While reading Mark Cuban’s blog, I noticed the search engine „Ice Rocket“ which added a few function to especially search for blogcontent. You’re able to search the web or specialize for News, PhonePics, Images (in cooperation with Google), MultiMedia and of course Blogs. It appears to be quite useful and I spent a few minutes searching for myself there:

• Mike Schnoor or without blogs
• author:(Mike Schnoor) or without blogs

I strumbled this saturday morning on an interesting issue concerning the variety of blogs and the corresponding content specialization.
Alex Steffen of Worldchanging.com and Thomas Pany of Telepolis published an articles about the Badlani Blog and the niche of reporting on a specialized topic which is in this case the pollution of plastic bags and its effects to both our nature and society.

I expect to see more and more of this micro-niche advocacy blogging over couple years, and that’s a great thing. Good blogs on a single issue can become real resources, as well as outreach tools.

But even these micro-nice blogs are not really free as even the authors of Badlani sell cotton bags – I guess they might be slightly prejudiced while moving on with their good goals to openly advocate the banishment of plastic bags. On the other hand, why not advertising your product in the micro-niche blog? It’s not much different from using cooperational advertising such as Google’s AdSense or many others. The revenues earned by the open advertisement of these cooperational ad programs are probably much lower than the revenues created by content within these micro-niche blogs as they serve the perfect environment for content-relevant advertisement.

Whoops? What’s that?! I’m going to be scared now, but „Your session will soon expire. We advise you to save your post.“ popped up all out of a sudden. Of course I understand the importance of security measures, but normally a session expires after 30 minutes or 1 hour, or usually if you log off from the computer or close your browser window. Nevertheless, the new Blogspirit alert window appears after 5 minutes (5*60*1000 in javascript as calculation). Don’t you think this is too short?

Especially people like me who browse the web while searching for blog-worthy content aren’t „Fast-Blogging“ within the given timeframe of each alert with 5, 10 or 15 minutes. Sometimes it is necessary to rethink a situation before you publish content, and each popup has been annoying. So far I received two of them since an entry takes its time. I’m sipping a cup of coffee or eat a snack, sometimes I read an article or consult other blogs to see how they refer to the topic, etc. Now I had to „Save as draft“ for the first time, because usually the session expiration never pulled me off. This was done because of a mixture of fear, anger and unsureness concerning the behavior of the blog’s admin interface if the third popup would notice me. The HTML source of the post.php told me it’s not going to auto refresh or close the window… phew!

But to protect people from being tweaked by others who get their hands on a PC in i.e. a computer lab or public office, I noticed a nice feature at Hotmail.com instead of the timeout event: Hotmail uses a small checkbox to let the user signal to the server if they reside at a public place or use somebody else’s computer (a very insecure place, checked) or if they are simply at home or use their private computer (a very secure place, unchecked). In any case, you have to manually hit the checkbox as it’s standard option remains on „unchecked“. And in the private situation, the session of hotmail may last very long… however the public session is rather limited.

Now it’s time to test this function – I haven’t ever done this: Writing a blogentry by sending an email to the server. The requirements are simple since I need to add an authorized email address which may send posts to the secret (!!!) email address created by Blogspirit. I hope it’s going to work, and who knows how it’s going to show up in the blog. I believe I have to manually change the category and community settings of the entry… stay tuned!

Update:
Yes, I had to manually modify the category and community settings. Perhaps it’d be quite useful to preset any posts being delivered by email?

Just to keep track of what I wrote on other blogs, here’s some backlinking to the few articles Highlights, RSS Feed für Sprblck? and Macht was draus…:

Mir war grade so als müßte ich bloggen, also haute ich das Modemkabel (ich hasse Modems!!!) in den Laptop und es pfunzt. Worüber ich mich jetzt auslassen will? Na klar, über die filmischen Highlights, an denen wir uns ergötzen dürfen. Heute vormittag haben wir (Kat und ich) wieder festgestellt, dass im deutschen TV Programm nur sinnloser „Ostermist” wiederholt wird… Highlights ( 03.28.05 @ 9:06 pm )