…must be posterous! to start blogging, follow these steps:
that’s it, really! after receiving your first e-mail, posterous sets up your blog at an auto-generated URL like michael-go12qr.posterous.com. ok, if you’re not into these kind of URLs, there’s one last step:
3. visit your new blog & change the URL to something more human readable.
this wednesday (30.4.) vienna’s (I guess) bloggers meet up at Blogtail 3. I just decided to join them for a beer or two, maybe you’ll come to 
Technorati recently went meta by adding a ‘Popular’ section, which is aggregating the most prominently blogged proponents in the categories Music, Internet Video, Movies and News. interestingly, their categorization seems to be based on links to authorative platforms like amazon.com, imdb.com and youtube.com. not really sure, but I guess this could mean that f.e. music-related posts referencing less known artists might not be considered in Technorati’s most popular at all. that’s probably not so bad, as such artists might not appear in the top-ranking anyway - but what about videos posted on other sites than youtube?
in other news, TechMeme - pioneer and probably still leader of the aggregating-pack - and siblings memeorandum (politics), Ballbug (baseball only) and WeSmirch (celebrity gossip) went mobile earlier this week (though Gabe Rivera, TechMeme-creator, prefers the term ‘Mini’). all sites now offer a more condensed version for reading on small screens by adding ‘/mini’ to their respective URLs.
superficial observation might suggest that blog-search & -indexing is a problem solved long time ago - after all we have specialised blog search-engines like Technorati, sphere and Icerocket. however, Technorati - blog-search pioneer and defacto market-leader - is afflicted by repeated technical problems (like randomly “forgetting” to index blogs for weeks - just google for wordpress + technorati + troubles) and performance-issues (after all, a ping after updating your blog should lead to almost immediately updated indizes, and not lagging several hours behind). another problem Technorati shares with all its competitors is the uphill combat against spam-blogs (aka ’splogs’) & replica-blogs. [disclaimer: in no way this should be a rant against Technorati - I'm using the service almost daily and don't see any real alternative at the moment]
you might suppose Google should’nt really have a problem to establish their very own kick ass blog-index, but like their online RSS-reader, which has only gained attention after its recent major upgrade, blogsearch.google.com has been living quite below the blogosphere’s radar. according to the screenshot (see below) blogger Andy Boyd has posted today, this might be subject to change in the very near future: in what might be a local beta-rollout, Andy seems to have received results from blogsearch mixed within the general results from google.com:
TechCrunch points out that this might be a “believable scenario because Google recently added blog search to Google News last month and to Google Alerts four days later”. indeed, Google would be the first mainstream search-engine to specifically incorporate blog-posts into their search-results. a great boost for the blogosphere in general, and smaller bloggers - holding a lower page-rank - in particular could be anticipated. so let’s sit back and see what’s coming (soon, hopefully) on google.com…:)
update: here’s what Google Blogscoped has to say about this:
Also, I wonder how Google wants to decide on quality for these blog links – surely they can’t allow any recently updated spam blog to inhibit this spot, but for very fresh posts it might also be hard to rank this in terms of backlinks… unless they manage to count blog-post backlinks in near real-time.
in case you’re not reading this with your favorite RSS-reader, you might have noticed the ‘Recent Readers’ widget - courtesy of MyBlogLog - I recently have added to the sidebar of this blog. MyBlogLog is a social network for blog-readers & -authors, giving a face to the largely anonymous crowd of the blogosphere. besides tracking visitors using cookies, MyBlogLog offers basic site-stats and simple messaging very much like MySpace (”thx for visiting…”). looks like MyBlogLog is gaining some momentum, with even big names like TechCrunch supporting the idea.
update: here’s another downside to the growing number of people consuming blogs through RSS-readers… since I read mostly on Google Reader, the MyBlogLog-cookie will almost never be triggered, therefor preventing my profile from appearing on ‘Recent Readers’-sections of blogs I check out daily…
wow, this looks like some awesome patchwork of technology! News At Seven is a video news-show, 100% automatically generated from content-bits all over the net. claimed to work totally autonomous, the engine fetches news-stories from various blogs and websites, runs the text through speech-synthesis, mixes it with matching still-images and video-clips and add’s a Halflife-character as virtual news-presenter - voila, instant virtual news! from the creators:
In this, our first deployment of the system, the show produced is a three-minute daily news update, featuring national, international, and human-interest stories, with commentary from blogs on the national story. After the material has been assembled, the system is ready to present the news using preset scripts. The engine, and our extensions to it, allows us to present believable human-like newscasters as well as more imaginative scenes and sets that are only possible because the show is virtual. We also use techniques to make the generated vocal audio more interesting and believable.
though the quality of speech-synthesis could be better and some of the clips look out of place, this feels like an impressive glimpse of how news/TV could be produced in the not-too-distant future… (and it reminded me of the short news-casts featured in Starship Troopers ;)…)
(Screenshot courtesy of Boing Boing)
if you’re into robotics you should definitely check out Suicide Bots, a fresh blog reporting on everything newsworthy from the world of our metallic friends. logo & title of the blog are a wink at popular “indie”-porn site Suicide Girls, btw…
Feedvertising offers bloggers - no matter how big their readership (actually the service turns down low-traffic sites) - a free & easy way to sell advertising-space in their RSS-feeds. Feedvertising works without changing the feed-URL, instead ads are inserted into the feed by a plugin extending the blogging-software (currently only Wordpress [self-hosted] is supported, with other systems soon to come). publishers can freely choose to sell adspace via Feedvertising or instead host in-house advertisments (like f.e. TechCrunch does). ads are HTML-text only, with prices calculated considering the feeds traffic, link popularity and overall topic. publishers share revenue with Feedvertising 50/50.
Tooum’s Switchboard (currently in public beta) is a free, hosted service integrating popular blogging-features with classic discussion-based forum-functioniality. although Switchboard offers only very limited functionality at the moment, the basic idea seems appealing and could very well lead to a solid Wordpress-plugin…
Om Malik’s GigaOM blog-network just launched Web Worker Daily - probably not coincidentally on yesterdays Labour Day. featuring hammer&sickle-inspired graphical design, the new blog is dedicated to nowadays’ mobile information-workforce: geographically uprooted from office-space, always-connected through wifi- and mobile broadband connections, laptop-hauling, latte-sipping cyber-beduins ;)… WWD aims to be a place for web-workers sharing their views & opinions among the decentralized business-world they are living in.
