Category: General

Gotta love this: Technorati v Google. I’ll give it to Dave Sifry, thinking big works, even if Technorati will never be bigger than Google in my lifetime why aim at the bottom when you can aim to be the best.

I called out Steve the other week about being wrong about RSS (and a whole pile of people disagreed with me…) but I’ve got to balance the ledger, so I’ve found something that I couldn’t agree with more: It’s Not About the Traffic.

Writes Steve:

See, anytime a blogger thinks blogging is just about getting more traffic then I really question why they’re in it. I lose my trust in them because I think they’re baiting me (which in this case, Copyblogger did). What’s more, I certainly don’t see any need to establish a closer bond by opting into their feed.

My suggestion is that if you’re blogging solely for building Web traffic and Google Juice, go build a Web site and advertise it on Google instead. Blogs are about being part of a community. Join it, add value to it, but don’t focus on the traffic.

It goes back to sayings such as all good things come to those who wait. There was another saying as well, along the lines of your return is only as good as the work you put in. The work you put in, in blogging terms anyway, includes being part of the community as well. Too many people these days focus on traffic and ignore the other fundamentals of blogging, sure, sometimes you do get a lot of traffic this way, but it’s nothing that will set you up in the longer term.

so it would seem:

From RSF:

Reporters Without Borders said it had obtained a copy of the court verdict against Li Zhi (below), a former official jailed for eight years in December 2003, confirming that US firm Yahoo! collaborated with the prosecution, as did local competitor, Sina.

“The Li Zhi verdict shows that all Internet sector companies are pulled in to help when the police investigate a political dissident,” the press freedom organisation said.

“It is unacceptable that US firms should turn themselves into auxiliaries of a government that systematically tramples on the rights of Internet-users to freedom of expression,” it said.

“Yahoo! should urgently withdraw its content and email servers from this country before further requests of this kind are made of it. The fact that it operates in China through a local partner, Alibaba, does not in any way absolve it of its ethical responsibilities,” said the organisation.

The verdict showed that Yahoo! Hong Kong Ltd and Sina Beijing had supplied information confirming that Li Zhi had set up an email account using their services. It did not however say if the content of messages he sent or received had been handed over to the courts.

It also showed that a local telecommunications agency had helped the authorities find Li Zhi’s address and telephone number, based on the IP address used to access Yahoo! and Sina email boxes.

Some of Li’s emails and transcripts of his discussions on forums on Sina.com formed part of the charges drawn up by the National Security Bureau. The verdict also quoted an article that was posted on his personal website, hosted by Muzi.com, headlined “Why is China lagging behind?”

Chinese police made use of “witnesses” to confirm that Li was putting the Internet to subversive use. One of them revealed that the official had asked his advice on how to get round online censorship.
Li was accused of getting in touch via the Internet with Xie Wanjun, head of the banned China Democracy Party. A membership form was apparently also found on his computer.

I promised I wouldn’t attack Mena in the future, so I’m not, saying someone is on drugs is Australian for saying something really stupid, bizarre, etc….

This from Business Week:
” think blog tools can get easier to use. Putting together a blog should be as easy as sending an e-mail. I foresee the next versions of blog tools as focusing less on features that appeal to early adopters. They’ll be easier for people to incorporate more media and maybe mobile capabilities. This will be important, because many more mainstream users will come to blogging. I believe the interest in blogging is just starting.”

Outside of Image Management, blogging is as easy as sending an email. Indeed I can post to a WordPress blog using email! I’m not sure if there is an equivalent in SixApart products, but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t. As for extras, has she not tried MSN Spaces or MySpace out? there isn’t a huge number of features here. Indeed I would argue that that we need more features in blogware not less. As the blogosphere matures users are and will be expecting to do more, not less, unless of course she counts the 200 million odd bloggers as “early adopters” 🙂

I should have posted this on The Blog Herald when I still had her. Things that annoy me: Feeds that fully reload in Bloglines so you get like the last 20 posts over the week or similar instead of just the ones you’ve already read. Of course, if you’re doing server or upgrade work this is going to happen with a blog, however some blogs do it all the time, and I’d think its a problem with the blogware they are using. Am I pointing my fingure at someone in particular? YES: Weblogs Inc and Blogsmith. My couple of Weblogs Inc blog feeds I subscribe to do this ALL the time. Its annoying….grizzle, grizzle, grizzle 🙂

MC Hammer has a blog. My,my,my,my 🙂

I’m still under contract not to say (I think) but given it’s public here it is.

God, I’m running the sucks theme here now 🙂

So here’s my sucks for the day: Feedburner.

I number of blogs and bloggers I read use this service (I won’t name names though, but you know who you are) and they’ve nearly all been uncontactable/ not updating in Bloglines for a week. I’ve corresponded with a few people who’ve told me Feedburner is blaming Bloglines…which is odd really because its only Feedburner feeds that are having the problem. If they’re using compliant (ie Dave Winer compliant) RSS I’d think they wouldn’t have a problem….but maybe its all in my head and they really don’t suck at all.

I’ve had a play with Feedburner in the past and I still don’t get why it’s all that amazing. Sure, you get to see that Bloglines, Yahoo and others are pulling your feed, so what? I knew that already from the Awstats feeds I was getting when I still owned The Blog Herald!

Threadwatch gets it totally right: it’s totally over when Google brings ecommerce to Google Base. Combine this with the much waited for Google Payments system, and if I owned eBay shares I’d be doing certain things in my pants very soon 🙂