Recent posts on technology, trends and more

Dooce and Jason Kottke on blogging

AUSTIN, Texas--If you were a blogger at the South by Southwest conference here Sunday, then you were almost certainly in the afternoon keynote.

That's because two of the blogosphere's biggest stars--Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong, aka Dooce, who was probably the first person to be fired for blogging--were onstage philosophizing about the daily lives of people who are known to millions, if only through the words they craft on a daily basis.

And let's be clear: Kottke and Armstrong engender adoration from the blog rank and file that borders on the religious: the two are among a small number of true blogger celebrities, even if what they're posting daily wouldn't seem all that extraordinary to someone who happened accidentally on either of their sites.

And that's kind of the nature of blogging, isn't it: It takes commitment, both on the part of the blogger and the reader. You can't post infrequently and get a readership, and you can't read infrequently and understand much of what the writers are talking about.

For Armstrong, that's particularly true. She is not a political blogger. She doesn't write about technology. No, she writes about herself. Yet because she's articulate, has interesting observations on her life, herself and her family, she has garnered the kind of regular audience that would make most writers bright green with envy.

So, too, has Kottke. He even got his readers to pay him to blog for a year, though he eventually abandoned his attempt at being a full-time blogger and went back to work.

Armstrong has gone even further, and is managing to support her family by blogging. And to many in attendance here, this is an admirable goal.

In any case, the two sat onstage in very comfortable-looking armchairs and they talked blogging. It was a simple conversation. They traded questions about their daily routines, about their blogging strategies and about the differences in their styles. And mutual admiration, as each are naked in their own appreciation for popular bloggers.

Mundane stuff, in one sense. Yet, the audience of maybe 1,000 was hanging on every word. And that's testament to the awe in which these two icons in this community are held: Their words are gold, their ideas are golden and they are role-models for anyone who looks to AdSense as a revenue generator.

Netomat = photos, RSS, chat + mobile phones, PCs

Most people take photos on their cell phone cameras but don't know how to share them with others. A start-up called Netomat has solved that problem. The company launched a free service last month that allows people to receive RSS feeds and photos on their PCs or mobile phones as well as share them with others via PC or mobile phone and chat in real-time about them.

Users can create "hubs" or groups devoted to any topic and invite friends to chat in private or public groups. People can also publish content from their Netomat hub to a public blog or an RSS aggregation Web site like My Yahoo for something akin to mobile two-way blogging, says Netomat chief executive Alan Gershenfeld.

Just last week Netomat announced that the Netomat service has been optimized for photos posted on the popular Flickr Web site. Netomat subscribers can receive Flickr images resized for mobile phones, along with any associated text. On Monday, Netomat said it had received an undisclosed amount of financing from Motorola Ventures, the strategic venture capital arm of Motorola.

Edgeio is classifieds publisher for bloggers

A new Web site has launched that serves as a classifieds publisher for bloggers. Edgeio organizes listing published from RSS-enabled Web sites. Tags like "listing" and "car" will indicate to Edgeio where to display the content. "No more listing fees, complicated forms to fill in, and struggling to keep content synchronized across multiple Web sites," the Edgeio site says. Buyers can search by tags and geographic location and subscribe to an RSS feed to be notified when something is listed.

Misbehavior forces Post to shut blog comments

The WashingtonPost.com said on Thursday that it had indefinitely shut off the ability for people to post comments on its blog Web site because of objectionable postings.

The company policy was to ban comments that were personal attacks or used profanity or hate speech.

"Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we've decided not to allow comments for the time being," Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, wrote in explaining the policy change on the Web site.

"It's a shame that it's come to this," he continued. "Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it's a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about."

It's not the first time a major publication has closed down an interactive online reader service. In June, the Los Angeles Times closed a Web site it had launched three days earlier that allowed readers to rewrite editorials, saying it was flooded with obscene messages and photos.

Details on FBI's secret call for Indymedia logs

Previously secret court documents that are now public provide an unusual glimpse into how the federal government gained access to the server of an independent news site.

