The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits -- to You
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Explore the myriad of distribution points -- automated data crunchers, search engines, social networks and fellow bloggers -- a blogger's words take on their way to readers.
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Tycho:  Months after it was necessary, Sony has thrown their blogging hat into the ring...  of blogging.  I've heard people compare it to Larry Hryb/Major Nelson's blog, but with a rotating "crew" of bloggers - like a public relations version of the Wu Tang Clan - it's more like Microsoft's Gamerscore blog.  Which, coincidentally, I never read because it is run by a rotating "crew" of bloggers, like a public relations version of the etcetera etcetera.  The mental image is that of a corporate hydra, the brand seared and scabbed upon its breast.
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In March 2002, I made a bet with Martin Nisenholtz about the relative importance of weblogs and the New York Times. I was and am a blogger, and Martin worked then, as he does now, for the Times. For the actual terms of the bet, read the piece on the LongNow site, and a story I wrote to announce the bet. A few comments.  1. It seems now is the time to decide who won the bet, if either of us did. 2. The world that I hoped would come about did not. While blogs have broken many stories, they have not, in general, turned into the authoritative sources I hoped they would in 2002. When the blogosphere resembles journalism it's often the tabloid kind.  3. I wouldn't mind losing the bet. That is, I wouldn't mind if the Times fully embraced the web, and I suspect Martin wouldn't mind if blogs rose to the quality of the Times. 4. If the bet had been held a year later, it seems there would be a pretty good chance that Martin would have won the bet because they recently took down the firewall at the Times, allowing search engines to index the full content. In the past, articles would remain visible for a couple of weeks then you'd have to pay money to access them. I believe they have a special deal with Google and other crawlers that allow them to get past the membership wall. For most of 2007 the Times articles were behind the firewall, and were less likely to be pointed to (which is how they rise in rank at Google). 5. It certainly is fun to speculate, but the decision about who won belongs exclusively to the Long Now Foundation. They have to decide who determines what the top stories of 2007 are, and imho they should consult with search experts to determine how to do the queries. Apparently it makes a difference how you do it.  But ultimately it's their decision. 6. Whether Wikipedia has more or less results seems to be a sidebar to the bet, which only talks about blogs and the Times. 7. Another interesting sidebar is rich media. In 2002, before podcasting had taken hold, before YouTube existed, it would have been hard to forsee the story of the South Carolina beauty queen, or the Don't Tase Me Bro guy. Questions about the future are always framed in the context of the past. Did the question Martin and I asked have any value in 2007, or did it just say something about the world of 2002?   Update: Paul Boutin who arranged the bet, apparently in conjunction with Google (I didn't know this) in 2002, weighs in.
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A few days back there was a post on the "The Codist" blog about why the author would never quite understand the appeal of PHP to the masses and some of his thoughts behind it. Well, there was such an outcry and response to his comments that he's written up another post on what he learned from comments made.   Clearly I touched a nerve. However I did learn a lot of things that you don't read in a quickly tutorial on PHP. The whole point of writing something is to get feedback, positive or negative, and hopefully learn from it.   He admits that his experience with PHP and its developers has been limited, so his perspective might have been thrown off a bit. He still holds to one thing from the previous article, though - that PHP just isn't for him.
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Paul Abrahams' comparison of blogs with the CB radio fad may or may not prove to be right, but too many of us are missing the wider influence of user-generated media.   It is not just bloggers who are influencing corporate reputations online.
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In response to this recent article from the Hiveminds website, Marco Tabini has a few choice words about some of the topics they cover in the article, and cover incorrectly.   Over the last few years, I've made it a point of trying to respond to at least some of the "PHP is dead"-type articles that crop up on the Net from time to time. The latest one comes from Hiveminds and reveals a complete misunderstanding of almost every point it covers.   He notes that though the article seems to be a coherent whole for why PHP is dwindling, it's "based on nothing more than a string of misinformed concepts cobbled together to give the appearance that the author knows what he or she is talking about". Marco comes back against each of the points made in the article, setting things right and eliminating some of the FUD (fear, uncertainly, and doubt) that the Hiveminds article spreads.
