Blog blogging

I often use the phrase “the adults are using the Web now” in response to naive spam emails or unsolicited instant messages, but author Andrew Keen appears to have taken this a might too seriously.

In an interview on BBC’s Digital Planet programme, Keen paraphrased a section of his book in which he referred to bloggers as “monkeys with typewriters”, mistaking the Borel/Eddington theorem regarding the nature of infinity for something that can be applied to creative writing or journalism.

Keen believes that we as media consumers have forgotten what the media is “for”, using Lord Reith’s largely anachronous mission statement which suggested that the BBC must “inform, educate and entertain” and applying it to the wholly democratic medium of the Internet.

I often say that if someone does not understand social networks such as Facebook, they should not engage with those media, but I wasn’t prepared for the idea that there are still some people who don’t understand what the entire Internet is for. I think even the most ardent technophobe would understand the idea that the Internet is a discussion rather than a broadcast medium.

I sympathise with Keen’s view that unchecked articles labelled as pieces of journalism can be damaging to media trust, but by not crediting Internet users with appropriate nouse to disseminate and judge accordingly the information they read, you’re playing into the hands of the misguided few who believe that video games and hip hop music is somehow responsible for cultural decline. The medium is a mouthpiece, a dumb terminal, a pipe between one person and another, so if you don’t like what’s on the end of the pipe, blame the source, not the medium.

The barriers to entry that Keen is so fearful of losing – the only things that allow his blinkered rhetoric a platform – are characterised by money and education. You have to spend a lot of money to setup a newspaper (presumably the only legitimate medium) and be fairly well-educated in order to write for one. But don’t those who don’t know how to use an apostrophe but have interesting and challenging opinions deserve a voice? Not in Keen’s world it seems.

So naturally, unqualified as I am to post within my own space and allow you to read my ill-educated rantings, I’ll be suspending the Bluemilkshake blog until such time as I have secured an appropriate qualification from a pre-approved University.

Want to find out whether a blog is written by a man or a woman and too busy to read the author’s profile? Consider yourself rescued.

The Gender Analyser (currently in beta) reads through a page and attempts to determine whether the content you’ve submitted is written by a man or a woman.

Much like the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser however, it almost always comes out with the same answer: we all blog like men.

Obviously this tool isn’t yet finished, but when it is, it could prove to be an interesting insight into whether one sex tempers or alters its style to fit in another’s space. As it assumes almost everything is written by a man it’s difficult to say exactly how accurate it is, as it doesn’t seem to offer a “neutral” output.

Being as this site is (probably) built in America (judging by the Z in “analyze”) I wonder whether its 2,000-strong list of blogs was skewed in the direction of an American dialect, and as all dialects differ around the world (not taking into account house styles) this makes comprehensive analysis a little more difficult.

I was tempted to reveal the blogs that were misidentified as being male in voice, but that might be a little unfair...:)

In terms of inspiration, when the well is full to overflowing it’s tempting to draw from it at speed, lest it run dry, thus filling up your blog with exciting new posts. But what happens when the well does run dry?

I’m a big believer in transparency, especially when it comes to blogging. I try to help my clients remember that they’re not writing faceless articles but personal accounts.

Because of that I tend to blog when the idea occurs to me, so when I’m bursting with new thoughts, theories and arguments my blog flourishes but when I’m out of ideas the site suffers.

So I started to ask myself whether it was prudent to keep one or two blog posts as drafts within my CMS as reserves, saved for a rainy day, or whether this would affect my relationship with my readers.

By presenting a blog post as new when it is in fact a couple of days or even weeks old I am effectively not being truthful with my audience, but does that really matter? As bloggers we all vet our comments to make sure spammers don’t plaster their links all over the place. This is by no means transparent, but is absolutely accepted, and necessary behaviour. Can the same be said about delayed blogging?

What do you do? Do you keep one in the bag for later, or do you think you should blog honestly? Does it even matter?

Feed readers take RSS feeds and display them in a meaningful way, but if you provide only summaries of your posts you make your readers’ lives harder and reduce the likelihood of your content being read.

