Category: Media

Mena Trott sent out info today (no URL) on how development of TypePad is going to affect existing Movable Type users. Roughly, they’re shooting for 100% API compatibility, which means existing posting tools will continue to work, plugins should work with either service, etc. I might have missed it in the past few weeks, but screenshots of the coming service are now up on the TypePad site, and looking dynamite. Integrated photo albums even. Wish I could have covered the service in the MacWorld blogging article I turned in a few weeks ago (look for it in the July issue).

Update: According to a post of Mena’s all TypePad entries will be rendered purely in buttons.

Speaking of MacWorld, recently learned that my article for them on setting up OS X as a PHP/MySQL rig won a regional ASPBE award for Best How-To article. Official announcement June 12.

History as though seen through the eyes of Fox News. Bril.

Speaking of Fox, there was hardly any mention of the fact that Bill O’Reilly was pre-empted throughout the entirety of the Iraq war. Lord, sweet respite. Did Fox feel he was just too inflammatory to be set loose on such a sensitive subject? He’s the network’s biggest draw, and it was as if they just decided to put a lid on the garbage can for a few weeks.

Jon Lebkowsky has been blogging highly detailed notes from O’Reilly’s Emerging Tech conference all week. Not so much futurist stuff but very smart people pulling the big picture of the new social computing into focus – RSS, Wikis, FOAF, hive mind, open spectrum, mesh…

Clay Shirky on social structure in social software:

Why do we have weblogs now? Why did we have geocities instead? We didn’t know what we were doing – it took a while to realize that conversation was better than pictures of cats. We’ve internalized, now people are building, and what they’re building is web native. A weblog and a wiki is web all the way in… lightweight, loosely coupled, easy to break down and extend.

Andrew Orlowski slams the conference, then Tim O’Reilly rebuts the slam. Boys, boys.

One of the take-home lessons of this war (for me) has been that it hammered home the gulf of coverage between television and the internet. With two 24-hour news channels and all the hundreds of embedded journalists at work, one might hope to have heard hundreds of meaningful perspectives. And the funny thing is, if TV was your only source of news through the course of the war, you probably felt that you were hearing lots of meaningful perspectives, that you were, on the whole, getting fair and balanced coverage.
Continue reading “War Media”

I know, the J-School should be all paneled out by now, not to mention weblogged out, but lo, another good webcast tonight:

Weblogs are mainstream, and they are changing the way we manage knowledge, work and communicate. On Thursday, April 10, join panelists Dan Gillmor, Scott Rosenberg, Donna Wentworth and others at the J-School in exploring how this change continues to affect academia, journalism, business, and society.

Just upgraded QuickTime Streaming Server to v4.1.3, and the initial load latency has been drastically reduced — no more 5-7 seconds of buffering before stream starts. Not quite sure how they accomplished that, but it’s impressive.

Looking around for examples of sites where blogging / CMS software is used to drive business sites, but not finding much. Wondering if I’m simply not looking in the right place or whether business as a category hasn’t caught on that they can save a few tens of thousands by skipping the high-end CMS or the hand-built site and going with a tailored weblog instead. Any examples you can think of? Comments welcome.

In Blogs as Disruptive Tech, WebCrimson looks at the fuzzy space where blogging software leaves off and content management systems begin. In his view, the transition we are seeing is akin to IBM having the mainframe market ripped out from underneath it by the PC explosion. CMSs frequently sell in the $10k – $500k range. Blogging packages tend to cost around $35, if not free. But there’s a parsec of difference between the categories, right? … or is there?

Than again, there’s the dullest blog in the world.