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  • 1 min read

What is a Blog, redux

I just came across a good summary on one of our favorite topics from KM Magazine. It was written by Bill Ives of Portals and KM fame:

" Blogs are both a technology and a way of communicating. On the one hand, they are nothing more than simple Web sites, often published in the form of a journal, that provide original content, links to other relevant content, simple editing features, comment capability, archiving, search, and security options. This ease of use provides a vehicle for the writer's unedited personal voice, which is considered a defining aspect of blogs. While many uses beyond personal journalism have emerged, the individual voice remains a central characteristic, even in the corporate setting."

I'll forgive Bill for not mentioning BlogBridge 🙂

  • 1 min read

Does this map look familiar?

Have you seen this map before? Yes?

Actually it's the map of states where the Cosi Restaurant chain has stores. I don't know what it means, but I thought it must mean something. Amusing.

(from a private mailing list I am on)

[Note to those who don 't obsessively follow US Politics and culture: the map above looks a lot like the map showing U.S. states where the Democratic candidate for president won in blue and where the Republican candidate for president won in red. However the map actually shows where a certain sandwhich restaurant chain has stores. The relation between the two is a mystery to me too.]

  • 1 min read

What is a blog, again?

My answer to the question: " What is a Blog", which I get asked often, goes something like this:

"A blog is a just a web site with articles or notes that get posted there, generally by a single person. There's nothing especially new or complex about the technology of blogs. What's new and compelling is the blogging phenomenon : For whatever reason, individuals with unique and important points of view are choosing to publish those in blogs."

Actually the point of this post is to point you this great and I would almost say moving account by Kevin Sites, keeper of a photo blog that was very active and interesting earlier this year and the year before.

Kevin Sites is a reporter who has been covering the Iraq war from the inside. You might have heard about the video tape of a marine shooting a prisoner which has made quite an uproar both here and in the Middle East.

It is, to me, amazing to be able to read, in Kevin Sites own words, what he saw, what he thought about it at the time and now, and how it has unfolded for him.

  • 2 min read

New BlogBridge Alpha

Hey, sorry if you aren't a BlogBridge user yet, but I just can't resist some news here.

First of all, we've released a new Alpha, just today. You can get it here. The way we work it is that if after a week or so of use there are no show stopped bugs, we will promote the Alpha to a Beta. The general release model is described here.

This new version has a ton of new feature stuff, plus major stability and performance improvements. I dare say, we are getting close to having a Release 1.0 product. Here are some highlights:

  • The BlogBridge Service gets a major new capability, which is RSS Discovery Services. The change to the user experience is minimal but I would say pretty significant. When you want to add a Feed, you don't need to hunt for the RSS Feed URL, which our non-technical users won't even understand. You just enter the URL for the Blog itself, that is, the one you read with a Web Browser, and BlogBridge will attempt to 'discover' the RSS Feed. Behind the scenes it spawns a process to talk to the BlogBridge Service to resolve it. Try it, it's pretty cool!

  • The second major new capability is the Feed Discovery Service. In it's initial form, there is a new command on the Feed Menu: "Discover new Feeds". Again working behind the scenes with the service, BlogBridge will analyze all the articles in a certain Feed, to see whether any of them point to Blogs that you don't know yet. If so, they are highlighted right in the article (let's say in Red.) The user can right click on the link and in one step add that new Feed to their subscription list.

  • Among the smaller changes are, much better (although not yet perfect) support of Mac OSX, a minor change to the menu structure and terminology based on customer feedback, and numerous bug fixes and performance improvements.

Here is a link to the announcement email we sent to our users.
Enjoy!

  • 1 min read

Curacao in Open Source News?!

There's this little island in the Caribean called Curacao. I happen to know a lot about it because that's where I was born and grew up. Now I live in the United States, but continue to keep up with what's going on in there.

This is from an article about an Open Source Conference that happened, where else? Yes, right there in Curacao.

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When I agreed to speak at this island's first-ever free/open source conference last Wednesday, I was warned that Linux and open source were not well-known here. This was not true, but most of Curacao's Linux and open source software users thought they were alone…

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  • 1 min read

Wikipedia and copyrights

If you haven't heard about Wikipedia, you should check it out. It's a grass roots encyclopedia. It has a huge number of articles, contributed in general by anyone who feels like writing an article, presumably because they know something about it. Here's the Wikipedia definition of Wikipedia.

It's quite an amazing thing, amazing because of how it has grown, how it was built, who built it and what it was built on.

One often mentioned question is how accurate is Wikipedia anyway?. It's an important question in that Wikipedia is developing quite a reputation, not only among Technorati, but also among civilians. I am waiting for the first time that a Wikipedia definition is cited in the New York Times. It may have already happened.

I was looking for a random snippet of information today (you'll see how random in a second!) Anyway, I Googled it, which produced quite a list of hits, including a Wikipedia definition and a "Freedictionary.com" definition (which I had not heard of before.)

Guess what: they are copies of each other! Just check the two links!

The question is, what direction was the copying done? Impossible to tell, but I was actually surprised to randomly stumble onto something like that. I don't want to make this into a big conspiracy theory - there may be a perfectly innocent explanation…

  • 3 min read

Is BlogBridge a ‘next generation’ Feed Reader?

In response to a query from Andrew Watt and Danny Ayers about what they called next-generation infromation aggregators, I wrote this, and I thought I'd share it here too.

Dear Andrew and Danny,

Still in early beta, but certainly not secret is BlogBridge, www.blogbridge.com, an app I've been working on, that I've been describing as a next generation blog aggregator.

In fact I am moving away from the term 'blog' as being too limited, and I think embracing the term 'feed'. Why? Because I kind of suspect that one of the early values of something like BlogBridge to people outside the hard-core blog fanatics (I am one) will be as an alternative way to email to receive notifications (like from UPS), mailing list updates (like from yahoo.groups) , and online web site content updates (like NYT.) These are or will soon be using RSS and possibly are of more direct benefit to someone who is not signed up to the blog phenomenon.

Why do I call BlogBridge 'next gen'? The focus of the app is to actively help the user deal with information overload. In features that are working now or are planned for the first release, BlogBridge does things like:

1) allow the user to indicate which are their favorite feeds (via a Tivo like thumbs up feature.) This information is used to generate a composite 1-5 star rating.

2) takes advantage of services like Technorati to figure out how 'authoratitive' a certain feed is (based on the number of inlinks) and factors that into the 1-5 star rating

3) Lets the user easily temporarily filter out or permanently unsubscribe from feeds which fall below a certain star rating

4) Analyzes the feeds the user is looking at, and locates links to new feeds that the user didn't know about and 'suggests' them if they are highly rated.

5) The user can set up a set of 'keywords' which are then highlighted in the articles, as well as summarized at a feed level so you can easily find those feeds which are talking about stuff you are interested in.

6) A user's thumbs-up rating can be uploaded to a companion BlogBridge Service. Eventually this will form the basis of a collaborative filtering capability.

7) Allows a user to share their particular set of favorite blogs with other users. This will allow me for example to subscribe to a set of blogs that mimic what Danny Ayers is following on the subject of RSS.

And there are other ideas floating around. The central theme is dealing with information overload and saving time for the user who is interested in following a hundred or more feeds.

As an aside, this is an open source project. It is a client side app (other than the service which of course is a server side.) And it is cross platform, written in Java, and runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (as well as others I am sure, I just haven't tested them.)

I hope this is useful and of course would love to be included in your book. Any follow up questions are welcome and you can of course also download and play with the current beta.