Disruptive Conversations

NxE's 50 Most Influential Female Bloggers...

I have to honestly say I haven't really paid a whole lot of attention to the gender of who is writing the articles I read these days. The truth is that what social media I do consume is mostly in micro-blogging like Twitter or aggregators like Friendfeed where often I just see small names and pictures... and it all merges into a blur, really, and I guess in so many ways I just don't really consider gender (or race or age) relevant... if an article is interesting, I'll read it.

Yet as I look at a lot of the blogs I read (when I actually have a chance to do so), I do have to admit that my current list in my RSS reader is overwhelmingly male.

So it was interesting to see NxE's Fifty Most Influential 'Female' Bloggers come out. A few of the bloggers listed are in fact ones that I subscribe to.... and there are predictably several female bloggers I subscribe to who are not on this list (it is, after all, only 50). Regardless, it's a good list of interesting people. I like how the compiler of the list formatted it with information about the blogger, a picture and "Why She Matters". Nicely done. There's a lot of great folks on there who deserve the attention and credit for all they've been doing...

Technorati Tags: blogging, women

An easy way to add video comments to your WordPress blog via Seesmic

Do you want a quick way to record and embed videos in your WordPress blog? Would you like to make it so that visitors to your blog could leave you video replies?

If so, Loic LeMeur and the Seesmic gang have come up with a rather cool option in the form of a WordPress plugin for Seesmic video. First announced yesterday on TechCrunch and then on Loic's blog, this plugin simply installs into your WordPress site and lets you both easily embed videos in your blog entries and also lets people leave video comments.

Given that I run this site on TypePad, I can't demonstrate the plugin here... but I built Voxeo's corporate blog portal using WordPress MU which does work with the video. You can see the plugin in action in this blog post in both the main post and also in the comments. (Please feel free to leave a comment as well! I'd love some more testers, especially "anonymous" testers without Seesmic accounts.)

CONTEXT MATTERS

One curious thing I did notice about using the plugin. If you have a Seesmic account, then the videos you create with the plugin also go out in your Seesmic feed. On one level, this is rather cool as it means that anyone following you in Seesmic will see the videos you create. However, when you are creating the videos you MUST remember:

Your video will be viewed in two different channels - with and without the context of the blog post.

For instance, here's the video I recorded this morning when I got the plugin working with the site:

Viewed within the context of the blog post, this video makes sense. However, just as a raw video in my Seesmic stream, the context isn't there. On what blog site was I testing out the plugin? Who is the "we" to which I was referring?

To make this make sense in both channels, I probably should have started off with something more like this:

Hi, this is Dan York and today I'm experimenting with adding the Seesmic video plugin for WordPress to our corporate blog site, blogs.voxeo.com, ...

Or something similar that clued people in to the blog site I was talking about.

Likewise when leaving a comment to a blog post, you will be commenting on the contents of the blog post. Someone seeing that within Seesmic will have no clue what you are talking about. Should you then start your post with something like this?

Hi, this is Dan York commenting on the blog post at <URL>:... blah, blah, blah...

Now here we have a problem. Without an intro like that ("commenting on the blog post at..."), the video comment makes perfect sense within the context of the blog post, but doesn't make sense in the Seesmic video stream. With an intro like that, the video seems a bit strange in the context of the blog post (you already know the URL of the site so why are you mentioning it), but does make sense in the Seesmic video stream.

Two different audiences viewing the same video with and without the context of the blog post.

SUGGESTION

Perhaps Seesmic needs to somehow add a field so that when a video is posted (either in the main post or as a reply) via the WordPress plugin there is a link in the Seesmic stream of the user back to the blog post where the video appears. Not sure how feasible that is, but perhaps it might address this issue.

In the meantime, users of the WP plugin should bear this dual audience factor in mind when you are recording videos.

If you do want to check out the Seesmic video plugin in action, you can visit the blog post I made earlier today and... seriously... feel free to leave a video comment if you have a camera. I'd love to get some more testing done of the plugin.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpress mu, wpmu, seemic, video, plugins, voxeo

How about checking with the target before posting that blog post?

In the latest reminder that in the "rush to publish", blog writers need to remember some of the basic rules of journalism, last Friday Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch came out with "Twitter Testing Advertising in Twitter Streams". Given Twitter's current prominence in the social media playground, this naturally set off a blogstorm of commentary around the potential of ads in Twitter.

And then Vasanth Sridharan over at Silicon Alley Insider did what should have been done at the beginning... he checked with the folks at Twitter! Their answer... no ads in Twitter.

Now, sure, Duncan Riley and the TechCrunch crowd are in the business of breaking news and in an era when gaining the credibility as a place to get breaking news means being only minutes (or even seconds) ahead of your competitors, I can understand why he ran with it. But it does seem odd given that it's Twitter and all of us on the service are so interconnected, that a quick fact check with the folks at Twitter couldn't have been done. (I also agree with I know that most all of us in the blogging world weren't schooled in the traditional ethics of journalism... nor do we necessarily claim to be journalists... but on a certain level, it seems to me to just be plain old common senses:

If you are going to write about someone, why not check with them about the accuracy of your story first?

Kudos to the Silicon Alley Insider folks for doing the right thing. P.S. On a similar vein, "Veracity: The Future of New Journalism" (although I agree with Mathew Ingram that spelling is also important!)

Technorati Tags: blogging, writing, journalism, fact checking

Isn't TweetLater missing the point of Twitter?

I have to admit that I don't quite get TweetLater:

"Now YOU Can Schedule Future Tweets For All Your Twitter Accounts"

And this:

"Stuck on an aircraft? Back to back meetings? Taking vacation? Running errands? Playing with the kids?

Have peace of mind and more free time. Keep your Twitter feed ticking over with new tweets even when you're not in front of your computer."

