Recently in Blogging Category
You can find the Seesmic Plugin for Movable Type at the MT Plugins Directory.
- Movable Type 4.1 has been working very well for us during my week away. We're into "steady as she goes" mode, until we go up to 4.2 next month.
- The bad family news seems to have mysteriously, but pleasingly, changed into good family news
- This blog is now protected by Typepad Antispam, rather than Akismet. I hope this will solve problem discussed in posts passim.
- Is is me, or is Twitter really up the spout?
- What is this Plurk of which you tweet?
Stop doing that thing where you try to create a sumptiously produced theatrical experience called studio-based news. Give me something more like Rocketboom. Give me content not packaging.
Here's how I would (tentatively) articulate them:
TheOpsMgr's DivestmentWatch blog has been taken down, seemingly at the behest of RBI management.
I've written about it and posted the cached copy
And so he has.
We're also having to set up some URL rewriting to handle elements of the change from Windows to Linux that mean case-sensitivity in URLs is an issue.
Oh, and one of our bloggers has used the problems to make a point. Transparency's good, right?
Building on the success of our local elections coverage, when our exclusive live blog gave online readers the opportunity to interact in real time with our journalists at counts across Merseyside and receive instant information, the Daily Post is running a live blog from 7am today until the presses roll during the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Staff will update the live blog throughout the day and everyone who logs on will be invited to comment on the work as it unfolds, ask questions or share information with the editorial team.
Nicholas, the chap in charge of the technical side of our MT4 upgrade, emailed this story about the BBC's blog upgrade this morning. They've beaten us to Movable Type 4, probably helped by the cunning use of those good folks at Headshift.
Nice work, Jon. Shame about the bouffant 'fro. Oh, wait. He's already dealt with that.
I'm posting to this blog in a whole new way this morning. I'm actually typing this in Facebook, using the new Blog It Facebook app released by Six Apart over night.
Now, it's not massively sophisticated. No WYSIWYG. No tagging, or categorising. With a bit of luck we'll see some of those levels of sophistication developing as time goes on.
And, much to my surprise, it supports for more platforms than the 6A Trio (Movable Type, Vox and Typepad). You can post to both the .org and .com flavours of WordPress, to Blogger and to Livejournal as well. And you can set it to auto-notify services like Twitter and Pownce when you post.
It's a neat little way of linking your blog and Facebook more closely, though, and that appeals to me.
It's one of the things that many journalists don't do enough of when they blog: Listen. That's one of the important skills for a blogging journalist. Blogging is not just publishing my thoughts. I can do that in any old media. Blogging is about the conversation.
Mmm. Spot on. As is this:
But isn't good journalism supposed to amplify the signal, find it in the noise? Aren't journalists supposed to help find the important data points, turning points to help people and themselves make sense of the world? It's an abdication of our professional responsibility if we stop trying to find the signal and become the noise.
The reason this has so much resonance with me is that all too often I see journalists heading off exactly the wrong path with their blogging. Instead of bringing the focus of their journalistic skills into the conversational publishing arena, I see them bringing the worst aspects of blogging (shrill, unformed opinions) into their journalism.
Technology is such a bitter-sweet joy, isn't it?
However, there's something to do before we go live. Testing. (Oh, and training, but that's grist for another post.) We have to do a robust set of tests on this new server configuration, before we push it live. If we don't do it in a structured, formal way, we don't get to push it live.
Now, that's fair. We didn't test the initial install properly when we started, and have been suffering the consequences of some, uh, "challenging" install decisions since. However, reinterpreting testing guidelines designed for software we write ourselves becomes challenging when we're working with bought-in software.After a period of time where we were all talking at cross-purposes, I'm now reasonably confident that we have a plan in progress that will make sure we get the server performance we need. But it's pretty much eaten my day. Ah, well. A late night in the office is to be expected when you've just been off sick for two and a half days.
RBI folks reading this can learn more detail on my internal blog. And the rest of you, uh, can't. That's why it's an internal blog... :-)
Mr Arrington of that widely admir'd and provocative pamphlet Techcrunch has discoursed at length about the coming juggernaut of the blog publishers. There's big venture capital money heading in the direction of the most promising guys, and a whole new way of thinking to go with it. Quoth Arrington:
And writing good content is only half the battle. You have to figure out the complex, dynamic web of politics between bloggers and mainstream media before you post to know where to get support. And you'll need support in the form of links from other prominent bloggers. An early push can take a post and make it a headline on TechMeme, which leads to page views and notice by sponsors. But since blogging is almost by definition a conversation between bloggers, fights tend to break out over emotional issues. Cliques develop. Can you count on them to support you down the road?How are mainstream publishers reacting? They're trying to sponge free content off bloggers. Um, good luck with that guys.
So, what's happening here? We're in a transition phase.
He's actually using it as much as a springboard for discussions about company acquisitions and changes as about this actual divestment itself (as "not much to report yet" gets pretty old, pretty quickly..) but it an interesting wee read.
Oh, don't you love it when you open up your RSS reader, and find something that encapsulates an aspect of your life? Ladies & gentlemen, Mr Howard Owens:
Most of the bad bloggers tend to gravitate toward current affairs blogging.
Unfortunately, political blogs are also the kind of blogs most journalists tend to read. So a lot of journalists have a very low opinion of blogging.
Those of us more immersed in blogging, or who have grown beyond merely the current affairs bloggers, know that there is more to blogging than rants and raves.
[From Journalists who learn to blog help their online sites grow beyond repuporsed print news | Howard Owens]
This is exactly what I face when I go into a room full of our journalists to do a blogging workshop with them. I always start these sessions by allowing them to tell me what they think blogging is, and I've only once had anyone come anywhere near the broadest truth. Instead, they almost always focus down on what they see as uninformed political ranting. It's just another thing journalists have to unlearn to become any good as bloggers.
