How rude can somebody be and announce the „blogging! magazine“ as a magazine about blogs and expect people to pay for it? I will not link this magazine as it would only increase its pagerank at Google. They plan to feature blog and blogosphere related news, information, reviews, commentary, interviews, tips, tricks, business, etc. But only those who have never heard of blog and blogosphere related information would benefit from this PDF magazine. Anybody who has some kind of interest into the blogosphere will be able to find all these things up-to-date on the internet and in the RSS feeds.
Corporate Blogging is a wide known aspect of sharing your company’s thoughts to the public audience. Last evening I strumbled upon an announcement of the french company Social Media Group. The company publishes several blogs including their newest additions in German: „Der Auto Blog“ and „Der Vintage Blog„. The use of the masculine article „der“ in relation to the word „Blog“ causes a minor uproar in the germanspeaking Blogosphere, as most people consider the „Blog“ as a word with a neutrum gender. To accomplish this, the article „das“ would be aligned to the word. The discussion on the correct use of „Blog“ continues here and on Loïc Le Meur. My contributions to the discussion were so far these statements mainly in response to Christophe:
Just a smaller note on the naming. Actually, the correct form of naming a blog with an article is „Das Blog“ (neutrum) and not „Der Blog“ (maskulinum). Sadly, the authors of the mentioned blogs made this mistake… :( In any case, keep in mind that „Blog“ is based on „Weblog“. Let’s focus on the word itself. As we all know, it’s German word „Weblog“ is based on „das Web“ and „das Log“ („das Logbuch“) — if you simplify the language to the roots. Nevertheless, the diary is „das Tagebuch“, and if you consider these words web, log and its combined meaning of an online diary as basic principle for creating the predestined articles in masculine, feminine or neutrum cases, you are already limited to the neutrum gender. The word „Blog“ in german is an anglicism, which is a transition from an originally english word into german language. Anglicisms are one-to-one identical transitions and translations of a word into german. To recall this – „Service-Provider“, „Recycling“, „Talk“, „Team“, „Party“ are some more common anglicisms in the german language. You would never dare to write i.e. „Riesaickling“ instead of „Recycling“, „Tiem“ instead of „Team“, or „Paartie“ instead of „Party“. If this would be the case, you had to reform „Blog“ into „Block“ (which is already the word for „block“) or „Blogg“ (which is no anglicism anymore). The word „blowg“ makes no sense to me due to the anglicism of „Blog“ – and it rather reminds me of the voice-sounds created by sheep. If ever, a „blohg“ to stress a longer o-sound is acceptable – but its no anglicism anymore. The „unbestimmter Article“ (ein, eine, ein) of the word Blog is hinting at it’s neutrum gender.
I believe it is most vital for companies to carefully inspect and evaluate „foreign countries“ and specialize in the development of their region, language, culture and society before stepping into their domain of heritage. Perhaps I am able to contribute some more useful input for Blogspirit, too. Let’s see what I can make out of it.
The german information-technology news magazine heise.de published an interesting article in their offspring Telepolis on the rising power of bloggers and their Scorching Rage. The author Thomas Pany expresses the struggle of the classic Mainstream-Media against the blogger’s Citizen-Media by using the example of the former CNN Eason Jordan who claimed on a press conference that 12 journalists were shot by US-troops‘ friendly fire in Iraq. The classic Mainstream-Media journalists never said a word on this note, but one of the attendants of the press conference, Rony Abovitz, wrote an article in his blog. As I reported earlier, the authors of blogs are used to facts. Instead of searching for the reason behind a statement, they re-print the statement and use the most deadly weapon to crush statements in its root – their personal opinion renders facts in different lights than expected. In the end, as Pany writes, the protagonists of Citizen-Media have won an important moral victory over the journalistic methods of the Mainstream-Media: Reporting the blunt truth.
