I thought it would be a clever idea to do my 1976 high school journal as a blog but I never realized just how many people the world over could relate on so many levels to my general seventeen year old geekiness. The blog quickly became amazingly popular with coverage from major sites and write-ups from various different countries.

So, why is his campaign only at $127 of the $12,000 goal even after being featured on Boing Boing? My guess is because the rewards for pledging to the campaign aren’t worded correctly. At first read it looks as though you have to pledge at least $250 in order to get a copy of the book.

I think if Steven rewords the rewards and makes it clear at which point you get a copy of the book his campaign will get some traction. Awesome idea.

Places on the web for sharing content and ideas often remind me of real life interactions. Facebook is the everlasting high school reunion. Twitter, which I love, is maybe half cocktail party, half party-line. Flickr & Instagram can be the best way to send a postcard, while LinkedIn is the best way to send a fax To me, there’s something sacred about reading a blog post on someone else’s site. It’s like visiting a friend’s house for a quick meal ‘round the breakfast table. It’s personal— you’re in their space, and the environment is uniquely suited for idea exchange and uninterrupted conversation. In many ways, we should be treating our blogs like our breakfast tables. Be welcoming & gracious when you host, and kind & respectful when visiting.

Twitter, for me is slightly more familial, professional, and often news breaking but otherwise I whole heartedly agree with this sentiment. If you have a blog you should feel it is your home online – everywhere else are places you go out to.

It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote that I thought that blogs were ripe for disruption. And I still think we’re on the cusp of that. Or, perhaps, it is happening right in front of my eyes and I am simply not noticing it.

In a recent discussion between Anil Dash and a few other veterans of blogging Anil mentioned that even something as simple as a status update or tweet could be considered blogging. Although Twitter is rarely referred to this way today it was, at its inception, called a microblogging service. So maybe blogging has already evolved and we just haven’t noticed. The frog in the boiling pot comes to mind.

Although the conversation seemed to focus a lot on commenting I would have liked to have seen much more discussion around the topic of ownership. Some of the participants felt that ownership was important. Others not as much. If you look at how the party split it was split between the platform-builders and service-builders. Ev and Meg built services (Blogger, Kinja, Twitter) while Anil worked on a platform (Movable Type). I think there was much more to say on this topic.

Meg Hourihan on ownership:

But I’m not convinced people view what they’re doing [on social networks] as producing content, nor thinking it’s something they should own, anymore than I want to “own” my phone call with a friend. (Sure I don’t want someone to record it and sell it, but that’s different.) My call is ephemeral, and it’s about conversation and communication, not content.

While Meg believes that she’s seeing the world as it is I think she’s really just identified the problem with these social networks. Twitter and Facebook have permenant URLs for every single tweet and status update that people post. Those links are not ephemeral as Meg describes. She may feel as though they are because Twitter doesn’t give you access to your entire stream but – in reality – these tweets do not go away.

And that’s where Anil nails it.

So that point is very, very interesting, Meg: What if the phone company gave you free unlimited phone calls but they could record, monitor and sell your phone calls and information about what you said on them.

I do agree so much of why people don’t value ownership in social media is that they see it as conversation, not content, but that’s often because we don’t *know* in advance when it becomes meaningful.

In other words, people are viewing Twitter and Facebook as conversation platforms more than they view them as publishing platforms. Facebook and Twitter are finding value in what we all consider to be valueless conversation. They are making money based on what we are saying, what we’re interested in, and what is happening in the world. If they find value in our “content” why don’t we? And, if they treat this information as permanent why aren’t we?

Back to the evolution of blogs. I don’t think there is much argument about whether or not Twitter and Facebook can be considered blogging platforms. So we should lump them into the conversation of how blogs need to evolve. Which brings us full circle back to ownership. I think that people should own their own content. And they should know, up front, that they will own the content if they use a particular service or choose to host it themselves. It shouldn’t matter. They should also feel as though the content they post to any service is to be considered permanent – not a phone call that is soon forgotten.

I don’t think that a blog needs to run on software that you install on your own server in order for you to feel as though you own the content. WordPress.com and WordPress.org are nearly identical services with the same import and export capabilities yet one is a service and the other a platform. So you can use either of these products and feel pretty confident that you own the content and that the information you post there is permanent.

So how does this particular aspect of blogging need to evolve? I think other services such as Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and (fill in the blank) should do a better job of making your content searchable and accessible (read: exportable into a readable format) right out of the box. Not hidden somewhere in a Mac-only application or three-levels-deep in an API doc. One click easy.

The next aspect of blogging that I believe needs to evolve is the reverse-chronological homepage. In May of 2011 I wrote:

I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.

Imagine you landed on /blog/ here at my cdevroe.com URL. What you’d find there would be what the typical blog homepage looks like. Just a list of posts from newest to oldest. It’d be very difficult to find out what I blogged about based on only the last few posts. This is why I chose to put my about page front-and-center. I believe that is a better way to get to know me, what I’m up to, and what my blog is about.

I don’t think the blog format is broken but it is certainly stale. Someone needs to come along and give us a new way to look at things. And not just in a novel way like tiles or something else that is pretty and neat to look at – I’d like to see something that is valuable, makes it really easy to see what the blog is about, perhaps what is popular now, or what was at one time popular. I think of the currently most visited URLs here on this blog. They are not the most recent posts. Not by a long shot. My top URLs on this blog are a few links that I’ve posted in the past that have somehow found their way to the top of the search engine rankings. Would that be important to show on the homepage of a blog? Or, what about the fact that a few of my posts have had hundreds and hundreds of comments? Would that be important to show?

Sidebar “widgets” sprang up years ago as ways to solve some of these issues. Related posts, popular posts, most-used tags, and other widgets made it easier to discover content that has already been pushed off of the homepage. But I still think that someone, somewhere has an idea of how to fix these issues and that one day we’ll wake up and someone will have made something better.

One last issue that I would have liked to see discussed in regards to what aspect of blogs that may need to evolve would be the use of databases. This is a more technical topic than the others but many platforms and services suffer from downtime whenever a post goes viral or hits the mass media. This simply shouldn’t happen.

Each platform and service chooses to handle content management in their own unique ways. Blogger and Moveable Type, for instance, used to publish HTML files (I have no idea what they do nowadays) while WordPress opted to use a simple database to host the content and serve those pages dynamically. Each approach has their pros and cons. But one thing is certain – it is far easier to serve a static HTML file millions of times than it is to request content from a database millions of times. Today’s web is one where at any moment an URL could be plagued by millions of visitors. Modern day blogging platforms and services should take this into consideration regardless if it was manually installed or hosted.

Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook all have extremely capable infrastructures in place to handle these issues. With WordPress.org you’re on your own to setup WordPress properly to handle load. It has taken some heat for this and while the argument could be made that people that are installing software on their own server should know better – the argument could also be made that by simply pre-bundling one of the many caching plugins into the core codebase this issue would be all but solved.

Tons of traffic to any particular post shouldn’t be thought of as an edge case. If you’re a blogger it will happen. Even if you’ve been writing for 40 years and it has never happened to you. It will. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not your blogging product of choice will crumble under the pressure of today’s web. Ever.

I could go on about this topic all day. The rest of the discussion is fantastic and I suggest that anyone with even a passing curiosity about the world of blogging – where it has been and where it is going – should give it a read at your next opportunity.

One of the benefits I see coming from disabling comments is the number of links you end up getting back to your site.

Almost a year ago I wrote about the fact that blogging was ready for disruption. (I still think it is.) And that the new “pro blog recipe” was a blog without comments.

Lately this topic seems to have risen its head again yet not in the same way as it has in the past. In fact, rather than there being a debate for or against a blog having comments it appears that most independent bloggers have resolved that a blog without comments is simply much more enjoyable and manageable while larger outfits still see the need to engage the community.

Matt Gemmell, who recently shut off comments on his personal blog, added a few reasons to the fray. Here is one of his reasons that I have also enjoyed since turning comments off on my personal blog.

I feel more willing to publish short pieces, and to write more frequently.

When I had comments on I wouldn’t publish anything that I thought may not start a conversation. Which ended up leading me in a direction I simply didn’t want to go in – I was starting conversations for the sake of starting conversations. That isn’t why I have my personal blog and I don’t want it to be. So, off went the comments. And it isn’t because I don’t want to hear the opinions of those that read my blog. It is because I don’t want to write simply for the gratification of receiving comments. It has been very liberating.

There is still a place for comments on blogs. Even personal blogs. Some blogs have very good reasons to have comments on them. In fact, even Jason Kottke turns on comments from time-to-time when they are needed. But there are better examples like Horace Dediu’s Asymco. He has made it plainly clear that he runs Asymco in order to work with his community on figuring out a problem. He wants feedback, questions, answers, rebuttals to his hypothesis and blog comments is his primary way of accomplishing that.

