http://annevankesteren.nl/archives/2004/08/weblog-system

http://news.com.com/Blogging+test+pilots+in+Boston/2010-1025_3-5293461.html

Why don’t more programmers use blogs to publish their change logs?

Nike Article
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/3634.asp

Media Guerilla
http://mmanuel.typepad.com/media_guerrilla/2004/07/informationweek.html

A few weeks ago, I introduced the term Blatigue to describe the overwhelming sense of pressure that most bloggers come to feel at one point in their blogging “career” or another. I know this author has.

Gadgetopia points to “Bloggers Suffer Burnout”, Wired’s version of the the New York Times piece. Though the sentiment s are the same, some interesting points are brought to the surface.

• Blogging Breeds Conversation - The majority of blogs that I visit do not garner significant commentary. I’ve often tried to rationalize why this may or may not be so, but it’s anyone’s guess right now. On the other hand, those individuals that do comment on things very close to the hearts of their readers are often bombarded with messages, some good, some bad, and many in between.

  Comments create an issue on two fronts. On the one hand, they provide an outlet for those bastard spammers. I know that as the sites I write for become more and more indexed, more and more SPAM comments have to be eradicated. On the other hand, and the more important one really, there’s the conversation to maintain. Visitors are engaging the author in dialog which creates a pressure to not only digest their thoughts, but to reply in kind. When there’s one or two comments, not so bad. When there’s 100 or more, it’s Everest.

  “You’ve only got so many hours in the day, and like most bloggers, I’ve got a full-time day job, and something had to give,” Billmon said. “In the end, monitoring comments on my blog was becoming a progressively larger part of my blogging time, and I just got to the point where I wasn’t able to keep up with it.”

  Source: Wired.com, “Bloggers Suffer Burnout”

• Blogging Breeds Dependency - Once a reader is hooked onto a blog, they are constantly polling it for their next fix. Anyone who’s checked their logs can see who the most common hosts are and even how often they’re checking in.

  An interesting correlation between health and post level is made:

  Several bloggers contacted for this story noted that their readers seem to look at their regular, consistent posting patterns as somewhat akin to a sign of physical health. And any break in that pattern is sometimes seen as a cause for alarm.

  “I know that if I go more than about five or six hours without posting, or telling people that I’m not going to be blogging for the rest of the day,” said Reynolds, readers e-mail him and say, “You haven’t posted anything in five or six hours. Are you OK?”

  Source: Wired.com, “Bloggers Suffer Burnout”

• Blogging Breeds Pressure - It is still debatable exactly how much attention one’s blog actually generates, but there is a gut feeling that tells every author that they are not alone (and sometimes statistics by way of referrer logs and the like). But the pressure is there and for man it just continues to rise till they collapse from it.

  “There’s always pressure to have new content up on the site,” said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, author of the anti-Bush blog Daily Kos (Moulitsas Zuniga is married to a regular Wired News contributor). “And it’s not like my readers are calling me up and saying, ‘What the hell?’ But you can sense it. You can sense it when you post something new and 10 minutes later there’s 50 comments. You can almost feel they were sitting there waiting.”

  Source: Wired.com, “Bloggers Suffer Burnout”

• Blogging Breeds Anxiety - Naturally, when there’s pressure, there’s anxiety. Discovering and creating content can be time-consuming, if not complicated tasks. Bloggers either have a well of stored thoughts and ideas they wish to relate or they must rummage through the fields to find new ideas to post about. It’s may be hard to imagine, but there are often times where I know in the back of my mind I am thinking “That’s not a good post” or “Posting was light this week”. Turns out, I’m not alone.

  “There are lulls where nothing seems interesting, where people are just talking about (blogging gadfly) David Winer again, and I say, what the fuck,” said Kottke, who himself depends at least in part on the blogosphere for good fodder for his site. “Sometimes it gets harder to find interesting stuff to talk about. There are 3 million blogs, and everyone is talking about everything. It’s tough to deal with that sometimes, and you don’t want to just be another person talking about the same stuff that everybody else is talking about.”

  Source: Wired.com, “Bloggers Suffer Burnout”

Eventually, this all leads to severe Blatigue and possibly event complete burnout. Have you been nice to your blogger today?

Recently, the Blogging World as a whole reached a new milestone. Technorati, famous for indexing the blogosphere en masse, has finally surpassed the 3 million blog limit. This is reminiscent of the days of past when the leading search engines were indexing anew and boasting of the millions of web pages that they were already indexing.

Anyone who was awake during that time had a sense that things were growing, and it the mega-buzz of the 90’s didn’t help to overly amplify the growth and potential of the medium, I don’t know what could have. Ironically enough, back then, we had to idea how bad the buzz was, nor how much the Internet had really arrived.

Looking at today, it seems we’re entering another boom period. Of course, there are a few key differences that are apparent:

• Money - Though we’re seeing capital flow into this space, it is certainly not nearly as dizzying or frenzied as the DotBomb period was. This is incredibly encouraging as temperament was the key component missing from the first Internet Stew.

• Organization - Previously, ideas and concepts were being organized from the top down. Lots of MBA brats and top brass were jumping off or into the pit and trying to make the rain they so needed. Today, we’re seeing several bottom-up forces at play. There’s the ever-growing and popular open source movement that is creating stunning software that still baffles some of the biggest gorillas. In addition, we’ve got regular citizens evolving into outlets, some even generating revenue early in the game. Imagine that there are countless bloggers that have already profited more than many publicly traded companies of yesteryear.

