Blog Day 2005

Blog Day 2005Perhaps there’s time to push yourself above the limit of reading blogs in these days. First, Duncan pulled the 100 Blogs in 100 Days out of nowhere, now Nir Ofir created the Blog Day 2005. The idea is to maximize the blogosphere on August 31st 2005: Every blogger from all over the world is supposed to post a recommendation of at least 5 new blogs (in the same time). As effect, the readers of the participating blogs will find new unknown blogs and authors. I’m with this useful idea which reminds me of somehow of a push-and-pull marketing campaign! This Blog Day will push the blogs that either don’t maintain their daily reads as a blogroll or don’t link other blogs for giving credit as sources, but will these others who are being linked by the participants of the Blog Day honor being pushed?

Many authors do not communicate with other authors, and various blogs do not even offer to discuss within comments or trackbacks. Instead of living from this inter-connectivity within the blogosphere, some quite good authors (and their blogs) won’t be recognized elsewhere but in the niche of unknownness.

[via Light Within]

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WordPress – Official COM

Logo WordPress Commercial Version
As reported by Darren and Duncan, Lorelle explained several issues about the upcoming commercialized version of WordPress. This includes screenshots and a lot text. Basically, the new version offers a WYSIWYG editor for your posts, an upload for images up to 15 MB per file, it is based as a multi-user version of the original WordPress, and is aimed for those who cannot afford their own webserver yet. But the question is, do we really need that unless we’re unable to finance a small webserver with a database? I’m not sure… so far I can handle everything quite well with this opensource WordPress.

[via The Blog Herald, Problogger]

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Hauptstadt-Blog

Logo Hauptstadt-Blog
Perhaps every capital city needs their own blog even if its not maintained by the governmental officials: The Hauptstadt-Blog offers a daily view upon various topics which keep the Berliner busy. This group-blog offers an interesting personality like its competitor among Germany’s major cities Minga.de (for Munich). It looks like some interesting magazine, and it surely got included in my daily reads at the feeds! I bet it will just take time until Nico Lumma will offer the „Hamburg Blog„…

[via Minga, Medienrauschen]

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Against Web-Censorship

For all those web users like Kevin in Shanghai and many others who cannot browse the web without facing the consequences of censorship by their governments, there’s the helpful guide HOWTO ByPass Internet Censorship.

Screenshot of zensur.freerk.com

A tutorial on how to bypass Internet Censorship using Proxies, Shells, JAP e.t.c. Different ways to beat the filtering in schools, countries or companies (blocked ports e.t.c).

[via Markus P. Zillman]

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Are Germans just… Wiki-Blogger?

,

Whatever the author had in mind, it was everything else but quality research. Perhaps that’s why journalists fear them, why they hate them, why they cannot understand them: Bloggers are indefinable. I haven’t seen such a stupid and most false article about blogs and their authors. The author Jan Freitag combines illustrive thoughts to create the phenomenon of a „Wiki-Blogger“.

That term is supposed to describe the typical blog author of the German blogosphere. But does that really fit? No, because now your deepest fear called Citizen-Media strikes back: Netzpolitik.org points out with some feisty quotes from the original source that blog authors are no mindless creation between SmartMobs, Wikipedia authors, discussion community board writers, and they certainly do not origin from the Chaos Computer Club. Clearly, one site not to read is the Neues Deutschland – Sozialistische Tageszeitung – but by promoting and criticising them in the blogosphere only pushes them ahead.

[via Kat on ICQ, Netzpolitik]

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100 blogs in 100 days

Duncan published an interesting approach of push-promoting blogs: 100 blogs in 100 days! I am not sure whether he’s going to accept the MikeSchnoor.com since Kat and myself are writing some posts in German, but I decided to write him an email and „submit ourselves“. His requirements are rather simple, and you may submit your blog unless you’ve already been included in his blogroll:

Email me at editor@blogherald.com with subject line of „100 blogs in 100 days” with your blogs details (name, url etc..). You also need to include up to, but no more than 100 words about your blog, what it does, what it’s about, or why the readers of the Blog Herald should visit it that will be published as part of the post. In return though I’ll be inviting Blog Herald readers to provide some feedback in the comments here on what they think about your blog.

