Blogging Roller

David Czarnecki explains why Flock's blog editor doesn't work with Drupal, Blojsom, Roller and (probably) many other blog servers. Flock is sending an integer for the publish parameter when it should be sending a boolean. Here's the bug report.

Town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina: NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED by the Mayor and Town Council that the Council hereby petitions the Bush Administration and Congress to immediately end the war in Iraq, re-establish a progressive tax code, curtail end favoritism toward corporate interests, develop responsible policies focused on renewable energy, and commit to priorities that reflect the common good.

According to Sally Greene, "the Town Council enthusiastically and unanimously passed" the resolution.

Both Niall Kennedy and Joel Spolsky have written interesting posts on the Google spam-blog connection today. I really don't understand why Google hasn't done more to shut down the spammers down. They're gaming Google's system and Google's passing the cost to the advertisers. On second thought, maybe they're taking it out of my AdSense check and maybe it's time to try something else. Eventually, advertisers will catch on. As Spolsky says: "AdSense will ruin Google's reputation among advertisers, something which could be deadly."

I haven't tried the Ecto blog client in quite a while and I've gotta say, it looks really nice. It's got a WYSIWYG rich-text editor, spell checking and automatic image upload, which makes things easy, but it also has a bunch of advanced features like iPhoto, iTunes, del.icio.us and Flickr integration. It's going to take a while to explore all of the features because it really tries to do a lot.

I've tested Ecto before with Roller 1.x and it worked fine. It also works with Roller 2.0 and recognizes multiple blogs if you have them. The only problem with Ecto? It only runs on Windows and Mac OS.

Here's a good summary of the Ecto feature set: ecto and MarsEdit

Now that I've got StarOffce 8, I need to get my hands on the StarOffice blogger addon and give that a spin.

I missed it when it came out at the start of the month, but Yahoo's RSS whitepaper RSS -- Crossing into the Mainstream presents some very interesting numbers.

Somebody, and I can't remember who it was, said that RSS/Atom newsfeeds won't be widely accepted until they are invisible. That makes a lot of sense to me. I've had a very difficult time convincing my (computer savvy) friends and family to use newsfeed readers. The Yahoo numbers back that idea up. Of the 31% of online users that use RSS, 27% are unaware of RSS.

According to the study, My Yahoo! is the most widely used RSS aggregator around. The reasons for that? First, My Yahoo! itself is popular and second, My Yahoo! makes RSS invisible. You don't "subscribe to RSS newsfeeds with your aggregator" -- nobody knows what that means. Instead, you just "Add to My Yahoo!" and you do it secure in the knowledge that you can opt-out at any time by pressing that little X button on your My Yahoo! page.

Newsgator is another company that's working to make RSS invisible. Newsgator's enterprise newsfeed server has MS Exchange integration so that administrators can direct newsfeeds right into folders in MS Outlook without the end-users doing anything or even knowing that RSS is involved.

So, RSS ain't simple. For most users, the way to make RSS palatable is to make it go away.

Congrats to the OpenOffice.org folks

Raible's got a timely find on this first morning of BlogOn 2005, a happy Roller user who writes (and I'm picking the same except that Raible did):

Roller, on the other hand, uses things like Hibernate to abstract away queries from the underlying DB implementations, and Velocity to separate out the display logic from the business logic. And blogging software does have business logic, or a model; blog entries and categories and tags and authentication and the manipulation thereof are not simple. As a result, I see features being added to Roller that I'm surprised to see happening so quickly.

There's a surprising (or perhaps not so surprising) number of PHP programs, intricate ones at that, that have developers who didn't bother to abstract away the database layer, and wrote DB-vendor-dependent queries. That's a pretty horrible thing to do, since it ties you quite firmly down to one DB (in many cases MySQL). The SQL code is often very tightly integrate with the display code; it's bad enough in the business layer, but the view layer as well? Good gods.

Very nice. Architecture is only one of the many reasons you should consider Roller for any large or "enterprise blogging" installation. And it's only one of the reasons that Roller is advancing so quickly; some great developers have joined the team recently (Allen Gilliland and Elias Torres for example) and we've got demanding bloggers at both Sun Microsystems and IBM pushing us along.