Tags: Citizen-Media, Heise, Jordangate, Mainstream-Media
This is an absolutely humorous video of The Daily Show on Comedy Central – their topic was Bloggers. Even if the authors intended to make fun of the Bloggers, they brought up some interesting points concerning the made-up fight between bloggers and journalists. Among these jokes is one comment on most bloggers who are however responsible correspondents and are focussed on niche reporting fields. These niches are surely not included in the major daily newspapers or the local town newspapers, but still these bloggers are using the internet media to build their news network. The general problem of these „attack bloggers“ is found in their behaviour and news posting: „They have no credibility. All they have is facts.“ All the bloggers do is gathering, collating and publishing accurate information which is found in our daily life in respect to companies, the government, individuals, society, etc. – all of this is published to the genera public audience. (via Anke Gröner, via onegoodmovie)
Visiting the Buch Blog, I strumbled upon the idea of „Blog Awareness“ found in a small debate on girlizine (german). The author describes the idea on how to push your blog with small chunks of blog entries in order to be omnipresent on the bloghoster’s main page which shows a list of all recently updated blogs. I consider such as blog spamming and commented the following:
Eigentlich ist soetwas schon eine Art Blog-Spam, wenn sich jeder über die zentrale Seite eines Bloghosters konsequent in die Öffentlichkeit schieben möchte, indem „Kurzeinträge“ im minutiösen Abstand gemacht werden. Das man sich mit diesem Verhalten auf Dauer die Leserschaft abspenstig macht ist schon vorprogrammiert. Wer will denn schon im 5 Minuten Takt lesen, dass jemand gerade ein Brot ist und über Gott und die Welt nachdenkt, danach sich ein Pfeifchen anzündet und über das politische Ambiente im TV unterhält, nur um zu wissen, dass gerade Klopause ist?
In the end, you only destroy your own reputation as blogger by becoming a spammer on your own. Instead of creating useful or interesting content, you become redundant to the readers.
You’re a blogger like myself and you still wonder why you are still on your job? Enjoy your job as long as possible, because it’s only a matter of time until they fire you. Buy it here (not my own store).
I’ve made it to reach 200 posts with this blogging experience. Oh how wonderful it is to realize you spent so much time at your laptop creating these tidbits of reality, magnifying your life under the scope of digitalization. Surprisingly, or merely not surprisingly, I will continue with the blogging mania. How I’ve done this? Always remembered the 7 C’s of Kotler and nearly compiled this enrichment to society within the frame of 26 steps to 15k a day:
A) Prep Work
B) Domain name
C) Site Design
D) Page Size
E) Content
F) Density, position, yada, yada, yada…
G) Outbound Links
H) Cross links
I) Put it Online
J) Submit
K) Logging and Tracking
L) Spiderlings
M) Topic directories
N) Links
O) Content
P) Gimmicks
Q) Link backs
R) Rounding out the offerings
S) Beware of Flyer and Brochure Syndrome
T) Build one page of content per day
U) Study those logs
V) Timely Topics
W) Friends and Family
X) Notes, Notes, Notes
Y) Submission check at six months
Z) Build one page of quality content per day
The search-engine company Yahoo released some useful tips and tricks on how to limit the sometimes aggressive behavior of their spider robot „Slurp“. In the previous months, this particular robot became one of the most annoying and invading robots of my Blogspirit account. I already used the suggested method of including the „crawl delay“ option in meta tags, tough the robot penetrates this small line of defense still. Dave Simpson suggests to enable Gzipped Files and Smart Caching to aid the process of restricting the robot’s aggressiveness. As I tested my subdomain with Netcraft, I was informed it’s Apache was using the mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a already. Since most image files for the HTML layout and formatting reside on my own server, the smart caching is little to worry about. Overall, Slurp is already restricted in it’s behavior but still very aggressive. I will try to analyse the whole situation in a near future once I’m done with the final tests.
Positively, the support staff of Blogspirit reacted to my previous support tickets and suggestions, and I expect a new version of this service to appear very soon. I wonder how the new version will merge with the current version as it might compromise any self made HTML modifications – like in my own blog. As far as I can tell, the Trackback-Ping, Robots and Bandwidth modifications, and Comment-Spam filters will definately boost the engine.