Now, don't get me wrong... I fully understand and appreciate the value in scheduling blog posts. Some time back when I was more interested in growing my readership, I did exactly that. I would write up a series of posts and have them set to publish on certain days at certain times. Do a flurry of writing and then let the posts just stream out there over the next days or weeks. Every now and then I consider doing that again. It makes sense to me if you are trying to maintain/grow readership and want to maintain consistency in posting.

But those are blog posts... usually larger blocks of text. And usually pieces that I really need to write on my laptop or other computer. They are took long to really type on a Blackberry or other portable device. (or at least longer than *I* want to type on a Blackberry!)

Do we really need this for Twitter?

Isn't the point of Twitter really to talk about what you are doing now... or what has your attention now? Isn't it really a tool for your life stream? Or for pointing to your blog posts? Or querying your network of people? Or hanging out at the virtual water cooler?

Now maybe those are just ways that I use it and maybe others have other uses where TweetLater might be useful. But given that you only type 140 characters or less and that you can do this from a zillion different interfaces (cell phones via SMS, cell phones via web, Internet cafes, any web access, other sites, etc.), it seems to me that it is easy enough to update Twitter from most places.

More to the point, if you are stuck on an aircraft or playing with your kids, why should you be twittering? In my book it's perfectly okay to be offline sometimes.

Are we finding people who feel they MUST twitter all the time?

Are there people who feel that they need to twitter on a consistent basis in order to grow/maintain their followers? Will people really have more "peace of mind" if they queue up a bunch of tweets?

Are we just creating another rat race where Twitters feel they have constantly keep producing? (And isn't that just a hamster wheel?)

That's certainly not how I use Twitter, and it seems to me to be the polar opposite of the whole Twitter "What are you doing" mindset... but maybe there are some folks out there of feel "they have to twitter" in order to keep on going. (I would suggest that perhaps such folks need to "chill out", but hey, that's just my view.)

Where I could see it working

Now where I can see something like TweetLater being used is for Twitter accounts tied to an event where you tweet out parts of the schedule. For instance, let's take a tech conference that has keynotes, breakout sessions, breaks, etc. The organizers could publicize that people could stay up-to-date on what is going on at the conference by following the conference twitter ID. The organizers could then use a service like TweetLater to queue up tweets to go out at certain times:

• 8:55 - "Keynote with XXX, CEO of YYY, starting in 5 minutes in Grand Ballroom I"
• 10:30 - "Morning refreshment break in Foyer II sponsored by XXXXX"
• 10:55 - "Concurrent sessions starting: XXXX in Panama 1, YYYY in Panama 2.."
• 11:00 - "Exhibit Hall now open. Visit booth 1234 to win an iPod."

Etc, etc. You get the idea. The conference staff could queue up these scheduled tweets to go out but then also send out unscheduled tweets as the need arose ("Session A in Panama 2 has been cancelled as the speaker's flights were cancelled."). Attendees who followed the conference name could get those updates on whatever device they found useful. All in all I could see that being useful at a conference.

So there I could see it being useful. But for individual twitter users? I don't see it... but maybe I also don't see all of how twitter has evolved.

What do you think? Would you use a service like TweetLater? Do you know of people you think might?

Technorati Tags: twitter, tweetlater, blogging, microblogging

Chris Brogan's new site design...

Ordinarily I would probably not bother to note that someone has a "redesigned web site"... I mean, that happens all the time, right? But seeing Chris Brogan's new redesign is also a good time to mention Chris again. If you are interested in social media and aren't reading Chris' blog, I think you really owe it to yourself to check it out. Chris posts great pieces on all sorts of topics related to social media... and he's a great writer, too, which helps. (He's also become a friend over the last few years, so I'm admittedly biased. :-)

He's also got a great story about how he met the people who helped with his site redesign... through social media, of course!

Technorati Tags: chris brogan, social media

Chris Brogan's free eBook on "Social Media Starting Points"

Chris Brogan yesterday released a free eBook "Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points" that does a nice job outlining what you need to think about as you look at starting to use social media and social networking for business communication. It's a well-done piece. As I commented, the only additional item I thought should be included was a comment policy, but that's mostly due to my recent experiences with the need for one! However, I'd still definitely recommend this eBook to people... it's great that Chris is putting together material like this.

Technorati Tags: chris brogan, chrisbrogan, socialmedia, social media, socialnetworking, social networking, howto, tutorial

Skitch is my new friend! (Especially when used with MarsEdit!)

Okay, tonight I am one VERY happy blogger!

I <3 Skitch!

You see, ever since leaving Windows back in October and moving onto the Mac platform, the one single biggest application I have missed - and really the only app I have missed! - has been Microsoft's Windows Live Writer. It truly rocks as an offline blog editor and I've been trying to find the same level of functionality ever since I moved to the Mac. I tried ecto but found it had some quirks that didn't work for me (however, I did buy both ecto and MarsEdit). I've mostly been using MarsEdit, but it has had one big glaring hole for me:

I can't easily paste in screen captures!

In fact, there's a good bit of irony to me that my last post, about using MarsEdit, was actually posted using ecto simply because it was the easiest way to incorporate screenshots!

However, I have seen the light! In the form of this little app called Skitch!

A number of people, including Daniel Jalkut who develops MarsEdit, had encouraged me to try it out, but for a whole variety of reasons I didn't get around to it. Until tonight.
Perhaps the single greatest feature of the app for me is this little tab on the bottom of the app that says "drag me". You see, MarsEdit has this great "Media Manager" to which you can simply "drag and drop" files, but you can't easily drag-and-drop a screen capture on a Mac. Oh, you can easily take a screenshot of a region - using either the magic keystroke of Cmd+Shift+Ctrl+4 or through using the "Grab" application, but in neither case could you easily drop it into MarsEdit's Media Manager. Instead what I would do would be to paste it into ecto's WYSWIG editor.