Tags: topic:{technorati}[BlogOn], topic:{technorati}[BlogOn2005], topic:{technorati}[Roller Weblogger], topic:{technorati}[Enterprise Blogging], topic:{technorati}[Sun Microsystems], topic:{technorati}[IBM]

It's my first time back in New York in about nine years. I lived up in White Plains for several years when I worked for Nynex Science & Tech. Now I'm back for BlogOn 2005. and I'm looking forward to a great conference. I spent the day walking around the city. I made it from Grand Central Station down to "ground zero" and then about half-way back before I wimped out and hopped on the subway.

Tags: topic:{technorati}[BlogOn], topic:{technorati}[BlogOn2005], topic:{technorati}[NYC]

http://blogapps.dev.java.net

I just started a new project at Java.Net to host the example code from my upcoming book RSS and Atom in Action. The examples include parsers, a Swing-based BlogClient (for MetaWeblog API and Atom Protocol), the standalone Roller Planet aggregator (which powers Triangle Blogs and the The Daily Mink), and lots of others. I'll also use it to distribute the Blogapps Demo Server, which is a standalone blog/wiki server based on Tomcat, Roller, JSPWiki and HSQLDB. (Don't tell anybody at Java.Net, but most of the examples are in both Java and C#). I haven't uploaded any code yet; I hope to get to that this weekend.

There's a new draft of the Atom Protocol available and I've already started working on updating my client (the BlogClient example from my upcoming book RSS and Atom in Action) and server (in the Roller sandbox) implementations. Surprisingly, the new spec doesn't look all that different from the previous one, so perhaps a weekend of work will do the trick.

Jim Grisanzio has written up a wonderful summary of lessons learned from his work in the Open Solaris community. He wrote it for the many teams at Sun that are involved in open source projects and open source community building, but it looks like good reading for just about anybody in the software industry today.

Tags: topic:{technorati}[Open Solaris], topic:{technorati}[Open Source], topic:{technorati}[Community Building]

Please help the survivors of the earthquake disaster in southern Asia by donating to the Red Cross.

I spent Friday and Saturday in Greensboro, NC at the ConvergeSouth 2005 conference. I had a great time meeting fellow NC bloggers and attending talks on community building, blogging and journalism, collaboration, blog tools and podcasting. The next couple of posts will be my trip report, based on my notes and recollections. This is final installment #3 of 3.

Saturday, the focus of the ConvergeSouth conference was new media and "creativity on the web for all people" and the format was Dave Winer blogcon style "un-conference." That means there's a moderator with no prepared talk or slides who briefly introduces a topic and then the audience engages in a blog-like conversation on the topic. Interesting idea and it can work well, but I still like the old tried-and-true "expert gives engaging, insightful and interesting talk" format of conference and fortunately some of the speakers at Converge did too.

Policing the Media, Duncan Black

The first talk I attended was Policing the Media led by Duncan Black. After a fairly long introduction, he went into the blogcon format. In his introduction Duncan explained that he wants to improve the media. We deserve better. He had a litany of complaints and didn't try to capture them all. Traditional (and I'm assuming he means print) journalists ignore the rest of the media: talk radio, cable news networks, and partisan news outlets. Journalists won't admit mistakes. They don't do proper fact checking.

After his intro, Duncan didn't really get any objections from the audience and in fact the first question was from a newspaper guy who asked how papers can collaborate with bloggers. Some suggestions were to use bloggers as stringers, to use hyperlinks, and to look at what The Raleigh News and Observer is doing with its blogs and specifically Tarheel Blogwatch. From there the conversation moved to stories of policing the media, the most memorable one involved the issue of hot topic voting machines. I must say, the blogcon format worked pretty well for this talk.

Collaboration, Jimmy Wales

The next talk was on collaboration by Jimmy Wikipedia Wales. It was a traditional presentation, not blogcon format, a complete history and status report on Wikipedia and closely related projects like WikiNews and Wiktionary.

