Where 15 years ago, having a Web site was something of a badge of nerdiness, today having a site doesn’t require much technical knowledge at all. Someone with almost no technical expertise can set up an account on WordPress.com or Blogger and be blogging within minutes.

However, this doesn’t mean that a blogger can get away with being a technical dunce. Though getting words on the Internet is pretty simple, building and growing a blog does require one to know a bit more than how to flip on a PC. Social networking sites make it easy to get online, but blogging, especially over the long haul, takes something more.

So what are those things that every blogger should know? There are many, definitely more than what is on this list, but here are five things every would-be blogger should know before, or at least shortly after, getting started. read more

Ada Lovelace

24th March 2009 is Ada Lovelace Day, and Suw Charman-Anderson has called for at least one thousand people to pledge to blog about a woman in technology that they admire.

“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.”

Suw writes on her blog:

I’ve mainly stayed away from the discussion of gender issues in technology. I didn’t think that I had any real expertise to share. But over the last six months, after many conversations, it has become clear that many of my female friends in tech really do feel disempowered. They feel invisible, lacking in confidence, and unsure how to compete for attention with the men around them…

If women need female role models, let’s come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.

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It looks as if Adobe has given sight to blind search engines. Previously if web designers of blogs, web sites, etc. coded their site in flash, they would have to give up the ability to have their site indexed by the Google giant, and their whipping boy Yahoo!

Now bloggers, web developers and social networks will be able to remake their sites into “one big eye candy,” without fear on missing out from search engine traffic (aka “Google juice”).
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Users of Google’s Blogger (aka BlogSpot) platform will be excited to see three new features being tested on Google’s eternal beta site for Blogger (which can be accessed over at draft.blogger.com).

The first is the ability for BlogSpot users to Import/Export their blogs to/from another server, computer or another blog platform.

(Blogger in Draft) Today’s release brings another long-desired feature to Blogger: Import and Export of blogs. Now you can export all of your posts and comments into a single, Atom-formatted XML file for easy backup. You can then import the posts back into Blogger, either into an existing blog or into a new one. [...]

When you import a blog, all of the posts will get saved in an “imported” state. From there you can publish just a few, or all of them at once.

The interesting thing about this feature is that once a blog is imported, users will be able to select which posts (along with the comments) to publish to their new blog. Also users can import more than one blog to a single blogger weblog, allowing users publishing from different sites to merge all of their articles together.
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A twitter from the oval office? The Speaker of the House’s staff blogging? Could some sort of change finally be coming to Washington, DC – and by that I don’t mean Obama?

Sometimes I wonder of the tech-sanity of our elected leaders. When I met with my own Congresswomen back in October, I was surprised to see that she had not read any blogs and that none of her staffers or volunteers were blogging about their experiences in working with a rookie Congresswoman from Minnesota.

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Fighting spam has proved to be a nearly impossible task.

The best and brightest minds of the legal and technical worlds have failed to come up with solutions to stem the flow of junk email, splogs or spam comments.

Every new law or technological advancement has just been an escalation in a never-ending arms race between the many who hate spam and the few that send it out.

To be certain, spam plays a much smaller part in our lives today than it did a few years ago. We rarely see spam in our inboxes, spam comments are largely filtered out and only search spam seems to work with any reliability, especially with blogs.

However, the junk content keeps flowing at an ever-increasing rate. More and more junk email gets sent out every year, comment spam is on the rise too.

We have managed to treat the symptoms, but not the illness. This is because we have been dealing with how spam mails us, one issue at a time rather than looking at the bigger picture.

It is time to take a look at the spam puzzle and how it all fits together.

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It looks as if Google Reader users will have another reason to use the feed reader over its rivals.

Google Reader has launched a feature that allows users to not only share their favorite items with friends, but also attach a mini note to the item as well.

(Google Reader Blog) If you are like me, you might want to share something in Reader, but think your friends might not “get” why you are sharing it. Use the “Share with note” button on the item toolbar to create a copy of that item with your own note attached to it.

While this feature will definitely appeal to Google fan boys/girls/bloggers of all types, what is interesting is that Google Reader users will also be able to share notes without the need to share an item at all–which may be a signal that Google Reader is heading directly into FriendFeed’s territory.
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Over the past few months I’ve added some new plugins and services to my blog at Webomatica that are solid and useful enough to recommend. All are working great with WordPress 2.5.

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Michael Arrington, owner of TechCrunch has recently allowed readers to post video comments upon all of the blogs apart of the “TechCrunch empire.”

The feature is powered by Seesmic, a service that Michael has invested in previously.

While video comments will probably help enhance the discussion (as you will have the opportunity to see just how ugly some readers truly are, especially if they have not shaved in a while), it could potentially compound the blog trolling problem, as individuals could simply shout out their annoyances at you instead of typing IN ALL CAPS.

Even though other types of abuses could be discussed (ranging from shameless promotional video comments to hard core porn), video comments may a feature bloggers should seriously consider adding to their sites–just as long as they are up to the challenge of moderating video comments posted to their site.

The web analytics program, Woopra, that generated massive enthusiasm when John Pozadzides presented it at WordCamp Dallas, will release a new beta version on Friday along with thousands of requests for access granted.

“We are excited to be able to extend the Woopra Real Time Analytics service to an additional 10,000 users beginning Friday April 25,” said Jad Younan, CTO of iFusion Labs. “The infrastructure has been holding up well for the roughly 4,000 users who have been on the system the last few weeks, and this is the next step in our phased approach as we scale the business.”

Elie Khoury, iFusion Labs’ CIO, added, “In addition to the mass approvals for Webmasters who have been waiting patiently, we will be releasing a new version of the Woopra client application with bug fixes and a number of new features.”

Layered Technologies and 3Tera are providing 100 grid-servers to Woopra to handle the sudden demand from the early release of the beta version at WordCamp Dallas, and by this weekend, the numerous requests for Woopra invitations will be granted on a first come, first serve basis along with the release of the latest version.
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