Oliver Willis has posted his thoughts on the “Blog bubble” and BloggerCon in a well linked piece from his blog. He challenges one of the pillars of Blogthink: that Blogging is changing the world; he argues that blogging is nothing more than a bubble, and based on his experiences of BloggerCon concludes that blogging is the pursuit of upper middle class white males. We disagree on both points. Blogging is changing the world, and it is not the pursuit of upper middle class white males (according to many suverys it is the pursuit of teenage girls). Either way, to quote Voltaire in Freedom: “I may not agree with what you say, but to your death I will defend your right to say it”, and the article is both humorous and challenging;
Deflating The Blog Bubble | Oliver Willis
Have spammers found a new way of using Blogs?
Regular readers to the Blog Herald would have noticed the rather bizarre link in our open referral log that reads: Discount Term Life Insurance – Save 70%. Always keen to check out referrals we visited the site and found no links to the Blog Herald. We thought nothing of it, until scanning Daypop’s Top 40 links and discovered the same link at No.3. Now given that the site doesn’t link to anywhere but its own server, how is it there on Daypop and The Blog Herald? Whilst some sites have dealt with Blogspam from this person/ site, how does it become a referrer? or do the spammers have a new method of manipulating blogs and blog lists? Any thoughts welcome.
The Blogging Iceberg: Not.
Perseus Development Corp has randomly surveyed 3,634 blogs on eight blog-hosting services (Blog-City, BlogSpot, Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePad, Weblogger and Xanga) and strangely come to the conclusion that 4.12 million blogs have been created and that 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned. So on the basis of 0.09% of Blogs on what are essentially free or low-cost, low setup servers, 66% of all weblogs on the web are kaput!. Perseus says its margin of error is 2.85%, based on what?
Whilst we are not statistical geniuses, there are many examples of polls based on supposed random sample data that have been far off the mark, some of the Election Polls in the US predicting a Democrat landslide in 2000, polls in Australia predicting Labor victories in 2001, the list can go on and on. The Blog Herald believes that the small sampling, restricted to blog hosting companies, should be taken with the grain of salt it deserves. Whilst not doubt that abandonment rates are high, and teenage girls make a large section of bloggers, such a small and narrow band of analysis does not make a true picture of blogging.
For those wishing to read the report: http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/
Radio UserLand woes
Xian from Radio Free Blogistan reports that the Salon blog community servers (hosted by UserLand) have been down since sometime Friday, frustrating Salon bloggers. As far as he can tell, UserLand is down to two (no-doubt overworked) employees unable to assist with the problem
Will the odd PC user at BloggerCon kindly stand up
photo from Dan Bricklin’s BloggerCon photos
Earlier on BloggerCon was criticized as being for an elite few by a self appointed elite few, including by the Blog Herald. Whilst Dave Winer did an excellent job of attracting a diverse field of participants, one must wonder whether BloggerCon would be better known as AppleCon given the image above, and others appearing in the Blogosphere, of the conference. Given that less than 10% of the population uses Macs, and although the statistics is slightly higher for Bloggers, the near dominance of Mac Laptops at the conference is bizarre at best. Some may argue that more intelligent people use Macs, but as a Blog edited on at PC, The Blog Herald asks: “why so many Macs, or are we just stupid?”
BloggerCon under way
The much hyped BloggerCon is under way, and if your like the Blog Herald and dont have a spare few thousand dollars and a days plane flight in time to travel there, you can catch all the action at the live BloggerCon webcast here. Be warned though that the sound quality is variable,even on an ADSL connection of 256k, most likely caused by server congestion. For other news see
The Official BloggerCon site
Bloggercon Blogroll
BloggerCon board at Yahoo!Feedsters BloggerCon watch
Blog outfits too expensive, Yahoo! to go it alone
The Blog Herald’s source inside Yahoo! has told us that the talks Yahoo! has been holding with a number of blogging tool providers, previously reported on the Blog Herald on August 26, have faltered due to the high prices being asked and scepticism within Yahoo! business development ranks as to whether any serious additional revenue can be made from an acquisition.
Yahoo! is now considering expanding its successful trial of blogging in Korea, which already hosts some 10.000 blogs after only 3 months of service, to English speaking markets.
Blog jobs: NewsMonster is Hiring
A new trend in blog related jobs? Will there one day be a blogging category in the employment guide??
NewsMonster is Hiring | peerfeer.org via mozillazine
The NewsMonster team is hiring! Are you fascinated by blogs? Interested in RSS/RDF and aggregation? Think the next big thing might just be FOAF? Do you dream in Java and or C++? Then you should come work on NewsMonster and help us build a killer aggregator!”
As easy as falling off a blog
Apparently tech writers in England find Blogging difficult.
As easy as falling off a blog | independent.co.uk
“The technology editor’s assignment seemed easy for a veteran tech hack like me: explore the much-hyped world of the weblog, set up my own blog and report back the findings. Seemed easy – but wasn’t.”
Irish operator launches phone blogs
Irish operator launches phone blogs | ENN
O2 Ireland is the first company in the world to deploy new software from NewBay that allows users to update Web logs from their mobile phones.