So I wound up in this bizarre blog editing world where I would use MarsEdit for all my blogging... unless I wanted to incorporate screen captures, in which case I'd switch to ecto! A real pain-in-the-neck.

But now, with Skitch and this little "drag me" tab, I simply take the screen shot, resize it if I want, and then drag it over to MarsEdit's Media Manager.

In fact, it even solves one of my frustrations with MarsEdit's drag-and-drop. I always found it annoying that when you dragged an image from a web page, for instance, into MarsEdit, the image would get named some really long ugly temporary filename. Now, if you only use MarsEdit's Media Manager, that's not too big of a deal, but sometimes I do go into TypePad's File Manager and right now there are a ton of image files with really ugly names that are meaningless to me. Anyway, with Skitch I just enter a name into the field right above "drag me", hit Enter, and then when I do drag the file to MarsEdit, it comes across with this nice new name. VERY cool!

Skitch also comes comes with a whole range of annotation tools, so you can do stuff like what I just did to a NASDAQ 10-year chart I pulled off of CNN.com a few minutes ago. Skitch did the screen shot and then let me annotate away. The nice thing is that I can go back and edit my annotations, change them around, delete them, change colors, etc.

When I'm done, I just drag it over to MarsEdit and... ta da.. there it is!

Now, Skitch also has a "Skitch.com" service where you can host your images, and there's a handy little "webpost" button at the bottom of the user interface that will post your image. The cool part, though, is that you don't have to use Skitch.com. You can use the "webpost" button to post to flickr, .Mac or other sites via FTP, SFTP or WebDAV. Again, VERY nice!

Now I see why people were telling me I should check it out. It's the solution to my screen capture problem on the Mac... and it's free!

In fact, I'm not really sure what the business model is for the Plasq crew that made it, except perhaps that it gets them publicity and may draw people to their other products. Perhaps it's only free in the beta period and then they'll be asking people to buy it. (I probably would.) Regardless, all I can say is that I'm grateful to them for making such a cool app available!

If you are a Mac user and have not yet tried it out, do head on over to Skitch.com and check it out... it will probably change the way you work with images very quickly.

Technorati Tags: images, apple, mac, macosx, skitch, screen captures, marsedit, blogging, blog editors

Using MarsEdit with NetNewsWire to accelerate posting from blog articles (i.e. what the "Post to Weblog" button can do)

In recent weeks I've started to use NetNewsWire for my RSS feed reading and have quite enjoyed one very cool aspect of it... this button in the top menu bar:

With one click, the text of the post appears over in MarsEdit where I can then write additional comments and post the entry. What's very cool is that if you select/highlight a block of text before clicking the button you get only that part brought across into MarsEdit. So if there is a paragraph you want to include in your post, simply highlight the paragraph, click the button and you're off and blogging.

(NOTE: In order for this to work with all the fields, you need to be in the "News Items" screen in NetNewsWire and not a "browser window" opened up inside of NNW. You can still use the button in those other windows, but it won't bring across the name of the blog and the URL of the blog itself.)

However, one thing I noted right away was that the format of how the text was brought across into my blog was not the way I wanted to have it appear. I would have to do extra work to go and change it around to fit the style of how I write here. For instance, I like to put "quoted" text in a <blockquote> and in italics. So each time I used the magic button, I had to do this re-formatting.

No more. I discovered in the MarsEdit preferences this little tab:

Which by default contains the text:

<p><a href="#url#">#title#</a>: "#body#"</p>

<p>(Via <a href="#sourceHomeURL#">#sourceName#</a>.)</p>

It was then a simple matter to change that to the style that I want to use:

<p>Over on <em><a href="#sourceHomeURL#">#sourceName#</a></em> the post "<em><a href="#url#">#title#</a></em>" contains this text:</p><blockquote><em>"#body#"</em></blockquote>

Now when I do this highlighting and clicking the button, I get something like this:

which looks like this when published:

Obviously once it is in MarsEdit I can write additional text, modify the text I've brought over. Many times I will change the text after it's brought over to say something like "Over on his blog, Lee Hopkins writes an excellent piece called... " but the bulk of the work has been done for me. I have links and the text and it's formatted in the way I want it to be.

Very nice integration between NetNewsWire and MarsEdit!

P.S. Naturally this only works with Macs... sorry about that Windows users! (On the other hand, you have the awesome Windows Live Writer!)

Technorati Tags: blogeditors, blogging, marsedit, netnewswire, tools

Allen Stern: Would You Pay $1 For A Feed?

Over on his Center Networks blog, Allen Stern asks a reasonable question: Would You Pay $1 For A Feed?

"What if blogs and journals offered a full feed for $1 per month with no ads, mobile access, etc. Would you subscribe for a buck? What I am proposing is the following forms of monetization: standard Web site with ads, partial feed with no ads, and a full feed with no ads for $1/month.

So many of the people I speak with daily subscribe to a ton of full feeds and never visit a site after picking up the feed. Some say that feeds strengthen the interactivity with a site because when they read the post, they are more likely to come to the site to comment. Sure, it's easy to jam an advertisement into a feed, but what if there was another way to provide a revenue stream for a blogger to live off of and for the consumer to enjoy the media knowing they are supporting the content they enjoy?"

Allen's piece and the ensuing comments are well worth a read. It's a good discussion point... if you are blogging as a living is it unreasonable to expect to people to subscribe to your work?

I'm skeptical, given the zillions of other websites out there... but I'm also certainly personally open to keeping on paying for content if it is valuable enough that I can't get it anywhere else. For instance, I do pay for a subscription to LWN.net because the crew there continues to provide the best coverage I've seen anywhere on Linux issues. (However, I had been reading them - for free - for several years before they asked readers to buy subscriptions... so they were already a known (and valued) entity to me when they moved to a subscription basis.)

