BusinessWeek about Blogs

There’s an interesting article in the BusinessWeek named „Blogs Will Change Your Business„:

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite.

The authors reflect certain aspects concerning blogs and corporate culture, while the final result of this article was to create their own blog found on Blogspotting.net as redirecting domain to their BW.com website. Another interesting approach to the Blogosphere done in this case by journalists and their mother company. [via: MEX]

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O’Reilly Radar

Ich finde, es ist ganz interessant für alle diejenigen, die auch ein Entwicklerherz besitzen. Im recht neuen Blog O’Reilly Radar gibt sich die Firma seit kurzem von seiner besten Seite:

…we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. Internally, we’ve called this predictive sense the „O’Reilly Radar“ — in fact it’s become a tradition to kick off O’Reilly conferences with a talk of the same name. And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses…

Mir scheint, dass das Blog erst gestern publik wurde, obwohl das Archiv bis Anfang März zurück datiert. War wohl eine kleine Testphase, aber dennoch viel Spaß und welcome in the blogosphere! In meinem Aggregator ist es auf jeden Fall zu finden!

[Fundstück via selbr.de]

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Flickr’s Membership Updates

I’m really not using it for my own photos, but I’ve always enjoyed to watch other people keeping their pictures online in this way. That’s my reason to write about this Flickr update. Yes, it’s true – the online photo sharing service fulfilled their promise of keeping in touch with their users once being accquired by Yahoo with this major update of their membership services:
The free accounts will be granted 20MB extra storage while the pro accounts have a price drop from $41.77 to $24.95 a year while the current holders of a pro account will receive an extended time of use for (adding 1 or 2 years to the chosen account). Nice for all who choose to pay… ;)

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Blog Burnout Syndrome

Duncan Riley writes about the Blog Burnout and offers a simple solution for professional bloggers as one easy lesson: take the weekend off. The Probloggers usually have a 7 day week if they maintain a blog as major source for their income or add the blogging on weekends on top of their 5 or 6 day workshift. For those who do it privately and free, the idea of taking the weekend off is not a major problem, but for those others it’s a problematic situation:

…when you don’t blog you lose traffic and if your chasing money as well, you potentially lose revenue.

In the end, I believe everyone must find his/her own best-working practise to solve this riddle about keeping blogging, life and work under one banner – being yourself.

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Blogroll Modifications

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I believe it’s time to modify my Blogroll in this blog’s navigation bar. To be honest – it disturbs me greatly. Since I’m reading over 150 blogs and newsfeeds each day (once they’re updated by using my RSS OWL aggregator), this handful bunch of links does not conform with the concept of Blogrolls. One idea instead of maintaining the Blogroll here is surely to publish the major categories of my feed list which will directly link to the OPML files, or I might only link the whole OPML file instead of pushing the other blogs into my content.

On the other hand, I wonder if Blogrolls are useful or rather not. In the end, it is just a nice service to push other blogs and increase their pagerank in search engines (unless you no-follow them). Keeping this in my mind, the whole concept of a Blogroll might become redundant since I am definately not using my Sichelputzer blog to jump to others. I do prefer to get content as fast as possible – which is the automated process of reading feeds. That’s why my Blogroll element might disappear sooner or later today.

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Bloglines adé? (Update)

Okay, die Überschrift trügt. Es ist nicht für immer weg, aber anscheinend gibt es einen Bug oder es sind unangekündigte Wartungszeiten. Wie kommt man auf soetwas? Naja, in meinen abonnierten RSS Feeds fiel mir auf, dass heute anscheinend Bloglines nicht mehr so möchte, wie es sollte. Wer hat noch Probleme – nun so ungefähr jeder auf der Welt ist am klagen und jammern… und ich jetzt auch. Zum Abschluss mal ein Screenshot vom Dilemma – herrlich! :(

UPDATE: Bloglines Outage

This morning, one of our user databases suffered a failure that wasn’t detected by our monitoring systems. This resulted in the inability of people to log into their Bloglines accounts. The database has been reset and no data was lost. We apologize for the issue and we’re looking at ways to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

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Bloglines Turmoil

This day turns out to be more than just a simple annoyance. First of all the disturbance in the Force, secondly the robot trouble and now this crap. Besides this, where’s the sense in using a „Lost your password“ tool if my email address is correct even if the server tells me it does not exist, but then actually states the password has been sent?

