Category Archives: Blogging

Blogs help Microsoft

Scobleizer quotes some interesting statistics: Microsoft is gaining server market share because of blogs (and wikis). Though some insightful comments modify the numbers a bit, the increase is still large, and shows that Microsoft can make a dent in that market by doing what they did on the desktop: Offer functionality that is "good enough" and relatively easy for the end user to set up. At the very least, it is in indication of blogs becoming a "must have" on any web site.

To respond, the open source community would have to go from pluribus to unum in terms of user experience, configurations and setup. I doubt that is going to happen. Wonder which segments of the market Microsoft is gaining in?

Blogstats

One third of the traffic referrers to the Washington Post web site is from blogs. Blog that, says Jeff Jarvis.

So, I am blogging it. And it is pretty important, actually.

Update: See comment from Jeff below.

John Sviokla blogs

John SvioklaDon’t know how this escaped my notice, but John Sviokla now has a blog which I immediately added to my blogroll. John taught at Harvard while I was a student there and was one of the few professors from the technology side who paid attention to ecommerce and the Internet from the very beginning. He left Harvard to consult in the space (literally, marketspace) between marketing and technology. A quick sampling of his posts promises thoughtful observations on issues such as the evolution of technology platforms (including the iPod) as well as discussions of RFID and customers service interfaces.

John writes in a style that is understandable for business managers yet doesn’t lose sight of the often rather subtle attributes of technology that really makes a difference. And he does like wikis.

Recommended.

Small layout change…

…on the main page: Going from three columns to two (to make it work better on small screens) and moving all the navigation and "about" information to the right column (to make it work better over slower interfaces, such as my cellphone.)

Bloglines overload

I have read some blogs today, written a few entries, but have not been particularly active over the last week or so. And I now have 1467 unread blogposts in Bloglines. Of these, Gizmodo and Engadget clock in at 200 each, Make Magazine at 158 and Slashdot at 165.

Time for Phase 2 of a blogger’s evolution: Time to prune the blogroll. Especially since I discovered Arts & Letters Daily and its younger and mostly Norwegian cousin Depesjer, which both have RSS feeds.

Searching and finding – hard to get into

I am currently reading two books on what can only be described as Web 2.0: John Batelle’s The Search and Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability. I don’t know why (maybe just my own overdosing on reading after starting my sabbatical), but I am finding both hard to get into.

Batelle front coverThe Search is better written – it is a mix of a corporate biography and a discussion of how search capability changes society. The language is tight – though sometimes cute, as in the phrase "the database of intentions" about Google clickstreams and archived query terms – and there is a thread (roughly chronological) through the book that allows most people who have been online for a while to nod and agree on almost any page. John Batelle has an excellent blog and plenty of scars from the dot-com boom and bust (I always liked Industry Standard and wrote a column for the Norwegian version, Business Standard, for a few years, so I am very favorably disposed), and his competence as a writer shows. The book reads like a long Wired report, but better structured, marginally below average in use of buzzwords and John has the right industry connections to pull it off.

Ambient findability front coverAmbient Findability looks at search from the other side of the coin – how do you make yourself findable in a world where search, rather than categorization, is the preferred user interface? For one thing, you have to make your whole web site findable, make it accessible and meaningful from all entry points. Morville fills the book up with drawings and pictures on almost every page, comes off as a widely read person, but I am still looking for a thorough expansion of the central message – or at least some  decent and deep speculation on personal and organizational consequences. It is more a book popularizing information science than a book that wants to tell a story, and it shows.

While both books are well worth the read if you are relatively new to the Internet, I was a little disappointed in the lack of new ideas – they are clever, but once you accept that the marginal cost of processing, storage and communciations bandwidth approaches zero, the conclusions kind of give themselves. Perhaps I am tired – actually, I am – perhaps I am unfairly critical after having treated myself to The Blank Slate, The World is Flat and Collapse, but these books, while both worthwhile, have failed to "wow" me.

Apologies. I will make a more determined re-entry once I wake up.

