July 2005 Archives

Thanks to Maciej who kindly authorized my to translate his original Audioblogging Manifesto, I just posted a French version of it: un manifeste de l'audioblogging.

I've been wanting to do this for quite a while (the original is more than one year old) and it's been triggered by the recent podcasting hype. I guess I just wanted to raise a few points around the issues of audioblogging. But don't take this as a judgment, audioblogging and podcasting are different things and there are very good examples out there. That I'm not into it doesn't mean it's bad :-).

Indeed. Although it was fun to do, I guess I won't go into podcasting anytime soon. It requires a lot of work, technique and attention if you want something of quality, and I definitely don't dig any medium where I'm a passive listener. (Although I like radio when I'm de facto in listening mode, e.g. awakening, eating, showering, etc.) It also really amazes me that Apple doesn't give you any simple way of recording voice on Mac OS X. We've got microphones all over the place (I've got two, one the in PowerBook, the other one in an iSight, and I guess I've got two or three old Apple mikes around). I've tried an iTalk with my iPod but the background noise is annoying (and it's picking up the hard drive sound). I ended up using an iSight with QuickTime Broadcaster, iMovie to edit and mix then iTunes to produce the final MP3 file. I know I could have got a third party software to record audio (there are half a dozen from $15 to $50 out there) but I really wanted to see if there was a way to do that with what Apple provides (answer's yes but that's an ugly hack). It's nice to see them popularize podcasts, but the same cannot be said for helping people produce them. May be Odeo retains an edge over iTunes here.

In its Saturday edition, July 16, the Australian Financial Review has published an article by Emily Carr titled Beware: your corporate blog is a total bore in which I'm quoted with my professional title along with my employer's name, as criticizing the blog of Boeing VP of marketing Randy Baseler. I would like to stress a few things:

1. I have not been interviewed by the journalist, who did a selective copy/paste of a six-month old post, Boeing Blog doesn't fly, without telling me
2. as it is clearly stated on my about page, this is a personal blog, and the opinions expressed on this site are mine and are not those of my current or former employers
3. Randy Baseler's Journal has since significantly improved, notably with the addition of comments and news feeds (I have updated the aforementioned post to reflect the changes)

I would really appreciate if the AFR would publish this as an errata. It would help them, and their readers, understand a little better what blogs are.

I take the opportunity of the recent upgrades to Firefox to ask you two (may be naive) questions that keep bugging me since I started to use this fine browser:

• Why display a Software Update feature within the Advanced preferences that never updates Firefox?
• Why put a direct link to Firefox Central in the address bar and, on this page, give me a zillion links except the one I'm always looking for there, which is... download Firefox? I don't know about you, but under "Getting Started" I would really welcome that "Download Firefox" link. Especially since the Software Update feature doesn't work.

Thanks for your attention.

Robert Scoble left a comment on my previous post about Technorati asking me if I did check his other posts. As I responded there, the point was that he didn't amend his original post , which continues to show an erroneous comparison that can mislead people who come from a link [update: he did, see below]. That's exactly how I was mistaken in this debate and used it here, but after I saw this response from David Berlind, I posted a follow-up and amended the original post so that visitors coming there from a link would not be misled.

As you can see if you follow this link (here's a screenshot), Scoble's recent posts are out of sight, unless you use the calendar links or click on the top banner, which in my experience a minority of users do (and which won't help anyway in a week or so, since those posts will have disappeared from his home page). Visitors continue to be exposed to wrong facts, and that's weakening Scoble's point about the alleged superiority of bloggers vs. journalists in their ability to amend their writings "after the fact". Scoble should have posted an update on his original post, and he still hasn't done it. I see him updating other posts today, so he's used to it. Why doesn't he fix the one that started this all?

Scoble also brags about the power of comments, i.e. the readers can fact-check a blogger. But look at this Scoble's comment in this post on David Sifry's blog:

Dave, I'm worried you're being out-executed by your competitors. Take a look: http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/07/14.html#a10642

Posted by: Robert Scoble at July 14, 2005 05:45 AM

This is how I found his comparison, and I bet lots of people did too. And three days later at the time of writing this, no one, including Scoble, has took the time to point out in the comments at David's blog that Scoble's comparison is erroneous and misleading. So much for the power of comments (ok, I can do something about it, like commenting myself).

And now we can watch another passe d'armes between Berlind, Scoble, and more Scoble, then Dave Winer shimes in, then Berlind to Scoble and Farber to Winer, and (finally?) Scoble.

