More minor geekery

The RSS feeds should now work, courtesy of an Apache redirect and a tweaking of the index page…

Scobelist irritations, redux

So having whinged about Robert Scoble’s bulkblogging, he links to my post using said bulkblogging tool, and the whole post is there. So it could just be a cunning stunt to make us all more concise….

Scobleist irritations

Robert Scoble has got himself a meta (or should that be mega?) blogging tool built into Outlook called OutlookMT - just drag an item into a folder, and bing! it posts itself. Which is useful for him, but intensely irritating for me, because it only provides (at most) a couple of lines of the post itself, and more often than not just the title. Wading through 80-odd titles is more than I can be bothered with most of the time, which is a shame because there’s probably some gems in there.

Doctorow on DRM

A fantastic essay / speech / lecture from Cory Doctorow to Microsoft Research on DRM, that demolishes - neatly and eruditely - the myths of DRM. It’s optimistic, pointing out that virtually every technological innovation invented in the last 100 years has been opposed by the then-equivilent of the RIAA and friends; and every technological innovation has then gone on to create bigger and better markets for the content that the RIAA and friends are trying to ‘protect’.

Not that I’m so optimistic. Which rules are made and which technologies prevail ultimately comes down to the whim of the lawmakers, at least in our current way of making decisions. And the trend seems to be that it’s not about the quality of the arguments so much as the resources that you can throw at making your argument. That gives Cory’s side of the argument a fundamental problem, because their resources are a fraction of those that the other side can call on.

Excuse the strange appearance…

… we’re playing with our stylesheets…

It didn’t take too long for the subversion to start

Current iMix playlists include:
‘iTunes Needs Indies’ - one track: ‘Money For Nothing’ by Dire Straits
‘Release The Indies’ - three tracks: ‘Insane In The Brain’, ‘Such A Twat’, and ‘What Is He Thinking?’

Some quotes from the Internet Planet conference on weblogs

Corporate Weblogs that don’t have an individual or face behind them don’t work

Anil Dash, Six Apart

If you don’t seize the opportunity, you are ceding it to someone else

Michael Gartenberg, Research Director, Jupiter Research

What [blogs do] is put a human face on the company

Greg Reinacker, Newsgator

Subcategories for Moveable Type

Continuing on the Moveable Type theme, one of the major limitations of the platform up until now has been the lack of support for sub-categories of postings. But one of MT’s great strengths is its plugins - small modules of code written by third-parties that extend the basic functionality of the products - and now there’s a new version of the Subcategories plugin from David Raynes that goes a long way to plugging that gap.

Listening to customers, redux

A few weeks ago I posted about reactions to the pricing structure of the latest version of Moveable Type, one of the most widely-used weblogging tools. The changes were announced on Six Apart’s blog - the post itself was an upbeat explanation of the new licensing terms, while the trackback links below were overwhelmingly (and vigorously) negative. A great example of instant feedback from customers.

To their credit, Six Apart didn’t react by immediately pulling down the criticism from their site, as you might expect a commercial organisation to do - after all, you can’t imagine McDonalds or Texaco allowing their sites to play host to opinions even slightly contrary to the party line, can you? Not only did they ride out the criticism, they also listened - the revised pricing structure has just been announced (on the blog, naturally), and it addresses many of the criticisms that were levelled at the initial version.

So a great example of the power of corporate weblogs on several levels. Not only did Six Apart get instantaneous - and very powerfully expressed - feedback on their decisions, they also took that feedback into account. Responses to the new model are fairly positive at the moment. From heros to zeros to heros again…

What’s a typical blog reader?

Weblogs have - how do you put this politely? - something of an image problem in the business environment. There are three responses we hear a lot when talking to businesses about how they could exploit weblogs in a corporate environment;

1. they’ve never heard of the word, let alone know what it means
2. they know what weblogs are, but see them as the preserve of the sandal-wearing geek
3. they can see the use of weblogs as a tool for both internal and external purposes.

Needless to say, we hear a lot more of 1 and 2 than 3.

Some interesting statistics from Blogads that came our way via e-consultancy.com suggest that opinion 2 is actually incorrect. Rather than weblogs being only for Unix geeks and angst-ridden teens, the typical blog reader is in fact older and wealthier than you might suppose. 60% are over 30, and 40% have an income in excess of GBP 50,000 (USD 90,000), while the average female blog reader is older still. Women are in a minority, however, as 80% of blog readers are male.

…the survey describes blog readers as “information junkies”

The research was skewed towards understanding the impact of weblogs on advertising, so it isn’t necessarily clear how these statistics translate into the impact on corporate weblogs, but the numbers suggest that a typical blog reader is more likely to be from the demographic groups that managers and influence makers fall into. And interestingly, the survey describes blog readers as “information junkies” - who are suffering most from information and email overload.