Former Blogger Googler Shellen joins LiveJournal
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Jason Shellen to be VP of product development at LiveJournal, a social network and blogging platform.
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Shortly after the election, Atrios posted a short piece on how to build the popularity of a blog. In it, his number one recommendation was to update frequently &mdash; at least once per day. People do not bother reading sites that only update once every several days. This, in case there is still confusion amongst those who run this fair website, is why the diary section overtook the regular article sections in terms of hits.  In order to avoid stagnation, history tells us, we need a constant influx of new users. At present, however, the only good reason to register a new account is when your old one gets banned. There is simply not enough front page content to attract the interest of potential new users. Additionally, without the life line provided by freshmeat.net's syndication of kuro5hin (ended some time last year), we need substantially more provocative and note-worthy content if we are to bring in fresh blood.  There are two simple administrative actions that could quickly allieviate the current front page content situation.
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Please quote me on this Stob There's another of those lists of supposedly amusing/sage/cute adagesÂ going around, bouncing from blog to email, accumulating fresh contributions and occasional edits and doing all the meme-ish things that memes do. This one differs from all the others that you have deleted irritably from your email inbox in that it includes a contribution taken from this very column.â¦
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Web search leader Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) on Thursday said the head of its Web log service, Blogger, will leave at the end of the week to pursue other interests.
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Google Inc.&#39;s Blogger team this week solved a technical problem with the blog publishing and hosting service and introduced a new feature that gives publishers the ability to upload videos to their sites.
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Those little devils who keep the gears turning inside the Twitter machine added a toy that's got the community sending public love missives whizzing around. You can figure it out yourself, or you can cheat and read this howto. @lovelyperson   Substitute the name of your lover in place of "lovelyperson" and you've just broadcast your love to all of TwitterLand.  While we're on the subject of Twitter, a couple of other items. 1. A must-read piece in today's NY Times, gives a clue why kids don't go for Twitter if their parents use it. No kid wants to be observed by his or her parents. Would they go for it if their parents weren't there? No one knows.  2. Conventional wisdom says you can't build a scalable distributed Twitter out of RSS. At first I accepted this, as a puzzle, then I remembered that's why we put the cloud element in there. I felt that for some applications polling would be too much. Since the cloud element has been largely ignored, most of the the apps of RSS couldn't scale to do what Twitter does. But if RSS desktop apps like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon were adapted to understand the cloud element, and if a proxy system was worked out to get through firewalls and NAT, it might just work.  3. Or you could use XMPP.
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Blog: Bloggers report that Google and Yahoo are creating new social networks to try to get back in the game since their existing services haven't gained widespread adoption
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Search Engine Roundtable, the blog of Barry Schwartz, has updated with a much more slick and streamlined design. I&#8217;ve been eagerly awaiting for the day that Barry updates his design as his company, Rusty Brick, puts out some incredible work and his personal blog, CartoonBarry, is top of the shelf in blog functionality. Excellent job Mr. Schwarzt!
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Phil Wolff on things for bloggers to do before they die.
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Found in the search marketing forums: AdWords Monitoring; Life Without the Little Green Bar; Help With Starting; and more.
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Jeff Jarvis, whose mind occupies the intersection of mainstream media and the blogging world, perhaps more than any other person, is having a conference in mid-October in NYC to bring together people from both worlds to present constructive ideas for working with each other. Me, my feet are firmly planted in the blogging world, but I've spent a lifetime reading and watching MSM, starting with the NY Times at the kitchen table with my parents and brother, when growing up. Some of my fondest memories as a child were our discussions of the days events, and the Times was our common structure. Everyone in our family read the newspaper, often from cover to cover.  As Jarvis councils us, never mind the mistakes, what can we do to make things work better? And I have a couple of proposals in that direction that I will try to present at the October 11 conference. In all cases, they involve the MSM opening up more to include not only the ideas of blogging, but also the bodies of the bloggers.  1. I've said it many times before, it's worth raising again. Any newspaper or radio or TV station with a good reputation in its community could embrace the fresh ideas of the bloggers in their community by offering free blogs to members of the community, who may be new to blogging. I suggested this to the Times in 2001 -- when a person is quoted in a Times article, a few days after the piece runs, contact them, and ask if they'd like to have a NY Times hosted blog. There would be no control over what appeared on the blog. It would have a nytimes.com domain (something like bullmancuso.nytimes.com). Build an aggregator, something very much like Twitter (which is after all, a river of news, not exactly a new idea, heh) that shows all the new posts from members of the community. Encourage (but don't require) your editorial people to read the blog posts. Let whatever happens happen.  2. Here's a new idea that I haven't proposed before. Open your newsroom to bloggers. Set aside a half-dozen desks for people who blog in your community, people you've gotten to know, and provide them with wifi, a water cooler, your coffee (no matter how bad it is) and chance to work alongside your editorial people and (very important) with each other. It's an incredible thing when bloggers get together in a physical space, the sparks can really fly. Now imagine what could happen if those sparks got flying between the remaining editorial people in a professional news organization and the bloggers. I believe the secret of scaling the news is right there, you just have to open the door and see what comes in.
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Found in the search marketing forums: Future of YPN?; Link Exchanges and Google's Opinion; Most Improved PPC Program; and more.
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The PHPWomen have posted a reminder about the mailing list that they're going to "dust off" and start using again (and suggest you do too!).   There's just the one list currently (as hosted by omniti) but there's lots of subscribers. You can check out the signup page for more information on the list and get access to some of the archives of previous topics.
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In my last blog post, I mentioned the work on rubinius (then at a 0.7 release and now at 0.8) and JRuby.  I also promised I&#8217;d follow up on them.  Here&#8217;s what&#8217;s been going on so far.
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Search Engine Watch gains a blog, as a new method of better speading news and information about search engines to readers.
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Crouching tiger slagging blogger Column Here's a quote from an interesting time in the past: ten years ago. You know, a decade back, 1997, when (It says here) 'Jorn Barger, who started his Robot Wisdom weblog in 1997, is "regarded by many" as the "first blogger".'â¦
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Eleven days ago I wrote a blog post describing a call-in service that I'd like to use to create a podcast with my friend and fellow blogger Robert Scoble. A new service (or one that I just became aware of) comes achingly close to doing what I want. Maybe it goes all the way there, but I've not seen how to do it. First, here's how it works. 1. Call 646-495-9201 x 49763. 2. Talk. 3. Hangup. There will be a new recording here.  http://drop.io/tradesecrets  Looks good!  But there are two problems. 1. The RSS feed doesn't have an enclosure, and even if you were willing to scrape the HTML there's no pointer to an MP3 file. 2. There's no pointer to an MP3 file on the landing page, although there appears to be one if you don't look at the HTML source. Tricky. It was enough to get Mike Arrington at Techcrunch to think it was there. I have a call into Mike to discuss. A caveat, I am also in touch with the folks at BlogTalkRadio. I want this service, and we're close to having it now. drop.io doesn't go quite far enough, they clearly want to drive traffic to their site, and appear unwilling to let the MP3 out into the wild. Interesting stuff!!  Update: I did a podcast with Robert and Patrick Scoble using drop.io. I was able to download the MP3, although it pretty well hidden, and upload it to my S3 account.