In any event, it's a worthwhile discussion to have... check out Allen's blog to join in the conversation.

Technorati Tags: blogging, feeds, allen stern

Ending the year as I began it... introducing a new blog! (This time, "Behind The Blog" from Voxeo)

There is a certain delightful symmetry to the fact that I began 2007 rolling out a new blog, Disruptive Telephony (followed shortly thereafter by this Disruptive Conversations blog), and now I end 2007 rolling out another new blog. In today's case, though, the blog in question is for my employer, Voxeo, and is simply titled "Behind The Blog". As I explained in the introductory post, the goal of the blog is to tell the ongoing story of what it took us to create the blogs.voxeo.com corporate blog portal and what we do to evolve the site in the time ahead. We'll write about WordPress plugins, code we have to change and other things we do. The intent is that it will be a fairly technical blog diving into the innards of WordPress MU.

To a large degree, the point of the site is to help others who want to create blog portals using WordPress MU - hopefully they can learn from what we've gone through and not necessarily suffer some of the pain that we did. If you are considering running a blog portal on WordPress MU, feel free to join us as we explore the world of running a corporate blog portal using WordPress MU. If you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to the direct feed for the blog or simply get new posts as part of the "all Voxeo blogs" feed. (Behind The Blog posts also appear in our new Twitter feed.)

I'm delighted to bring out this new blog... and am very definitely looking forward to more blogging and podcasting in 2008!

Happy New Year to you all!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, wordpress mu, wpmu

Where have all the Blognation editors/writers gone? (Martyn tells us...)

With the demise of blognation (also here), an obvious question is: where did all the excellent Blognation writers/editors go? Say what you will about Sam Sethi's business practices... he did, though, pull together a top-notch team of writers. So where did they all go? Well... Martyn Davies has compiled an excellent list of where all the Blognation writers/editors are. Many thanks to Martyn for putting that list together! Of special note, I'll mention that Tris Hussey has now landed at b5 media. Congrats, Tris! I look forward to seeing what evolves there.

Technorati Tags: blognation, martyn davies, tris hussey

A truly awesome signoff by Blognation...

The main page of Blognation.com (captured in the image to the right should the page change) is truly a wonderful way to end a rather sordid saga. Kudos to whomever came up with with the idea!

(And a tip of the hat to Triona Carey for pointing this out.)

Technorati Tags: blognation

Blognation ends in fire and mud...

And so it ends.

Earlier this month I had written that it looked like Blognation was in trouble, but Sam Sethi now has confirmed that with his post.

I'm not going to dignify that post with any further discussion here as there is just way too much mud being thrown around right now. There's definitely room for a higher level of professionalism on a number of different fronts.

Right now my thoughts are more with friends like (ca.blognation.com editor) Tris Hussey, who has now naturally posted that he is looking for a new role. Whatever Sam's personal failings may have been, he did pull together a great team of writers! And now they are needing to find something new just as the holidays are upon us.

Personally, I'll miss blognation. The sites had great posts on a range of topics. They brought a great range of commentary on emerging technology and were a good voice to have out there.

What a mess.

Technorati Tags: blognation, sam sethi, blogging

MarsEdit supports Tags in WordPress 2.3!

Over on my Voxeo blog site, we are using WordPress MU which is based on WordPress 2.3 and includes a very nice "tags" feature in addition to categories. This allows you to do things like have the "tag cloud" that you can see in the right sidebar of our "Speaking of Standards" blog. It's quite nice but in working with the blog site, we ran into one major annoyance - none of the offline blog editors on the Mac seemed to support WordPress 2.3 tags. This resulted in a bizarre posting process where if you wrote the post offline you then needed to login to the site to go back and add tags to the post. Thankfully, a quick search brought me to a post back in September indicating that marsedit already supported WP 2.3 tags! All that is required is to go into the View menu (when writing a post) and choose "Keywords Field". When you enter in keywords, those are then automagically mapped to WP 2.3 tags when you publish the post. VERY nice!

Technorati Tags: marsedit, tags, wordpress, wpmu, wordpress mu, blog editors

My own Open Letter to Sam Sethi - please bring back the post about Marc Orchant's heart attack!

UPDATE: As noted in the comments, Sam Sethi indicates he is restoring the post about Marc. Thank you, Sam!
--------

Dear Sam,

I don't know you. Odds are you don't know me. I've been a huge fan of your blognation network and am personal friends with several of the authors who write for you. Today it is pretty clear you are having some challenges. It is probably not one of your better days. Understandably, you seem to be removing all traces of Oliver Starr from your us.blognation.com site. Personally, I think that's rather short-sighted because Oliver and Marc and everyone who wrote for you there were talented writers and many of us linked to those pages and valued their writing. If you do want to salvage blognation.com, many of us have given you lots of "link love" which will now wind up getting errors. From an SEO point-of-view, it does not seem to be the smartest move. But it's your site and you can do with it what you will. Oliver has personally attacked you in a very public manner. You are no doubt angry and that is understandable.

But why? Why? Why? Why did you have to pull down the post about Marc Orchant's massive heart attack? (and along with it all the comments left by well-wishers?)

All around the blogosphere, hundreds upon hundreds of bloggers have linked to that post (as did I). When last I saw, there were something like close to 200 comments left to that post. It is very clear from Oliver's update page that this was great solace to Marc's family.

Why did you pull the post down? Sure, it was written by Oliver, but so what? It is about one of your employees who suffered a massive heart attack and even now lies in a coma! Through the blogosphere people have heard about Marc and will be continuing to check in on that page to get the status of Marc's recovery.