In October 2004, a federal prosecutor sent a subpoena to Rackspace Managed Hosting of San Antonio, Texas, as part of an investigation underway in Italy into an attempted murder. Under a mutual legal assistance treaty, the U.S. government is required to help other nations secure evidence in certain criminal cases.

The newly disclosed subpoena, which has been partially redacted, asks only for specific "log files."

But Rackspace turned over the entire hard drive at the time, taking the server offline and effectively pulling the plug on more than 20 Independent Media Center Web sites for about a week.

Rackspace claimed at the time that the subpoena required the company to turn over the customer's "hardware."

Now that the documents have been unsealed by a federal judge in Texas, though, Rackspace is backpedalling. "A Rackspace employee mistakenly used the word 'hardware' to describe the contents of a federal order," company spokeswoman Annalie Drusch said in an e-mail message to CNET News.com on Tuesday.

Drusch's e-mail also said: "Rackspace employees searched for the specific information requested in the subpoena but were unable to locate this information prior to the strict delivery deadline imposed by the FBI. In order to comply with the mandated deadline, Rackspace delivered copied drives to the FBI. Shortly thereafter, Rackspace succeeded in isolating and extracting the relevant files responsive to the subpoena and immediately asked that the drives be returned by the FBI. The FBI returned the drives, and it was our understanding that at no time had they been reviewed by the FBI. The relevant files were then delivered to the FBI."

Kurt Opsahl, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that Rackspace handed over far more than was legally necessary. EFF is representing the Indymedia collective and won the release of the secret court documents.

"It would be like getting a subpoena for one document in a warehouse of documents--and instead of turning over that document, they turned over the entire warehouse," Opsahl said.

The Blubble

The Dullest Blog in the World lives up to its name. "I was standing at a central point in the room," our fearless author wrote in April. "The walls were all at approximately the same distance from me. I continued to stand there for a few moments."

The self-parody helps prove a point. There seems to be way too many blogs out there giving rise to a blog bubble, or blubble for the time compressed.

Put the word "blog" into search engine Google, and 67 million links are spat back. There's even one purportedly by Terry Schiavo, whose death became a political football. If you crunch the numbers that means there's one blog for every five American citizens, which anyway you put it seems like way too much.

If everybody's blogging, whose reading all these other blogs? Some people are, given the plethora of blogs that focus on other blogs. It's only a matter of time before someone starts writing a Consumer Reports-style blog about blogs that critique other blogs.

There's a blog bubble, and you read it here first (in a blog, of course!)

Dancing on and defending Microsoft's dirty laundry

A Microsoft recruiter's blog about her workplace frustrations has triggered a heated exchange between two of the tech world's more prominent bloggers.

The original blog, which I wrote about last week, prompted a withering analysis of Microsoft by software developer and blogger Joel Spolsky. Spolsky, who maintains the Joel on Software blog and founded a small company called Fog Creek Software,
wrote on Wednesday:

"The best recruiting department in the world can't make people want to work at a company that's moribund, that can't figure out how to ship a compelling upgrade to their flagship OS, or update their flagship database server more than once every five years, that has added tens of thousands of technical workers who aren't adding any dollars to the bottom line, and that constantly annoys twenty year veterans by playing Furniture Police games over what office furniture they are and aren't allowed to have. Summer interns at Fog Creek have better chairs, monitors, and computers than the most senior Microsoft programmers."

Spolsky's dig seemed to get under the skin of Robert Scoble, Microsoft technical evangelist and arguably the best-known blogger at the software giant. In a posting Thursday entitled "Joel dances on our dirty laundry and I respond," Scoble offered a veritable laundry list of cool things about his company, as well as some counterpunches directed at Spolsky.

"Let's visit David Ornstein's office (I just filmed him recently). Now, look at his computers. He has a nice big monitor, just like Joel's interns have, but he has a Tablet PC too. Do you give your employees one of those? I didn't see any when I visited your offices recently. Oh, I guess you don't want your employees to go and work on code somewhere else other than in your office. But, remove that for a second, do your employees work with a projector like he, and quite a few other employees do?

"Do you have any hardware toys like our hardware division has? Or our research division has?...

"Did the Prime Minister of Indochina visit your offices a few weeks ago? How about Hillary Clinton? She signed my Tablet PC when she visited. Yesterday Scott Stanzel, former Bush-Cheney Press Secretary spoke here."