So while the debate rages on – and all debates are good when they furnish constructive conversation – unlike Gemmell I firmly believe it is a matter of choice by the publisher rather than a cut-and-dry answer. There are pros and cons to having comments on or off and, once weighed, the publisher can then make a decision on how he or she would like to run their own blog.

In short; I never missed a post.

In some ways, those days are going away and now I’m at the mercy of the realtime web and an algorithm. And so far I don’t think I like it.

On Twitter, from what I can tell, I have access to about 7 days worth of tweets in their official clients; web, mobile, and apps on the iPhone and iPad. Tweetbot, a third-party Twitter client for iPhone, only pulls in the latest 50 messages in my Timeline and also on Lists that I’ve created. If I haven’t checked Twitter via Tweetbot in more than 50 tweets I simply miss those tweets.

Some people do use Twitter just to see, as Twitter puts it, “What’s happening now”. And, of course, that is extremely valuable. The pulse of the planet. But I use Twitter to keep up with family, friends, a few interesting people, a couple of companies, and yes – even a few celebrities. But I want to see every tweet. Not just the most recent few.

On Facebook the News Feed is run by some algorithm (which I shall now refer to as “secret sauce”). This secret sauce is both pretty bad and pretty nebulous. It is pretty bad because I’m routinely missing posts that I probably would have cared about. Case in point, my brother asked me the other day if I had seen a video he put on Facebook. “Nope, never saw it.”, I replied. I have my brother marked as a family member on Facebook. Surely Facebook’s secret sauce would deem a post by him as something I would like to show up in my News Feed? Apparently it didn’t. It is pretty nebulous because apart from some controls on the News Feed about the types of items I would rather not see, there really aren’t many controls for this secret sauce recipe thingy.

I realize I’m probably in the minority but I prefer to have access to every single update from the blogs that I subscribe to, Twitter accounts that I follow, or people on Facebook that I friend. I wouldn’t have decided to make those connections if I didn’t care to see them all. I’m going to miss the good old days.

When lunch break hit, I was hurting pretty badly. So I ended up sitting just outside the Swedish American Hall for a while and finally, while Om and I were speaking outside, Om said: “Go get some rest buddy.” Good advice.

That is Om in a nutshell. Easily one of the nicest and hardest working guys around.

His and Fred Wilson’s post made me try to figure out exactly when I began blogging. My best guess is somewhere in 1997. Unlike Om I haven’t been blogging every single day and I only made my living on blogging for a short period of time in these last 14 or so years. Someday I’ll have to write up my experiences though… it’d be fun.

Although I wish the app supported Markdown format (rather than just HTML) I’ll take it.

Just in time for our trip to Ireland too.

Update: A small, yet very welcomed update, is that the Posts tab is now the default tab rather than the Comments tab. This makes things so much quicker. Again, a very, very nice update to WordPress for iOS.

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball is a recipe that is working and the cooks are busy in the kitchen adding a pinch of this, a pinch of that and seeing what works for them.

So far none of these recipes have become better, in this blogger’s opinion, than its master recipe but several have certainly managed to create their own dish that works well enough to feed their own mouths.

What is the Daring Fireball recipe? It consists of the following:

• 1 multiple-times-per-day updated link log.
• 1 not-so-frequently updated blog with longer, well-written posts.
• 1 (or two) audio podcasts (to taste).
• 1 weekly RSS feed sponsorship.
• 1 well-curated image-based ad on each page view.

From outward appearances this recipe nets Daring Fireball a very decent sum – which is why the cooks are in the kitchen. With no inside information here is what one can surmise based on what is public knowledge.

The three main ways Daring Fireball generates revenue is through its weekly RSS feed sponsorship, The Deck Ad Network, and sponsorship of 5by5 Network’s The Talk Show. Daring Fireball also uses affiliate links and sells Tshirts from time-to-time but I do not believe these to be major contributors to its profit. They may both contribute to its ability to generate revenue but I believe the bulk of its profit come from the three channels I’m covering here. Without knowing more about how The Deck Ad Network and The 5by5 Network distribute revenue it is impossible to know exactly how much revenue goes to Daring Fireball but we can do exactly what the other cooks are doing; make assumptions and get close.

Daring Fireball currently charges $6,500 USD per week to sponsor the RSS feed. This recently increased from $6,000 within the last few weeks, and increased to that not too long ago from $5,000 USD and so on. So to figure out the yearly revenue generated through this single sponsorship program would depend on where you start and end the year. But, lets jump out on a limb and say that a weekly sponsorship has cost at least $5,000 for the last year. That’d be about $260,000 USD per year from the RSS feed sponsorship. At $6,500, should it maintain or go up higher from here, it’d be $338,000 USD for the next year.

The Deck, of which Daring Fireball is only 1-of-52 members, has a current cost of $8,300 USD per month. Or, sponsors can pay to buy a day, called a “roadblock”, for $8,300 per day. With 27 sponsors in the month of September that is about $224,000 USD generated. (Assuming The Deck had sold absolutely no “roadblock” ads. If they had it’d be significantly more.) I’m assuming that The Deck distributes revenues based on a traffic-based model of sorts (more page views == more moolah) but I don’t know exactly. But even if you were to split this revenue evenly among all parties that’d be nearly $8,300 per month for Daring Fireball. Based on nothing other than my gut Daring Fireball’s 4M+ page views per month make up a fair amount of The Deck’s overall traffic and so, one could assume, that Daring Fireball gets a slightly larger share than my math suggests.

5by5 is currently charging $3,000 USD a month for its Livestream sponsorship (which The Talk Show does each week) and $3,000 for its bandwidth sponsorship as well as individual show sponsorships which they don’t publicize the price for. It is very difficult to tell how 5by5 would distribute this revenue but, again, I’ll make some assumptions. I assume that a bandwidth sponsorship is all for 5by5. Bandwidth is a bill that goes to 5by5 and not the hosts. Bandwidth for a show as popular as The Talk Show could easily be a few thousand dollars per month (not to mention editing costs, etc.) So if we take the bandwidth sponsorship off the table I can only assume that The Talk Show generates about $9,000 USD per month. $3,000 for the Livestream sponsorship, and $6,000 for the two episode-based sponsorships that are within the show. Plus donations, Tshirts? I think I’m underestimating the revenue-generating power of The Talk Show but I can’t be sure.

Not counting the revenue Daring Fireball generates with its affiliate links and tshirt sales; it is my assumption that Daring Fireball could generate upwards of $550,000 USD per year (going forward). And I believe I’m underestimating because my assumptions are probably low. Again, the affiliate links and tshirt sales are probably fairly good revenue generators but the bulk of Daring Fireball’s profit likely does not come from these two channels.

Why go through all of this to figure out how much revenue Daring Fireball generates? Because it is exactly what wannabe-pro-bloggers are doing every single day. They do this math based on the information they can gather and decide to take a stab at it themselves. And with Daring Fireball’s RSS feed sponsorship increasing every few months why wouldn’t they? And good for them. The more the merrier. I just have one request.

I hope that those that decide to use Daring Fireball’s recipe decide to do whatever they can to make it all their own. Don’t just add a little more salt and pepper – change the main course from fish to beef. Make every ingredient from your own garden and don’t use the same brand ingredients Daring Fireball does. Make something unique that will inspire others to do the same. Be a good cook not a copy cat.

And for the past few years I think this has settled down a little. The standards those few pioneers set in the beginning are still around. Most blogs today have a fairly similar feature-set and layout. Even when the layout is dramatically different than the status quo the feature-set is still just about the same.

I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.

Several rather new trends are appearing in the pro blogosphere that started only a few years ago but are now becoming the new pro blog recipe. These trends simply weren’t there 7 or even 5 years ago. Disabling comments is seems to be the main dish (though 4 years ago it was debated). Having a podcast on-the-side is the side-dish. Add to that some sponsorship opportunities in RSS feeds, and a sprinkling of an ad network to taste, and you’ve got yourself the modern day pro blog recipe. Actually, all you really have is a direct mirror of what John Gruber has put together with Daring Fireball – but, nonetheless, these are the trends among pro bloggers and these must be taken into consideration when coming up with a brand new blog format that could set the trend for the next few years.

Syndication has also changed. It seems just yesterday that people thought full-content RSS feeds would destroy their ability to make money blogging. It turns out that could possibly be the most profitable part of their blog’s business model.

