Criterias for Weblog Service Providing

Markus K. Westner, the co-founder of Blogigo.de, published his Master Dissertation on weblogs, especially on the identification of functional requirements and evaluation of existing weblog services in German and English languages.

[…] Based on literature and interviews, the report identifies and ranks functional requirements for weblog services from a user’s perspective. 29 of these requirements are considered to be the most significant ones. They are categorised according to the content creation process on weblogs using the categories „Community”, „Content Creation”, „Content Management”, „Content Interaction”, „Content Rendering”, and „Security”. […]

He evaluated 77 weblog services to create his criterias based on the detailed features and functionality implemented into the different software packages.

[…] As one of the key results, it becomes obvious that the most popular services implement more features than their less popular competitors. Thus, the features offered by a weblog service seem to have an impact on its acceptance. […]

/von

„Humankapital“ as Misnormer 2004

The term „Humankapital“ has been selected as the Misnormer of the Year 2004 [Unwort des Jahres] by German jurors. Out of 1218 different proposals, the linguists and literates of Germany voted for the term „Humankapital“ to explicitly express the harsh discrepancy between the word itself and the describing matter. The term does not only degrade the work force of a country, but places all human beings into general and only economically interesting values. The nominations for the Misnormer of the Year exist since 1991 in Germany and reflect the current world events. Previous decisions brought the words „Peanuts“ (1995), „Tätervolk“ [committer nation] (2003), „national befreite Zone“ [national freed zone] (2000) oder „Gotteskrieger“ [God’s Warrior] (2001) to medial focus.

Above can be understood as a summary of the information found in the (more or less) official press release. My personal definition of „human capital“ is similiar to a thought of Prof. Dr. Mike Friedrichsen on Medienmanagement. He mentioning the term „human capital“ during his summary of our lecture on normative, operative and strategic management. There we figured even jokingly, once we justify ourselves as being inherited with human capital, we must consider this as being the most important factor for our personal advancement and enrichment. We may not rely anymore on our aggregated value added found in assigned values of our daily life, but should concentrate on our skills and knowledge found in our mental abilities, inner strength and skill of the mind. Once we distinguish between the specific and general human capital, all skills or knowledge is useful only to a single employer whereas general human capital is useful to all employers.

/von

How to promote your Weblog?

Not every weblog will be found easily, and every author is advised to think widely about how much effort will be placed into the blog’s promotion. Several good ideas for Weblog-Promotion can be found in an older article of Blogger Knowledge written by the google-employee Biz Stone. I specialized his issues for Blogspirit in order to find more suggestions and advancements for this service:

Technical Issues
These ideas concern the technical department of Blogspirit mostly. I believe Philippe and Thomas will surely become entertained…

– Set your blog to ping Directories
Its highly advisable to add the functionality to ping other weblogs. Any update will be notified by the readers of the weblogs automatically. At this time, Blogspirit pings technorati.com, blo.gs and weblog.com. So far as they told me, they are indeed working on a new feature to insert an indivual URL to ping any directory you want.

– Advance the Navbar
As each blog displays the navigation bar with the Blogspirit logo on top, an optional search function might help to integrate a higher community usability for every author.

– Install Email This Post
Not just to comment or permalink an enty, but to actively promote an email function will enable the readers to forward any post to friends, co-workers, family members, etc.

– Turn on your site feed
Never forget to implement the buttons for the RSS and Atom feeds. Many readers use different programs to browse blogs and other news media faster than using bookmarks and manual url editing to grab our daily digits.

Content and Quality Issues
Since these are mandatory to keep readers instead of scaring them away, the sublines shall suffice for everybody to understand. There’s a number of authors on Blogspirit who apparently forget a few of these important factors:
– Write quality content and do it well
– Publish regular updates
– Think of your audience
– Keep search engines in mind
– Keep your posts and paragraphs short

Marketing Action Issues
Certain of these ideas help to advertise your work while they reduce the interest in your site as much once you invalidate the above ideas concerning content and quality.
– Put your blog URL in your email signature
– Sumbit your address to blog search sites and directories
– Participate in meme games
– Advertise!
– Link to other blogs
– Install a blogroll
– Be an active commenter
– Pitch your posts via email to other bloggers
– Print your blog URL on cards, stickers, etc

In the end, there’s alot of more input to be found in a few other of my issues. Have fun blogging!
– Bandwidth Limitation for Robots
– E-Mail Address shown in RSS2/ATOM Feeds
– Lifeless Reasons for Blogging
– Against Comment Spam

/von

Planetopia: How a TV magazine kills Bloggers off…

Last night, the TV magazine „Planetopia“ spent a few minutes to report about the medial hype of blogging. Their report focussed on the authors of a few blogs and the possible reasons of the phenomenon of utilizing blogs for private and corporate uses. „Der Schockwellenreiter“ and „Spreeblick“ were previously interviewed, but apparently the entire episode caused an uproar in the German Blogosphere. The general message created by Planetopia can be roughly interpreted as: „Weblogs are evil! Trust nobody, because nobody controls them as you are used to it at our traditional media formats.“ Immediately this morning, each author published an account from their opposing point of view. But by reflecting the Blogosphere in a negative light, Planetopia only pokes the fire by fitting into their own teaser – „Planetopia about the blogger’s underestimated power.“

/von

Bandwidth Limitation for Robots

I noticed the increasing ammount of searchbots trying to spider my blog. Especially „slurp“ and „msn bot“ are reaching a critical stage concerning the already limited bandwith. Already half of the bandwith is wasted to the robots, and the more active and publically aware my blog becomes, the sooner the bandwidth will be reached.

