Category: Web 2.0

I’ve been using Blogdesk for a couple of days now, and for once in my life I can actually feel my blogging productivity increase, mainly because I can quickly copy, cut and edit an image into any blog post, to any of my blogs, along with what I’ve got to say on the story.

I asked Johannes Oppermann, the German based author of Blogdesk, a few quick questions, and this was his response:

I wrote BlogDesk because blogging is about communication and I like the idea to enable people to communicate (one of my other programs is the mail client PostMe). Blogging seems to be easy, but it’s only easy for geeks and the younger tech-generation. I know a lot of people that could never publish a photo with WordPress – but they can do using BlogDesk. When I develop a new program I always think of my 70 year old dad – he has to be able to work with my program.

Why do I give it away for free? I don’t like selling

Again, I’m not being paid for this plug, but I’m loving Blogdesk mainly because of it’s imaging editing abilities. It doesn’t work with all blog clients, but well…technorati tags, image editing, categories…everything I’d ever want…well pretty much close to it. So give it a try! it’s well worth it, and I’m some one who has never felt comfortable with blogging tools like this.

Tags: BlogDesk

All the blogosphere is buzzing about Sphere, the latest kid on the blog search engine block.

Maybe I’ve become sceptical again, but I played with it for a while, its just another blog search engine, and I honestly don’t think it’s quite at the Technorati level yet. Pretty to look at, for sure, but outside of the nice look, I couldn’t find much that was really special.

I’m tempted to start asking people like Michael Arrington and Steve Rubel whether they are actually capable of giving critical press to anything new in Web 2.0.

I mean Tech Crunch and Micro Persuasion are both a good read, but Tech Chrunch in particular appears to be coming the poster boy for hyping every new Web 2.0 tool launch and nearly incapable of giving criticism to any Web 2.0 launch less they start loosing invitations to all the cool Web 2.0 launch parties Michael and the gang get invites to.

Back to my cold and flu tablets now 🙂 A good round up of Sphere can be found over on Greywolfs blog.

Despite the haze of the flu drugs I’ve started taking, and having my 3 year old running around the house with the same flu (isn’t it wonderful how your children love to share) I managed to participate in an interesting podcast this morning at 2web crew where Richard Giles and I interviewed Markus Frind, the chap behind the highly successful free dating site Plenty of Fish, who also makes about $10,000 USD a day from Adsense as well (well to be fair Richard did most of it…..).

Worthy of listening to if your in the blogging business and use Adsense.

He made one particularly interesting point right at the end. If you were starting up a site now, find something that others aren’t doing.

Another point in relation to the so-called Web 2.0 bubble, he said that he didn’t think there was an across the board bubble, only a bubble in VC funding….interesting.

Tags: markus frind

Darrens got a great list of Blog Tools over at Problogger at the moment, including a list of blog editing software. One struck my eye as being worthy of download:

Why did Blogdesk stand out you might ask. I’ll tell you why. The image. Yep, the image directly above this text! It comes with a built in image editor that allow you to crop images and add things like shadows, and the best thing of all: it uploads the image to your server, so you’re never showing images from another site like sooooo many of the blog editing tools out there do.

It’s always been hard for me to use software like this, but with image editing and uploading built in, as well as trackbracks and what not….it’s looking good.

Tags: BlogDesk

I sold two sites today. Weblog Empire for $1k USD and Coupon Weblog.com for $250. It took one and a half hours. Scary. Scary in that they could have been worth easily more. Scary in that even relatively non maintained sites can be worth so much. I’ve still got a long list of fun/ trial/ experiment sites I could sell… given these prices, well the ducted gas heating at $6k AUD is looking a distinct possibility 🙂

But the question then arises? what is a blog worth. When I sold the Blog Herald it was a really hard question. Anything above $10k is a hard sale…really. But even smaller blogs? PR6 blog? Is it worth $1k, $2k, $5k???? interesting question.

What I do hope (oddly enough) is that we see more blog sales, because we need to establish a proper market for blogs, and then we can establish a market price.

I was just reading Valleywag and it hit me: Nick Denton is taking the community out of Web 2.0. Why? easy: closed comments. This whole you’ve got to apply and be approved to be a commenter on his sites….well it sucks. Sure, we all know the difficulties of managing comments and the risks open comments present, but you’d think a company the size of Gawker Media could manage it, Weblogs Inc., does, and does it pretty damn well I’d add. Gawker Media’s model is elitist and does nothing to add to the community.

Sorry Nick.

