems. Shared space would be very cost effective.

Another Consortium service would be a listing of those with extra server space, willing to provide hosting for others. For instance, on my own system, once the environment is in place for Movable Type, adding new weblogs isn’t that much of a strain on resources. I have more than one weblog on the server now, and could easily add another 5 or 6 weblogs without any strain. In case you’re wondering whether my server will ‘go away’ some day, I’ve had a web server since 1996 — neither Burningbird nor YASD is going away.

Dorothea Salo has also offered to host some Blogger weblogs, and I imagine that most people with a server have extra space.

Finally, a third spoke to this Consortium wheel is a weblogger supported fund used to finance servers for newbies only. These servers can be pre-setup with Movable Type installed for each weblog, simplifying the process for new webloggers. In addition, perhaps other weblogging tool companies would also donate services for the Newbie Servers, though companies like Userland in addition to Blogger have taken on more than their fair share of free hosting (and are to be commended for their generosity).

If the newbies last past six months, at that point then they would move to a hosted server. The weblogging community would help them make this move (handle tool set-ups, migration of archives and so on). The weblogger would then pay for the tool they’re using (such as Blogger, Radio, or MT, or whatever), and pay a small yearly fee to be hosted. The amount of this fee would be based on what they could afford. Hopefully with this approach, the servers would eventually be self-funded.

The Consortium would not be a quickie Paypal setup with no financial accountability — the plan would be administered by a sanctioned organization under whatever non-profit corporate laws are in effect to the host country, with online access to the books and balance at any time.

Weblogging shouldn’t be for those with lots of bucks or technical skill. It should be open to anyone who can find some way of connecting to the Internet, and has something to say.

Stay tuned because I’m going to have more to say on this. And I’d like to hear what others say.

Mike Golby ended one of his exceptional weblog postings with a rant: seems as if Blogger is misbehaving. Again. And when I clicked the permalink to copy the URL, the page below showed up. As Mike might say (just might, you know), seren-fucking-dipity.

Blogspot is failing, and it seems as if Blogger isn’t much further behind. If these technical problems continue, we’re looking at the potential loss of weblogs, and webloggers. As it is, as Mike points out, we’re losing some lovely writing as post after post after post is lost.

I have my own server and use Movable Type, but I have several friends whose weblogging homes are in Blogspot, and whose blogging tool of choice is Blogger. I don’t want to lose them, or even a letter of their writing. Their problems are my problems, too.

The sad thing is, Blogger is still the easiest approach to bringing new webloggers into the community. It’s a no-cost, no-host solution that allows a person to try weblogging without any investment other than their time. For some people, low or no cost solutions are essential — even 20.00 US a month can mean the difference between paying electricity or not for some members in our community.

(And as for those webloggers who shelled out for Blogger Pro, as I did, the frustration must be doubly painful. These people trusted Pyra to deliver a professional product and, instead, received a lot of new toys built on the same old problems. Not Good Business.)

Regardless of whether the weblogger eventually moves to MT or Radio or some other weblogging tool, we need to have a no-cost, non-technical solution for the newbies, or we’re going to lose potential voices. Not to mention the voices of friends we’ve already made.

Bottom line: We — the global community of webloggers — can’t afford to lose Blogger. However, I’m not sure we can afford to continue with it, either.