5by5: The Pipeline 6: Matt Haughey.
Nice podcast interview with Matt Haughey.
The Atlantic: What is Rupert Murdoch Doing to Journalism?
“… his once distinctive flair — the flashy headlines, the juicy photos, the winking (or sometimes bludgeoning) partisan tilt that for years was a staple of European papers rather than American — turns out to be quite imitable, a return the yellower days of journalism. Online, the style’s genealogy winds its way through Drudge, the Huffington Post and many blogs.” Ugh, call what we do Murdochian, and I’ll close this place down tomorrow.
Splorp: SXSW Found Type Photowalk 2010.
Cool. Wish SXSW were cheaper.
Server’s been getting borked during the day.
Apologies. Should be right now. (Again).
Macworld: Huge number of Web sites barely visited, report finds.
“The Internet, famously, has a long tail, but a new analysis has revealed another characteristic of this vast slew of obscure Web sites. Huge numbers of them are never visited.”
Ghost in the Machine: A Decade of Berk.
My favorite blogdog. Happy B-day, Berk!
ReadWriteCloud: Backing Up a Wordpress Blog to the Cloud Using Amazon S3.
This goes on my ‘recommend’ list to WP clients.
Kahunaburger: The Birds.
kikolani: Unlock Your Marketing Genius to Make Money Online.
If you want to monetize your bloggings, you can do worse than skim through this article. I particularly admire these two statements: “They [Online Marketers] are also not concerned with volumes of traffic, they want conversions and sales”, and “Social Traffic doesn’t convert well, but it does convert sometimes.” Targeting and measurable results, kiddies. Social marketing takes a lot of time, and that time needs to be compensated for ... otherwise, you’re twittering your way to bankruptcy.
Juli scored a good press writeup.
mad orange fools: my first press! You deserve it, kiddo.
BBC News: WordPress network bug throws millions of blogs offline.
”It seems the company has enough goodwill to spare a couple hours of failure ... [snip] ... But one thing’s for sure, people won’t be so friendly if it happens again.” Oh, it won’t start an exodus. It’ll just unlatch the snark cage.
WebDesignerWall: Unique Blog Posts and WordPress Tips.
I was mentioning this the other day ... wish I had the time to craft uniquely designed blog posts on occasion.
LA Times: Breaking through the noise of social media.
“According to the survey, since 2008 the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of consumer and business information dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%. Similarly, in the past year, the number of people who view peers as credible spokespersons also slipped. Even more strikingly, however, after a precipitous decline earlier in the decade, informed consumers have regained trust in traditional authorities and experts.”
If this article is true, it means the country is ripe for the old ‘simple answers’ canard. We’re tired of complexity, and want black-and-white clear-cut living for a while. Waiting for a virtual Mommy and Daddy to make decisions for us. The authoritarians will win in 2010.
Mashable: Are We All Asking to Be Robbed?
“It’s no secret that when you share your location via Google Buzz and Foursquare you’re exposing information that could put you at risk. Many of us location-sharers get so caught up in the novelty and bonuses associated with our behavior that we forget the implications of our actions. PleaseRobMe.com seeks to make us more aware.” This is what postdating blog posts is for. Fun as it can be to share location, it doesn’t take much imagination to see the opportunities it presents.
Mashable: Why Brands are Becoming Media.
This one nabbed for future perusal. In other words, a quick skim of the content caught me, but I don’t have time to read it fully right yet.
Haven’t had time to do a lot of linkage today.
Be sure to check my Posterous for tons of videos and motion graphics. I’m adding to them daily. I don’t put everything on dm! here ... I’d easily overload this joint with videos.
vowe dot net: Google Buzz, one day later.
Concur. Twitter’s a terrible place to try to support a conversation (especially for a verbose nitwit like myself). I can’t answer in a timely manner, because I’m spending all my time fighting the -215.
Woopra’s been a great tool.
Been doing some deeper observation of the weblog over time. One thing that’s helped me immensely, is playing with Woopra.
Some things have become patently obvious:
1. I need to get up earlier, or post-date entries, if I want to catch my largest audience. The earlier I get up, the better my European performance, and if I start content-gathering at 6AM, I catch the East Coasters in numbers.
2. I need to set up a mobile template, at least for iPhone users, if noone else.
3. I have to continue to allow for 800 pixel wide screens and IE6. (Bummer.)
4. Discovered some fundamental flaws in the navigation structure of my pre-2003 posts, now repaired. Didn’t need to reindex on Google, because they seem to love to troll this site semi-hourly. These missing ‘older’ posts are now showing up in stats.
5. My Google custom entire-domain search had stopped functioning. In the process of setting up a new custom search ... disabled until I can fudge the aesthetic (more difficult now).
Trying to judge what to do with this weblog, moving forward. Have to deal with Facebook, Twitter, Buzz and all the rest. I remain personality-oriented, rather than blog-centered, profit-motive or niche-targeted, and am structuring everything to accommodate that.
I still would prefer to have a single, central database under my own control, and parcel out information to all these services, rather than put original content in third party services and have to call them back in to my domains. There’s a part of my brain that’s continuing to percolate over that ... there’s gotta be a way to beat these systems.
Business Insider: WARNING: Google Buzz Has A Huge Privacy Flaw.
I ran into the fix for this right after I accepted my Buzz invite. Some screen popped up, and I shrieked at the contacts it was automatically following. I turned everyone off except webloggers, family, friends. Nothing Facebook or Twitter haven’t seen. But jeez. So this is well-taken. Via Sin Pantalones Twitter.
Been playing with stats lately.
I am astonished at how many visit here using IE6. And how many are still rocking 800x600 monitors! I don’t need to tell you to upgrade, switch to Firefox or Google Chrome as soon as you can. Chrome requires Service Pack 2 - Firefox doesn’t. Get rid of skanky IE6!
The monitor resolution thing just confuses me. Just a few short months ago, 800x600 was way down on my resolutions list. It’s popped back up near the top! Has my audience changed that much? Or is it the economy? Tempted to start posting widescreen monitor deals. You can pick ‘em up cheap nowadays. As one friend to another, I can tell you a larger monitor will improve your web surfing experience and productivity immeasurably.
Later: Here I didn’t think I needed to keep offering my flexible width design ... but apparently I do. Note to self: check stats before every redesign.
A Whole Lotta Nothing: This is kind of awesome.
Beware of flirting with an endless loop.
Guardian.UK: McSweeney’s inspiration dies. Books | guardian.co.uk
“Knowing that the journal bore the name of a real person who had endured years of struggle threw melancholy shadows over the enterprise. But the McSweeneys insisted that the use of the name was acceptable, even appropriate, given Timothy’s background as an artist and search for connection and meaning through the written word.”
LA Times: A writing career becomes harder to scale.
“I have taught in MFA programs for many years now, and I begin my first class of each semester by looking around the workshop table at my students’ eager faces and then telling them they are pursuing a degree that will entitle them to nothing. I don’t do this to be sadistic or because I want to be an unpopular professor; I tell them this because it’s the truth.” So, weblogging is good then, for writers, given that you’re only as marketable as your very latest post ...
Line 25: Tips for Designing Unique and Attractive Blog Posts.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have the time to do something like this for blog posts? I suppose if it’s your business, one has the time.
Converted Feedburner over to Google.
For those few dozen of you using Feedburner to read this site, let me know if you see any issues.
