blogging

I like Om Malik and I like what he’s doing with GigaOm as a network. Somehow I think when Web2.0 advertising dries up, there will still be marketing dollars for Malik’s blogs which are both niche and important in the long term. His latest is NewTeeVee and is highly recommended.

If you are a completely miserable git – like me, you will love consumerist. Its a blog that will focus consumer frustration, spraying lame companies with virtual offal. Along with Sploid, its a Gawker media property that I will actually read – in fact this time i may actually contribute. The Consumerist: Shoppers Bite Back

So Kottke has set up in an garret in Brooklyn to become the first full-time Blogger with Left-Bank style freedom – which is great news, good luck Jason. What is irrational is that people somehow think that having patrons, as opposed to a day job or corporate sponsors is selling out. Er… patronage is what traditionally separates artists from employees. Van Gogh had a patron, he was not a ‘for-profit’ enterprise. Take this nonsense in the Guardian: “For me, a more serious concern is that, like the rapper who runs out of things to write songs about when he becomes a celebrity, Kottke.org’s “voice” will become lose something from becoming a for-profit enterprise.” Give me a break! Guardian Unlimited | Newsblog | Paid to blog

Alternative travel: Gridskipper – How to go on an urban safari if your’re not an SUV driver. Hard and edgy travel guide for people who prefer alcohol to bucolic. Alternative software: Lifehacker – Wonkette meets Gizmodo, hackette driven guide to stringing together all those useful software bits and bobs into something more useful – softly softly approach to give late adopters the early adopter scoop.

Ooh I like this, about time fact checking got a reality check. Jason Kottke satirizes anal retentive blogger fact checking of big media, pointing out that almost anything can be deconstructed to look misleading. 60 Minutes wrong again! (kottke.org)

Well there are several possible measures (and one very interesting candidate): offline recognition (i.e. PR exposure, number of mentions in news articles), traffic/reach, (Alexa rank), popularity amongst Bloggers (Technorati 100), hybrid measure of online popularity (Google Pagerank). The interesting thing is that there is no clear winner amongst these measures and that although there are similar rankings for top weblogs accross the board, there is one clear winner for Pagerank. It beats the Gawker media sites and Boingboing and Scripting with a Pagerank of 9 – PVRblog PVRblog also has the biggest gap between Pagerank and Alexa rank. These stats demonstrate something interesting – perhaps PVR blog shows the perfect scope for a vertical market weblog with maximum Google exposure for its traffic. I’m not entirely sure what this means, the difference should either disappear over time as a Pagerank of 9 drives more traffic and thus boosts Alexa rank…

Do Penis Enlargement Pills Work? is a weblog that has been aggressively linked to recently. Ostensibly it is a personal account of a guy from New York trying the type of product that is normally advertised in spam email. I’m fairly sure this a new type of marketing scam, a ‘Spamblog’, a fake personal blog designed specifically to drive Pagerank and visitors to a product? The evidence: 1. Only two products are mentioned throughout the blog. 2. They are mentioned too often and the links seem too judicious to be real. 3. The discussion of the results of the product are wholly positive (and this stuff is snake oil). 4. Both products have similar websites and are clearly distributed by the same company. 5. The ‘about me’ seems to generic, this is not a real person. So there you have it, I guess there will be more of these types…

Sixapart are in a position to dominate the weblog publishing market, they have the best pro tool, Moveable type and the best service, Typepad. But the pro tool is used for free by many people (cough), and the service which is easier for new users is paid for and competes against free services. Wouldn’t it be better to have the Moveable Type as a paid for tool – the Dreamweaver of blogging and Typepad as an ad supported free service?