I suggest to allow the users at Blogspirit to create their own robot.txt file to limit, restrict and possibly exclude the robots‘ aggressive behavior. For example, the entry „User-Agent: slurp“ with a „Crawl-Delay: 20“ already helps to delay the robots, while the meta tag invites them to index the complete blog. Here is an example from the „Stats > Detailed Statistics“ page:

Robots (from search engines)

RobotsHitsBandwidthLast Visit
slurp410 17 MB 15/01/2005
msnbot101 2 MB 15/01/2005
googlebot70 3 MB 14/01/2005
crawl24 517 KB 14/01/2005
ia_archiver5 146 KB 14/01/2005
spider4 164 KB 11/01/2005
webclipping.com3 125 KB13/01/2005
bbot1 42 KB 09/01/2005

/von

Prince Charles goes berzerk!

Last night Prince Charles was furious over Prince Harry’s decision to dress as a Nazi on a party. Even Prince William must share the blame. Since both William and Harry bought the costumes together, the older brother should have stopped the younger one. Charles ordered both of the minor-monarchs to visit Auschwitz to learn and understand the the atrocities and horrors of the Holocaust. The british newspaper The Guardian communicates slightly different in their blog on „Meanwhile in Germany“ than The Sun – its very interesting to scroll through the comments of this blog…

/von

E-Mail Address shown in RSS2/ATOM Feeds

While utilizing a few tools for this blog, I noticed a minor security leak in the RSS2 and Atom Feeds. I already informed Blogspirit’s support staff by using a support ticket. I advise everybody to manually edit their Feed-Templates to secure your email from being spidered by Spambots.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I noticed that you include my email-address in the RSS and ATOM Feeds without any kind of security protection.

I suggest you encode it similar to the optional email display of the side bar.

The troublesome lines are these:
—ATOM—
{if isset($post.authoremail)}
{$post.authoremail|utf8_encode}
{/if}
—ATOM—

—RSS2—
{$user.email}
—RSS2—

Best regards,
Mike Schnoor

/von

Britain’s Nazi Mess

Another most interesting and amusing article about Britain’s general problem of historical and cultural awareness. Prince Harry is not the only one who needs to be more educated about both local and global development of the political world. As Der Spiegel reports in Prince Harry Isn’t Alone in Needing a History Lesson:

The photo of Prince Harry that has angered the world doesn’t show a young Nazi doing the Prussian goose-step. It shows a thoughtless rascal trying to impress a few other mindless twerps at a party of the young and fashionable. But it also underscores a more disturbing fact: Brits lately have been doing a worse job of dealing with history than the Germans.

This here is from an article found on The Jerusalem Post: Ignorance of the Holocaust in response to DJ’s comment.

The survey […] found that 45 percent of respondents in Britain said they had not heard of Auschwitz. […] 63 percent of 840 respondents did not know what Auschwitz-Birkenau referred to, with the highest levels of ignorance among the 21-30 age group.

/von

Medial Death and Racist Devastation

The german designer Rudolf Moshammer was found dead in his appartment in Munich. Apparently, he was strangled to death with a telephone cable. But some germans already wondered why he wasn’t murdered sooner! Mr. Moshammer was a fat and chubby designer who continously pestered the german media with his endless gayish behaviour, want-to-be-spicey songs for the Grand Prix de la Eurovision Chanson.

Perhaps it was nobody else but Prince Harry who’s been tagged as a Nazi on a recent society party (When Harry Met Hitler). This disgusting little party youngster who freaks out the british high society through his nothingness and troublesome idiotism should be locked away once and for all. How else can we serve the Queen better?

By now, only Sven and Yannic had nothing else to do but to pester and complain about the fact that I’ve been blogging a little. This public soulstriptease is special, and its my priviledge – not theirs. At least my girlfriend seems to like it, too.

/von

EFF: Rights for Bloggers

According to golem.de, the Electronic Frontier Foundation will defend bloggers against Apple. The company filed a suit against the bloggers who wrote about an unofficial product named „Asteroid“ which appears to be an adaption for Apple’s software „GarageBand“. The EFF will aid the bloggers of AppleInsider and PowerPage who keep the names of their informants in secrecy.

Jason O’Grady of PowerPage expresses his disappointment on Apple’s behavior as he questions if corporate-paranoia is more important than article 1. More information can be found on golem.de in german.

/von