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Fed up with the Stats…

That’s it! I simply checked the stats of my Blogspirit account and figured that 354MB traffic was way too much. I wondered why, since I know my blog won’t be read by that many users. However, the statistics list revealed yet another sad truth: Robots crawl my site as if a stampede would race over the server. Both Googlebot and Slurp create more than 200MB, and the robots create roughly 78% of the traffic in total! This is way too much, and I’d like to ask for some support here. I already modified the META for robots to „index,nofollow“ and revisit-after to „7 days“, but a robot.txt file to specifically exclude aggressive spider robots or the ability to edit the .htaccess for more usability to ban certain IP Addresses from spamming would really help… Philippe, Thomas? That’s how I made my 300th blog entry, and I’d like to continue still… ;)

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American Idiotism: Blogs for the Media

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The well-known media mogul Rupert Murdoch expressed his new opinion concerning the supposed-to-be rivalry between usually independent blog authors and journalist faction formed by the Mainstream-Media. According to him, the whole battle cannot be fought forever. In order to seek for the end of this struggle, he expects blog authors to contribute and support the journalists to complete the whole coverage of each valuable and expensive day:

At the same time, we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy — chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. Plainly, we can’t vouch for the quality of people who aren’t regularly employed by us – and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve, so long as our readers understand the clear distinction between bloggers and our journalists. (via Blogbar and Newscorp)

But why are these days valuable and expensive? The answer is rather simple. I believe Murdoch realized the uselessness of the whole concept of pay-per-view content (especially for tv and internet) and probably expects more incoming „monkey-money“ from the younger generation if he changes Multi-National Corporation by adapting a „nicer“ public corporate-culture. To adapt this kind of new strategy seems to be one of the first steps… but even if he’s trying to include independent authors within his corporate dependency… what’s going to happen next?

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Blogs are Weapons of Mass Destruction

Why would I consider blogs as „Weapons of Mass Destruction“? Originally, there’s simply the issue that the author of a blog may influence the life of certain people – especially those who’ve been targetted by the author. Remember the case of Citizen-Media-Ethos in which Eason Jordan was bound to a statement concerning US troops in Iraq infront of a small internal journalist group, but one has been a blogger without affiliance to the Mainstream-Media or any Multinational Corporation. This fact about the hidden and often underestimated power of blog authors made me name this blog Sichelputzer with the subtitle of „Weapons of Mass Destruction“ (seen in the layout image). But blogs as „Weapons of Mass Destruction“ are certainly effecting different topics such as:

Infected Blogs
…which unleash trojans, keyloggers or viruses by utilizing the often provided diskspace to save malicious files and prepare them for an automated download in the HTML of the weblog. Usually the infected blog is being promoted by using the most simple idea: spam mails. On the other hand one should ask why people still grant permission to auto-install software via the internet explorer or visit spam mail related websites… please, stupidity is no excuse.

Censored Blogs
…which is commonly done in China and other countries which fear the truth and non-governmental-controlled media. But even a democratic country like Spain plans to censor the internet and especially blogs. Now the idea to study in a spanish language specialization for my International Management study seems to be oblivious.

(Un)Censored Blogs
…which is explained by a recent voting poll by the US webhosting-company Hostway: 80 percent of a total of 2500 participants in this poll expressed that blog authors should not publish third-party information. Nevertheless, about 52 percent of the participants support the idea of granting private journalists (blog authors) the same rights as traditional and official journalists have – only 27% had no independent opinion on the subject.

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