I was most interested in the discussion of real time peer review and the techniques used to keep the wiki vandals and spammers at bay. The Wikipedia folks are able to correct damage and ban the attacker within a minute of an attack. That's great, but is pretty depressing how many people they have working on "recent changes patrol." That's why I keep the Roller wiki locked down and only give username/password access to people I know. Jimmy mentioned the need for a global blacklist of spammers and vandals and that Wikipedia is the logical place to maintain such a blacklist. Roller really needs a good blacklist (for comment/trackback spam), especially now that Jay Allen has stopped maintaining MT-Blacklist.

Tools & the Future, Dave Winer

This was an open blogcon style session centered on the question what do you want from the tools. Much of the discussion was dominated by a couple of complete newbies who just wanted things to be easier, but didn't have any concrete suggestions. That's fine I guess. It confirms what I think most folks working on blogging tools already know: ease of use and simplification are the top-priority (well, ok, maybe they come second to spam-prevention). Here are the most useful suggestions that I heard during the session.

• Ability to annotate podcasts and provide metadata
• Easy point-and-click audio and video blogging
• Automatic hyperlinks
• Built-in spell checking
• Interactive and comprehensive how-to tutorial for new bloggers
• Better directories to help us find interesting blogs
• Better ways to index and query the blogs

I don't think the blogcon format worked very well in this session. We would all have benefitted from a little better preparation and a little more steering. See also: Kevin Howarth's notes from this session.

Podcasting, Herb Everett

This session was a basic overview of podcasting. While it was interesting to hear Herb's experiences, I really didn't learn anything that I didn't already know about podcasting. Talking to some podcasters after the session I learned that the Apple iTunes tags are pretty important nowadays (but have the bugs been worked out?). I'm wondering if Roller's podcast support should include them in addition to the standard <enclosure> tag. See also: Kevin Howarth's notes from this session.

Dinner and conclusion

Saturday night, I attended one of the hosted dinners and finally got to meet Ed Cone, Greensboro blogger and one of the conference organizers. I've been reading Ed's blog ever since I discovered his Jerry Garcia interviews a couple of years back. Ed interviewed Jonathan Schwartz and Tim Bray just the other week, but didn't realize that blogs.sun.com is driven by homegrown North Carolina software.

That's it for my trip report. All and all a great experience. If you want to read more about the conference, check out conference organizer Sue Polinsky's list of posts on the topic and the Technorati tag ConvergeSouth.

Tags: topic:{technorati}[ConvergeSouth], topic:{technorati}[Journalism], topic:{technorati}[Podcasting], topic:{technorati}[Blogging]

I spent Friday and Saturday in Greensboro, NC at the ConvergeSouth 2005 conference. I had a great time meeting fellow NC bloggers and attending talks on community building, blogging and journalism, collaboration, blog tools and podcasting. The next couple of posts will be my trip report, based on my notes and recollections. This is installment #2.

I didn't get much out of this session because it was completely focused on the business of journalism. That's not to say it wasn't interesting, it was, but there wasn't a whole lot of information that I could relate to or take away and use in my day-to-day work. The session leaders were Phil Meyers, Sybril Bennnet, Chris Nolan and Martin Heimann.

UNC journalism professor Phil Myers gave a fascinating summary of the old journalism business model, which was based around newspapers. His book, The Vanishing Newspaper, sounds interesting even for a non-journalist.

Sybril Bennett and Chris Nolan covered the new business model, which I admit, I don't totally understand. It seems to involve outsourcing the newsroom. Now that the "newsroom has left the building" due to both the advent of personal publishing tools and old media layoffs, you have to go out, track it down and pay it to write for you again. One way to do that is to use bloggers as stringers to get additional local coverage (Jeff Jarvis wrote about this). And bigger name bloggers can band together to sell ads across a network, to sell their writing to main-stream media outlets or just to get bought-out. Weblogs Inc., Gawker Media and Pajama Media were offered as an examples of this type of organization. Hmmm... $25 million dollars... on second thought, maybe I do understand.

Finally, Martin Heimann explained how his company can help you to internationalize and localize your websites. I guess I was completely lost at this point because I could not figure out how this relates to the new journalism business model. Seemed to me, this was, to use a journalistic term, "filler."

