Posts in category "blogging"

I have experimented at various times with both Tumblr and Posterous which are hosted blog services. I tend to view them as useful services for a scrapbook style blog, a linkblog, a lifestream or even a fully fledged blog. If I was starting a blog today, I would probably use one or the other.

Posterous, in particular, has been getting a lot of coverage recently and I like the ease of use, the 'Post by Email' facility and continue to follow developments with interest.

I often describe Posterous as a 'blog for people who don't want a blog'. For example, Uncle Harry doesn't even know what a blog is and certainly doesn't need a blog. However, Uncle Harry is also perfectly capable of attaching photos of his sailing holiday in Greece and emailing them to his daughter, brother, wife, friends and colleagues. He could do this using Posterous and, lo and behold, without even knowing it, he now has a blog.

Posterous is a hosted blog service and until recently, was limited to a single, universal theme. This didn't particularly bother me as I quite liked the plain, minimal looking Posterous design.

I also felt the default Posterous theme actually helped to reinforce the Posterous 'brand'. Whenever you encountered a Posterous blog, you could immediately recognise it as such.

However, custom themes were a frequently requested enhancement by (potential) users so Posterous have finally added support for your own themes including pre-built designs, custom header images, full HTML customisation and interestingly, the use of Tumblr themes.

Now I suspect that supporting 'Tumblr' style themes out of the box was a master stroke. Posterous users immediately have a wealth of pre-built, attractive looking themes available off the shelf, free of charge.

Tumblr have even helpfully created a theme repository for Posterous users. You just find a Tumblr theme you like, copy and paste the HTML, dump it into Posterous and you're done.

You now have a lovely, stylish professional looking Posterous blog that looks identical to a lovely, stylish professional looking Tumblr blog.

I love the way TechCrunch uses the the term 'leverage' to describe the addition of this (almost seamless - some blocks are not supported) integration with the Tumblr theme engine.

Of course, all themes are just HTML and CSS but I can't help wondering whether the Tumblr development team and their own band of loyal and passionate users feel quite the same way about this wonderful, new addition from Posterous.

Anyone suffering from the desire to communicate what they are doing or thinking every minute of the day in fewer than 140 characters is best described as a twat.

Janet Street Porter calling me a 'twat'. Possibly my proudest moment.

I prefer to define µblogging as 'an infinite byte stream of inane drivel' but I also enjoyed Stephen Fry's post on the same subject:

'40% of Twitter is “pointless babble”, which means of course that a full 60% of Twitter discourse is NOT pointless babble, which is disappointing.'

Early Jurassic - Mum takes you to playgroup, kicking and screaming and your friends are forced upon you. Free milk at 11 am.

Cretaceous - Primary school. You go round to Roberts for tea and Robert comes round to your house for tea. Painfully shy in female company.

Middle Monolithic - Secondary school - you hang out with the kids who play football and avoid those who threaten you with knives at the bus stop.

Triassic - Football, gigs, pubs. The best time of your life. With the best friends of your life. None of them will ever do FaceBook but that doesn't matter.

Late Mesozoic - University - no real strategy here. If someone stands their round, then that's good enough.

Web 0.1 (alpha) - Usenet, flame fests, email using elm on an amber VT100. Avoid people who use VMS at all costs.

Web 1.0 - IRC is just like a Friday night in the pub. There will be fights at closing time.

Web 1.0 - surf the internet, send large attachments (amusing photos) to colleagues every Friday afternoon.

Web 2.0 - social networking. Accept blindly absolutely any friend request. Approach complete strangers and ask them to be your 'special friends'. Friendship isn't friendship - it's a bragging contest.

Web 2.0 (beta) - Follow Scoble's example and be slightly more selective. Cull thousands of so-called 'friends' in futile attempt to avoid information overload.

Web 3.0 - Twitter - the endless, interminable byte stream of inane drivel. Until Stephen Fry signs up which makes it all alright. Stalk celebrities.

Web 3.0 RC3 - Finally it dawns on you.

• People on Posterous mainly like talking about Posterous
• People on FriendFeed mainly like singing the praises of FriendFeed.
• People on Twitter mainly like talking about Twitter. Repeat ad infinitum.
• People on identi.ca love identi.ca and open source and despise the evil borg.
• People in UK tend to have more friends in the UK
• You are on first names terms with the developers of Disqus and they fix stuff - just for you.
• If you're a keen photographer, try Flickr.
• If you like football, seek out people who like football.
• If someone Like's a post/tweet you wrote, it's possible (but not certain) you will like their outputs.
• If someone lives on your road, it doesn't mean they're your friend. There's a good reason you haven't had your neighbours round for coffee since last Christmas.
• If people actively dislike your output, it is less likely they will be a good friend.
• If people say 'Great, interesting, thought provoking post', it's likely they are trying to sell you a 'Penis Enlargement Kit' (or worse).

Web 4.0 - The end of the world. Social Networking dies and we all adjourn to the pub (again) and play board games.

