Category — blogs

This post from Penelope Trunk is so awesome you all should go and read it. Penelope deconstructs Tim Ferris‘ “i am so cool, i work only 4 hours and am famous and rich and fit” image, plus gives some good time-management tips.

It's childish. It's a childish, semantic game. And it reminds me of him winning the Chinese National Kickboxing Championships by leveraging a little-known rule that people are disqualified if they stop outside the box. So he pushed each of his opponents outside the box to win.

He is winning the I-work-less-than-you game with a similarly questionable method: semantics.

5 Time management tricks I learned from years of hating Tim Ferriss (found via Ade’s friendfeed)

A thoughtful contribution to the personal vs professional blogging discussion:

The point is not to show up on a list, the point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking. That's the work of an author, and I think rather than kissing author blogs goodbye, someone should just start a new list.

Seth’s Blog: Death of the personal blog?

I don’t claim to be a journalist, and I’m never neutral.

Michael Arrington in the comment thread for his article GetClicky GetsMad

Stylewise, little distinguishes today’s popular blogs from ordinary news sites. One good indicator is page bloat. The Register’s John Oates points today to a revealing study of the growing obesity of once slender blog pages. “Blog front pages are now large pages of images and scripts rather than the pared-down text pages of old,” he writes. The study, by Pingdom, is remarkable. Among the top 100 blogs, as listed by the blog search engine Technorati, the average “front page” (note, by the way, how the mainstream-media term is pushing aside the more personal “home page”) is nearly a megabyte, and three-quarters of the blogs have front pages larger than a half megabyte. The main culprits behind the bloat are image files, which have proliferated as blogs have adopted the look of traditional news sites. The top 100 blogs have, on average, a whopping 63 images on their front pages.

Nick Carr — Who killed the blogosphere?

As I said, “professional blogging” is a contradiction in terms.

This week’s printed version of The Economist carries an article on blogging, Oh grow up. Blogging, the article argues, has now become mainstream, and this “looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death”.

While I agree that blogging has become mainstream, I am skeptical that it “is no longer what it was”. As an explanation of the change The Economist quotes Calacanis‘ Official announcement regarding my retirement from blogging:

“Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it,” he offered by way of explanation. It was, he said, “the pressure” of staying on the A-list—ie, of keeping his blog so big and impersonal—that got him. Only a few years ago, so few people blogged that being a blogosphere celebrity required little more than showing up. Now it takes hard work. And vitriol. “Today the blogosphere is so charged, so polarised, and so filled with haters hating that it’s simply not worth it,” Mr Calacanis lamented.

The term blog is a contraction of “web log”, and was originally used to describe a personal website where the author maintained an informal record of events, musings, rants, photos and etcetera. What The Economist calls “professional blogs” are simply online media outlets with comments; they are the opinion columns (and, sometimes, newspapers) of the twenty-first century.

The pressure that Calacanis talked about only exists for those who are interested in reaching a massive audience, those that are trying hard to become “internet famous” or to make money directly from their blog. But those aren’t bloggers in the traditional sense; “online columnists” might be a better suited term.

The Economist is conveniently missing some facts suggesting that Calacanis hasn’t retired at all from his online posting activity:

• Calacanis ditched his blog for Jason’s List. From the note on Jason’s blog: “you can find my commentary/blog posts on my private mailing list now”. What makes this list “private” is that the archives aren’t publicly available; instead, you have to subscribe first to the list, which you can do for free and as long as you use your real name.
• After the dramatic farewell, Calacanis’ blog has seen 8 new posts (so far) after. A couple of those new posts are repostings of e-mails he sent to his private mailing list.

To quote Dave Winer:

Now if you ask me — there never was such a thing as a pro blogger. It’s a contradiction in terms. It’s like calling someone a professional amateur. It’s like salty orange juice, a drink whose taste is derived from its acidity. Blogging is an amateur activity. It’s users writing about what they do, not professionals writing about what users do.

Try to write a book or a blog post that can’t possibly be any shorter than it is.

One would think focusing on brevity makes things easier. After all, there is less to write, right? Wrong. Just ask Steve Yegge.

Me, I weasel my way into brevity by using others’ words.

Go read Seth Godin’s excellent Just one post note.

Seth is right: you have at least one post in you. And not just a blog post: I bet you also have at least one contribution to make in many other fields. So just go and implement it. Why not?

Lately I’ve been noticing that a big percentage of entry titles in the RSS feeds I read contain a numeral. Often these titles are of the form: “N ways of doing X” or “M best Ys.

This trend seems particularly pronounced in the del.icio.us/popular feed. As I write this, the top two popular bookmarks are Top 17 Search Innovations Outside Of Google and Top 57 Wikis By Rank.

Today I noticed Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers, one of Jakob Nielsen’s last columns. The summary of the article goes:

It’s better to use “23″ than “twenty-three” to catch users’ eyes when they scan Web pages for facts, according to eyetracking data.

Apparently writing numbers as numerals, instead of spelling them out, improves scannability of the text. Which is, of course, the exact opposite of what our language teachers taught us.

And not only numerals make your facts easier to extract from the text, Nielsen claims that numerals can also increase your credibility:

Even when users aren’t scanning for data, having your facts stand out visually by presenting them as numerals is an easy way to enhance credibility by making your page seem more useful.

This might explain the numbers-in-titles phenomenon: the “10″ in the 10 R’s to Apply if you Want to Succeed makes the title/article so credible that 668 people found fit to bookmark it. Scary stuff.

A good friend of mine, Ali, has started posted regularly in his blog, xawaaTir, about current events in Lebanon (his home country). For those interested in a different perspective on the current Israeli attacks on Lebanon (different from the one you will get from CNN, that is), it might be an interesting read.

I was reading Ali’s latest post, and I was reminded of all those surprised Americans we saw on TV on the days after 9/11. They stared wide-eyed into the camera and wondered “Why would someone want to hurt us?” I suppose if they read more posts like some of Ali’s, they would understand why. Not that Ali advocates physical aggression in any way. Not that physical aggression is ever justified.

As I said, an interesting read.
xawaaTir

Sometimes you feel that you should shorten your feed list. Sometimes you wonder which blogs are worth keeping and which not. Posts like this really help making such a decision.

I just changed the theme for a modified version of White As Milk. I started working on this new look a while ago, but then lack of time (or, someone could say, inability to focus on thing at a time) made me abandon it. We’ll see if this time around I can take it to some state that I am satisfied with.

Let me know what you think. More stuff on the sidebar? Less stuff? One of my ideas was to leave only one post on the front page, and then just list the previous posts below. Is that a good idea? Don’t know. Will continue thinking.

And yes, I will write about at least on of the gazillion things on my list soon. I promise.

Diego has cast the “five weird habits” meme on me. The problem is, I don’t know which of my habits are strange. They all look perfectly normal to me. I’d better go and ask someone that can judge my habits objectively. Just give me a sec.

Ok, I’m back. This is what I got:

1. I ask ‘What?’ often even if I did understand what was said to me.
2. I am indecisive about parking spaces, so I take too long to choose a spot to park.
3. I scratch myself.
4. I don’ like The Beatles. (This is not a habit, though. And I consider it pure common sense, nothing strange about it.)
5. I get upset when people call me Russian, even though I look and sound Russian. (This is inaccurate, as I do not get upset. I merely get surprised. And the thing about me sounding Russian apparently only happens when I speak English, so it is not entirely true either.)

So there you have my five supposedly weird habits. Nothing strange about them, in my opinion. Now let’s see who should I damn with this curse… mmm… Ok, I would like to know five strange habits from the following people: Tatus, Helga and Fer.

In November 1999, I left a very secure job with Big Media for a startup technology company that I was pretty sure would be bankrupt within six months. Why would a 41-year-old father of three take a $25,000 pay cut to work with a bunch of guys who still got carded when they ordered beer with their pizza? It’s a long story, but one I now have lots of time to tell. This blog is partly about that, but mostly about what happened during the following five years and three months, while I served as Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management for Google.

This is how the first post of Xooglers begins. It is a new blog written by Doug Edwards, who was Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management for Google until recently. As the tag line says, Xooglers pretends to be “A gathering spot for ex-Googlers to reminisce and comment on the latest developments in search”. It might actually be an interesting read, specially if some ex-googlers join the conversation.

(via John Batelle’s Searchblog)

One of the (thousands of) reasons why posting is being irregular on this blog is that I’ve been spending some time setting up Planeta Teleco, together with Chema from Las Penas del Agente Smith.

Planeta Teleco is a planet-style aggregator for blogs related to one of my two alma maters, ETSIT UPM.

Although there is some polishing left to do, Planeta Teleco is now officialy up & running :: cheers ::. If you are somehow related to the ETSIT, and you want your blog syndicated on the Planeta, just send an e-mail to Chema or to me (details on the planet’s main page).

Scoble writes that his 11-year-old son Patrick has started a blog, which he nameds Mini Scobleizer. The tag line of Patrick’s blog is “I’m the son of a 40 year old blogger you can check his blog at scobleizer.wordpress.com/”.

Just the tag line just gives me a lot to think about. And not just the tag line.

A 11-year-old describing himself as the son of a famous blogger? Bragging in the first post that ‘my dad didn’t help me at all on this one’? Getting 29 comments (at the time of this writing) on your second post, probably just because your dad linked to you?

Interesting stuff. Never occurred to me to call myself Mini-Ulin. But then, I am 1,56m tall, so the ‘mini’ goes without saying, I suppose…

A little over two weeks ago I got an invite to beta-test TailRank, a site which promises to give you recommendations on blogs and other web content based on your personal interests. I suppose the idea is to turn it into something like Last.fm for blogs.

As soon as I got the invite I registered, and share a couple of links. But I found it difficult to understand how was I supposed to use the site, and what should I do in order to get better recommendations. Also, it seemed to me at most recommended items had been shared by Kevin Burton, the creator of TailRank himself, who seems to be the most active user, as well. It didn’t seem too interesting to read items shared by the same person, so seeing no clear value in spending more time playing around, I decided to wait a bit and try it some time later.

This morning I decided to give it another try. First, I couldn’t log in because I couldn’t remember the username I had chosen. So I used the ‘remind password’ form, twice, but with no luck: no e-mail came, and no message on the site. Frustrated, I registered again, with same e-mail and different handle. So now I have two accounts, but the profiles seem to be somehow mixed up, presumably because of the identical e-mails. Clearly something that needs fixing. At least now I have two working TailRank accounts.

Next I explored the site a bit more again. To my great surprise, one of the links I shared in my first round of the site now appears as shared by Burton, and not as shared by me. Weird.

Then I tried to upload the OPML from my Bloglines subscription, but no luck. Got a Java error. Thrice.

I tried to get some recommendations, but once more, the content seems to be monopolized by Burton, and the recommendations don’t seem enticing.

The idea behind the site is a good one, but it still needs some work. There seem to be a few bugs, and the interface could use some refining. For example, there is no clear link to update your profile, and the ‘logout’ link does not appear on all pages, just on some.

In general, I would enjoy a cleaner interface that made it easier to use the site. As I see it now, it is difficult to understand what is going on and how are you supposed to use it. And the ‘home’ page is way too overloaded with text; it makes my brain ache when I look at it. A logo would be cool as well.

It would also be nice if TailRank incorporated some kind of ‘automatic’ harvesting of what a user is interested in, so that you don’t need to go through the tedious process of inputing links manually. For example, it would be nice if TailRank could pick up automagically my del.icio.us subscriptions and ’share’ them in my TailRank account. It would be something like an Audioscrobbler plugin, but for web-surfing instead of for music. That would be great.

A very nice feature of TailRank is the possibility of include in your own website the results of TailRank recommendation. I suppose that can be a very cool thing to have, say, on the sidebar of a group blog that keeps a TailRank account.

Summarizing, I think that the TailRank idea is cool, but it still needs some polishing (but hey, that is what a beta is about, isn’t it?). I think it has lots of potential, if only it would become a bit more user-friendly. Keep up the good work!

UPDATE 2005/10/25 The OPML bug seems to be fixed, but for some reason TailRank only imported 37 feeds from my 63-feed OPML. No reasons given. I am still finding it difficult to understand how to use the site. For example, it took me a lot of clicking around to find out how could I tag the feeds I just imported. Read Kevin’s comment below for some more information about TailRank development. If TailRank is the result of just five weeks of work, I am impressed!

As posting here is being, er, let’s say irregular, due to excessive workload, I suggest that while you await another fine post from me, you go and check some fine posts from other people.

For example, you can go and have a look at some interesting flash animations suggested by Bryan.

Or you can go and read Kathy’s thought-provoking post about how dignity is deadly.

If you want to improve your blog, you can read the tips on How to make a good blog archive pointed by Lifehacker.

You can also reflect on the Web 2.0 concept with help of the mindmap from Business2Blog.

And if you are, like, *totally* bored, you can help me to find a cool hostname. I need that for my new job.

Catching up with last week’s Carnival of the Capitalists I came across a nice post from Rosa Say, Start a List: “What I Want to Learn”, where she suggests:

Just write down all the intriguing ideas coming your way this month, and something will start to emerge as your first pick before you know it.

This is exactly what happened (is happening) with this blog, as I explained in a previous post. It is amazing how difficult it can be to ‘think’ about what are we interested in, what do we want, who we are, and how easy it is to find the answers to these questions if we just observe carfelly the patterns that emerge from our actions.

Some weeks ago, Random Thoughts from a CTO wrote that

Regardless of which type of blog you promote, one thing is for sure — “You need to find your voice” and stay true to it.

Identity is certainly a fundamental ingredient to make a project successful. It doesn’t matter if the project is your personal blog, or some bigger task where a whole team is involved. People need to know the values, motivations and goals of the project, so that they can find how they connect to the project, how do they fit in it.

But do we ‘decide’ on the identity beforehand, when the project starts, or does it emerge organically over time? For business-style projects, I would suppose that the identity is something clear from the beginning, as they start with clear goals and motivations. But for more personal-style or experimental projects, such as blogs, the identity might not be defined long after the project started.

When I bought this domain and put up this page, it wasn’t even a blog. But I gradually realized that something blog-like is what I really wanted, and timidly started to experiment with the medium. I started with some short posts on random issues, trying out what worked best for me, what felt more comfortable, more fun. Slowly, some main subjects started to emerge: current events, IT, books I read… Later, some six months into my ‘blogging career’, I realized that the CMS I was using (Pivot) was inadequate, and migrated to what I perceived as a better one (Wordpress). Later still, I started looking for a tag line that would somehow convey what are the main subjects of this blog. Along the way, the design of the site changed quite a few times. And finally, after a bit more than a year, I have a clearer idea about the identity of this blog. But it is definitely nothing that I consciously planned.

But of course, this is just my personal case. Clearly, many blogs are created with a clear identity in mind, and state it clearly in their titles, tag lines and posts from day one.

Ok, so today is BlogDay, and I am going to make my 5 blog recommendations right now, in a fast and semi-random fashion, before I overthink it.

• If you are interested in looking at different perspectives on current events, you should check Global Voices Online.
• For a nice English-language blog written by a nice Swede, I would recomend Home Taping is Killing Music, but unfortunately it doesn’t get updated too often (to put it extremely mildly…), so instead I am going to recommend Johan Norberg, who is well-known and respected in the Swesphere.
• Gonzalo Cotorruelo writes a nice blog on ICT, innovation and business in general. He deserves to have more than just 8 55 Bloglines subscribers.
• Infocult is one of my all-time favourites, even though there is hardly any intersection between Bryan’s themes and the ones I blog about.
• Ton Zijlstra has quite interesting Interdependent Thoughts.

Hey, that was easier than I thought!

Margot Wallstr?ɬ?m, Commissioner for Institutional Relations and Communication and Vice-President of the European Commission, has a brand new blog. As of this writing, she has posted only one entry, but I am already horribly curious to see how she continues from here.

In her first post, Margot goes from the tsunami disaster to the Commission’s recent visit to Luxembourg to her love of Fado to her worries about putting on extra weight. She finishes off with a surprising Personally I am glad to leave 2004 ?��Ǩ��� start a new year. 2004 sucked!. And it is hosted on the official EU site, too!

The “interactive functions’ of the blog are apparently under construction, and I can see no feed anywhere. So let’s wait and see how this develops.

(found via A Fistful of Euros)

Some Spanish bloggers had the fun idea of play this Christmas an online version of Secret Santa. You can register before the 31st of December at Amigo Invisible 2004, edici?ɬ?n blog.

I love it when the online spills into the offline, and viceversa.

The Danish e-shop Nerdorama has a fun t-shirt for bloggers.

(thanks Tatus for the link)

Andy Fugard’s site has a fun “Info on Sweden” section. The section includes an invaluable guide to opening a milk carton and a list of interesting Swedish words and expressions. From this list, I particularly like “fjortis”, explained as “a teenage girl who “wears a bucket of makeup and acts like a wannabe”; a mega-fjortis is a middle-aged equivalent”.

Though Andy has been around Chalmers for a while now, and I have seen some e-mails from him at Chalmers International mailing lists, I have never met him personally. It was he who found me through Orkut and gave me the link to his Swedish word list. So for those who asked me about Orkut: yeah, it is not completely useless.

Frank Schaap has a wonderful “about” section for his weblog. Here is a snippet.

Well, you maybe say, you do have the Web now, don’t you? It’s not enough for me. The vision is brighter, much brighter. It’s fast, real-time, like thought. Intricate and brittle, huge and fractally detailed. It’s me inside out, my thoughts splattered out on the canvas. No… it’s not static, that’s why the machine is there, that’s why I want to hook up to a computer… to animate this structure. And maybe it’s not really a structure, since it changes, it is not located. It gives when you push, forgets but still knows, holds but never can keep… it’s frothing the synaptic bath.

This I won’t have for a long time. Yes, I do have it. It’s here, in my head, but it can’t get out! No escape except in part, in/out context, strangely warped and never the same, static. Where am I heading? Have a piece of my mind… or maybe not.