Can you please bring that post back?

Obviously, if Oliver is no longer part of blognation, he can't update the page and it sounds like he is more directly connected to Marc than you are. Okay, so why can't you go into that (restored) page and simply put at the very top something like this:

UPDATE: As Oliver Starr is no longer associated with Blognation, future updates on Marc's condition and recovery can be found on Oliver's update page about Marc. Our thoughts are with Marc and his family in this terrible time.

Or some words like that. Let people come back to the page about Marc's condition and then find out where to go to get updates.

Please.

You and Oliver can have your public disagreement and flame each other all you want... but let's leave Marc out of the picture. He's in a coma and he and his family need the thoughts, prayers, good wishes, resources, etc. of all the rest of us.

Please do the right thing and bring that page back. Please bring back those comments which were obviously appreciated by Marc's family.

At the very least, can you please put a redirect in your web server that maps the URL for the original post about Marc to Oliver's update page? Yes, I know you don't like Oliver right now and probably would sooner stick a knife in your body than link to Oliver's new site... but please...

do it for Marc.

Thank you for your consideration,
Dan York

Technorati Tags: blognation, marc orchant, marcorchant, sam sethi, samsethi

Blognation Meltdown? Oliver Starr leaves Blognation with accusations in his "Open Letter to Sam Sethi"

Is the Blognation network of blogs really built on a house of cards? Is it in the process of a major meltdown?

This morning at about 5am US Pacific time, I headed over to us.blognation.com to see if there was any update on the status of Marc Orchant. You can imagine then, my surprise at being confronted with "An Open Letter to Sam Sethi" posted by Oliver Starr:

Please Note: This is an open letter to Sam Sethi, Founder and CEO of Blognation. I have elected to write this letter after having been one of the principal Blognation authors since August of this year. In all that time I have not received the pay promised in my contract nor the reimbursement promised for expenses incurred on behalf of Blognation during this period. I am not alone. Every other Blognation author is in the same unsavory situation.

This open letter details in very broad strokes the reasons why I have lost faith in Sam. It makes specific statements as to the veracity of things Sam has said or written as well as things he has failed to do. I do not say these things lightly. Every statement made in this letter can be backed up with verifiable written material from email correspondence, Skype chats, or SMS messages.

The introductory post had more and ended with this:

Lastly, this post is likely to be removed very shortly after I post it so please, make a screen capture, download it to an off-line reader, copy and paste it into a document or repost it on your own blog(really). At the end, this is a cautionary tale and the victims are the people that have worked for months on the content many of you have enjoyed but for which Sam Sethi has yet to (and may never) pay.

The post then went on into the actual "open letter to Sam Sethi" which did, at great length, go into the allegations Oliver raises against Sam.

True to what Oliver wrote, the post was yanked. Before I could save it to read later, I clicked on another link to see something and a second or two later when I went back in the browser, the post was gone - as were all other posts after October 31st!

Oliver did, though, publish the post in its entirety over on his new website, owstarr.com.

It is, indeed, a sordid story.

Obviously, it is only one side of the story and until we see some response from Sam, presumably on one of the blognation pages (or perhaps on his Twitter page) we can't see the other side of the story.

Given that some of the other authors who are involved with blognation are friends of mine, I would very dearly like to hope that Blognation is not the house of cards that Oliver alleges it to be. They have all (including Oliver) been outstanding writers and I have very much enjoyed reading their posts. Hopefully the network will be able to continue, although if Oliver's allegations are true it is hard to see how it could realistically go on for much longer.

Right now, we really need to wait to hear from Sam - or from other authors within the blognation network.

This is not a good day for the blogosphere.

---

UPDATE #1, 6:15am: Tech Crunch is also carrying Oliver's letter in its entirety.

UPDATE #2 - In removing Oliver's posts, Sam also removed the post about Marc Orchant that almost all of us have been linking to! Oliver Starr, though, now has a new page providing updates about Marc.

Technorati Tags: blog networks, blogging, blognation, sam sethi

FIR Book Review: "WordPress for Dummies" - November 27, 2007

Earlier today I participated in a audio book review of "WordPress for Dummies" with FIR co-host Neville Hobson (I am a weekly "correspondent" into the FIR podcast). The podcast is now online on the FIR site and I will also be cross-posting the podcast notice below as well. It was fun to do the interview with Neville and overall we both were very positive about the new book. (You'll hear my one main point of criticism, which was not so much with the content but with the way it was presented.) If you are working with WordPress - or thinking about it - I would definitely recommend you check out this book.

NOTE: Neville cross-posted the podcast notice on his blog and the book author has responded with a comment.

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One of the most popular platforms for creating and managing a blog is WordPress. From its origins in 2003, WordPress has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

A new book, WordPress For Dummies, has just been published, with explanations in plain English about WordPress and how to use it.

Written by Lisa Sabin-Wilson, WordPress for Dummies covers blogging basics, choosing a hosting solution or setting up a host, developing blog content, syndicating blog posts with RSS, launching a specialized blog (including podcasting, photoblogging, mobile blogging, and videoblogging), and even earning revenue. It includes help on every aspect of installing and using WordPress, illustrations from real-world WordPress blogs, step-by-step tutorials on key topics, and insights from bloggers who use WordPress.

FIR co-host Neville Hobson and FIR correspondent Dan York discuss their take on the new book, looking at various aspects of the overall content, and concluding with their recommendation about the book.

Download the review here (MP3, 12.6MB, 27mins 37 secs), or sign up for the FIR Book Reviews RSS feed to get it and future reviews automatically. To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the twice-weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, sign up for the full RSS feed.

Listen to this podcast now:

Voxeo
If you have comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, email us at fircomments@gmail.com; or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America) or +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe); or Skype: fircomments; or comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR; or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We&#8217;ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Podsafe intro music - On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc
Paperback, 384 pages
Published in November 2007
ISBN: 978-0-470-14946-1
Available online now from Amazon.com and other outlets.