Merry Christmas, dammit

Political correctness hasn’t hit Norway quite as hard as the US, so I will take my chances wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, offered here with a few pictures from Tove Jansson’s “Trollvinter“, perhaps the most beautiful book ever written about winter, alienation and friendship. Incidentally, don’t confuse this wonderful book with theMummitrollet og v�rl�sningen latter cartoon characters – it bears the same. relationship to those as A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh bears to Disney’s version.

In Norway, Christmas starts early – for us, at least, on December 23 with the traditional “julegrøt” – rice porridge. In the porridge, eaten with sugar, cinnamon and an “eye” of butter, goes a few almonds – and the one who finds the most almonds gets a prize.

Tomorrow, the 24th, is the big day, with a slow morning and, for the children, an even slower afternoon until (after church around 2pm) it is time for the big Christmas dinner. (Incidentally, I don’t go to church myself, so I have the house to myself and get to put on Swedish television with Disney’s Christmas – largely unchanged since the 1960s – prepare the potatoes and sample the wine until the family returns, which for me is the best possible start of Christmas.) After dinner, when the younger children are close to exploding from repressed anticipation, comes the unpacking of gifts – always done slowly, one gift after another – from under the Christmas tree. This takes a while, during which heaps of cakes, wine, and other goodies are consumed until everyone drifts off to sleep, to awake on Christmas morning to prepare for a late and very large breakfast.

Until then, not a word will be heard from here – may your Christmas be peaceful and quiet, the food delicious, the gastrointestinal apparatus in capital shape and the gifts well thought out (or, failing that, returnable.)

And the winner is…

…not me, but Eirik Solheim, whose blog has a mixture of technical stuff (it is a real technology blog) as well as delights such as this year set of photos through a window as well as a cartoon explanation of why the media industry needs a rethink in their approach to strategic marketing.

Thanks to those, from Australia (The Skau family) to California (Jim Ware) via many places in between, who responded to my plea for votes. And I can revel in nice comments, such as this one:

Yours is definitely the best Norwegian-language blog that I have ever looked at

Come to think of it, he is monolingual….

Vote early, vote often…

My Norwegian language blog, Tversover, has been nominated for a prize of "Best technology blog" in Norway. If you would like to vote for it (I think the voting is open until Dec. 5, but am not sure, so vote early…)  you can do that here.

It is in Norwegian, so for "Kategori", choose "Techno", then choose "Tversover" (the word means both "across" and "bowtie" in Norwegian). Assuming you want to vote for me, of course. Then fill in name, email (non-spam) and type in the spam-stopping security thing, and I will be eternally grateful. Or maybe not.

Email subscriptions available….

For those of you who haven’t moved to RSS, I have added an email subscription form in the left column – enter your email address, and after confirmation by email, you get updates to this site right to your mailbox. Just what the doctor ordered, more mail….

(This is untested as of yet, but supposedly this service only send out one mail message per day, no matte how many entries I make here.) 

Brevity is the digital way

Michelle Cameron of Interactive Media Associates has a nice little article about how to improve legibility of online material at Ubiquity.

Goodbye Google Ads

I have decided to remove Google ads from this blog as well as my Norwegian blog, though my wife is keeping them on Lena’s Knits and Pieces. The reason is that the costs exceed the benefits – the income is not there, and the ads were getting on my nerves. It is a bit tiring to write something about universities and have the Google Ad section fill up with exhortations to get a degree by mail order. Likewise when I pan alternative health care and see my page providing links to holistic healing, homeopathy and other garbage.

I think this is a problem with generic blogs. My wife’s site is about quilting, and the ads she gets are focused and interesting to her. She often clicks on them herself to see what others are doing. For a less focused blog like mine the ads are either generic (blog services) or just irritating.

(Incidentally, when the great software and hardware magazine BYTE disappeared, it was for the same reason. BYTE had wide readership and excellent articles, but it was not focused to one particular audience (the way PC Magazine or MacWorld was) and hence had problems getting advertising.)

Being rounded is a problem in a focused world. Perhaps I should have 10 different blogs – or Google should start to qualify their ads, rather than allowing all kinds of crap to advertise.