RSS is a technology that is most effective for blogs, giving us an easy way to read authors’ content. Before the advent of Web-based apps like Google Reader, providing summaries of blog posts via the description tag made sense: there were fewer feeds around (worth reading) in those days so you received alerts when new content was made available, much like we still do now with email.

But as the number of blogs increases, and with the advent of blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger and all the rest of them, “really simple syndication” (which isn’t what RSS stands for*) is widely regarded as the way to read blog posts.

I very rarely visit blogs any more, unless a particular post uses script that Google Reader can’t render or that RSS doesn’t reproduce. However, there is another reason that forces me to jump out of my reading panel and disrupt my flow, and that is incomplete feeds.

As I mentioned before, you used to be able to get away with putting a summary of your content in the description tag of each post’s item tag. (Most developers use the word “node” as it’s an XML term, but it’s a similar makeup to HTML so I’m simplifying). However, bloggers - or more specifically blogging platform developers - can embed the entire content of a post into the item tag by creating a content:encoded tag and importing a namespace (basically adding a line near the top of the RSS document). Feed readers understand this tag, which allows for storing of HTML, which obviously includes images and embedded Flash movies.

This relatively small change has a massive effect on the way a reader consumes an author’s content and it is very simple to implement, however there are still a number of blogs that don’t use this and I find it infuriating.

When I’m skimming through the new articles that have been written in the last 24 hours or so, if I see a headline that catches my eye - or a new article by a writer whose posts I particularly enjoy - I want to read the whole article there and then, in a familiar setting. I don’t want to have to click, scroll, adjust to the layout and continue reading.

Imagine if you were reading a newspaper, but instead of printing the full article the publishers just printed the page number of an accompanying magazine which was full of adverts. If they did that for every section you’d be up to your knees in cheap gloss.

Bloggers: please take a look at the source code for your RSS feeds. (You can do it in your Web browser.) If you don’t see a content:encoded tag for each of your posts, download the right plugin for your blog software or contact your developer because your posts could be going unread. (Failing that you could simply be annoying your readers, and there’s never a reason for that.)

There are people who, infuriatingly enough serve incomplete RSS feeds on purpose, because they want to track the number of subscribers they have. This is fairly pointless however because, if you are writing good content you will insight people either to comment on it, link to it, forward it on or visit the site to find out more, all of which are trackable. RSS readers are lurkers, so you should focus on converting them to real visitors by providing full content rather than arrogantly assuming they will follow your predetermined conversion path.

_{* it’s RDF Site Summary incidentally}

I’ve been busy with new contracts and other commitments over the past couple of weeks, and my blogging has suffered. It’s a common side-effect of business and a mismanagement of proprieties.

Most people put blogging quite low down the list of priorities when they come up against their own personal busy season, but in the same way that you should never stop chasing new business when you’re already stacked, you shouldn’t stop blogging when you’ve got ideas in your head, just because you haven’t made the time to write.

Of course, that assumes you’re blossoming with ideas and viewpoints. What do you do when you’ve got nothing to write about? Should you blog “for the sake of it” or only when you have an original, unprompted thought? Do they have to be mutually exclusive?

That’s enough questions.

So, in the absence of another polemical argument, I thought I’d give you a heads-up as to what’s going on in Bluemilokshakeland.

Byron, my fancy content management framework is getting an overhaul to make it more scalable and increase its usability for developers. It’s already very efficient but as a developer tool it’s lacking any form of intuitive logic.

I’m currently doing some work in Henley in Arden (in the Midlands, on the way to Stratford, UK) and sharing social marketing links and ideas, which has lead me to think about getting a page of links setup on bluemilkshake.co.uk, or working with my del.icio.us list to provide a comprehensive list of my recommended reads.

Also got lots of projects on, and am thinking of getting a dedicated Linux box for all my various WordPress sites, and to host any new Ruby on Rails projects as and when they come about.

So that’s me. Thanks for your patience and I hope to be back and as divisive as ever very soon!

I’m suffering from reader’s guilt. There are just too many posts from people I like, and not enough time to read them all.

It’s a problem I think many people have already come across and learnt to deal with. Their feed lists become fatter and fatter until eventually something gives and they end up hemorrhaging reading material.