Tags: Blogspirit, Robots, Bandwidth, Comment-Spam
Siegried Hirsch recently created a small questionaire concerning the topic of site syndication with RSS. As I wish to contribute to this questionaire, I suggest you will answer the questions on your own – either within his article (in german) or in my blog – where I translated the questions into english. The information provided might help Blogspirit to develop, too.
1. Which sources do you currently use to search for RSS-Feeds?
(Welche Quellen nutzen Sie im Augenblick um nach RSS-Feeds zu suchen?)2. Which must be offered by a Search-Engine/Directory-Service for RSS-Feeds?
(Was muss eine Suchmaschine/Verzeichnis für RSS-Feeds bieten?)3. How is the expectance to categorizing?
(Wie sind die Erwartungen an die Kategorisierung?)4. How important is the completeness of recorded feeds?
(Wie wichtig ist die Vollständigkeit der verzeichneten Feeds?)5. Should inactive feeds be listed?
(Sollen inaktive Feeds aufgeführt werden?)6. How important is the possibility to subscribe to a Feed directly?
(Wie wichtig ist die Möglichkeit direkt einen Feed zu abonnieren?)7. How important is a German feed-directory at all?
(Wie wichtig ist ein deutsches Verzeichnis von RSS-Feeds überhaupt?)8. What else has to be considered?
(Was wäre sonst noch zu beachten?)
My answers:
1. As sources, I prefer the direct method to accquire feeds by news websites, blogs (of course) and other portals such as Technorati or search engines. I hardly browse Feed-Directories since most of these services are filled with (subjectively) useless feeds. These directories are often unmoderated as they grow in time. A centralized feed directory and not an endless sum of competitors aids the process of keeping up to date with education and information.
2. Search-Engines must offer a clear distinction between commercial (company/corporate) and private feeds. An up to date sample of each feed found by the search engine must be visible before choosing to subscribe to it.
3. The categorization process for a feed may not be limited to a handful of categories since many feeds contain multiple topics and areas to cover. As much as search-engines restrict users, the important entries of a feed may never become visible to a greater audience. For feeds themselves, the idea to categorize the content is highly advisable and should not be forgotten by its author or service provider.
4. Feeds may be distributed completely, but while the number of subscribed-to feeds increases, the download traffic increases, too. To offer teasers or the first paragraph of an entry is as much marketing as newspapers cover with their printed version: The reader is drawn towards the content, and will either decide between reading it or skipping the article while filtering the information by your most personal interest. I offer a limited feed for this blog as not every reader may not be interested in everything.
5. Clearly, an inactive feed should be marked as „inactive for xyz days“, but not completely be removed. This problem occurrs mostly for private feeds created by authors who are indeed able to contribute with world-changing ideas, but might be persecuted by their government in return for their written work.
6. It is very important, and I am not sure how you can not subscribe directly to a feed except if the subscription is moderated by the author(s). But certain people have experienced difficulties with the cut-copy-paste process of URLs. The feed reader software should link to the feeds and automatically catch them. Perhaps a special W3C guideline will aid this process.
7. A German feed is interesting, but not important at all as most German authors who write 7C-content usually distribute their content on a global scape.
8. Free accessability for at least a teaser article of 50 words or more instead of listing only headlines. A central archive for feeds will limit the chance of data loss for the smaller and greater authors, by which even articles of limited or restricted feeds are archived completely. Distribution of RSS Feeds by newspapers. To include Tagging contributes to the connectivity of feeds in order to create a network.
Tags: RSS, Syndication, Feeds
Über mich
Mein Name ist Mike Schnoor und ich unterstütze Unternehmen und Marken als Digitalexperte, Fachautor und Vortragsreferent, damit sie sich im digitalen Wettbewerb hinsichtlich Strategien und Prozessen richtig positionieren können.
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