• Quality - Let’s face it, in the 90’s there were some outright stupid ideas being funded with serious money. I won’t name names, but you know who you are. Today, we’re seeing something quite different emerging. Audiences of 1 seem to be enough to fund the development of thoughts, business, and interaction. Bloggers are writing because they want to, and about the things they want to. People are tuning in - in droves, including the big media and other outlets that should/would otherwise scowl. People are starting to get attached in ways never seen before.

To round this up, I’ll point to some amazing statistics that Joi Ito recently pointed out.

On an average weekday, we’re seeing over 15,000 new weblogs created per day. That means that a new weblog is created somewhere in the world every 5.8 seconds.

Of course, not all weblogs that are created are actively updated. Even though abandonment rates are high - our analyses show that about 45% of the weblogs we track have not had a post in over 3 months we are still tracking a significant population of people who are posting each day. The number of conversations are increasing. We’re seeing over 275,000 individual posts every day. That means that on average, more than 3 blogs are updated every second. The median time from when someone posts something to their weblog to when it is indexed and available for searches on Technorati is 7 minutes. And we’re striving to handle the load. But to be perfectly frank, it isn’t easy. We’ve had some bugs and some outages - and for that I am truly sorry. I don’t think the service is fast enough or stable enough. So, stability and fast response time is job #1, over new features and product developments. It has to work, 100% of the time.

Source: Joi Ito’s Blog, ” Technorati tracks 3M blogs! “

As a freelance developer, I am often brought on location to work with clients/development teams on a number of different projects. For the most part, these projects span several weeks, if not months. Joining a team in this manner forms both new acquaintances and friendships. Often, the activities we engage in outside of work roll into parts of conversations during work.

Several months ago I was working on a 4 month contract. It was with a client I’ve had for several years now so they, staff and management, were aware of my blog and the things I was working on. Something struck me one day as I was posting up an entry I had written, “Will they see the timestamp on this and feel I was not working on work-related things?”.

For the most part, I write most of my entries late at night, around midnight or so. I tend to prepare several but post them over time throughout the day (there’s reasons for that which I’ll cover some other time). As a result, it’s possible to find lengthy posts in the middle of the day even though I hadn’t written it right then.

For that specific contract, I was billing by the hour. I wasn’t particularly worried that the client would be checking up on me or that they would even accuse me, however, it did raise an eyebrow. It seems entirely possible that if a dispute had arisen, the frequency and volume of your posts could actually be a liability if a client wished to go over matters with a fine-toothed comb.

I know from past fiascos with clients that regardless of the quality of your work, once a client is unhappy with some aspect (be it failed marketing, overzealous expectations, etc.) they come back and blame only one group, the developers.

(more…)

For any and all Feedster users out there, a new, impressive version is soon to be released and Peter Caputa has some details. Check it out to find out what the features are and see a quick glimpse of the new interface.

We’ve often seen cases where the people creating profiles on the various social networking sites, e-mail providers, and other outlets exaggerate, lie, or otherwise manipulate their representations of self. For the proprietors of these sites and services, it has proved to be a true challenge, often requiring teams of staff members to police their ranks.

The blogging world, on the other hand, has been somewhat more protected from impersonation (at least that’s the accepted consensus). There have been instances in the past, such as Belle de Jour. However, many of the authenticity of these matters were rumored though never proved true. But no more!

Suw Charman writes at the Social Software Weblog about a true hoax that has been revealed by the author:

A three year old blog chronicling the life of a woman called Layne Johnson has been revealed as a fake. According to the Mercury News, the Plain Layne Weblog had thousands of readers who were drawn by her polished, witty postings about “her relationships, her travels and her adventures at ‘Minicorp’, the nickname she gave her high-tech Minnesota employer”.

Layne not only kept a blog, she commented on other people’s, created profiles on social networking sites and exchanged emails and instant messages with fans.

Source: Social Software Weblog, “Plain Layne Weblog was ‘interactive fiction’”

So if you fake your identity on Friendster, your a Fakester. If you fake your identity on a blog, what are you?

Liz Lawley makes a compelling argument that if we intend to really understand blogs, we need to study them in much they way we would any social trend. She identifies, as starting points, 5 areas of study (paraphrased here):

1. Study of the Form - this entails providing a firm definition of what a blog is. Largely, many things are grouped into the blog category based on the appearance of single attributes which inevitably clouds discussions. Part of this she defines as “types of blogs” by way of authority, audience, or interactivity.

2. Study of Interactions - “the study of interactions between blogs and blog authors, and the clusters (or communities) that are forming in this context”

3. Study of Ethnographics - “both qualitative and quantitative assessments of these emerging communities”. How do different audiences and authors use their blog?

4. Study of Content and Style - this would look at the various writing styles and resulting communications that are emerging as a result of the unique characteristics of blogging.

5. Study of Use in Organizational Contexts - “From blogs as coursware to blogs as information-sharing tool in business team settings to blogs as research team project tools, there’s still a lot we need to learn and understand about blogs as tools for specific tasks and contexts.”

Source: Many 2 Many, “blog research issues”

Hopefully, I’ve done a decent job of summarizing her points here. I will point out/add that I’ve also been trying to look into the blogging world, though I’ve not laid out as long of a roadmap as Liz.

Specifically, I’ve already attempted to categorize the style and format of blog entries via the Blog Entry Archetypes. Additionally, I’ve started now to consider the various types of blogs themselves with the Blog Archetypes. Though the approaches are somewhat different, hopefully the efforts are additive (I know I’ll be trying to merge some of these points into my final Blog definition).