Blogebrity

Blogebrity talks about Bloggers and nobody else. That’s an issue of considerance – a printed magazine only about only bloggers? I sense a strange disturbance in the blogosphere…


Heiko already wondered who might be on the cover if they’d have a german edition, and I guess the chances are high it’d be Nico Lumma, Robert Basic, Johnny Haeuseler, Jörg Kantel or Anke Gröner? The only disturbing fact is simply found within the Blogger.com environment – they require the usual registration for their services, which I simply don’t appreciate.

/von

RSS and Advertisement

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The debate about the implementation of advertisements in RSS feeds gets quite intensive in the Blogosphere, and Scoble made a clear and easy to understand statement concerning feeds with ad content.

1. Worst: headline only feeds with ads.
2. Almost worst: partial text feeds with ads.
3. Barely passable: partial text feeds without ads.
4. Better: Full text feeds with ads.
5. Best: Full text feeds with no ads.

I prefer to read all my daily accquired blogs and news feeds with RSS 2.0 compatible feeds, and once this entire advertisement becomes an annoyance, I believe I will cancel such feeds at once if it is showing clear signs of advertisements in the form of point 1 or point 2. The „golden middle“ found in point 3 seems to be acceptable due to the fact that many newspaper feeds are already partial, but once the advertisement like in the almost worst case gets too much covering, I’d delete the feed off my aggregator.

I consider the fourth option to be debatable. Receiving the full text as usual is definately the best way to keep feeds being read by the audience, and the usual method of trying to grab some money out of i.e. Google’s AdSense programs at the bottom of the feed content is quite acceptable – since many authors need this money to finance their blog work. But in the end, I will probably stick to the best case of showing no advertisements in the feeds – or we could simply go by traditional bookmark surfing again, or not?

[via RSS Blogger, Scoble]

/von

BlogSpirit in German and Spanish

It’s done, and it looks quite nice. I’ve been helping the blogSpiritlers to create the germanized version of blogSpirit. Now they feature seven languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Chinese (both in simplified and traditional), and I believe it’s the way to go to open up the market and grab a little bit from Germany’s marketshare. However, there are a few minimum changes to be added to the german version, and I believe it’ll be totally completed on the weekend.

/von

Preople’s CEO is quite a fast one ;)

Long time ago I registered for the Preople.com service, and I haven’t found much time to use this web gadget alot. But suddenly I noticed my Hotmail account contained a Preople-Mail! I usually refer to my Hotmail address once I register for websites due to security and anti-spam reasons, but this one looked quite funny:

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten just visited your Personal Profile and added a link to your page to their Personal Profile. You can visit that page here if you want to know more about Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten or maybe you want to return the favor and add a link to their page too:
http://www.preople.com/?r=personal&id=1
or visit your own page:
http://www.preople.com/?r=personal&id=2049
The Preople Server

That made me simply return to the Preople Server to look up the „Number-One“ Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, and since he is the CEO of Preople, I thought it’d be a good idea to copy his RSS feed to my own list. Sadly, the feed did not validate for my reader. But upon sending him a message, he promptly reacted and wrote me a kind reply and fixed the error.

Thanks! It looks like my own RSS reader was less strict about the code so I didn’t see any errors. I used Feedvalidator to check all the code now and I found 3 more errors that were easy to fix. So thanks to you our RSS feeds now validate perfectly…

Quite fast and good ;)

/von

Corporate Weblogs – Potential Germany?

Proximity Germany, a customer relationship management agency, recently released a case study on Corporate Blogging in Germany. Under the final stroke, Germany offers a high potential to german companies and their multi-national brothers or subsidiaries, CEO Martin Nit explains (translated):

Even if the expectation is not yet so high at present to own Corporate Blogs, this attitude will definately change strongy on a medium-term base in Germany. This means that enterprises must argue promptly and professionally with the topic of weblogs. Weblogs are useful for the dialogue with the most different target groups such as consumers, customers and also coworkers.

However the question rises on how german companies, especially the german multi-nationals, will apply the benefits and dangers of this direct connection to the consumer. It’s going to become an interesting issue on adapting weblogs within corporate culture (and perhaps their corporate and „ethical“ policy).

[via M-E-X, Corporate Blogging]

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iso 800

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Fabian Mohr has recently created his new photo reportage blog „iso 800“ last week. By using a Canon EOS 300D camera he plans to introduce a variety of shots alongside a few hints and tips on how to work with your own camera. The blog already includes some interesting and amazing shots which are usually published on Flickr, too.