17 August 2005 - Started life on Blogger.

12 October 2005 - Moved to self-hosted Blogger

13 November 2005 - Moved to hosted WordPress.com.

30 September 2006 - Purchased domain name and moved to self-hosted WordPress.org

01 July 2007 - Adsense appears.

29 August 2007 - One of many crises of confidence where I nearly shut down the blog and deleted all content.

19 January 2008 - Adsense disappears.

15 February 2008 - Moved from WordPress to Habari.

This humble blog is four years old today so tonight I will be taking Blog in isolation and some of its closest friends to LazerQuest (Mega Death Match Party Edition with Pizza and gallons of Coca Cola to ensure the kids are well and truly revved up).

Everyone loves meaningful statistics so here is a pretty chart of posts by month (for all you management types):

Curiously, since I returned from my holiday, I seem to have rediscovered a little of my zest for blogging. Also, I have a feeling that things are gradually turning full circle. My initial decision to dip my toe in the water was prompted by reading and enjoying the writing of other people and I sense that element is slowly returning. More recently, reading blogs had turned into mindlessly hitting 'J' in Google Reader as fast as humanly possible simply in order to say 'Done'.

Over the weekend, I spent time enjoying some brilliant posts from the dusty archives of one of my favourite UK bloggers - Diamond Geezer (pseudonym alert). This, in turn, (via his blogroll) led to the discovery of a handful of other interesting and downright funny UK blogs. I have bemoaned my failure to find decent UK blogs more than once - maybe I just didn't look hard enough or in the right places.

Before my holiday, I was experimenting once again with Tumblr and Posterous and while these services may have a place for a rapid fire linkblogs, scrapbooks and ready made, easy blogs (for people who don't know or care what a blog is), I suspect that posts I made there were simply posts I could have equally made over here. But I was too lazy.

Blogging takes time. Blogging is difficult. Blogging is time-consuming.

Firstly, you have to think of a subject. Then you have to waste time thinking up all the words. Then you have to login. to your blog Then you have to actually type all the words in. Then you have to endlessly preview and endeavour to fix all your typos and grammar. Then you have to add an image to spice things up and break the article into logical sections for your reader (just like the 'Blogging 101 Guide' says). Then you have to add tags. Then you have to monitor and reply to all comments. Then you have to publicise it.

Yes - blogging is hard. So much easier and a lot quicker to hit 'Like' what someone else has produced.

Ironically, the well publicised death of FriendFeed sparked my interest and I was briefly active again over there, providing counselling services to the bereaved.

So, what does all of this mean for the next four years of this blog ? God knows.

Theres been a lot of chatter recently about Feedburners support for the PubSubHubbub protocol.

Apparently, it means that blog posts show up much quicker in FriendFeed, Google Reader and other services. I must admit I was fairly sceptical as my posts still take a couple of hours to appear.

However, I was wrong (again). Look at this recent example. The post showed up a full three and a half hours on Google Reader before I published it.

Apparently, the next release will read your mind, type the words in, link to relevant pictures and publish your blog entries automatically. It's called the 'real-time Web'.

This is a quick test to check that Habari is no longer adding additional paragraph tags and random line breaks for people consuming this blog in a feed reader.

Both of you.

Many thanks to arthus (possible pseudonym alert) aka Morgante Pell (additional pseudonym alert) for creating the plugin that made this possible and the death of autop().

Yet another service in the overcrowded blog comment field is JS-Kit who already have a conventional outsourced blog comment capability (similar to IntenseDebate and Disqus).

JS-Kit recently announced an extension to the service called 'Echo' which also includes any fleeting reference to your blog post, refreshed in real-time from other services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader and Facebook.

Echo isn't generally available to mere mortals yet. Yes, you guessed it - it's limited beta, invitation only and curiously, you need a Twitter account to even request an invitation.

However, if your name is Michael Arrington, Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble or Duncan Riley, you are entitled to use the service which is fair enough as it works best for high volume sites with lots of comments

However, look at this example on The Inquistr of Echo in action on a live site.

Wow - just look at all those 'comments'. Look again closely. Most entries are not comments at all. They are merely links or retweets to the article from Twitter or FriendFeed. The vast majority merely echo the main headline with no additional comment or insight.

Look again and try to find any meaningful comments where people are actually commenting on the post and expressing their opinion. Guess what. The vast majority are mostly classified as 'via Comments'.

So, that's three reasons, I won't be installing 'Echo' on this blog.

1. I don't use Twitter.
2. It adds no value.
3. No-one ever comments anyway.

Theres only one man in the world who could have uttered the following:

On Monday I unfollowed 106,000 people on Twitter.

Yes. You guessed it - Robert Scoble.

And yes, before you ask, he used a script.

Since I started this blog almost four years ago, I have posted every month. Until last month - July 2009.

To accentuate the radio silence effect, this blog was also completely offline for the latter two weeks of July 2009 (PHP/FastCGI configuration problem at Bluehost).