Having a Twitter account for your blog, or simply being selective with what is tweeted from your blog (which is my current model), is where things may very well be shifting. Today it would be unthinkable to see sponsored tweets in amongst the links to posts but give it a few years. Today’s Twitter feed is yesterday’s RSS feed. I imagine there will be sponsored tweets too and, in the near future, people will be just fine with that.

Exclusive, paid-for email newsletters had a spike earlier this year with a few services launching and some key figures in the industry taking a stab at them. I have no inside information on how those are turning out – but there is reason to believe that the blog could also do with some exclusive, paid-for content. It may not work for your blog about Hobbit-lore but perhaps it’d work for an incredibly good cooking, investing advice, design-and-code-tutorial, or architecture exam review blog.

Something I’ve always had issue with is that there aren’t enough “home pages” on blogs. That is why the home page for my site is my about page rather than a reverse chronological list of posts as most blogs are. I have that page too but people landing directly on cdevroe.com should not be introduced to my website by only seeing the latest few posts I’ve written. It wouldn’t be a very good introduction and, very well, may not even represent what my blog is about. Because this is a personal blog and not a blog about any one topic, the latest few blog posts would be a very bad representation about what this site really is – a personal blog.

Most blogs that try to earn a buck want to put as many clickable items on their home pages as possible. They probably feel that if they didn’t you’d never go anywhere besides the home page. I can say, after pouring over the stastics of my home page, that isn’t true. A fair percentage of the people that have come to my home page have stayed on that page for a few moments (presumably reading the page) and subsequently clicked on the blog or diet page(s), done a search, or gone to my Twitter account. All good things. I hope that someone solves this issue in a much better way than I have because I really do believe there is a lot of room for improvement here.

Advertising on blogs has simply never worked well. Yes, publishers have made money. Yes, advertisers have increased sales by purchasing ad space on blogs. However, for the core-subscribers to a blog the ads are just noise. Ad networks like The Deck do a very good job at striving to keep a higher quality product by controlling the ads and how they are displayed. But, arguably, even at that level of curation we still just end up with an ad in a sidebar on a blog. I wish there was a better answer for making content “free” to blog subscribers but – at present – advertising is our mule.

Some people claim the trackback is dead. I don’t believe that to be true. In fact, I rather like trackbacks. I like when blogs show me what others have written about a particular blog post. I like them even better than comments. Perhaps if blog software, and the theme of a blog, used the optional excerpt of the trackback standard better they’d work much more like comments (and be much more valueable) than they do now.

Reblogging, Retweeting, Sharing/Liking on Facebook, etc. are all ways to have a post be spread outside of a blog’s audience. The modern day word of mouth. There is no doubt that these tools work very well for some blogs while on others they do nothing. I have these options on my blog and, while I do get a few people using them per day, they serve little purpose then to remind people that if they’d like to share the post they can do it quickly and easily. But in reality, if a post is simply too good not to pass on it will be passed on whether you have a big Facebook button on your blog or not. These tools aren’t going anywhere in fact they are going to become even more ubiquitous – but it’d be nice if someone with an ounce of taste figured out a way to make these options pretty as well as easy to use and, as a hat-trick, much more valuable to all parties involved.

I know, I know, I’m going on and on about this but all of the above is just the tip of the iceberg as to why I believe that the blog format is ripe for someone to really begin innovating again. We have all of the tools and over a decade’s worth of content – all we need are some pioneers.

All good questions. Here is how I write on iPad.

First, I use an application called iA Writer. This application gives me a distraction free writing environment that has just the right amount of features to make writing easy.

I do not use nor own an external keyboard for iPad. Never have. In fact, the on-screen keyboard in Writer has a custom keyboard with few shortcuts that I find very convenient.

I also edit within Writer. I read and re-read (unless I’m in a rush for some reason) the post until I’m happy with it. At this point there is no HTML, no links, no images, no videos in the post.

I then copy and paste the text from Writer into WordPress for iOS. I immediately save the post as a Draft (just in case). At this point I’ll either add the links, images, or video. If there is a lot of media to add to the post I may wait until I’m on my MacBook Pro to finish the rest. Sometimes adding a lot of HTML to a post using iPad can be cumbersome. I’m hoping that WordPress for iOS, at some point, adds a custom keyboard for written HTML quicker.

When the post is finished I’ll then schedule it to be published, usually sometime in the morning the next day since I typically write at night or very early in the morning. This gives the post time to stew a bit and gives me a chance to yank it if I end up not feeling good about the post. It also gives my blog a feeling of consistent publishing rather than a sporadic schedule.

And that is how this post was written.

Barz weighed in on Color’s $41M funding. I haven’t done so because I feel it has been a big distraction and much of the coverage has been by those that clearly have no insight into this industry (I consider myself someone who has very little valuable insight into such things). Barz has that insight. And his take is both sobering and balanced. He mainly comments on Henry Blodget’s take in Business Insider.

“It leads me to believe that Mr. Blodget’s piece might be satirical.”

And then…

“Mr. Blodget points out all the reasons why investing $41 million at this stage is a good idea. For instance, he points out that with that investment, Color is worth at LEAST $41 million to any buyer! Even if they spend half of it, Blodget assumes that the company would then have $20 million in cash and $20 million in a good idea developed! I mean, LOL. The investors can’t lose, he points out, because they have preferred stock. “

If you knew Wayne you’d be LOLing right along with him. I love the ending…

“Funds with a lot of money get to start the bubbles. Like a big ponzi scheme, the first ones in reap the most benefit. Because in a bubble, there’s always someone next in line ready to add more air. Until there isn’t.”

Subscribe to Techonomic Man. You will not regret it.

• Photo and video uploads now work on iPad 2
• Made the post status (such as “Draft”) more clear in the posts list

I use my iPad to write posts and, now that I have iPad 2, I hope to do it a lot more often while on the go. WordPress for iOS has been making very steady progress lately and this update is a very timely one.

Why are these updates key for me? Because iPad 2 would instantly crash when trying to add a photo to a blog post. I was able to work around it by using iPhone but it was pretty frustrating. Also, I write posts, save them as drafts, and then schedule them for publishing all from my iPad. This allows me to pick the time that a post gets published regardless of when I feel impelled to write it and also gives me time to edit them (which I did poorly on yesterday’s post). Being able to see which posts are in draft right in the posts list is a very welcomed update.

Thanks WordPress for iOS team.

The post is both touching and honest. It reminds me of the better days of blogging when people wrote journal entries rather than gadget reviews. When people wrote about how much their day sucked rather than how much their Internet connection does. When people wrote about family vacations rather than writing about topics that are good search engine fodder.

We need to get back to blogging.

“Science does not embody all that men know, only what is for men of science. The woodman tells me how he caught trout in a box trap, how he made his trough for maple sap of pine logs, and the spouts of sumach or white ash, which have a large pith. He can relate his facts to human life. The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.”

I also like the bit where he mentions that a lot of man’s knowledge ends up going to waste – presumably because it is lost with the man at death. Henry David Thoreau, though, didn’t live in a world with blogs and Twitter. If more people would spout out knowledge through these channels, instead of negativity, I think Henry’s thoughts could be outdated.

For contrast here is the way that I currently back up my WordPress powered blog. First, I export the database from mySQL. This can be done a variety of ways (as a CSV file, SQL file, etc.) but the result is the same – I back up the data that mySQL stores to be imported should a failure occur. Already I’ve left 99% of the world’s population wondering what the heck I’m talking about. Second, I copy all of the PHP files that run WordPress, my current theme, and any plugins that I have installed. There are a lot of files that run a WordPress powered site. Technically speaking I don’t need to copy the core WordPress files because those can be downloaded online at any time but I do it so that the back up of my site is a much more complete copy. Third, I copy any and all images and/or downloadable files to my local hard disk to be sure I can restore those should the need arise. It isn’t necessarily difficult to do all of this but if someone wasn’t as geeky as I am (Hi Mom) then I have no idea how they’d pull it off.

This isn’t the fault of WordPress. Comparing WordPress to Tumblr isn’t fair. Comparing WordPress.com to Tumblr, though, is a much more fair comparison. The purpose of WordPress.com, like Tumblr, is to bring blogging to the masses. WordPress.com is a service for people that would have no idea how to do what I described above let alone install and set up WordPress on their own. Presumably the backing up of any WordPress.com-powered blog being done in the background all the time. If a catastrophic failure happened to someone’s WordPress.com-powered blog they could just contact support and get it back up and running. Even the chance of someone’s blog having a failure is less because of it being powered by WordPress.com.

However, this doesn’t mean that they have an easy exit strategy for all of their content. Saving everything you need to restore a blog from WordPress.com is, as far as I know, not possible to do easily. The only options available currently on WordPress.com’s “Export” admin page is to export your posts, pages, and preferences as one big XML file that is only readable by another copy of WordPress.