Near the end of his blog, Scoble raises an important point about Microsoft's willingness to air its problems in the first place. He argues--and I agree--that the company's hands-off policy regarding employee blogs is a credit to Microsoft and probably will serve it in the end:

"By the way, while you're dancing on our dirty laundry, note that we allow our employees to share their dirty laundry. Hint: every company has dirty laundry. Every company is screwed up in some way. Even Apple. Even Google. Even, gasp, your company. None of us are perfect. But our company lets us talk about all the ways we aren't perfect and work to fix those things. How about at your company? Will those interns be able to blog about the things they don't like about your company? So that we can dance on your dirty laundry?"

Some comments to Scoble's blog poked fun at him for getting so worked up. But in his own blog entry today, Spolsky seemed to seek to bury the blog hatchet, as it were. He repeated his point that "recruiting has to be done at the Bill and Steve level," but he also wrote:

"Folks, give Robert Scoble a break. Folks over at Microsoft are feeling a little defensive these days, and he just wanted to point out that Microsoft can still be a great place to work. Apparently Hillary Clinton, the President of Indochina, had lunch with Malcolm Gladwell there, where they signed his super tablet computer. Rock on."

Cybersquatters target blogs

For years, cybersquatters and typosquatters have preyed on highly trafficked Web sites such as Google, Yahoo and AOL.

Now they are turning their sights on a new group: bloggers. Examples abound: Misspell PVRblog.com and you are directed to a porn site. Type blooger.com or bloogger.com and you are directed to sites with keyword link ads.

"It seems like a natural progression and maybe an indicator that blogs really are capturing some sizable audiences," said Matt Haughey, creator of PVRblog.com, a blogging site for fans of TiVo, Replay and other DVRs.

Haughey added: "People aren't naturally gravitating towards just a few major sites anymore, and besides, those few major sites have prominent legal teams. So you go to the blogs, small operators with millions of visitors and try to collect the mistakes and turn them into cash somehow."

VeriSign sees business in blogs

Ten years ago VeriSign started as a digital certificate provider. Today the Mountain View, Calif.-based company does all kinds of things, from running information security for large organizations to selling ringtones and other downloads for mobile phones.

As VeriSign moves into its teenage years, the company is eying even more markets. VeriSign wants to provide security and infrastructure products for blogs, CEO Stratton Sclavos announced in a presentation Thursday at his company's annual meeting for financial analysts.

These products should help prevent blogs, and particularly Really Simple Syndication and Atom feeds from being abused for spam, phishing and other common Internet-based threats, VeriSign executives said.

Huffington hatches star-studded blog

Arianna Huffington--biographer, rightist-turned-leftist, and former candidate for governor of California (but who wasn't?)--is planning to pull the stars from the skies and deposit them in a giant liberal celebrity-ridden blog.

That's what the New York Observer reports, anyway. The Huffington Report's lineup includes the likes of Warren Beatty, Sen. Jon Corzine, David Geffen, Viacom co-COO and co-President Tom Freston, Barry Diller, Tina Brown and Gwyneth Paltrow.

The Observer positions Huffington's new venture as Hollywood liberals' answer to Matt Drudge. Drudge's response: "I look forward to the Warren Beatty News Network."

March 2006 archive

S	M	Tu	W	Th	F	S
« February
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

More News.com blogs

• All CNET News.com blogs
• Apple blog
• Blogma
• Broadband blog
• Cellular blog
• Cisco blog
• Coop's Corner blog
• Corporate security blog
• Deal of the day
• Dell blog
• Enterprise software blog
• Future tech blog
• Gadgets blog
• Gaming blog
• Google blog
• Half-baked blog
• IBM blog
• Media blog
• Microsoft blog
• Missing links blog
• Music blog
• Open source and standards blog
• Oracle blog
• PCs blog
• Politics blog
• Processors blog
• Quote of the day
• RFID blog
• Science blog
• Search blog
• Security blog
• Sun Microsystems blog
• VoIP blog
• Windows blog
• Workplace blog
• Yahoo blog