Tag: blogging

February 23, 2011

What is blogging

Ian Beck recently wrote about what blogging is (and what it is not). Perhaps my favorite quote:

Blogging is not giving a damn about whether people visit your site, and publishing for the sake of creating something interesting, public, and potentially useful for others.

That’s why content comes first. Without compelling content and quality writing a blog is far less likely to gain a following. Combine both of those features and you may end up with a blog that allows you to go full-time.

Reminds me a bit of Matt’s recent essay, which makes the point that a blog is where you go when you want flexibility and control in crafting your words and ideas.

Daniel Jalkut’s idea of a dedicated site for teaching the basics of blogging is a very interesting idea. It could go a long way toward helping people publish effectively on the web.

February 9, 2011

Moving to a Staff Blog. One school benefits by ditching mass emails and keeping all communication between staff on an internal blog. The information is archived, searchable, and comments beat the heck out of traditional email.

January 23, 2011

!@$#ing for a living

!@$#ing for a living. What if we had a publishing platform that cost $10 per month and allowed users to distribute half of that money among their favorite 20 bloggers? Sounds like a pretty cool idea and a win all the way around.

November 10, 2010

Retweets and permalinks

My last post threw me against an odd stumbling block with new-style retweets on Twitter: there are no permalinks for retweets.

In a post explaining the changes to retweets almost a year ago Evan Williams noted various problems with the old style of retweets. Two mentioned were that retweets were untrackable and that they created confusion over attribution. This may be true of the old style but the new method is even worse for attribution in any medium other than Twitter’s.

That post I mention above was about a slick, adaptive CSS grid framework. I only found it because Lauren Rabaino retweeted an earlier post from Nathan Smith.

So what are my options if I want to give Lauren credit in a blog post?

I can link to her profile page which will be irrelevant for that tweet in a short while.

I could link to the original tweet from Nathan Smith. This would show Lauren’s profile picture as one of the retweets but it doesn’t scale well. If the tweet were more popular and had dozens of retweets Lauren’s information might not even appear. For example, 56 people retweeted this but only 15 avatars show.

There ought to be an easier way. Twitter should have a permalink to both the original tweet as well as something I can link to showing it was Lauren that made me aware of the post.

Proper attribution in this case only exists within Twitter’s platform. Maybe that’s the point. If that’s true it’s frustrating to say the least. Retweeting is a form of publishing and we as users ought to be able to link to any form of published content on the web.

August 22, 2010

Leo Laporte – Buzz Kill

Leo Laporte is back to writing on his blog:

I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs. Well no more. I’m sorry for having neglected you Leoville.

Via Dave Winer.