Technorati Tags: blogging, danyork, fir, nevillehobson, wordpressfordummies, wordpress, wordpressmu

Choosing WordPress Mu for a blogging portal...

As I've been discussing, I'm in the midst of evaluating various pieces of software for Voxeo's blog portal. When I last wrote, I was debating between WordPress MU and Lyceum... I've now made the decision to move ahead with WordPress MU into the next stage of pilot testing. Why? Really one word...

Tags

As noted in the announcement of Wordpress 2.3, there is now native support for tags in addition to categories. It happens that I very much like the use of tags on a whole number of levels. Lyceum looks to be an excellent multi-user blogging platform, but its current release is based on the older WordPress 2.0.11. WordPress MU, on the other hand, is based on the current WordPress 2.3.1 release. (I'll note that somewhere in the site I saw that the Lyceum folks are working on a Lyceum 1.1 release that will be based on WordPress 2.3.1, but I need to move ahead now with the blogging project.)

That's the latest... stay tuned for more as I plunge into all the customization and configuration.

Technorati Tags: blog portals, blogging, wordpress, wordpressmu

"Spinning Spammers Steal Our Blog Content" - Lorelle on WordPress describes a new type of content theft

If you blog and care about the theft of your content, you should really read this post from the "Lorelle on WordPress" blog: "Spinning Spammers Steal Our Blog Content".

Like most bloggers, my text has been lifted/scraped/stolen... whatever terms you want to use. In a couple of particularly egregious cases, I did actually make the effort to contact the thief and in one case got it taken down. (A marketing company that seemed to be setting up bogus blogs for SEO purposes and populating them with content from various RSS feeds. The CEO was a bit surprised/embarrassed when I called her up on the phone and basically said "Why are you stealing my content?") But I don't have the time to do that with any regularity. I could probably spend all day doing that and have about as much effectiveness as banging my head against a wall. I'd rather write new content and do all those other things that I need to do each day.

So I was a bit saddened to read of this newest development in the constant war between the spammers/sploggers/thieves and the content producers. Now we have people who will take the content of our RSS feeds, mash it up/remix it with synonyms, and put it out in a probably unreadable form... for SEO or whatever purpose they may be paid for.

I do wonder if these people can honestly look at themselves in the mirror in the morning... but yes, they probably can... as far as they are concerned they are finding new and innovative ways to service their clients. There's just this minor little matter that they are stealing our content to do so....

Technorati Tags: blogging, blog spam

Blog Portals - looking at WordPress MU and Lyceum...

As I've mentioned in previous posts, one of my tasks in my new role with Voxeo is to create a "blogs.voxeo.com" blog portal for the blogs the company will create. Given my interest in open source, I've been investigating options there for a "corporate blog portal". Why open source? Primarily because I'm a huge control-freak and I want to be able to control all aspects of the portal, even if it means diving deep into source code. So my first inclination is to investigate open source options and then if I can't find something there that meets my requirements, I'll move on to commercial software.

On first-glance, though, it would appear that there are two viable open source options out there:

• WordPress MU (Multi-User) - Based on WordPress, this is the "official" multi-user version of WordPress and powers the hosted site WordPress.com.
• Lyceum - Also based on Wordpress and developed by the great folks over at ibiblio.org, this is "a multi-blog derivative of WordPress, suitable for installations with 2 or 2,000,000 blogs. (Nicely, they have a screencast showing the installation process.)

Both options look good. Both let you use the zillion WordPress plugins out there. Both provide front-end portals. Both can be customized to the nth degree. Stay tuned for more analysis... and if any of you reading this have used either of them, I'd appreciate any insight you can offer.

Technorati Tags: blog portals, blogging, lyceum, voxeo, wordpress, wordpressmu

Yea! Microsoft's Windows Live Writer is now out of beta! Get the new version now...

Longtime readers will know that I have been a huge fan of Microsoft's Windows Live Writer offline blogging editor (see what I've written about it). In fact, I have to say that WLW is the ONLY application that I severely miss now that I've moved to MacOS X (sorry, neither ecto nor marsedit yet measure up to WLW for me) and I'm actually considering running Parallels just to be able to use it. To me, it is that good.

So I was delighted for all the Windows bloggers out there to see the tweet from Neville pointing to the Microsoft blog entry indicating that "Windows Live Writer 2008" is now available. You can download it now.

If you have never used an offline blog editor and you are on Windows, do check it out. I've been using offline blog editors for most of the seven years I've been blogging and once you start... you'll never want to go back.

To all you Windows users, enjoy! Me? I'm thinking of firing up Parallels to give the new release a try...

Technorati Tags: blogeditors, microsoft, windowslivewriter

"Corporate Blog Portal" area now opened up on The New PR Wiki - please contribute! (or send feedback)

Per my last blog post on the topic, I've now added my "Design Suggestions for a Corporate Blog Portal" to The New PR Wiki. There is now a "Corporate Blog Portal" page which includes the suggestions I've blogged about here, as well as some examples and a placeholder for links to software.

Feedback would be definitely appreciated! What do you think about these suggestions? Are there other items you think should be on the list? Do you have examples of corporate blog portals that you thought were really well done?

Please feel free to leave suggestions as comments here on this blog post, email me, or make the edits directly in the wiki if you have the password. If you don't and want to edit there, please feel free to email me.

Technorati Tags: blog portals, blogging

Do you have a favorite example of a "corporate blog portal" that works well?

Question for readers - do you have any examples of "corporate blog portals" that you think are done "right"?