I thought of giving him such a nice cross-mixture of whatever we’ve been covering here, and I’m still not satisfied with it since 100 words don’t really cover everything. But then, why covering everything if you’re trying to be unique? That’s the „for now“ description of the MikeSchnoor.com blog:

In the fast living media, all words are weapons of mass destruction. They become a powerful tool which can be used by everybody. The focus of the authors is centered on ideas concerning culture, politics, media and management. Therefore, the MikeSchnoor.com shows a non-German perspective written by Germans. But instead of having a tight bond to one nation, we prefer to become international managers with our studies at the University of Flensburg. In the end, our goal is just to support the reader with an alternative to their urban reality.

I thought that’d read nice, but we’ll see in time. One thing I already hate after mailing him 10 minutes ago is the fact that I’ve included two slogans without even noticing: „Words are Weapons of Mass Destruction“ as seen in the title logo (above), and „The Alternative to Urban Reality“ as my previous slogan for the former Sichelputzer site. I shouldn’t consider my knowledge from the marketing courses while writing anything here…

[via Blogherald]

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Blogspeed

Earlier today while having an instant chat with Katharina, she told me that I’d have blogged too little today. I honestly wonder about that as being a problem. Not that I blog quite regularly and constantly, I rather enjoy to write down my thoughts (and opinions, of course) and just unleash my mind’s power to the public. Nevertheless, today I haven’t had any real reason to pull the trigger and shoot it out. Instead I rather preferred to keep things within me and not vent or scream out loud. But I’ll surely contribute to the Blogosphere with a few thoughts about the changes in the German media about „Das Vierte“ and perhaps I’ll give some insight into ideological troubles from an english-speaking perspective to support Katharina’s post about Mr. Anal Mr. Analytical Edmund Stoiber.

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WordPress Exploit

WordPress Logo

There’s yet another small major security bug for WordPress users: Florian Holzhauer explains on how to disable the bug which allows to execute an entire set of PHP or shell commands.

There is an exploit for WordPress up and including to 1.5.1.3 out in the wild, which works on webservers with enabled register_globals.
The quick fix is to place
unset($wp_filter);
in index.php at the very top, right after declaring „php“ before any other php statements.

There’s no guarantee and liability for the success or any possible errors caused by this mini-workaround, so the best idea is to use an upcoming WordPress version which corrects the bug.

[via Blogbar]

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Lost in the Blogosphere

Just after explaining why I had started blogging, Shirazi covered the other side – the Death of Blogs. And while looking at the mentioned examples, I had the same question in my brain: Why are people counting the number of newly created blogs like Technorati‘ s Chiefmaster Sifry does? Aren’t those blogs which are lost, abandoned and closed more important to count in order to get the final number of blogs that exist – and not just those that matter? And on top of that, please let’s be real – what would these estimated numbers ever explain except the fact that people try to rely on themselves and (secretly) overthrown the classic media companies by being a new media phenomenon.

[via Light Within]

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First-Timer

I just thought about the past and was wondering what caused me starting to blog. First of all, I was used in maintaining my own website a few years ago. Around Autumm 2003 I began writing some mini-episodes of myself as a bunch of hand-crafted website without using any CMS. Anyways, after having some sort of time-lagging while publishing articles more or less constantly, I stopped putting effort into that webspace. Who knows why, I don’t know – but around November 2004 I was a regular again under the banners of two blog hosters until now.

But what was the first blog that inspired me? I don’t know it anymore, and I wonder what it really was. But no, I was probably searching for some easy-to-use CMS. While I admit that I still had memorized the basic ideas of my former employer’s content-management-system, I never really felt an urge to reprogram a CMS from scratch. I was lazy! I preferred to use some OpenSource stuff, and well – since I haven’t had the opportunity to use a database on my own, I was bound to these free-hosting services that offered me a framework to get startet.

After becoming disappointed from the stuff on i.e. Sourceforge, I guess I was googling for blog, blogs or weblogs – not sure which and when. But whatever kept me there was the germanspeaking Blogosphere. And for being the „First-Timer“ as in reading the first blog, I figure it was either Nico Wilfer, Thomas Gigold, Jörg Kantel or Robert Basic. Thanks!

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