[via M-E-X, netzjournalist]

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Resume

I’ve been quite occupied with university work this week, and I remembered my Todo-List from last monday. If I’m scrolling over it, I definately had a Skype-Chat (and not a Skype-Call) with Philippe and Olivier about the translation, enjoyed a longer discussion with Robert about the potential of the new World of Warcraft blog at gamers-living.com, and I finished the paper for Spanish 2. However, I haven’t kept up with my ideas about „E-Awareness Management“ and only found time to register instead of designing the blog for Rafael. I’m sorry about this, but sometimes there’s too much to do besides the internet mania I’m facing all day long. The rest of my list is still meant to be done.

Good news is that both Kat and I were quite fascinated by a large appartment in Flensburg’s city, and we’ll probably move over there in July. ;)

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RSS/Atom modification for Blogspirit’s feeds

While reading my own articles for correction via my RSS reader, I noticed that the extended posts weren’t displayed in the feed and no link hinted at the remaining content. I modified the RSS Syndication and Atom Templates to replace the original content, and I hope it’s not going to unleash an additional load to the servers:

Old:
New:

/von

Citizen Media – Citizen Journalists

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Richard Edelman, President and CEO of Edelman PR and co-author of their company’s blog Speak Up, wrote an interesting article about the recent movements in the news company OhmyNews in Korea.

The paper receives 200 stories a day from these volunteers. Much of the professional staff time is spent on editing and fact checking these stories before they are posted. In fact 70% of the stories submitted are accepted for publication. The citizen reporters must be verified through government registration numbers, and then sign onto a strict code of ethics including a promise not to write a story for personal financial gain and to tell the truth in each piece.

OhmyNews has embraced the philosophy that every citizen can be a reporter.

I suggest to read the full article as it appears to be a prototype for a new form of media awareness and the use of traditional media. Especially the Mainstream-Media (MSM) would like to learn from this role model which is nothing else but combining forces of professional journalists and their volunteering counterpart. But as these are still professional authors, it reflects nothing else but the current problems of the Blogosphere in which journalists fight bloggers and criticize them at all costs to protect themselves and the MSM. Perhaps the MSM needs to rethink more and more… and revise their processes to include this volunteer work of free authors and blog authors, too.

/von

Nico’s „How to Blog“-Compendium

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There’s an interesting compendium on Nico Lumma’s blog Lummaland where he describes his basic ideas on how to maintain a blog. I have the nerve to copy his work to translate it into english. I believe it’s quite a valuable resource especially for those who are at the beginning of blogging. The more you get to used to blogging, the easier it is for you to get comfortable with the usual netiquette.

1. A Weblog is no Forum neither Email.
– don’t use „Hello, it’s me again“ phrases to introduce each entry.
– don’t sign with „Best regards, XYZ“ or „Sincerely yours, XYZ“ as it appears obstrusive and strange.
– to order your entry with paragraphes aids in the reading process.
– some correctness of spelling and grammar should not be forgotten.

2. Sources.
– sources are compulsory and/or to be linked.
– link to the exact source and not just the main domain „via cnn.com“ unless you link this reference to the exact URL.
– fancy users speak about the Permalink, the permanent habitat on the source’s server.

3. Comments.
– the weblog is yours.
– if somebody is molesting in the comments, you may simply delete it or close the comments.
– you don’t have to acquiesce everything.
– a reply to comments is often appreciated.
– anonymous comments are simply uncool.

4. Trackbacks.
– you inform the readers of another weblog-entry about other topic-related articles in other weblogs.
– choose trackbacks wisely and not „just so“.
– mutuality is important to trackbacking as you should refer within your article to the trackbacked entry.

5. Images.
– many images are copyrighted, please validate their use.
– images should fit into the entire layout of the blog as 1024×768 for an image is way too large.
– keep PG-13 rating for your images or password protect the blog for special visitors.

6. Music.
– don’t let the music start upon visiting your blog.
– links to MP3s which are copyrighted and are not royalty free should not be placed except if you like to consult your lawyer.

7. Content and Topics.
– write whatever you like to write about.

However I believe that the deletition of comments is not always the right choice as it might result in a flame war between you (the deleting side) and the comment’s author (the flaming side). Sometimes a tough discussion requires value based argumentation, but spamming and a wordwar of insults is not acceptable. Over all, you’ll get better and better in time the more you use your blog.

/von