One of my tasks with Voxeo will be to create a "blogs.voxeo.com" portal with some of the blogs that we are looking to launch. Obviously, I'm looking to learn from what others have done and come out with something that works well. Back in April, I posted the second round of my "Design Requirements for a Corporate Blog Portal" and that naturally serves as a background for my development, but I'm curious for feedback six months later... are there more items you think should be added to the list? (For instance, I'm thinking that a "tag cloud" would be a worthwhile addition.)

Do you have examples of companies you think did it well? I listed Cisco and Sun in my post, and a commenter suggested Edelman... and then there's the rather minimalist Microsoft MSDN portal. Do you have other suggestions?

Also, if any of you have built corporate web portals, do you have any suggestions for software? Anyone done it with open source solutions like Wordpress? Or have you used commercial software? Any and all suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks in advance if you have any suggestions for either corporate blog portals or software.

P.S. Ultimately, my aim is to capture all this inside of The New PR Wiki so that others can learn from this exchange.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, blog portals

MarsEdit is outstanding - but there is one reason why it doesn't (yet) work for me for offline blog editing

After I asked in my last post about offline blog editors for the Mac, several people responded publicly and privately suggesting I check out MarsEdit, including the developer, Daniel Jalkut, who left this great comment. Naturally, I downloaded and tried it out - and I can see why people are saying great things about it. It's a great offline editor.

Makes it very simple to edit posts. Easy to use. Lots of macros. Tons of capabilities. Doesn't do rich text editing like ecto or, on Windows, Windows Live Writer or Semagic, but it's a solid offline text editor. If you aren't using an offline editor and you're on the Mac, I'd definitely encourage you to check MarsEdit out!

Unfortunately, unless I'm seriously missing something, it doesn't work for me. For one simple reason:

Lack of support for pasting in images.

As readers know, I like to illustrate my posts with images. Specifically, and here's the challenge - screen captures. However, what I don't like to do is to save an image to a file, upload it, link to it, etc. That's too slow. What I want to do is this:

1. Capture a part of the screen, typically either a region, or a window. On Windows I was using TechSmith's awesome SnagIt program and on the Mac I'm using the built in capture utlity (Cmd+Shift+Ctrl+4 lets you capture a region or window and put it on your clipboard.
2. Click into the offline blog editor at the appropriate point and simply do a Paste.

Ta da... screen capture inside of blog entry. The blog editor automagically:
1) creates a thumbnail of the image at the location of your cursor;
2) creates a link to the larger image;
3) creates temporary files and filenames for both files; and
4) uploads all the files and creates the correct links when you hit "Publish".

It's magical. Drop in images, write your text, hit "Publish"... and you never have to worry about naming the files, uploading them, etc. The key for me also is... it's FAST. I can just capture and write away.

Now, Microsoft's Windows Live Writer still does this the best out of all the ones I've tried. Semagic also handles it well. And here on the Mac, ecto does it, albeit with the alignment issue that I mentioned in my previous post.

That's a key requirement that I need to be able to post quickly. If I'm missing something in MarsEdit, I'd love to be clued into that. It seems that I have to save the file first in order to include it.

Having said all this, I should say that MarsEdit does have a VERY cool "Media Manager" component that let's you easily link to your Flickr stream and also - and this is huge - a "catalog" of the images that you've used in your blog (since the time you started blogging with MarsEdit). The Flickr integration is awesome and for any blog entries where I want to use a Flickr photo, it's a great benefit to be able to just pull in the image.

Likewise, the catalog is incredibly beneficial! Right now, I have all these various different images that I've screen captured and inserted into my blog entries. But if I want to link to one of those images again, I have to go find my blog entry where I use the image, right-click it and get the link, and then link to it in my new post... or... and this is usually faster... I have to re-capture the image which then results in more disk space being wasted in my TypePad account because I already have a similar image there. So this image catalog is excellent.

I just wish there was a way to paste in a screen capture! Add that in and I'd probably switch entirely. (This post was written in ecto so that I could include the screen captures.)

Outside of that, I definitely agree that MarsEdit is a great tool. If you don't do screen captures, it's a great one for you to consider for offline blogging.

Technorati Tags: blogeditors, blogging, ecto, windowslivewriter, semagic, images, tools

What's the best offline blog editor for the Mac? ecto? (and some issues I've had with ecto)

Mac users out there... what's the best offline editor you have found for blogging? I've been using ecto for the past two weeks and started with it primarily only because I was familiar with it from the Windows side (where I'd actually moved to using Windows Live Writer almost exclusively). My trial period for ecto is winding down and so I have to decide whether to buy it or try something else. So I'm curious to ask you all:

If you are on a Mac, what do you use as an offline blog editor?

Are there other programs out there I should consider? I've actually been quite happy with ecto with only three smaller issues:

1. I like to include graphics at the beginning of my posts and like to right-align the images. If I put the image at the very beginning of a paragraph (which I often do with the first paragraph, but also may do so in the body of longer articles), the HTML code is initially like this:

<p><img ...... align="right">....

And this usually works fine if I just write the entry in ecto and then immediately publish it. However, if I save the entry as a draft and then re-open it, or if I open up a published draft to edit it again, ecto automagically changes the HTML code to this:

<p style="text-align:right"><img ...... align="right">....

which, yes, indeed, right-justifies the TEXT of the paragraph. If I click in the paragraph and press the left-align button, it goes back to normal left alignment - until the next time I open it up. I have, however, forgotten to do so several times and wound up with right-aligned text. Clearly a bug and one I'll be reporting to the ecto folks.

2. ecto does not support horizontal lines (<hr>) in its rich text editor and so if I want to use one (for instance, to separate an "UPDATE" piece of text from the main body) I have to switch to the HTML view - and remain in that view - or do the edit in TypePad's web interface.