I’m not sure how long this listing will last….but I’ve got to love the response:

Project: Blog commenter
ID: 1145900161

Status: Open
Budget: N/A
Created: 4/24/2006 at 13:36 EST
Bidding Ends: 5/1/2006 at 13:36 EST (6 days left)
Project Creator: oxley1165
Rating: (No Feedback Yet)
Description: I would like a program created which will post comments in thousands of blogs and guestbooks on the internet.

Regards,
Joe
Additional Info (Added 4/24/2006 at 13:42 EST)…

The programmer would have to get a list of blogs to comment on. Idealy I would like to be able to enter a desired keyword and have the program comment on many blogs and guestbooks relating to that keyword.

The response:

hex251 $27,650 850 days 4/24/2006 at 14:02 EST
10/10
(1 review)
My standard bid for spammers.

Just an idle thought. A lot of people I’m talking to online and offline lately involved in Web 2.0 (including some cutting edge blogging stuff) are 25-40 and have young kids. Am I falling into the trap I was always afraid of when I wrote The Blog Herald where I’ve become insular and naturally refined myself to those similar to myself, or is there something more to this? (in case you didn’t know, my new boss will be 4 in August…and that will be 100 metres of track laid thanks daddy).

I mean, really, when you’ve got young children, you shouldn’t be taking risks…right? And yet, more and more people I’ve met are! And its like there’s a majority in the field to some extent. I’ve done no hard figures on this, but I’d think that this demographic seems to be quite over represented as a proportion of the general population.

Share your thoughts. Am I on to something, or do I just need to get out more 🙂

Having finally got through a backlog of work I wanted to post about my trip to Perth the Wednesday night just gone, and the great people I met at the Perth Blog Meetup.

Worst thing, I didn’t take notes so I’m going to forget some names, but if I have missed you, apologies in advance.

A meetup that was suppose to go from 7-9pm finished a bit before midnight. I could have talked to this group for twice as long again.

I wont give a full run down of everything that was discussed, but I’ll make a couple of points.

Australian Blogging and Web 2.0 is really amazing. Even amongst the odd 12 people in attendance (the number varied throughout the night, with the last guest arriving at 11pm) there was a group of people doing some amazing things. And I know these guys (and gals) are only a very small sample of what’s currently going on in the Australian blogging and Web 2.0 communities.

As big Kev use to say: I’m excited. And more now than ever I want to do more towards (time permitting) being a part of the greater community and helping provide ways and means of promoting Australian bloggers and projects.

Of course I’ve got one semi-secret project that will work towards this (it’s secret in that I’ve posted what I’m doing, but I’ve never publicly really tied together the subject matter previously, but it’s not hard to guess, and certainly most there on Wednesday know what it is). It’s not earth shattering, front page of the news paper sort of thing, but it will hopefully become part of the bigger jigsaw puzzle.
(more…)

Digg is in strife. Big time. Despite some unfortunate comments from Jason Calacanis which I think were totally unhelpful, For those of you who haven’t been following the whole thing, I’ll try to surmise it (some parts may be missed, comment if I need to add anything).

1. Jacob Gower (good bloke by the way) from Forever Geek posts here about suspicious activity at Digg, in particular 17 people Digging 2 items at A List a Part in the exact same order. I’d note that Jacob neither accused Digg, or Digg Founder Kevin Rose of doing the wrong thing, but did ask whether it was more than a coincidence, a not unreasonable question in the circumstances.

2. Other blogs pick up on it, and they get Dugg. Then mysteriously their stories are manually removed, and in some cases their accounts are suspended. Digg responds to these bloggers it was because their posts supported accusations of wrong doing at Digg.

3. Forever Geek is suspended from Digg according to Kevin Rose, for spamming Digg

4. Now its on Slashdot, tech.memeorandum, and all over the place. Jacobs follow up post is here that fills in the rest of the story.

5. Digg results start going wonky. Posts with 44 diggs make the front page. Something is going on at Digg, something very strange.

OK, so thats the short version. I don’t have any evidence that Kevin Rose or others are doing the wrong thing here, but I do know that the odds of having 17 odd people digg an item in the same order for the same blog in a short time frame are astronomical if we were to presume that they were all done legitimately. If these diggs were blogs everyone (including Jason Calacanis) would be yelling spam blogs from the tops of the tallest buildings.

Reality is: it smells, and it smells big time.

Digg also now has a pretty big PR disaster on it’s hands, and its founder is totally compromised because it would appear, is some respects, that he may have been involved in the matter. For him to rule that nothing was untoward and then accuse Forever Geek of spamming has absolutely no credibility.

I like Digg, and a frequently visit the site mainly because of the interesting things I can find there. Now that I know that potentially the content delivered is potentially no reflective of the interests of the greater blogging community….well I’m not going to stop using the site, but I’m certainly not going to hold it in the same esteem anymore, and I would suggest, neither would a whole lot of other people.