UserLand Offers Headlines From NYTimes.com

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 10, 2002--NYTimes.com announced today that it had reached an agreement with UserLand Software to distribute content from NYTimes.com to the network of Radio UserLand 8.0 desktop content management users. This new feature allows New York Times links to flow, with reader annotation, through the growing network of "Weblog" sites published with Radio 8.
posted by Gorilla ;*) at 6:28 PM

 

I'm blogging because my website lacked any relevance to what I preach. I read dozens of books, articles, web-zines and sites everyday; I distill them into rants that I then preach to my clients and help them implement. I actually do more than rant, I implement these things that I preach - like creating effective websites, using every low-cost means to reach your existing and potential client base - and BLOGGING is one of them. So here I am after trying out several blogging possibilities - I've settled on using blogger pro - and I'm recreating the content from my old website and moving into the land of Blog. It allows me to post articles, news, references quickly and adds a level of currency to my website that didn't formerly exist..

This is my idea - if I can run my site from a cheap host (yahoo) and use blogging to create a professional-looking website that people actually read and that I can feel comfortable represents who i am and what i do - and that this web site causes other people to be inspired to use my services (i.e. revenue) - then 'blogging' will be added to my list of effective techniques for building a web presence and creating brand recognition..so let the experiment begin...
posted by Gorilla ;*) at 6:26 PM

 

A blog is a web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically—like a what's new page or a journal. The content and purposes of blogs varies greatly—from links and commentary about other web sites, to news about a company/person/idea, to diaries, photos, poetry, mini-essays, project updates, even fiction.

Blogs posts are like instant messages to the web.

Many blogs are personal, "what's on my mind" type musings. Others are collaborative efforts based on a specific topic or area of mutual interest. Some blogs are for play. Some are for work. Some are both.

Blogs are also excellent team/department/company/family communication tools. They help small groups communicate in a way that is simpler and easier to follow than email or discussion forums. Use a private blog on an intranet to allow team members to post related links, files, quotes, or commentary. Set up a family blog where relatives can share personal news. A blog can help keep everyone in the loop, promote cohesiveness and group culture, and provide an informal "voice" of a project or department to outsiders.

posted by Gorilla ;*) at 6:25 PM

 
Safire on Blogging

ON LANGUAGE
Blog
By WILLIAM SAFIRE


In an upbeat Independence Day column in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan, the incurable optimist, wrote about all ''the lights that didn't fail'' America -- from cops and firemen to peach-growing farmers and cancer-curing scientists, from local churches to TV comedians to blogging.

Blogging? She explained the word as ''the 24/7 opinion sites that offer free speech at its straightest, truest, wildest, most uncensored, most thoughtful, most strange. Thousands of independent information entrepreneurs are informing, arguing, adding information.''

Blog is a shortening of Web log. It is a Web site belonging to some average but opinionated Joe or Josie who keeps what used to be called a ''commonplace book'' -- a collection of clippings, musings and other things like journal entries that strike one's fancy or titillate one's curiosity. What makes this online daybook different from the commonplace book is that this form of personal noodling or diary-writing is on the Internet, with links that take the reader around the world in pursuit of more about a topic.

To set one up (which I have not done because I don't want anyone to know what I think), you log on to a free service like blogger.com or xanga.com, fill out a form and let it create a Web site for you. Then you follow the instructions about how to post your thoughts, photos and clippings, making you an instant publisher. You then persuade or coerce your friends, family or colleagues to log on to you and write in their own loving or snide comments.

''Will the blogs kill old media?'' asked Newsweek, an old-media publication, perhaps a little worried about this disintermediation leading to an invasion of alien ad-snatchers. My answer is no; gossips like an old-fashioned party line, but most information seekers and opinion junkies will go for reliable old media in zingy new digital clothes. Be that as it may (a phrase to avoid the voguism that said), the noun blog is a useful addition to the lexicon.

Forget its earliest sense, perhaps related to grog, reported in 1982 in The Toronto Globe and Mail as ''a lethal fanzine punch concocted more or less at random out of any available alcoholic beverages.'' The first use I can find of the root of blog in its current sense was the 1999 ''Robot Wisdom Weblog,'' created by Jorn Barger of Chicago.

Then followed bloggers, for those who perform the act of blogging and -- to encompass the burgeoning world of Web logs -- blogistan as well as the coinage of William Quick on the blog he calls The Daily Pundit, the blogosphere. Sure to come: the blogiverse.


posted by Gorilla ;*) at 6:18 PM

 
{ To learn more about the origins of blogging, check out Our Blog Focus Area Resources}

{The article is promoting a course taught by the author's boss Jonn Batelle, co-founder of Wired magazine - talk about using your own mediums to promote yourself, eh? }

By Noah Shachtman for wired.com

Click here visit wired.com and read the whole story

June 6, 2002
One of the country's most respected training grounds for professional reporters has become the first school to offer a class on the 21st century symbol of do-it-yourself journalism.

Next fall, a handful of students at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism will convene weekly to learn about blogging from John Batelle, a co-founder of Wired magazine, and Paul Grabowicz, the school's new media program director.

Students will create a weblog devoted to copyright issues, from "deep-linking" to online music trading. They'll also debate whether blogs are "a sensible medium for doing journalism, and what does that mean?" said Grabowicz, who contributes to the Poynter Institute's online media blog.