3. At least with TypePad blogs, it seems to set the time of the article to when I start writing it. However, when I go to publish the article, ecto does not seem to update the time. If I'm writing and immediately posting an article, the time it took to write the article is not necessarily a big deal, although it certainly could affect the placement of the article in sites like Technorati or other sites that list current articles (i.e. it will show up earlier than it actually was). However, when I work on a draft, save it and then come back to it a day or two later, I've been bitten several times by the fact that it posts with the original date... resulting in my "new" article not appearing at the top of the blog. I now have to remember to click the "Adjust Time" button before I go to post an article, which is something I really shouldn't have to do. There should be some way to have it just automagically post with the current time. (And perhaps there's an option here I've missed.)

Those are the only real issues I've had beyond the normal having to learn a new interface, new keyboard shortcuts, etc. Overall, I'm quite pleased with the editor. It's worked well and unless someone can point me to something better I'll probably pay to continue using it. I would, however, be curious to know:

What do YOU use for posting blog entries from your Mac?

Technorati Tags: apple, blogeditors, blogging, ecto, macbook, macbookpro, tools

This conference will be photographed and uploaded! (aka life in the always-on(line) world)

Being at a conference full of bloggers, podcasters, etc., one of the more subtle elements to be aware of is this:

There are a ton of people taking pictures - and uploading them all to Flickr!

Translation... just remember that whatever shirt you are wearing or however you style your hair - it will be up on the Internet for all to see. Forever. (Or at least as long as sites like Flickr are around.) Or if you are doing something funny with all those bottles of beer.... or dancing on the table... or whatever.

You will be photographed (especially if it's funny). It will be uploaded. There you are. If you don't like that... if you want to keep pictures like that off the Internet... well, you're only real choice is to not attend a conference like this!

This conference will be photographed. Recorded. On audio. On video. And uploaded.

So it goes. You have been warned. Dress appropriately. Assume that anything you do could be online.

Welcome to life in the transparent always-online world.

By the way, if you want to see pictures from this show, the Podcast and New Media Expo, you can look at these links below. The tag the conference has been encouraging people to use is "newmediaexpo2007" but not everyone is using that. Here they are:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/newmediaexpo2007
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/podcastexpo/clusters/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/pme/clusters/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/cc_chapman/

The last link is from C.C. Chapman, who is a great photographer among his many other talents. He took the picture I included above, which is of me and Terry Fallis of InsidePR fame.

Technorati Tags: blogging, conferences, flickr, images, podcasting, socialmedia

"Hi, my name is Dan. I am a screen shot addict."

I had to laugh when I saw in my Facebook News Feed that several of my friends had joined a new Facebook group "I am a screen shot addict" (You must be a Facebook member to see the group). I laughed a bit more when I saw Betsy Weber's blog post which in turn pointed me to the creator of the Facebook group, Bryan Eisenberg, and his post "Confessions of a Screen Shot Addict".

You see, I am a screen shot addict. Always have been. Probably largely because I used to write a lot of courseware related to computer programs and so naturally I needed to illustrate those documents with screenshots. Now, I take screenshots galore for these blogs. I just like illustrating my articles with graphics... and screen shots are one of the best ways to do that.

On my Windows laptop, I was using TechSmith's SnagIt and loving it. I was also using TechSmith's Jing Project for quick screen shots that I wanted to reference in, typically, an IM conversation. Now that I'm on the Mac, I've got a wonderful built in utility (I love Shift+Ctrl+Cmd+4) and I'm also checking out Jing for the Mac.

So yes, I love screenshots... if you do, too, and are a Facebook user, feel free to "join the group".

Technorati Tags: facebook, bryan eisenberg, screencaptures, screenshots

Heading out to Podcast and New Media Expo next week...

I'm delighted to say that I'll now definitely be at the Podcast and New Media Expo at the end of next week (and into the weekend) out in Ontario, California. I was debating whether or not to go because I'll be at AstriCon the previous few days in Phoenix, Arizona. Originally I was intending to just do AstriCon, but I've changed my schedule a bit so that I'll fly from Phoenix to Ontario, CA, on Thursday night so that I can participate in PME events on Friday through Sunday. Taking the good old red-eye home Sunday night.

I went to last year's PME and very much enjoyed spending time with all the various podcasters and bloggers that I've come to know. Should be a good bit of fun this year as well, although my focus will be a wee bit different. One of the various new paths I'm very seriously considering is to head into consulting and may do more with social media work. I've already been advising several companies about podcasts, blogs, etc.... I may turn that into something more formal. So my trip to PME will be much more business-focused than last year... and I'll be looking to talk to a number of folks about potential partnership opportunities. (Are you interested in potentially partnering with me? or engaging my services? Let's talk. ;-)

In any event, most of all it will simply be just plain fun to reconnect face-to-face with so many of the other members of the social media community whom I know now as friends!

If you read this and are going to be out at the PME, please do drop a line as I'm always interested to connect with folks.

Technorati Tags: pme, podcastexpo, podcasting, tools

Why does the MacBook Pro camera give you a mirror image picture? (and a solution)

I have to blame Chris Brogan. Some time back he had a picture in his left sidebar of him with some other people, and in that picture, his hair was parted on his right. However, above that, he had a picture in his banner with his hair parted on his left (as you can see in his banner now). Other pictures he put in his header were also different from his left sidebar picture. Now, realizing that people do change their hair parts, I asked him this when we were in the middle of some other other conversation. His answer was something like this:

No, the issue is that the MacBook camera reverses the image.

So naturally when I bought a MacBook Pro, one of the things I did check out was the camera and it's image. Sure enough, it gives you a mirror image. For instance, here's the picture I just recorded in a Facebook video:

Note that my hair is parted on my right. Now, if you were to see me, or take a digital picture of me, you would see that my hair is normally parted on my left: