01.09.07
Posted in News at 10:33 am by jon yang
While this isn’t exactly blog related, it’s just too beautiful to not share: The Apple iPhone. Wow. I’m a gadget freak myself but this tops everything I’ve ever seen. Forget hoverboards and cybernetics (for now), this’ll even quicken the heart rate of any technophile. If you weren’t able to attend the Macworld 2007 meeting — where Steve Jobs likes to announce lust inducing items such as the iPod and various upgrades to iProducts — you can follow along on blogs such as Engadget. It’s almost as good as being there!
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12.24.06
Posted in News, Tools & Resources at 4:38 pm by jon yang
Seems like Blogger’s always (fashionably) late to the party nowadays right? The platform largely responsible for launching blogs into the mainstream is now reactionary. Little trinkets like labels, site feeds, and password protected entries are only now entering the Blogger service through its Beta Blogger — which is now open for all.
In an ocean filled with what seems like hundreds of blog providers, Blogger may no longer innovate but when it makes changes, it makes a huge impact. I mean, when Blogger add new features, or requires users to switch to new logins (Beta Blogger requires a Google Login), millions of blogs are impacted. Big ship, that blogger.
I’d been waiting for my own beta Blogger invite to appear on my various Blogger hosted blogs. When I finally got the opportunity, I was delighted. Here were the labels I was looking for, here was drag-and-drop template customization, here was better displays for archives, I loved it.
Then, I tried to take my non-blogspot.com hosted blogs over to beta Blogger. Bad news. If you were trying to FTP to Blogger, there were huge icebergs ahead. I spent a week panicking that my blogs would be no more. Online forums reported users who had lost blogs, users who could no longer publish, users who were stuck in limbo between old Blogger and beta Blogger. I had the same problems, mainly being unable to FTP to the domain of my choice.
Blogger Help was timely and helpful during that hand-wringing week, but I think I learned a valuable lesson here: always create a test blog before converting something over to a new platform. In addition, always save copies of your stuff. But you knew that already, right?
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11.17.06
Posted in News at 8:34 pm by jon yang
Modern Life Is Rubbish points us towards “Common traits of the top few blogs,” with nifty little pie-charts (reminiscent of our favorite game, Trivial Pursuit) that depict the percentage of bloggers using a particular blog platform, font, background color, and main subject of the blog. Neat-o!
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11.13.06
Posted in News at 10:26 pm by jon yang
WeblogToolsCollection.com is sponsoring a Blogging Essay Competition — for cash! The competition starts today and runs for the next 30 days. You can submit as many essays as you can crank out (of 1000 words or more) and there are prizes for runner-ups too. Oh right, the big prize? A cool $150 bucks.
Go read the rules and get to writing already!
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11.06.06
Posted in News at 3:03 pm by jon yang
A new “State of the Blogosphere” has been released by Dave Sifry of Technorati. Dave charts stats on how many blogs there are out in the world and feeds us tidbits like that tell us the growth of the blogosphere is slowing — we’re apparently only doubling every 236 days instead of every 150. Apparently, it’s getting hard to double the number of blogs every few months when there are 57 million blogs on the internet nowadays.
Out of those 57 million blogs, about 55% of them are active — with “active” being defined as being updated at least once in the last 3 months. Do your part people, update that blog! We can hit 75% active in the next quarter, I’m sure we can! Do I sound like an over-zealous investor? I’m not, really. I just get excited when people blog.
Check out the full report for some serious statistics and analysis of the blogosphere.
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10.28.06
Posted in News, Tools & Resources at 3:47 pm by jon yang
Six Apart has been pushing the envelope for developing new (and better) blogging services and platforms. Their newest creation is entitled “Vox.” The product is aimed toward potential bloggers who want to blog, but don’t want to get bogged down by the technology behind the magic. Keeping the curtain pulled on the wizard as it were.
“Vox, which is free, lets users import audio, video, photos and other content from services like the photo sharing sites Flickr and Photobucket, and the video sharing site YouTube. Vox also provides integration with mobile devices that run on the Palm OS, Symbian OS and Windows Mobile platforms. The service also lets publishers deliver their blogs’ content via syndicated feeds.”
-IT News-
In a way, Six Apart’s new service will be competing with its current easy to use offerings such as TypePad and LiveJournal — not to mention other established services such as Blogger, Window’s Live Spaces, and My Space.
In my opinion, Vox looks beautiful — with a charming interface and website — and is a return to the idea of blogging as something super simple, not just “relatively” simple. Should the dictionary make room for a new entry in 2007? “Vox: blogging made simple.”
Oh wait, vox already means something. Scrabble anyone?
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09.28.06
Posted in News at 11:02 pm by jon yang
“Video blogger and freelance journalist Josh Wolf was on Wednesday given two more days to either turn himself back in to prison or cooperate with a federal grand jury seeking unpublished footage he shot during a protest that turned violent.”
-c|net news-
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