This back up application for Tumblr is altogether different. When the process is complete you’re left with the content of your Tumblog in a very readable, searchable, and even machine readable set of files. If Marco added an “open the back up in your browser when finished” button I think any caveman (sorry guys) would be able to use and understand this application. Using very simple HTML each of your posts are saved separately, as well as together in monthly archives, which can even be searched using Mac OS X’s very powerful Spotlight search. After backing up my Tumblr account as a test of this application I realized how awesome it is to be able to use Spotlight to find something you’ve written on your blog. Inside of the individual HTML files for each post is also an XML schema, using the same schema as Tumblr’s own API, that can be used to pull out the specific metadata for that post. Brilliant.

I’m not sure why Marco decided against using Microformats, perhaps even in addition to the XML included, to make the HTML files machine readable but that doesn’t matter too much. Everything you need to restore your Tumblog is there. Which brings us to the one big caveat of this back up application. Restoring.

Unless I’m missing something I do not believe there is a way to restore your Tumblog using this application but I also believe that if anyone is going to make that much, much more simple than anyone else it will be the Tumblr team. The true sign of an excellent back up workflow is, as Joel Spolsky recently said, in the process of restoring from that back up.

“The minimum bar for a reliable service is not that you have done a backup, but that you have done a restore.”

I think this application is much better than any other backup service or application I’ve seen from competing services. It is dead simple to use and gives you something you can actually use, read, and search on your local computer. Once they get the restore process down they will be ninety-nine miles ahead of everyone else.

I’ve never liked the word “content” but I love when people set goals before themselves to write more. Anton Peck created Project52 this back in 2007. He has now reissued the challenge and is accepting anyone/everyone with a blog to join in on the fun.

I’m in. And over 200 others (so far) are in as well. This sort of reminds me of NaNoDrawMo in that it sets out a goal for people to strive after. Although I failed pretty miserably at NaNoDrawMo this year at least it got me to draw more. So whether or not everyone on the list writes at least 52 posts next year – I’m willing to bet they’ll all write a bit more – and thats great.

The very next day Steven asked, via his own Web site, for some suggestions on what Panic could do to achieve the goal of being “more accessible and more open.” While he offered some of his own ideas he asked for suggestions to be sent to his personal email address.

On December 7th, five months after the interview and who-knows-how many months of internal discussions at Panic, the company has an official blog. They have a Twitter account too but the Twitter account has been in use for some time (they even respond to inquiries about their products promptly).

This new blog, however, is the company’s largest leap forward towards transparency at Panic. Or, at least it has the potential to be. So far the company has used the blog for announcements and peeks at the culture within Panic. This is excellent, of course, but I hope they use their blog to let us in on some of the things coming in the future, to ask questions, to show the thought process behind a decision, etc. And I’m sure they will. The blog’s bindings haven’t even been broken yet so we’ll give them time to loosen it up. B’okay?

In usual Panic style their blog is incredibly gorgeous, unique in nearly every possible way, and shows off the company’s culture. Well done Panic.

Huzzah! And there was much rejoicing.

Oh, his site is Pink for October for a reason.

“Twitter killed a lot of blogs, and I’m beginning to think that it’s killed even more comments. I love Twitter, but I do miss the old days of the blogosphere, back when blogs where as common as opinions (I was traversing my archives earlier; it was like visiting a graveyard, with URLs for headstones). Back when even a half-assed entry would garner comments from near and far, and people would link to each other and the sense of community was in-between people and their writing, rather than in-between 140-character quips.

Those days are gone, and a new batch have arrived, where if I write that I’m eating a strawberry pie on Facebook, it’ll get more replies than if I dig up a super-rare interview with George Lucas and write about it on my blog… What’s a man to do?”

Michael and I share these feelings. I really do miss the old days of blogging. I do like Twitter and Facebook, but it doesn’t distract me from reading and participating on blogs. Although it seems to do just that to the majority of ‘the blogosphere’.

A few examples of this in action, if I may.

The other day I wrote a link about Gmail labels and asked a question at the end of the post about how people currently use labels. That question got zero replies. Back when I was one of the authors of the now defunct TheUberGeeks.net that question could have garnered 10-20 replies before the sun set. Even here on my personal blog I’d get a few replies to a question like that – back in the old days. After a day or so of not getting any replies I Twittered a link to the post. That managed to get three replies. As irony would have it, Michael was the very first person to respond.

Here is another example. And one that fits in well with Michael’s comment about strawberries and Facebook. Yesterday I was eating a banana. So I Twittered nothing other than the word banana. I got at least 8 replies on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and other services. Wow. Fruit is still popular.

Well Michael, my friend, the old days of blogging are long gone. They will more than likely never return. As you say you may be able to adapt and overcome – but I like to think that we’ll just have to live with it like old men that wish for ‘the old days’ again.

Random 60: Stop complaining! | Favorite on Viddler.

In the world of social media everyone has a voice. If you only have 1 follower on Twitter (I’m cdevroe, btw) or the only friends you have on Facebook (I’m on there too) are your relatives – it doesn’t matter – you have a way to spread “your message” easier than ever. Why not make it a positive one?

It seems that people are spurred on to talk about the bad more than they are about the good. If your cable goes out, your car won’t start, or your cell phone loses coverage — you complain. This is understandable. I do it too. But all that does is spread that negativity. Lets stop spreading as much negativity and try to be positive now and then. Lets be real (don’t be fake-positive) but lets try to keep it balanced at the very least.

How? If you use Twitter or Facebook copy and paste this:

REPLACE THIS WITH A POSITIVE MSG – #r60 http://bit.ly/19r0Vm

Note: You do not have to do a video. A Twitter message, Facebook status, Flickr photo, or blog post will more than suffice.

If you have a blog, you can probably figure out how to tag your post with r60. We can watch the results on Twitter here.

Today it changes again. I’ve decided that my personal blog being ‘named’ my name just wasn’t working. I’ve known this for a long time but I didn’t do anything about it because I wasn’t sure what to do. Finally I got sick and tired of thinking about it and just decided to name it after what it has already become, rather than naming it something I’d like it to become. If that makes any sense.

As of today this blog, which is still going to be my personal Web site in all of the glory that it has come to be, is known as First Initial, Last Name – The official Web site of Colin Devroe.

For several years I have admired the ‘blogs’ that have been branded with their own names yet are run by one or very few people. If you read this blog with any regularity you can probably guess the forthcoming list, but here it is anyway: Daring Fireball run by John Gruber, Waxy.org by Andy Baio, Avalonstar by Bryan Veloso, Waking Ideas by Daniel Nicolas, Monday by Noon by Jon Christopher – and many, many others. I’m listing my friends who are good examples because, well, they are my friends and this is my blog and I can do that sort of thing.

This doesn’t mean that I put my own personal blog in this same line up. I don’t. It isn’t worthy. Also, some of these examples shouldn’t be classified as blogs. Daring Fireball is a business. It is the way John feeds his family. It just so happens that John’s business is “blogging”. This site will never be a Daring Fireball.

So First Initial, Last Name it is. I may grab an appropriate domain name for it, at some point, but I’ve always done more than fine with cdevroe.com so I don’t see that happening any time soon. Who types in domain names more than once or twice anyway, really? You should have subscribed to this site by now.

Side note: I’ve recently added the Share This button to my site (come to this post to see it). If you feel that anything I share on this site is worthy of letting others know about, please consider using this button to make it quick and easy to share the post, photo, or video on your service of choice.

Thanks to all of you that subscribe, read, and participate on my site. I really do appreciate it.

I’m spoiled by a rich-editor in WordPress, that saves drafts automatically and even has multiple revisions, and so I’m sticking with WordPress for now. But if I was going to use an application to write with – it’d be MarsEdit.

Oh, and the latest version supports Tumblr now. Which is excellent.

Random 60: Reading. | Favorite on Viddler.

In this fast paced, Twitter-powered world it seems like all we do is consume shorter, and shorter bits of data. First it was blog posts, now it is micro-blogging with services like Twitter (I’m cdevroe by the way). I believe reading books can really slow us down, disconnect us from the Internet for a little while, and get us back to consumer larger ideas.

What do you think? When was the last time you read a book?

Alex Payne, one of the many talented people behind Twitter, recently wrote on his blog his thoughts on blog comments. In a nut, Alex felt that by leaving comments off he’s elevating the level of conversation. That, if he had comments turned on, there would be less than desirable comments written on his blog. That, by turning comments off, it forces people to reply to his blog posts from their own blog. Since people don’t want to write stupid things on their own blog the level of conversation would automatically be risen. Smart.