Those whose blogs are well written and widely read often have a string of writers behind them, all gagging for their feed to be added to the author’s reader.

I have a similar problem. My blog isn’t massively read - I get the odd stumble which you assume helps you pick up one or two new subscribers - but I do have a lot of content I like to keep up with, and a fair amount of it is from friends and other contacts who are important to me, both personally and for my business.

As I’m a busy man with numerous projects and commitments on the go - as of course we all are - I only get time to glance through my Google Reader list and pick up on the ones that most attract my attention. The rest get marked automatically as read so that I don’t end up with a sea of folder names in bold blue with numbers of ever-increasing size in brackets.

Sometimes the only feeds I get the chance to read are ones to which I’m most closely linked: personal projects, possible networking opportunities and pearls of marketing wisdom. Even some of those types of posts fall by the wayside but in the main that’s all I seem to read now.

So my problem is not simply that I have too much to read, but more that I’m increasingly finding myself in a situation where people (in real life, you know, away from the monitor) talk about their latest posts and ask for my opinion, however I have no opinion to offer because I’ve simply not got round to reading their posts.

Again this is a problem I think many have dealt with: you learn to reconcile yourself to the fact that you can’t possibly read everything written by everyone you like, no matter how good they think it is. And it’s not because their work has a lower currency, it’s simply that when you’re reading for necessity and not simply for the pleasure of learning new things and being inspired, you have to make a difficult decision.

The simple fact is, I may never read that brilliant post you wrote last week, and that’s fine, because there’s so many other people who will that it makes no odds whether I do nor not. Thanks Pete for that piece of wisdom, which you imparted to me many weeks ago in a pub somewhere in Aston.

It’s been a long time coming, but finally Bluemilkshake has a .NET site again, after popping over to WordPress for a wee while.

WordPress is a great system, and one of the things I loved about it was the way you could just “get on” with writing without really having to worry about anything else, and that’s part of what I’ve tried to achieve with Byron, the content management system that this site is built on.

I moved hosting a week or so ago, from a budget PHP host to Fasthosts, and with the move came the necessity to close down the original site, moving as I was from PHP to .NET (in short meaning that the old site wouldn’t work).

So I put up a holding page claiming boldly that the new site would be up by July 1st, a deadline which had already been put back a few days. I had a number of other projects on at the time which needed my attention so inevitably my own site suffered, leading to something of an all-nighter, the evidence of which you can see in the three videos below.

10pm

12am

3am

There’s nothing like sticking to a good deadline is there!?

Anyway...there’s still a lot more to do on the site, and a lot of content to add but I felt it important to at least have a place I could direct people to, plus it’s nice to get my blog back again!

(I’ll be working on getting all the old URLs to redirect but in the meantime the RSS feed URL that readers use to subscribe is being automatically redirected so you should be able to pick this new post up in your RSS reader.)

In a recent post, Lee Robertson of Epiblogger gave us seven reasons for why Firefox is better for blogging than Internet Explorer. Actually it’s got nothing to do with Firefox at all, but more to do with the add-ons that are available for it.

Why Firefox should have such a glut of add-ons in comparison to IE I’m not sure - and please don’t mention it’s because it’s open source: Firefox is cool because it’s written by nice people who make their code available for everyone to break, and IE is horrible because it’s written by Microsoft who are all fascists. I digress. I do that sometimes.

I really like Lee and Rhett’s work: Rhett has critiqued my friend Kev’s blog and is a regular listener to, and critic of my podcast. They’re both good writers with good ideas, and this latest post by Lee is no exception: i just don’t agree with the argument.

To demonstrate that, I thought I’d look into each of Lee’s points and try to rebut them, if only for the sake of balance. It’s got nothing to do with fairness, I just think IE7 is a better browser than Firefox. So to point 1:

1. “Firefox might not have been the first browser to offer tabbed browsing, but it is one of the greatest features for bloggers to have.” Agreed, and it’s implemented into the core of IE7.
2. “Firefox add-ons extend Firefox to make it much more than a web browser...” I used to be a desktop software developer and find the continuing blurring of the lines between desktop and web apps unsettling. I don’t like the idea that soon everything from watching IPTV to listening to Internet radio will be done through a web browser. I think web browsers should stick to being web browsers. Lee then goes on to look at the add-ins that make Firefox a great blogging platform.
   1. CoLT is a plugin that allows you to copy and paste the text and URL of a link so you can easily paste it into your post editor. Can I not do that already? I highlight the link text then hit CTRL+C to copy, or right-click the link and select Copy Shortcut. Or am I missing something?
   2. ScribeFire is an alternative post editor, so if you don’t like your WordPress/Blogger/etc interface you can use this. Windows Live Writer does this already, is browser-independent and is surprisingly good. I’ve used it before and was impressed at how well it worked with a standard blogging platform or - I imagine - anything that implements XML-RPC.
   3. FireFTP is an FTP client for Firefox. IE has supported FTP since version 5 (and in stable form since 6), or you can just use Windows Explorer. When Dreamweaver fails to connect I go straight to Windows Explorer for my FTP, and have never needed any third-party software.
   4. Zemanta suggests pictures and links related to your blog post. This sounds really cool, and according to the FAQ they’re testing an IE version. Either way, one point to Firefox.
   5. Web Developer gives you a massive set of tools to help test your web pages’ functionality and appearance. A brilliant add-on and another point to Firefox. If you develop for the Web and use Firefox but don’t have this add-on, get it. Chalk up another one to the mighty ’fox.
   6. Twitterfox is a Twitter client for Firefox. There are a whole glut of these and they’re very useful but I found that - as I documented in Adventures in Browserland - being too closely connected with such a vibrant community was distracting. Nevertheless, it’s something IE doesn’t have.
   7. Dictionaries and language packs What Lee’s referring to here is, not a dictionary but a spell checker. Some blogging platforms include their own but are often horrible (WordPress is no exception), but as I mentioned in How to Make Sense of your Blog, ieSpell is a great add-on for IE that gives you multi-lingual spell checking support that works really well.
3. “Multiple Home Pages - This goes along with tabbed browsing. You can open several pages as your home page.” Very true, but another feature that was implemented at the same time as tabbed browsing into IE7.

Obviously some of the features I’ve documented here are very much in the “me too” vein, where Microsoft have been trying to play catch-up with the rest of the online community, but whether a development camp thought of an idea first or whether they’re implementing something that has gone missed for ages is by the by.

In all of this I’m completely discounting IE6 and all those who have gone before. IE6 is a dreadful browser with more bugs than a dung heap in Mexico - see, I do jokes too - but its successor far surpasses even Firefox in my opinion. I still think there’s no reason to use anything other than IE7 on a Windows machine unless you need to use some of the tools I’ve mentioned that IE doesn’t have (mainly the Web Developer toolbar).

So that’s my rebuttal. If you think there’s something I’ve missed or you just want to call me Microsoft’s bitch or a capitalist pig-dog please be my guest! I am a capitalist pig-dog but no, I have never suckled at the mighty Gates teat, and never will.

I’ve just added my name to the list of attendees at WordCamp UK, a big bloggy love-in for all fans of the amazing blogging platform that powers this site, amongst many thousands of others.

If all goes well it will be taking place between the 19th and 20th of July, at a place (in Birmingham) yet to be decided. Stef has been busy putting a logo together and suggesting ideas for venues, and a tagging system has already been put in place to group all related posts together (see the wordcampuk tag below).

At the moment details are sketchy but a potential crowd of 200 could be expected. Lots of people have been putting their hands up to offer help and services - myself included - so we’ll see who gets to do what.

Corporal Lachlan MacNeil of the 16 Air Brigade is taking part in a unique project run by the Guardian. He’ll be blogging his way through the next six months via text and video, mainly to give us “back home” the chance to see what life is like for a British squaddy in in Afghanistan, but also to give a voice to some of his troops so they can communicate - albeit one way - with their loved ones.

I’m more than a little intrigued to see how it pans out over the coming weeks and months. Other than a headcam I’m not entirely sure what the Guardian have kitted him out with, nor how the pressures of life under fire will affect the regularity of his posts, but if nothing else it should prove an interesting experiment.

I doubt we’ll see other social media tools put to great use in the Army: the idea of troops twittering their current location is probably unlikely.