Roland Tanglao - November 18, 2004 - 11:54pm
Had a great time at New Media BC tonight co-presenting Building 21st Century Websites with Weblogs and RSS with Darren Barefoot. After the break, check out the Powerpoint presentation, and my Notes, Reflections, Redux where I take about Flickr, digital identity with sxip, web 2.0 with syndication, aggregation, search and clear APIs and interfaces and lots of other cool stuff.
- Check out the PowerPoint Presentation
- Points from the presentation that perhaps were unclear or that I would like to pontificate:-) about more
- What are blogs? I like the following definitions
- Blog systems automatically create HTML pages and archive by category and date
- you just write in your web browser or in your email client
- you don't have to know HTML
- RSS enables the people's new media, i.e. what Marc Canter calls our media
- Blogs are social software
- How Do I get large amounts of links to my blogs?
- Compelling Content Constantly
- Leave comments on related blogs linking to your best stuff
- Short email to popular bloggers in your industry with links to good stuff
- Syndication is part of the next phase of the web, i.e. Web 2.0
- e.g. publishing an RSS feed
- Aggregation is also part of Web 2.0
- e.g. putting together RSS feeds in interesting ways like UrbanVancouver and Loosely Coupled
- Search is also Web 2.0
- APIs and clean interfaces are also Web 2.0
- e.g. Amazon, eBay, PayPal have interfaces and APIs where you can use their apps and data in ways they couldn't have thought of
- Examples of non tech businesses getting clear ROI from their blogs
- Join the blog and RSS revolution
- Start a Blogger blog and play, it's free
- Start a Flickr photo blog and play, it's free (Pro version allows 1 GB of uploads per month and is very cheap!)
- When you are serious use a real blog system like Bryght, Drupal, Blogware, MovableType and TypePad
- RSS Ads
- Video Blogging
- It's still early and tools are still being developed. For early adopters now, the rest of us soon.
- We have the infrastructure. The same infrastructure that already in place, i.e. RSS, to deliver audio for Podcasts can also deliver video
- Problem is bandwidth. This will be fixed by BitTorrent and other P2P filesharing technology soon.
- Someone asked about building your own blog system and/or hacking new features onto an open source blog system
- hacking: Wordpress, Drupal, Plone. MovableType, has lots of traction and a cool developer plugin ecosystem but is not open source
- Build your own:
- My view: Don't do it! Build on top of Drupal, Wordpress, Plone, MovableType etc. but hey go for it if think these systems s*ck!
- Dick Hardt asked about comment spam
- Some solutions
- turn on comment moderation
- turn off anonymous commenting
- turn off comments and people can comment by sending a Trackback (a message from another blog site saying that this site has posted something about a particular blog post) or linking to you and you can find out about this through PubSub and Feedster and Technorati
- I plugged Dick's company, sxip. Why? They have a single sign on digital identity system that they are putting into all open source (and popular non-open source) systems (blog systems, CMS systems, bug tracking systems, etc. basically anything that requires user authentication). e.g. it is in Drupal (and therefore Bryght of course) and it will be in Plone and hopefully in all the other major blog and content management systems
- What does this have to do with blog comment spam?
- Well, the reason people leave anonymous comments is because the cost of joining a blog specific system is you have to register at each system and supply the same info over and over again as well as think of and remember multiple passwords. Easier just to leave anon comments.
- So if all popular blog systems (Drupal, Manila, Radio, Bryght, Blogware, Blogger, MovableType/TypePad, etc.) implemented sxip then you would only need one id
- And if you knew a critical mass of people had sxip ids then you could disable anonymous comments and turn on sxip and spammers would be dead (unless of course they manage to create SPAM sxip ids),
- And sxip ids are free for users! Unlike other systems. And if sxip's good enough for world renowned educational blogger Stephen Downes, it's good enough for me
- Angie asked if there was another system like Blogger that gave you a backup by FTPing everything back to your server.
- As far as I know, no!
- Bryght will give you your databases at any time which basically gives you a backup! And since Bryght is unforked Drupal you are not locked in. Just take the databases, put them into Drupal which is free, open source and downloadable by all and you are off to the races.