Alex isn’t the first person to share this sentiment. I’ve written about blog comments in 2004, again in 2007, and have thought about it many times since I began blogging around the turn of the century. In 2004 I was commenting on the indirect benefits for turning off comments. The main benefit I highlighted was that by not allowing comments, you’d be forcing people to link to your site from theirs, creating more link backs to your site, increasing your blog’s audience, and improving your site’s Pagerank on search engines. All very good things for any writer. I suppose those benefits really just improve Alex’s reason. Improving the conversation while at the same time doing well for yourself.

In 2007 I was, in an ironic sort of way, responding to Jeremy Keith’s thoughts on leaving blog comments off. He said that he didn’t like having them on because of they were “examples of antisocial networking”. He made examples of YouTube and Digg being saturated with worthless comments. I’ve recently reread my post and I think I worded my response quite well, so if you’re interested, give it a read.

I think my thoughts hold up, two years later, that Digg and YouTube are, well, Digg and YouTube. Digg, generally speaking, is meant to act as a human filter for the world’s news. The comments on a Digg are, for the most part, about whether or not that particular news item, link, photo, video, or whatever should be worthy of being on Digg at all. Digg has gotten so much better than it was when it first reached critical mass. YouTube, however, still has a lot of maturing to do. The community is so vast that as you browse around the site you will see that thoughtful videos usually are rewarded with thoughtful responses while not-so-thoughtful videos are not. The nature of the beast I suppose.

There are edge cases, of course. Where you have a thoughtful video that gets the attention of the trolls. Where dumb people with nothing to do flock to a particular video and, for no other reason than their own personal entertainment, tee off in the comments in a tirade of incredibly distasteful, worthless, and (even I’ll admit) humorous commentary.

I suppose my main reason for agreeing to disagree with Jeremy was because, well, my site isn’t that popular. This isn’t Digg. This isn’t YouTube. I don’t have the problem of having millions of troll-like morons looking for an excuse to yell things like “first” or, well, any other worthless response (let alone the off-color ones). If I did I’d probably deal with that in my own way. This is, afterall, my house. I very much doubt I’d ever turn comments off entirely. One of my core beliefs, which I mentioned in my 2007 note, was that I thought of blog posts as the beginning of or the response to conversations. I still feel that way. I wouldn’t write anything on my blog, ever, if I didn’t in some way want someone to think about what I’m writing about and, if they chose to, respond to it. That is why I write.

Daring Fireball, one of my favorite Weblogs of all time, which made my Best of 2008 list, and is run by my friend John Gruber, also leaves comments off. John, who recently linked to Alex Payne’s thoughts, has covered this topic a few times. Based on what he’s written publicly about this topic I can safely say that he is in agreement with both Alex and Jeremy. And he has reason to. Jeremy’s main point about how there are too many worthless comments out there has a lot to do with scale. Daring Fireball has enough scale, though no where near the scale of Digg or YouTube, to create those types of moderation problems for John. You see, John curates Daring Fireball like a rooftop garden in a busy city. He cares for it. Every pixel. He cares for it as though it has very limited space. He uses that space efficiently. It is like he needs to get the greatest quality vegetables possible from the absolutely least amount of area. Besides John’s writing it is probably the biggest factor in the success of Daring Fireball. With as much traffic as he gets (which is about 1.2M hits per month according to his Sponsorship page) he would probably run into the problem of trolls. When John goes off on jackasses (which are some of my favorite posts, by the way) I’m pretty sure other jackasses would chime in.  With regards to Alex’s main point, about the fact that Alex really enjoys well thought-out discussions rather than terse commentary, John also tends to link to many people that mention his site in thoughtful posts. John enjoys good writing as much as anyone. In other words, I can see why blogs like Daring Fireball leave comments off.

TechCrunch, one of the most popular blogs right now, has comments on. It has some troll activity. It has some comments that, in my opinion, aren’t worth all that much. But, some people have used the comment area on TechCrunch to do a great job of responding to not only TechCrunch’s commentary but also to the TechCrunch audience. Gary Vaynerchuk, someone I consider a dear friend, runs a Web site called Cork’d. (You can read my interview with Gary about Cork’d, if you’d like). When Cork’d got hacked, and TechCrunch promptly reported on it, Gary took the opportunity to directly communicate what was going on through his own blog and through TechCrunch’s comments. I’d love to hear Michael Arrington’s thoughts on comments on TechCrunch and why they’ve chosen to leave them on for the majority of their posts. I’m positive he has an opinion on this matter.

Again, I’ve been blogging for 10 years. Longer than it has been called blogging. Longer than there has been any form of personal content management systems. This topic of comments, and whether or not to have them on my site, has been debated in many conversations with other bloggers at blogging meetups and conferences, with myself in the shower, with the road while I’m driving, in my own brain, and many other places over those years. I struggle with it. All. The. Time.  My strategy, as of today, is that if it even became a problem where I began to regret having comments on – where the comments I get on my site do not have a value to quantity ratio that I’m happy with – or when my goal is for people to link to my site from their own sites for the sake of getting linkbacks – then maybe I’ll turn them off. But not until then. And neither of those situations have happened in all of these years and I doubt they will any time soon.

I’m just happy to know that other people think about these sorts of things still too. That, even after 10 years of publishing on the Web, we’re all still struggling together with the same fundamental issues that the Web, in all of its social greatness, has imposed on our efforts of sharing ideas. No matter how good the tools get, no matter how many people jump online worldwide and join the conversation, we will always have the decision to make of how we’d like interact. What we’re comfortable with for us, for our companies, and for our Web sites. The learning curve is, as far as I see it, infinite. And I’m okay with that.

I’ve been subscribed to Sarah Marchant’s blog, dreamdust, for a while. I believe Mike found her photos on Flickr, suggested her profile to me, and it went from there. That was years ago. Recently, however, Sarah has been on fire on her blog.

She posts about her life, plain and simple. It isn’t that her life is any more exciting than any of our’s – it is just about the way she looks at things, describes them, and focuses on details that would go unnoticed by most of us. Most recently I’ve enjoyed fair warning, Yucky things, and Oh good, she’s talking about compost again.

I suggest visiting her site. If you like what see, subscribe.

Source: dreamdust.

Some people at IBM put together what they call their Social Computing Guidelines and after perusing them rather quickly – I think they are quite good.

If you are a business that has been around awhile and you’ve been scared to allow your employees to blog or to have your own blog, take a look at these guidelines and think about implementing them for yourself.

Source: IBM Social Computing Guidelines.

“So that’s it. Before you even get into the technical merits of the platforms, think about the license, especially if you’re a theme developer. Slapping a Creative Commons license on your theme will work just fine for Habari. Doing it for WordPress is a violation of their license.”

He says this because WordPress is released under the GNU General Public License that states that if you create a work that contains any part of WordPress it must “be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License”. Which is pretty much anything built “on top” of WordPress, right?  Plugins, themes, small widgets, all have WordPress’ built-in functions in them.

Should this be a real cause for concern? Owen thinks so.  There is some interesting chatter in the comments of his post too.

Source: One Way in which Habari Absolutely Slaughters WordPress.

Oh, before I begin, let me just say that I’m completely open to the fact that I could be dead wrong with any of my thoughts below. If I am wrong, please feel free to correct my thinking in the comments section.

TechCrunch doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot “digging” lately.  It seems like, for a lack of a better way to put it, the TechCrunch editors need to be spoon fed stories rather than them hunting them down and finding them.

Maybe the volume of submissions that they get is such that they simply do not have time to go out and find any other stories.  Or, maybe the fault lies on me, for not continuously emailing the editors or driving to their office and barging in, demanding that they cover various things going on at Viddler.

Or maybe they’re just like me. They only have 24 hours in a day and they need to focus on what does them the most good. Maybe they only cover Twitter, Yahoo!, and many other Silicon Valley-based companies because they’re far more interesting to their audience than Viddler’s new customizable player.

It could be that since I failed to go out and tell them about Viddler’s API, our business-to-business Web services, or our Vidgets – that they would have never known about them otherwise.

Let me be clear; I certainly don’t feel shunned by anyone at TechCrunch.  In fact, all of my dealings with everyone there (past and present) has always been great.  They’ve covered Viddler’s launch, and embedded our player on many occassion.  They just don’t seem to be paying attention to some of the things happening over here on the east coast, and I’m wondering what we might be doing wrong.

Some have commented to me; “So long as your users know what is going on, you shouldn’t worry about the TechCrunch audience.”  In some ways I agree with that statement, but we want everyone to know how great Viddler’s services are maturing to be – and we think that those that read TechCrunch deserve to know as much as Center Network’s readers.