My feeling after watching this is a bitter taste at the way Scoble reacts, like here in his comments:

And the point of this grand debate is? Christopher Coulter • 7/17/05; 4:27:55 AM

---

Christopher: I don't know. I think it is "professional journalists don't make mistakes but bloggers do, here's proof." Robert Scoble • 7/17/05; 4:33:08 AM

Or when Shel Israel pops in in support of his friend Scoble writing (emphasis is mine) "I thought Berlind was unreasonably snitty to you Robert. With all that criticism he hurled, I don't quite see an actual factual error." After their interview of Michel-Edouard Leclerc, I thought they would agree with him that blogging requires a lot of humility and intellectual strictness:

Q2. What have you learned from blogging? Has it change your views in any way? How so?

Blogging is thinking in front of others. It is accepting that you are open to their comments, their suggestions and their criticism. This "exhibition" in front of the public leads to two attitudes. First of all, humility. You need to be prepared to make amends, to review an argument or to reformulate it. Then, intellectual strictness. When you lead a huge company, you create, against your will, expectations. As in my blog I pretend to enrich the public debate, it is up to me to be as credible as possible, coherent and not to contradict what I say in my blog with the concrete practices of the company.

There isn't an ounce of humility in his reaction to this whole argument (it's more akin to "mmmmkay, I got one figure wrong, but I'm still correct and you're a jerk"). As for intellectual strictness, Scoble doesn't lead a huge company but still, he's the lead blogger of one (Microsoft) and the traffic he gets on his blog should hold him to higher standards than the casual blogger.

And lastly, to see Dave Winer come in defense of Scoble in this debate is like seing G.W. Bush backing up Tony Blair's truthfulness in fact-checking the existence of WMD in Iraq.

Journalists: 2, bloggers: 0.

[Update, July 18] Robert Scoble updated his post by linking to this note! I didn't ask that much but as we say in French, c'est très fair play, bravo. After this interesting conversation (and the proof that the blogs are as flexible as their bloggers want it to be) I'm amending this thread. Now what I'm looking forward is seeing real progress done at Technorati, Bloglines and alikes, because the main point of this conversation is that there is definitely room for improvement in that space.

Doc Searls has more on Technorati (he cites my pseudo there but without a link, hello Doc!) and an interesting question about getting objective evaluations of RSS search engines. Very much needed, but will they be transparent enough for that?

From Doc's post I saw a response from David Berlind to Scoble's Technorati vs. Bloglines comparison I mentionned previously. In short, Scoble was comparing apples to oranges, and quality is not quantity (Technorati seems to do a better job than Bloglines at removing duplicates). This article also confirmed what I've been thinking for a long time, i.e. the Technorati methodology for determining authority is to count the number of links from a home page to a blog, not the number of links from an entire site. Berlind also reports that Technorati actually keeps all the links in its index but it doesn't show them. Yet it seems to have some problems spitting out the most recent ones coherently.

During this surf I also saw the passe d'armes between Scoble and Ian Betteridge (Ian, Scoble, Ian, Scoble) where Ian basically says that 30,000 bloggers can be wrong (I agree, one of the drawbacks of the networked nature of the blogosphere is its propensity to act as an echo chamber) and Scoble brags the superiority of the bloggers vs. journalists is that the former can and more often do amend themselves when they write something wrong on their blog than the latter. The trouble is, Scoble has yet to amend his apples to oranges comparison on his own blog! [Update: he did.] Meanwhile, I'm going to amend my previous post.

At last, a WYSIWYG editor that departs from the old school ones. TinyMCE is a multibrowser/multiplatform javascript content editor which knows about CSS (check this example, it also sports an old school style when CSS is not an option). It looks easy to integrate (it has some capacity to replace TEXTAREA and DIV elements), has drag-and-drop support for links, custom callback functions and it's open source. Support is incomplete for Safari, but it looks good in Firefox.

I desperately need something like this in my blogging software...

ZDNet Australia is running a story titled Sun's CIO backs blogs despite lawyer worries, which is an interesting read except for the odd fact that Sun has been the poster boy of corporate blogging for quite some time now. Did it really take one year for Sun's CIO to pick up on blogs after Sun's President gave the go-ahead to the entire company, or is it just the timing of this article?

Following my earlier post on Technorati, here is a typical egorati(*) journey there, with snapshots.

More often than not, I get an error, today's is business (or lack thereof) as usual (note that if the site is too busy, why does it tell me so after one minute and not upfront?):

So I pick the recommended choice to add this as a watchlist. After one or two minutes of watching the spinning Technorati logo (I like it, very much inspired from the Apple spinning circle used as a waiting sign all over Mac OS X), I eventually get these two results:

Then I add the RSS feed of this search to my aggregator, and I get this:

Only one result, completely different from the two results for the same search displayed on the web site. Tell me about the index accuracy.