Tags: topic:{technorati}[ConvergeSouth], topic:{technorati}[Journalism], topic:{technorati}[Blogging]

Not this time. I still haven't been able to get the new Google newsfeed reader to do anything useful.

I spent Friday and Saturday in Greensboro, NC at the ConvergeSouth 2005 conference. I had a great time meeting fellow NC bloggers and attending talks on community building, blogging and journalism, collaboration, blog tools and podcasting. The next couple of posts will be my trip report, based on my notes and recollections.

Day one of the conference focused on new journalism and the media. The first session I attended was Blogging and Community Building, which was led by David Hoggard, Ruby Sinreich and Bora Zivkovic. Ruby talked about Orange Politics, a local politics/community activism website which uses blog software (Wordpress), but is really more of a moderated community forum. Ruby is one of several site editors who have the ability to post new topics and moderate reader comments. She said that having well chosen topics and good moderation is very important, otherwise the flames can spin out of control.

Bora Zivkivic talked about the concept of a blog carnival, a concept originated by NC bloggers at Siflay Hraka. A blog carnival is a roaming blog anthology. A bunch of bloggers decide to participate in a carnival on a specific topic, they all submit their best posts on the topic and on carnival day the host of the carnival posts a summary that describes and links to all of the posts that were submitted. The next time the carnival is held, it's hosted by a different blogger. Everybody involved gets an increased flow of new readers, finds interesting new things to read and of course, some extra google juice from all the cross-linking. As of today, you can browse 108 individual carnivals at blogcarnival.com.

You know, we didn't realize it at the time, but the Open Solaris launch was a blog carnival. Everybody involved did their best to come up with interesting and insightful posts on topics related to Open Solaris and on launch day we turned the blogs.sun.com front page into an aggregation of Open Solaris blogs; a sort of robotic blog carnival host. Within a day after the launch, Sun blogger Bryan Cantrell stepped up and starting doing the work of a real-live human blog carnival host with his posts Sifting through the blogs, More blog sifting and Yet more blog sifting. By the way, it was a great success; here's a good summary by Andy Lark.

Some of the other ideas for blog community building were community aggregators, meet-ups and blog teach-ins to help newbies get started with blogging. David Hoggard mentioned the Greensboro101 and NCBlogs aggregators and the value of face-to-face meet-ups in bringing a community together. Brian Russell brought up the idea of having teach-ins to help newbie bloggers get started, which has worked well for new bloggers in Greensboro and the Triangle areas.

Most of the ideas discussed in the session are pretty well known in the Java and Open Solaris communities. We've been using community aggregators (e.g. planetsolaris.org, planetsun.org, javablogs.com, etc.) and, of course, meet-ups (e.g. Java and now Open Solaris user group meetings) for some time now. We've discussed teach-ins for new bloggers at Sun, but we haven't followed through on that yet.

Near the end of the session, Dave Winer asked why we care about building communities, is it all about getting hits and flow, and what's the point? Based on the responses from the panel and the audience, I'd say the point of blog-based community building is to work towards the shared goals of a community whether that is to change local politics, share good writing, or build and support a great open source operating system.

Tags: topic:{technorati}[ConvergeSouth], topic:{technorati}[Blog Carnival], topic:{technorati}[Open Solaris], topic:{technorati}[Community Building]

• Dreaming of an Atom Store
  Joe: "Let's roll up our sleeves and make it happen"
• Building an Atom Store
  Mark: "It's coming. Within weeks, not years"

Tuesday 6:30PM at Cafe Cyclo in Cameron Village (via Josh).

Like Josh, I'm doing some travel and getting some schoolin' this month too. This Friday, I'm heading over to Greensboro, NC for the blogging-focused ConvergeSouth conference. I'm looking forward to meeting lots of interesting people and attending sessions on blogging and community building, where's the business model going, creating branding, collaboration and tools & the future. Next, I'm going up to NYC for BlogOn 2005 conference where I'll take part in a panel discussion with Scott Rafer of Wireless Ink and Scott Gatz of Yahoo!

Congrats to Josh. He's been accepted to Startup School in Boston.