I have seen many discussions about TechCrunch and its editors, good, bad, and downright ugly – I hope this post doesn’t come across as anything other than me being honest.  I want the entire world to know about Viddler, and I believe TechCrunch to be an excellent technology blog/online magazine that could be instrumental in helping us achieve that goal.  It just isn’t doing so right now.

Hey TechCrunch! Put Viddler on your radar. Please?

(The above post also relates to any one or any company that covers the technology space. Let me know of other outlets that should be covering Viddler that aren’t and I’ll try to contact them.)

I believe the price for a link and write up in his feed when first launched was around $750 per week? I know in October 2007 it was $900 per week. I remember looking only a few days ago and it was $1,250 per week. Now I look and see it is up to $1,750 per week and that it is sold out until at least 2009.

Two quick points. I guess the price should have been higher eh John? Second, this is so well-deserved and justified that I’m really happy it is happening to such a hard working “blogger”. And, from out of the mouths of those who have opened their wallet to sponsor Daring Fireball, completely worth it.

Congratulations John for all your success with Daring Fireball. You have absolutely earned it.

Especially on today’s Internet. I’ve had “my own site” for as long as I’ve ever been online. It all started on some Geocities and Tripod powered sites in the mid-90s. Then, when I switched from using AOL  (read: When I finally realized AOL was not the Internet.), I used some shared space on Prodigy.net, my ISP at the time. It wasn’t long before I discovered the world of Web development and purchased a domain (then called colinspage.com) for around $70 per year.

Fast forward about a year and a few of my friends put together a Star Wars related news site called thehutt.net. I didn’t help out too much with the design and development but I did write some for the site.  It wasn’t long after that when I wanted to scratch my own itch and had my own blog.  Which ended up turning towards theubergeeks.net, and now I have cdevroe.com.

I think having your own Web site is a valuable thing, especially for those of us that work on the Web.  It helps you stay in touch with what people are going through when they want to publish content online, edit some code, or even customize an open source project.  There are countless lessons to be learned by having your own site to fiddle with.

Great work Kyle. I’ll check in on you and your site(s) in 14 years.

Source: Kyle Slattery.com.

Ansel Adams, considered one of the best American West photographers, had a studio which is still owned by his family and is named The Ansel Adams Gallery, now has a blog.  Still very fresh, this blog is cataloging some of the activities of the studio, its members, and fans of Ansel Adams.

I am of the opinion that pretty much every projects deserves a blog to help catalog experiences, but I definitely feel that photography and blogging are really a great match.  Subscribed!

Source: The Ansel Adams Gallery Blog.
Via: Robert Scoble: Kodak Moment: Following Ansel Adams [sic] footsteps.
Additional info: Ansel Adams on Wikipedia.

Upgrading

As with all WordPress upgrades, it is as easy as advertised. I was able to click Upgrade and in a matter of milliseconds my database was updated. Since I hadn’t upgraded since prior to 2.2 I had a few plugins that were now rendered obsolete, so I deactivated them, edited only a few template tags, and deleted a few template files – and I was done.

Quick tips for upgrading, that may save your life one day, are as follows:

• Back up your blog’s database
• Deactivate all plugins

Doing these two, rather simple, things will save you tons of time and the need to debug thousands of lines of code once you’ve upgraded and you see some errors from your plugins.

A few oddities

There are a few things I’ve noticed that seem sorta odd – but I think I have to do a little more investigating to be sure. The first is that I can no longer reorganize the “write panel” in the WordPress admin? Maybe there is a plugin or option somewhere to let me do this, but I’d much rather be able to reorder this page how I’d like it. Like, why is Slug all the way at the bottom?

The second thing is that, in my opinion, WordPress should have told me that I no longer need the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, and that I could just go to Manage > Import and quickly convert my tags into WordPress tags and be done. The process was really simple and I was able to disable a huge plugin, which I like, but even knowing that it was available wasn’t apparent enough.

I used to have two mobile categories here on my site, one for mobile photos and one for mobile notes. Each of them resided under a parent Mobile category. The URLs for these were /mobile/notes/ and /mobile/photos/. I can no longer structure my categories like this because WordPress 2.5, automatically, decided to rename my category slugs to photos-2 and notes-2. Very annoying. Is this a bug?

I don’t have “Add media”

The WordPress Admin needed a change and, while I’m not in love with the new design quite yet, any change was a good change and I’m sure that future version (and time) will go a long way.

Oh. I don’t have a “media panel” for uploading multiple photos/video, etc. Where is that?

Conclusion

Solid update and I recommend it for everyone that uses WordPress for no other reason than the inline plugin updating – which is something that WordPress should use to upgrade its own code base too!

Now I really need to get the new theme of my site completed so that I can take advantage of all of these new things I’ve been plugging in.

“One of the problems with all the new and wonderful applications that are coming about as part of the Web 2.0 movement is that information is spread out all over the internet. It can become quite easy to find yourself stretched thin when trying to manage your identity. To solve this problem, I would like this site to become a central hub for all of my information online.”

I would like to thank Chris for the link to my site but his site doesn’t have comments and his contact page asks you to fill in a form that doesn’t exist. Maybe he’s better off, because here I am linking back to his site, which is something I’ve been saying since 2004.

(Source: Bringing it All Together | Chris M Johnson)

“Over the past few weeks I developed Asaph – a small blogging system, that allows you to instantly post links and images directly from any page on the web.”

After watching the demo video, I really like how simple the tool really is. Now I want to adjust my site’s bookmarklet (the one I’m using to write this very post) to do a few of the things that Aspah’s bookmarklet does.

(Source: Asaph Microblog – Beta – phoboslab.org)
[Via John Gruber]

As it stands I post what I’m currently doing to Twitter, I am testing out Pownce with mobile blogging, events, links, and files, I post mobile phone photos to Flickr (as well as the occasional screenshot), videos go on Viddler, bookmarks end up on Ma.gnolia, tasting notes end up on Cork’d, and my thoughts on Apple products find their way to TUG.n.

It is exhausting, and starting to become a little bit of a headache.

There are definitely many pros to using each of these services, as I believe each and every one is built very well for their purpose, and each have their own thriving community of users that make you feel right at home. Services like Viddler and Flickr also make sharing videos and photos extremely cost effective. Even with these benefits I always feel as though I’m spreading myself out too wide, so I think I’m going to start pulling all of these bits together here on my site in some fashion.

As it stands, I use my front page as the main way to show the latest activity on each of these services. This has been fine for a while but I now would like to change from aggregating everything to storing everything here, and perhaps pushing updates to the services, rather than the other way around. This isn’t going to be an easy thing to accomplish at first, but once I get everything setup, I think I’ll be much happier and have much more control of what and how I share.

There are a few other benefits to this change, at least for me. Cutting down on distraction is always a goal of mine and my most recent try at this has been to remove a huge portion of my Twitter and Flickr “friends” so that I cut down on a lot of the noise. I’ve also switched the Twitter notices preference to not include @replies from people I am not following, and this has really cut down on the chatter that I’m not even part of. I believe I went from seeing hundreds of Tweets per day to now only seeing a few an hour. Actually, I’m not even seeing that many since I’ve now decided to keep Twitterrific hidden in the background until I need it. I’ll still see @cdevroe messages, so that will still be a valuable way to communicate, but will also cut down on distractions. A win-win.

I’m going to begin working on one service at a time, slowly bringing it all together, and giving each a home here on my site. I’ll try my best to keep a log of my experiences doing each of these, jotting down why I’m handling it the way that I am, and asking for feedback as I find the best solution for me as I go forward. Of course, I’ll be using WordPress as my backbone for this – as I’ve always found it to be extremely flexible and powerful enough for me to do just about everything I want to do.

I’m looking at this as both a fun project and an experiment. Have you ever thought of doing this, or can you point me to some good examples of those who have?

For those of you that do not know, I used to run a small blog with a few friends where we tried our hat at writing about geeky topics. We called it TheUberGeeks.net, or TUG.n, and we’ve recently begun working on its resurrection. We’ve got some big plans (as big as they can get giving it our night and weekend attention for the next few months) and I hope that anyone that used to subscribe will find their way back to TUG.n.

We’ve got two new articles up there and we’ll have at least a few more before this week is out. The two most recent articles were written by me:

• An iPhone FAQ – covering the top questions I receive from people that see me with an iPhone.
• Porting Mac applications to Windows – An interview with Cris Pearson of plasq – where I conduct a short interview with the CEO of a small software development company about the challenges of porting software with a small team.