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Blogs and wikis are wonderful tools, but they can devolve into the online equivalent of grunting apes.
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New chapters in the portal's quest for user-generated content.
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I've been saying this ever since I started blogging.  When you have a product to announce, start a blog (if you don't already have one) and announce it. Before there were blogs, I wished Infoworld or PC Week would give space to the lead developer of the product, whether he or she is a marketer or technical, even the CEO if they wouldn't assign a former reporter or ad guy to write it, and tell us what you meant when you designed this product. Who were you thinking of and what would they do with it. And where does it go? What does 2.0 look like if it's 1.0 or 3.0 if it's 2.0.  I like it when people like Zuckerberg, Andreessen or Canter write a blog post that tells you without pulling any punches what the intent of the product is, in their own words. I'd like to hear what they said to the team that worked on it. I'd like to use my imagination. That's why I don't like Steve Jobs' keynotes, he's telling you what Eddie Haskell would say about the product to Mrs. Cleaver. You never get the intent when it's filtered by the press. And many of the people that call themselves bloggers, love them and bless them, aren't anything like bloggers, and they're everything like the bored hired writers that used to work at CNET and Fortune. In fact, many of them are exactly like them (because they are them).  We live in the age of DIY, that means if you have something to say, just say it. PS: Here's a picture of three child actors from Leave It To Beaver, taken when they're in their fifties. From left to right, Eddie Haskell, Beaver and Wally. Time Waits for No One.
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WebReference.com has posted part four (the final installment) of their "Building a Weblog" series today, focusing on creating the categories for the posts, adding a new entry, and updating a current one.   First off is the creation of the categories script - just a simple little page that takes in the category name (from a form) and inserts it into the categories table in the database. The next form functions in basically the same way, but handles more information. It lets you write and save a new blog entry to the database.    Finally, since everyone makes mistakes, they include a sample script to let you update one of your already posted blog entries, using the same kind of form you used to enter it.
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By Patricia Kitchen, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.  Feb. 18--Just as employers are figuring out the role of blogs, their value and downside, along come wikis.
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By Chris Tomlinson  You may have noticed that the web is obsessed with lists. This is either something to do with ordering content logically or the autistic genius of its early creators.
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The ProDevTips website has posted part seven of their series covering the construction of a community site (or CMS) with the combination of Smarty and the Zend Framework.   Since XOOPS didn't do it for me when it comes to this project I have started with the blog component. As it turns out, a blog is more complicated than you would think. Therefore this part will not cover the whole component, only as far as I've gotten at the moment. Covering the whole process in one piece would make it a very long piece indeed.   He provides the code examples and complete SQL structure to get the blog up and rolling as well as some handy tips and explanations along the way.
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Sandro Groganz has a quick note posted on his blog about the online availability of the text of his article "PHP 5 Enterprise Edition".   I just found that my article entitled "PHP 5 Enterprise Edition" is now available online. It has initially been published in the International PHP Magazine.   He quotes a bit from the introduction to give you an idea of what the article's about, but defers the rest of the article to the International PHP Magazine website. There's lots of good content, screenshots, layouts and plenty of related links as well.
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).
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From Paul Jones' weblog today, there's a posting that more and more developers should live by - Document Your Project Already!
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DevShed caps off another series with this new tutorial today, ending their look at creating a blogging engine in PHP.   Welcome to the concluding installment of the series "Building a blogger with PHP." Made up of three friendly articles, this series provides you with all the information you need to start building a blog system with PHP in a few easy steps.   They look at their blogProcessor class first, including adding the needed database functionality to it. Then it's back out to the client side for the input forms and some validation before adding some style and formatting to the layout of the pages to make it a bit easier to use.