Movable Type 3.2

…is now installed (after some messing around), and it is a much larger big step forward than the 3.18 to 3.2 decimal increase indicates. The interface is cleaner, a number of bugs are fixed (for the first time for me, Preview works,) there is a facility to choose your own post URLs (thus greatly increasing searchability) and many great features useful for administrators (such as SpamLookup and multi-blog administration) is now available as standard. Highly recommended!

Curious blogspam

I keep getting a lot of blogspam with the email “google@yahoo.nl” and with links to Google’s main site. Normally I would block any link that shows up in a blogspam, but I don’t want to block Google, and there are not other links there.
It is not a huge problem – the comments are forced to moderation by Spamlookup and never show up on the public site, but I wonder what the purpose of this blogspamming is. I doubt that Google would resort or even need to promote themselves by blogspamming, so is this some sort of campaign to block Google links from blog comments or just plain incompetence?

The reluctant linker

Robert Scoble has a projectlet going to convince an SVP at UPS that blogging is important. Like this: shipping. OK, I’ll do it.
On the other hand, I must say I have always preferred UPS to Fedex for shipping – they have an extemely long term view of what creates value – I once had a conversation with an exec in UPS who referred to himself as a relative newcomer, since he only had 27 years in the company…..

Bridget Jill

Saturday 9:38am: Reading Jill’s Bridget Jones-writealike blog entry. Fun, reminds me of Umberto Eco’s piece about time spent on research (from How to travel with a salmon), where he (if memory serves me right) proves that as a professor of linguistics, he had 1 hour per year or so for research. Especially liked the entry on “Head of Department can decide less teaching for self”, followed by “Head of Department realizes resource contraints and find she has to teach anyway.”
Aside from that, I remember a study done at American Airlines in the early 90s, about white-collar productivity. The idea was that about 40% of people’s time was spent unproductively, doing things such as unproductive meetings, waiting for the copying machine etc. The company was investing in office automation, and wanted justify it by decreasing unroductive time by using computers to automate boring stuff, so people could concentrate on the core part of their job. Disappointing results, though people liked email and an integrated work platform. And spent as much time as before being “unproductive”.
Seems we humans have a need for some time in slow gear doing busywork. Such as blogging. And she might have a book in this…..

Comment trouble

Seems I have a problem with MT: People can post comments, I get them sent to me as email, but they never show up in the database. Anyone know a fix – or perhaps it is time to move to MT 3.x?
(And yes, comments posted here will increment the counter but not show….. I will update manually.)

Taking up Anders’ challenge

I have already posted about the Tsunami in my Norwegian blog, but who can resist Anders Jacobsen‘s call for links to feed a donation with muliplier effects?
(In my posting, I suggested that Norwegians should donate the money normally spent on fireworks for New Years eve to the Tsunami victims. I think this was one of those ideas that many people came up with at the same time – I soon as I had posted it on my blog, I heard that there already had been little “Tsunamis” of SMS messages swarming around the country. Fireworks sales were down (and donations up) quite substantially.
Here are Anders’ links to international aid organizations:
UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund)
United Nations’ World Food Programme
Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors without Borders (donate!)
CARE International
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
UK/Europe:
Disasters Emergency Comittee (DEC) – comprises a raft of aid agencies, including the below and others
British Red Cross
Oxfam
Save the Children UK
North America:
American Red Cross
Canadian Red Cross
Save The Children
Oxfam America

An example to emulate (if only I knew how)

Richard Posner, who popped to the blogosphere surface because he has started a blog with Gary Becker – a blog that has the distinction of being heavily subscribed while only the test message was up – is a very interesting individual. Not only is his written production astounding – 4 books, 30 academic papers, 27 shorter papers, and 171 legal opinions in 2 years – but he does all the writing himself, and has even found time to write a week’s diary for Slate (albeit in 2002). Off the scale.
An interesting aspect of the new blog was that Kieran at Crooked Timber thought it an elaborate hoax – though I am beginning to suspect some tongue in cheek here, especially since Lawrence Lessig has endorsed the new blog. Anyway, blogging is getting serious.