I’m looking forward to seeing Chris’ Song of the Week return in style as well as Josue’s coverage of several TV series. In the next month or so we’ll have several pretty neat announcements there, so keep your ear to the ground. Actually, just subscribe to the TUG.n feed, and that will keep you up-to-date.

We’re back baby!

This is just a quick rant, written on my iPhone which is less conducive to writing more than 140 characters than I’d hoped, but I hope to try a little harder starting tomorrow.

Some deal with this issue from an ideological perspective in that they disable comments because they feel that people will behave differently when commenting than they would if they wrote from their own Web sites. Jeremy Keith recently said:

“Choose a random video on YouTube or a random story on Digg, read each and every comment and then tell me that the comments contribute to any kind of community discussion. They are shining examples of antisocial networking.” — Reflection

I feel this is a blanket statement, which has some validity, but I do not believe that YouTube or Digg comments are completely “examples of antisocial networking”.

Sure. Many comments found on Digg threads are a bunch of teenaged boys (the proof is in the statistics) yelling back and forth about whether or not that specific article is digg worthy – but I believe those threads are there exactly for that reason. Should the commentary on Digg be about the article itself? Or should that conversation be reserved for the article’s origin? I believe it is up to the community to decide and it seems like they have.

Not that Jeremy’s point isn’t a valid one. Someone leaving a comment on my blog may indeed be a little looser with their speech than they would if they were responding, like I am right now, from their own Web sites. And if the author of the site is not willing to weed through the comments – then perhaps it is best to disable the comments for that very reason.

But I believe there is a completely different angle to consider.

One of the benefits I see coming from disabling comments is the number of links you end up getting back to your site. It is always nice when someone writes a blog post in response to something you said or wrote and have them link to your site or post as a way to direct people to the rest of the conversation. I’ve been fortunate to have a fair amount of people doing that very thing with some of my posts here on my personal site – and everytime I enjoy it when they do. I wonder, if I disabled comments, would the number of “linkbacks” increase because I was no longer providing a way for the conversation to continue on this site?

In the spring of 2004 I published a poorly written post entitled: “Disabling Comments, The Pros” wherein I spoke about a few sites that were good examples of this “theory” at work. Some of the most popular personal weblogs to date have been those who rarely, if at all, enable comments on their posts. I don’t believe this to be “the formula for creating a popular personal blog” but I believe it may help in some cases.

I leave comments enabled because I suppose I’m not as strict as Jeremy. I don’t care if my readers (all 11 of you) comment in a little different form than they would if they had written an entire response on their sites. So I guess I’m willing to moderate, though I very rarely do, in order to keep the conversation somewhat centralized.

What do you think? Have you ever considered turning off comments? Why? You may answer in the comment form below.

As you can see from this list of attendees I won’t be alone either! WordCamp looks like it is shaping up to be a really great weekend jammed full of great information.

I’ll be in San Francisco from Friday evening until Tuesday morning. I’m looking forward to meeting up with all of the WordCamp attendees as well as some of my friends in the San Francisco area. I’ll also be meeting up with the Viddler iPhone contest winner Edwin Villanueva to personally hand him his iPhone! I’ll have some free time in the evenings and on Monday so if you’re going to be in the San Francisco area and would like to say hi, drop me a line.

Also – if anyone is going to be near SFO on Friday evening around 5pm EST and wouldn’t mind picking up someone from the airport, that’d be cool too.

Kyle Neath has kindly allowed me to hitch a ride to the Avalonstar miniPrix right after I get off the plane. Thanks Kyle! You rock.

See you in California!

The main problem is; we’re all hiding. In general the entire east coast is overridden by old-world companies that are closed, non-communicative, and local. With more events like BlogPhiladelphia – I think we could start to see some real change in Pennsylvania. I think we’ll start seeing some of these companies start to reach for the open, community-driven successes of their west coast “competitors”.

BlogPhiladelphia was thoroughly enjoyable. Unless you knew it, you’d never guess that this was the first event of its kind (that I know of) that has been held in the Philadephia area. The unconference was well organized, well attended, and properly represented outside of its venue walls.

The sessions of BlogPhiladelphia

Every session on the BlogPhiladelphia schedule seemed to have just the right balance between education and discussion. Each seemed to also hold enough value that it made me wish that I could have attended them all instead of needing to choose between two conflicting sessions.

BlogPhiladelphia attendees – Credit: Jason Smith Copyright: uwishunu.com

Each session had a “leader” who acted as the moderator for the discussion topic rather than a lecturer. This worked very nicely for the majority of the topics and each moderator seemed to do a very good job at involving the attendees into the discussion topic. My favorite sessions ended up being those where the leader of them didn’t end up saying a whole lot, but rather steered the conversation in a way that kept with its topic. I think the vast majority of the session leaders did a fantastic job!

The food of BlogPhiladelphia

Pleasantly surprised. That is how I would describe my reaction to the food that was served at BlogPhiladelphia. Breakfast and lunch, for each day, was provided by uwishunu.com, ziddio, and philly.com. Thanks to each of those organizations, and whomever picked the menu, for providing good food rather than what is typically given at some of these types of events which would eventually have you going home holding your stomach.

The after parties!

When I arrived in Philadelphia on Wednesday night I drove straight from my home to the studio offices of P’unk Ave for a pre-party hosted by my new friends Geoff, Alex, and Rick. The P’unk Ave guys are excellent hosts! The pre-party was great and I can’t wait to get back to Philadelphia sometime to spend more time with the P’unk Ave team.

After Thursday’s sessions we were invited by the Radisson-Warwick hotel to the bar in the lobby ( I think it was called Tavern 17? ) for free finger-foods and wine. The wine was actually fairly good (I’d venture a guess that it was some type of Australian Shiraz. Can anyone confirm?) and I wish there was someone there to thank for everything before we headed to the next location.

Alex Hillman

Marisa and Roz

Crazy people!

Owen Winkler

The party at Triumph Brewing Company. All photos credit Roz.

The party moved to the Triumph Brewing Company where, and I think I can speak for everyone that attended, we all had a very good time chatting, playing games, taking photos, and just generally enjoying the company of our fellow attendees. Thanks to Indepedents Hall (Alex Hillman) and anyone else that helped pick up the tab for us all to enjoy ourselves until Triumph closed. If it wasn’t for you I may have remembered Geoff Dimasi of P’unk Ave picking on me all night.

I was unable to attend the final after party on Friday night due to my long drive home. In retrospect I should have stayed for a few hours because all I ended up doing is sitting in traffic. Ugh.

The value of BlogPhiladelphia

Scott McNulty and I
Photo credit: Marisa McClellan

As Chris Conley pointed out in his recap of BlogPhiladelphia, there is much more value than meets the eye with BlogPhildelphia in the relationships and conversations you hold during offtimes of the event and after the event has come and gone. This is something that is true for nearly every event I’ve attended over the last half year with Viddler. The value of these events is in the relationships you build while attending them.

Not that there was not any value in the sessions or discussions that took place during BlogPhiladelphia. To loosely quote several attendees that commented about their experiences: “I’ve learned more in the last 48-hours than I have in the last few years.”.

BlogPhiladelphia was a huge success and was very meaningful for everyone that attended. I’m very happy to have attended and I look forward for the next event in Philadelphia.

You can watch my twitter and my flickr for updates throughout the day as well.

Update: Dave Parmet pointed out that there is an official BlogPhiladelphia flickr group so please add all of your photos there.

9:30am – The introductions are complete. We had an introduction to “what an unconference is” for those in the room that have not been to one. And now the first session is beginning. For session information, see this page.

Update: The video of this session is now available.

Update: “I think being too serious can actually drive away readers.” — Joey Sweeney.

Caroline Marks says that Ziddio sees users that end up getting tons of views on Ziddio but not on their own sites. I’m beginning to wonder if there will ever be a market for an open platform for video sharing that does not have a portal site attached to it? Would someone pay for something like that to subsidize that portal? Oh, and Ziddio has cats on their frontpage – must be that Web 3.0 thing.

@BlogPhiladelphia attendee: Students “practice medicine” in SecondLife. Awesome. Would you try to advertise, or network, for your company/blog in SecondLife? Have you? Personally I’m not against it because I’ve read many success stories involving the use of Second Life. I think you go to where the people are, you don’t decide where the people should be.

Request: Anyone in the room have an advil or aspirin or something? Please bring it up to the front table to the guy in the marroon Viddler shirt. I’ll buy ya an open source beer.

Emily King: (quoted loosely) “It takes about a week to get a post out.” — Intelligent Travel. Is this “blogging” if it takes so long and is such a process? She says that she’s working hard to make that much quicker though, so keep pushing Emily!