(A blog is, to oversimplify, a constantly updated combination of diary and link collection.)

The Berkeley class on blogging is the latest in a series of signs that the media establishment is starting to warm up to what was long seen as legitimate journalism's loud-mouthed kid sister.

MSNBC, for example, recently joined Fox News, Slate, the San Jose Mercury News and others by adding blogs to its website.

"This means that professional journalists aren't just poking at bloggers like creatures in a zoo cage -- they're in the cage themselves," said John Hiler, editor of Microcontent News, a site keeping tabs on the blogging world.

But the new embrace is making many bloggers squirm.

"Mark my words, this (Berkeley class) is going to be the Altamont of the blogging movement," Sean Kirby posted on the Daily Pundit blog.

He added in an e-mail, "Teaching of blogging in journalism school signals an end of an era, a movement from blogging being separate from the old media, to it being appropriated by the media establishment."

To Jonathon Delacour, this establishment treats bloggers like a "vast pool of unpaid researchers who do a lot of leg work while the journalist gets the kudos in mainstream society and gets paid."

Added Delacour, whose site covers, in a single day, everything from the World Cup to XML to Mahayana Buddhism, "It's a master-servant relationship."

For some in the mainstream press, the sour feelings are mutual. To these traditional reporters, like the Boston Globe's Alex Beam, blogs are an "infinite echo chamber of self-regard," as he wrote in a recent column, "(a) medium where no thought goes unpublished, no long-out-of-print book goes unhawked, and no fellow 'blogger,' no matter how outré, goes unpraised."

Despite this, a number of schools, including USC's Annenberg School for Communication, will include blogging in their online journalism classes in the fall. And senior bloggers, like Dave Winer and Ken Layne, have recently given talks both Cal and Stanford.

Teachers at every level from elementary school to MBA are trying to bring blogs into their classrooms. They're finding the most success when they use the blog as a "classroom management tool" ­-- a way to broadcast homework assignments, keep parents informed, and provide links to research materials, said Sarah Lohnes, an educational technology specialist at Middlebury College in Vermont.

But efforts to get students to participate in classroom blogs have, for the most part, fallen flat.

Contributing to the blog will be required in Grabowicz's Berkeley class.

And students won't be allowed to just submit "a list of links that some bot could generate." Nor can it "degenerate into 'my personal feelings,' which is not professional journalism," Grabowicz said.

The intellectual-property issues the Berkeley class will try to sift through are particularly important to the blogging community, because a weblog site's combination of liberally used links and off-the-cuff commentary make it a juicy target for corporate lawsuits.

"We're probably only six months away from seeing a blogger served with a libel lawsuit," Microcontent News' Hiler said.

But despite the timeliness of the issues, many bloggers are wondering whether their craft can be taught in journalism school at all.

Ken Layne, blogger and veteran Los Angeles journalist, said the course "sounds useful," but "it will have to be the complete opposite of the J-school learning process, which works at a snail's pace. You can't sit around talking ethics before typing a line."

Will Richardson, who runs a website chronicling the use of blogs in the classroom, added, "Do they need it to train professional journalists? I don't know about that."

posted by Gorilla ;*) at 6:05 PM

 
I went to an blogging event a few weeks back that was organized by a computer, I got an invitation from http://blog.meetup.com/ to go to a social gathering of local fellow bloggers. I was curious - mostly because I was looking for free technical advice from some more experienced bloggers, and also to see if how the actual beings compared to their blog sites - so of which were quite hip and trendy. So I went to http://blog.meetup.com/ and RSVP to the meeting, voted online for which local venue I want go to. I picked the Jupiter Cafe just off Davie because it was the closest to my domicile - and then for the next 3 weeks I got little email reminders to show up for the event and even a request to post a graphic on my website to advertise the blessed event - which I the html-challenged one managed to proudly insert in the blog template after a few misguided attempts...on the http://blog.meetup.com/ site there was (and still is a list of about 30 Vancouverites and links to their blogs)..I visited most just to get a sense of who was hanging around the community. And then on the appointed day I moseyed over to the Jupiter Cafe - with a copy of XML & Web Services Magazine in hand so that I appeared suitably geeky and searched the cavernous lounge for fellow bloggers. I even arrived on time. I'm not one to hold to that social thing of arriving fashionably late..

And to my chagrin, no one showed. Not a single blogger was sighted. I was needless to say quite disappointed and a little miffed that I had been so completely suckered by an automated computer-driven event coordinator. I emailed to a few of the local bloggers to find out if I'd miscued on the time/location, these were folks that were listed on the http://blog.meetup.com/ attendee list - which it turns out was simply a list of all Vancouver-based bloggers - not RSVPers - everyone returned my emails and I had a couple of nice bits of technical advice from a few of them as well. And one of them even said that two bloggers did actually show up and chatted with each other and that I must have missed them.

I am still completely flabbergasted that http://blog.meetup.com/ managed to create the look and feel of a real physical occurrence without involving a single human interaction and I fell for it. Http://blog.meetup.com/ sets up these events all over the world and claims that for this upcoming meetup events which occur worldwide. So far, 2812 bloggers have signed up. I have no idea how many venues that is - but one of them is Vancouver and one of the 2812 is me cause I've signed up again and I'll give it another whirl, but this time I'm emailing around to try and get a few other local bloggers to confirm that they'll show up.
posted by Gorilla ;*) at 5:50 PM