The second post in roughly 24 hours from Prince Campbell. I didn’t post on the first one because I’ve see the stray post before. Chartreuse is back in the house and welcomed from me.  Lets hope the issues of last year are left behind and we see some great blogging once again. Prince is a great bloke who I had the opportunity of spending a bit of time with last year.

 It must of been something subliminal from me as despite having a big Google Reader purge about 5 weeks ago I left Chartreuse in my reading.

Loren Feldman has apparently insulted African Americans, then visited rehab, then appeared again, all in the space of a couple of days.

Although I’ve only spent 2 days one-on-one with Loren in the past (so I’m not an expert) Loren would be one of the most down to earth honest people I’ve ever met, and that’s an even more powerful statement given he’s American.

So WTF?

I smell pantomime, but I cant prove it. Certainly the comments would appear to support the proposition. Either way, if Loren is legitimately in distress of any sort I wish him the best in his recovery. If it’s all show, he’s once again proved why 1938media cuts through the noise. Loren is a star video blogger, no doubt about it. That New York  in your face style cuts far better than anything the Valley can dish up.

I’m doing some research on switching back to MovableType, in part so I can support the MT Open Source initiative.

WordPress isn’t what it use to be, both from a development and security perspective, as well as having a leadership that seems more focused on commercial interests than the open source side.

If anyone has any advice/ tips/ recommended MT plugins let me know. I’ve noticed that a lot of extra functionality comes standard in MT 4 so I’m not seeing the need for a large number of plugins, but there must be some that come well recommended.

Next stop: relearning the MT template tag structure. 🙂

I’ve always liked Ars, but lately I’m starting to wonder. I’ve heard people allege previously that all Ars does is rip stories off, particularly from MSM sources, and never credits. But here’s an example that is so blatant, its sickening:

Long Zheng at istartedsomething: Microsoft files patent for possible taskbar replacement (July 15 Australian EST)

Ars Technica: Microsoft patent gives a peek at the future beyond the taskbar (July 16 USCT…and no credit for the story).

Worse still the Ars post just hit Techmeme.

The whole thing sits somewhere between sad and pathetic. You very rarely EVER see a credit for a story in an Ars post (if at all), and yet anyone writing for any publication knows that when you run a story, if you didn’t get it from the source, you credit. Sometimes of course you get grief for running a story from another site; I have at TechCrunch before, but certainly if it’s not an original story and you’ve picked up the crux from another site you always do the right thing and credit, be it in the post itself or at the end of the post, and 99.9% of sites respect and follow that rule.

Personally I think enough is enough in terms of Ars Technica: if they don’t want to play by fair rules, then people should stop reading them, which is a shame, it’s a good read, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

See here.

Finalists are the top 3 in each category. For a State that is so remote from the rest of the world there’s an impressive lineup of sites.

The winners will be announced at the Duxton, Perth, August 17.

And incase I’ve failed to mention it previously: I was a judge for the awards. Suffice to say that there were a lot more submissions that finalists, but it was a good experience none the less. It’s amazing what people can come up with in terms of site design and delivery.

I’ve decided that the one thing I don’t like about Facebook is exerting effort for a small group of people; basically I don’t get why Facebook pages should be closed to all bar friends. It’s not that I dislike my Facebook friends; I appreciate every one of them, it’s just that in a society that values user generated content where there is a finite amount of time in a day, you only  want to post or create on X amount of places, preferably ones that maximise the audience. Take for example photos: I post to my Flickr account what I want people to see, be they friends or otherwise, why cant I do the same on Facebook?

OK, so people rave about the privacy and closed networks, but how hard would it be to be able to provide the option “Private or Public Profile?” 

If you do want to see what goes on behind the great privacy wall of Facebook (and it’s not that exciting…yet) add me as a friend on Facebook. I might have to have a friend-a-thon so I can play catchup with Robert Scoble…although I’ve got a bloody long way to go 🙂

Tunku Varadarajan at The Wall Street Journal wishes blogging a happy 10th birthday; one problem, blogging is not 10 years old, it’s actually older.

According to my history of blogging (still No. 3 on Google BTW, and heavily researched at the time) blogging turned 11 on January 10, the date in which the first credited blogger (according to Wikipedia as well) Justin Hall commences writing an online journal with dated daily entries, although each daily post is linked through an index page. On the journal he writes ?¢‚Ǩ?ìSome days, before I go to bed, I think about my day, and how it meshed with my life, and I write a little about what learned me.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

In February Dave Winer follows up with a weblog that chronicles the 24 Hours of Democracy Project.

Winer has often claimed that he was the first blogger, I’ve long disagreed but whether it was Hall or Winer is a moot point: both were blogging in 1996, and yet Varadarajan writes this rubbish:

“We are approaching a decade since the first blogger — regarded by many to be Jorn Barger — began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote….”

Um, absolutely not and NO. Barger has always been credited with popularizing the term weblog (although as I found in my research back in 2005 he wasn’t the first to use it the term), but I’ve never read ANYONE claiming that Jorn Barger was the first blogger; even Rebecca Blood’s insular and cliquey history of blogging (written in 2000) which has been at the top of Google for pretty much ever, refers to Berger as coining the term, not creating blogging.