The backchannels (blogs, twitter, etc) for BlogPhiladelphia must be working – because nearby bloggers are beginning to flock to BlogPhiladelphia. Come on down, and bring Aspirin.

Marisa, of ForkYouTV, hooked me up with some pills! Thanks so much Marisa!

Break time.

11:30am – In the Crystal Ballroom. About 60 people are in here, so far, to listen to the COO Dina Kaplan from Blip.tv. I’ll fill in the details as I have them.

She asked for a few examples of video blogs, one is called PhilaStories. Sounds interesting. She’s giving an overview of Blip and says the number one tip to building an audience is doing “regularly updated content”.

Dina: “The average video blog length is 3-5 minutes.” Setting a specific period of time for each show, and trying to live within that for each episode, will set the bar with viewers to expect a certain amount of time they’ll need to devote to watching it.

“You set the rate” regarding how much you should be able to get for sponsorship of your show. I thought it was amazing that she didn’t know ForkYou when they were mentioned when ForkYou uses Blip to host its raw video files while using Viddler’s flash player. I know Scott and Marisa. I heart ForkYou!

Attendee: “How do you address the questions of the media buyers like: How many rolls of toilet paper will we sell by sponsoring a video blog?” Trial and error. Faith. Instead of going gangbusters, do a trial period. If the results do not pan out, move on.

1:45pm – Lunch was very good. Cheese steaks! Looking forward to the afternoon’s sessions as well as my opportunity to demo Viddler!

Side note: Tonight there will be a sponsored event at a bar (Alex can you give details)? Please see Alex if you, or your company, can donate a few extra dollars towards the open bar. Thanks!

Update: Additional coverage of BlogPhiladelphia can be found everywhere. In podcast form at PhillyTip.com, and John Suder’s blog are two examples. Any others? Put them in the comments please. Oh, and of course – pay close attention to the blogphiladelphia tag on Viddler for video coverage of some of the sessions.

2:30pm – Don Bain from Electric Rain compares the 2d browsing experience with the 3d experience of Second Life. Tens of thousands of people are looking at the same page (Amazon.com) and you wouldn’t know it. In Second Life, you can be with other people looking at the same thing. The avatar is the “personalization”. The person is the cursor. “Navigation” is actual movement. Excellent points.

Thomas Taylor told me that there is now a BlogPhiladelphia wiki so if you can help to document this conference, and don’t have a blog or would rather use this wiki, please do so!

Updating the next day: I was without my laptop for the last 6 hours or so, long story. So I am going to edit this entry even though its already Friday.

Scott McNulty lead a session at the end of the day talking about negative, or bad, comments left on a blog. Opinions about moderation ranged from “delete immediately” to “never delete” comments that are felt as being negative. What are your thoughts on negative comments? Keep them? Ditch them? Ignore them?

At the end of the day we had an OpenGrid where Allen Stern, of the tech blog CenterNetworks, was able to present PreRollr. PreRollr allows you to add ad overlays to videos on your site. Then I was able to do a presentation on Viddler which, went, not so well considering that I didn’t bring the right cabling to hook into the projector here. My boy John Billota came to the rescue with his computer though (thanks John!).

Afterwards the hotel Radisson’s Tavern 17 (I think) invited us down for free wine and food which was a great precursor to an after party at Triumph Brewing Company. Thanks to all that chipped in (I’ll get a full list from Alex and update) and letting us eat and drink for free until the bar closed.

I’m aiming to leave for Philadelphia around 4pm, get a haircut, and then begin my drive southeast. So, I guess watch this space for the rest of the day, and my blog for tomorrow and Friday’s posts, and the blogphiladelphia tag on Viddler if you’d like to experience BlogPhiladelphia with me.

10:15am – I’ll also be updating my Twitter account with small bits here and there. Use that as your way to find out where I am in Philadelphia (especially for those of you that are going to be there), and also for small previews for information that will probably find its way onto my blog.

Please use the comments section of this post, and the proceeding two posts for each day, as a way to link to other resources regarding BlogPhiladelphia (including wikis, IRC chat rooms, blog posts, photos, videos, etc.) and I will do my best to include these in the posts as well. Many thanks to anyone that can help out.

11:00am – Somewhat related, since many of the bloggers in Philadelphia do indeed use video, I just posted on the Viddler blog about the video shot by Viddler’s President Rob Sandie (sandieman) at the NY Video 2.0 July Meetup where a panel from industry leaders discussed “What’s Next in Online Video Advertising?”. A very interesting topic for content producers that would like to make money from the video that they share online. So while I put together a demo of Viddler that I’m hoping to present on Friday in Philadelphia, watch the video!

11:15am – My good friend Alex Hillman just posted on his blog “holy crap, that’s tomorrow: blogphiladelphia” wherein he covers the history of his involvment and also gives a fairly good overview of the goings-on for the next few days. A good post to read if you need a crash course in BlogPhiladelphia. He also mentions that he will not be live blogging this time because he’ll be too busy – hopefully between Rob’s videos and my postings, we can pick up the slack.

12:00pm – The official BlogPhiladelphia Web site was missing a few key details, or at least they were hard to find, in that I couldn’t find any information about “where” things were happening in the city. So I pinged Alex Hillman and asked him to look into it. He responded amazingly fast by editing the header of the main site as well as writing up this post. Thanks Alex! I’ve now updated my iPhone with all of the relevant locations and hopefully I won’t get lost too many times!

1:00pm – Stan from Toonamation asked an interesting question on the official site so I thought I’d replicate it here as a resource for those looking for a place to park their car if you’re only staying in Philadelphia for one of the days. Here are all the locations to park near the Radisson Hotel where the unconference is located.

4:15pm – Heading out the door and hitting the road. First top: Gas. Then, haircut. Then, hopefully… the hotel. See you soon Philly! Follow my Twitter and Flickr for updates until I get wifi at the hotel.

1:51am – Sorry I didn’t post more but things got a little crazy. I’ll be trying, my best, to live blog the event tomorrow. Let me clarify what I will be live blogging too… My experiences at the event. I can’t possibly cover, nor attend, every single session. I hope that I can bring all of you along with me to the event… but brining you complete coverage of all of the information would be nearly impossible. I think there will be a strong need for this event, and future events like this, to be covered by a dedicated team of bloggers. Any takers?

Being updated periodically throughout the day, stay tuned…

Cira Center – Philadelphia, PA – Circa April 2006

This Wednesday evening through Friday evening I’ll be in Philadelphia attending Blog Philadelphia. I’m looking forward to this conference for many reasons – the first of which is because it is in my home state!

The schedule looks promising with there being plenty of time for some great sessions to occur. Its like an unconference with some guidelines, definitely something up my alley.

The sessions I’m looking forward to most include my friend Alex Hillman‘s “Being Independent Doesn’t Mean Working Alone” which should focus on his coworking efforts in Philadelphia. Another friend of mine, Scott McNulty, will be leading a few sessions about “How to deal with negative comments” and “Blogging: Is it better in groups” about his experiences at TUAW. Can’t wait to see these guys in action!

If you are going to be in Philadelphia later in the week and would like to meet up, leave me a comment or email me. Hopefully I will find enough time to meet with everyone who has told me they’ll be around so far. See you in Philly!

My personal weblog is the first way that I “blog”*. I use it to gather together most of the ways that I blog. If you haven’t seen my home page lately, I suggest you check it out. I wish I actually had the time, and the creativity, to write more often on my blog.

I also write on TUG.n (which is about to get a kick in the pants in March), ChanceCube (which is also going to get a kick in the pants), and the Viddler blog (which is bustling like crazy actually and we’re really happy with what we’ve been able to do there in such a short period of time).

My MeToday photos is another way that “blog”. Almost daily photo updates wherein I explain what I am currently doing, or just whatever I feel like. I’m hoping to continue this (though I may migrate it onto my site as a copy or something) for quite awhile. There are many others that do it too and it keeps growing.

My current statuses that I post to Twitter is another form of blogging. Instead of just saying “Away”, or “In the office.” as a status, I try to add a little more to it. I’ve been scalded for my number of updates so I am continually trying to strike a balance.

My videos on Viddler may not be very structured at the moment, but I have some plans in the works. I probably won’t structure it like a typical “video blog” but I plan on adding a ton of fun content to it over the next few months. More on this later.

So how many ways do you produce content? How many ways do you blog? I’m at four and I hope I don’t add any more anytime soon.

* By blog I mean put my thoughts into content. In my opinion there are many various forms of blogging that span the different types of media.

[tags]blogging, twitter, cdevroe.com, flickr, metoday[/tags]
[slug]my-blogging[/slug]