Now that Trackback has been killed by spammers, one could hope to be able to follow conversations through services like Technorati (which provides a nice API to do just that). However, we see that it's far from being comprehensive and accurate. That might explain why Jeremy has to pile up three competing services to do that: Technorati, Feedster and Bloglines (he had a fourth one, Yahoo! Links or something like that in the past, but I don't see it now). But this is tedious and requires many clicks for the visitor to follow the conversation. I would love to have a way to see the conversation -- whether from comments, Trackbacks, whatever links back to a specific post -- without the visitor having to click through all those strange names. Frankly, between "conversation" and "Trackback/Technorati/Feedster/Bloglines/", what do you think speaks to the casual visitor?

P.S. for the sake of ironic transparency, I'm posting this on a server that keeps going up and down. But, heck, I don't have a hundred dedicated servers to power my site :-).

(*) Can you tell I'm a slightly addicted blogger?

For a long, long time I've been silently complaining at the less than stellar reliability of Technorati. Today I read the long list of complaints that Jeremy Wright has posted in the past few days: Leaving Technorati Behind, Technorati: Too Quick, Too Fast and Doc Searls Calls Me Out. As well as Technorati is dying by the Blog Herald and a flurry of citations to The selling of the Blogosphere by Tom Foremski.

Jeremy's posts triggered a response from David Sifry, CEO of Technorati: Scaling, performance, and plain old bug fixing. I immediatly thought of comparing indexes between Technorati and Bloglines but Scoble did it in Sifry's comments (the Lazy Web is improving, you don't even need to ask now):

Technorati search for Dave Sifry's blog reveals 735 links.

Bloglines Citation search for same thing reveals 2,644 links.

Dave, that's what you need to fix. Bloglines is building a better index and, at the end of the day, that's what's gonna matter.

Technorati has a nicer design, though.

[P.S. July 17, Scoble's comparison is misleading, see this follow-up] Technorati has a nicer design. Ouch! The various look & feel redesigns of Technorati have been the most visible changes in the past year or so, along with the addition of APIs and new features such as tags. But reliability, speed and accuracy of the index, which are absolutely vital to the credibility of the company, have not been improved. At least not visibly and not in a sustainable manner (there were some improvements in the past, but they didn't last long). When last year my gripe was that searches took ages to return results, now nine out of ten searches result in a "Zero Sized Reply" proxy error (or this morning with a nicer "we're experiencing heavy load, sorry" message, except that it was 10am CET in Paris, i.e. 4am in NYC or 1am in California, not exactly peak time). And I pass on the issue of blog spam overwhelming the index, which IMO explains the strange trends at work here.

Unlike others, I don't see any issue with Technorati and alike trying to make a buck out of their work. After all, they filled a gap in providing a fast search service to the fast content-producing blogosphere, where Google still needs ages to update its index (with respect to the blogosphere warped sense of time). For me as an information whore Technorati did raise lots of expectations and when I look at how much we pay for a press clipping service at my company, there is obviously room for a similar business on the internet. But only if there is value and accuracy above what one can get for free already. For Technorati to take my business, cosmetic redesigns and "we feel your pain" messages aren't going to cut it, not after years of the same painful story. Especially when I get better results from others.

Speaking of which, take a look at those technorati alternatives suggested by Jeremy: PubSub, Bloglines, BlogPulse and IceRocket, plus Feedster and Daypop.

Oh, and one day the Really Big Guys -- Google, Yahoo! and consorts -- will wake up.

Six Apart just released Movable Type 3.2 beta. It's a public beta test, so everyone and their dog is invited, but in case you feel the urge to upgrade your existing blog with this version, you'd better read the beta test rules, notably the parts labelled "For testing purposes only" and "Backup your data".

Excellent question. I just love the conclusion, Dr Dave.

It's a sad day today in London.

As usual, security measures will be further tightened pretty much everywhere, which will just make public transportation a little more difficult for everybody, and will not prevent in any way another attack. Apart from the foolish war that's going on in Irak, have our leaders a clue on what's going on and what to do? Tim Bray has a point:

I’m not saying that there’s any political grievance to which attacking New York, Madrid or London is a reasonable response. But when something is driving enough people into insane belief systems that we see regular explosions in our cities, it would be smart to care—a lot—what that something is. Because, on the evidence, I don’t think the leaders of the Western world have a clue.

EU Parliament bins software patent bill, by 648 votes to 14, with 18 abstentions. It's pretty unusual if I'm correct for those sort of things to happen in the European legislative system, but it's not like the Commission has made a good job here, by consistently and patently (if I may) ignoring all the previous votes of the MEP. Reading that "no directive was the best directive we could hope for" tells a lot about this whole affair.

This wednesday the European parliament will cast its last vote on the issue of software patents in Europe. I hope a majority of MEP will vote in favor of the Buzek-Rocard-Duff amendments (or withdraw it) and save Europe from software patents. Not only this will save us from the nonsense that is going on in the U.S. but it will give Europe, and its numerous open source projects and web startups, a tremendous competitive advantage.

Visit No-e-patents and The Economic Majority for more information.

Store Wars.