So Tunku Varadarajan: if Barger is “regarded by many” to be the first blogger, name your sources! I checked the first half dozen references on Google, all of them say its Hall except Bloods that doesn’t credit the first blogger. If not: withdraw the article or issue a correction. We expect better from the WSJ, even if most of the rest of the mainstream media has long since moved to the gutter. To others who are blindly joining the celebrations: do some homework before believing everything you read on WSJ.com

Update: Rex Hammock claims in the comments that Dave Winer has never tried to claim credit for being the first blogger, and that this entire article is flawed because that claim is wrong. What’s wrong is that people like Hammond and Varadarajan can’t use Google. To quote Dave Winer on 21 January 2007:

Time flies when you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re having fun. The 10 year anniversary of Scripting News is approaching and with it, the ten year anniversary of blogging.

I’m not sure how else to interpret that. As for claims that Varadarajan is more correct than my 2005 history of blogging because he writes for the WSJ and I’m nothing more than a lowly blogger: Rex, if you can find references to prove Barger was the first blogger, show me. I can’t and in all my years blogging (many dedicated to writing on the blogging space itself) I’ve never heard Barger being noted as the first blogger. It is arguable when the first blog is written, however it always comes back to Winer or Hall (1996 v 1994 vs early 1997 as well), but never Berger in late 97.

Update 2: Scoble points out that Berger was using a Dave Winer CMS for his blog. So which came first, the chicken or the egg? 🙂 Hammock still arguing over the Winer point in the comments and via email…obviously the concept of “moot point” doesn’t translate: I couldn’t care less whether Dave Winer claimed or didn’t claim to be the first blogger (although he clearly claimed the anniversary for himself), the point is, and has always been, that Winer and Hall predate Barger. Lee Hind also notes in the comments that he was blogging in April 2006. That makes 3 blogs predating Barger by more than 18 months.

I don’t even use MyBlogLog anymore, and yet I keep getting spam emails from MyBlogLog users; advertising networks, Nigerian style scams etc. Am I alone? I probably shouldn’t complain and just switch off the emails and resign my MyBlogLog membership properly..but I thought I’d check.  Looks like Yahoo ownership still hasn’t improved things.

All that is old is new again. I’ve been following in passing the debate over sponsored WordPress themes over the last week or so (Jacob Gower has a good summary, Matt Mullenweg’s post here) and I can’t help but shake my head. As Jacob notes the folks at WordPress and other sites are entitled to feature or not feature what they want, but why the jihad, and why now?

I’ve always had a world of respect and admiration of Matt Mullenweg, but I’m starting to question my past loyalty. Remember this is a guy who got done a couple of years back for running spam on WordPress.org, not just a little bit but a ton of it. I defended him at the time, and I don’t regret doing so, but attacking hard working people from doing sponsored WordPress templates that include one sponsored link in return for a free product? WTF?

Of course there seems to be an aloofness creeping in to WordPress these days as well. I contacted Matt not long after I started writing for TechCrunch with a question about a site being shut down/ removed from WordPress.com, the response I got was terse and down right rude. I sent another email off, thinking that perhaps he’d forgotten my past loyalties to him (being one of the very few people to publicly defend him…heck, even his mother and sister contacted me to thank me for supporting him during the spam crisis) and all I got back was a shit response again. Suffice to say I didn’t send him any more email requests. Really weird though that I’m able to talk to CEO’s of multi-million dollar startups without a problem and yet the only serious grief I’ve had in 3 months at TechCrunch was from Matt Mullenweg.

If it smells like Old Mena and it quacks like Old Mena….

But of course that’s being unfair to Mena. She and I have moved past those dark days of MovableType 3.0 and SixApart is back in the good books, with MT to be open sourced this year. We all get older, wiser…and of course we all make mistakes. (so apologies to Mena if you do take offense at the comparison, none is intended, it’s all about the past, not the present).

I really hope that WordPress and Matt Mullenweg don’t repeat the mistakes of Mena and SixApart in the past…but it’s starting to look that way. What next: WordPress development stops to focus of WordPress.com alone?

And while we’re at it: if we’re on a jihad against links, how about the WordPress team stop stuffing their own links into the standard install of WordPress. WordPress is open source after all, and if we’re all about not benefiting anyone, lets be serious about it. I never want to see a link to Matt Mullenweg’s blog again in WordPress unless it’s linked to the dictionary definition of hypocrite.

For all 5 people who will probably listen, I’m another step forward to a podcast again, after a couple of previously failed attempts at the Blog Herald, then a TPN podcast that never got off the ground as I got caught up running a previous company.

I’ve got the Mic, I’ve got Garage Band and I’ve now got Audio Hijack Pro working + registered. Great program BTW, audio quality recording from Skype was quite remarkable.

It has a running title, but I’m waiting on Cam Reilly to sign off on it and get me set up. Format will be plain old talk, I’ll have a guest on and talk about them and general things. In some ways I might end up being the mini-Cam; GDay World without pissing off and offending quite so many people, but expect the swearing to be occasionally at a similar level.

If you’d like to be a guest, let me know. If you don’t want to be I’ll probably contact some of you and insist anyway. Subject matter is fully open; this won’t be a tech podcast as such although it will probably end up having a strong focus in that direction, Id like for example to highlight some Australian tech success stories.  

More soon. 🙂