This was the second of what we hope will be a long series of bi-weekly
blog-based chat sessions on topics related to business on the Internet.
Check http://iblogcom.blogspot.com/
for news about
upcoming sessions and also to access the chat room.
20:01:31 Brent Ashley: I'm an independent consultant and scripting specialist. I wrote this blogchat thing among other things.
20:00:35 Richard Seltzer: Brent -- as you know this is the beauteous chaos of chat -- the bits of conversation get woven around one another.
20:01:11 sujamthe: I always look forward to what the woven fabric will look like just before each chat start, love it!
20:01:12 Richard Seltzer: Brent -- that's one of the reasons I love this version of chat of yours -- the ability to save the history, then edit it and post it.
20:01:54 Richard Seltzer: When I'm doing the editing, I'm always surprised at how the pieces look when straightened out a bit...
20:00:52 Alfred Thompson: OK Intro first. I am Alfred Thompson and I
work for Microsoft in academic relations. Social computing is a long time
personal
interest
20:02:18 Richard Seltzer: Welcome David and Kat, please introduce yourselves. We're just getting started.
20:01:29 David Sifry: Hi all. Glad to be here. I literally had to drive
to a Starbucks to get online because I'm out of the office today. here's
a pic of my mobile workspace:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsifry/123853013/
:-)
20:02:25 Alfred Thompson: have to love wi=fi
20:02:59 Brent Ashley: I'm also a partner in a company that does wifi infrastructure - we have our equipmt and services in 400 McDonalds across Canada for instance
20:03:05 Kat Ortland: Hi everyone, I'm Kat Ortland, Project Manager of SEOmoz.org and lead researcher of the Web 2.0 Awards (web2.0awards.org)
20:03:54 sujamthe: Hi Kat, glad you could stop by. Richard, Kat is our guest for next session, will join us to share the magic of blogs
20:03:55 Kat Ortland: also, I'm a long-time blogger. I've been blogging since 2001: jumped on the bandwagon in college and was the only one of my friends to keep up with it
20:04:21 Richard Seltzer: Kat -- glad you are a long-time blogger. We
need more of those. I'm a blog newcomer. I've been posting on the
Web regularly, frequently
since '94, but still don't really understand blogging.
20:05:05 David Sifry: Hi, I'm a part-time blogger, I blog at http://sifry.com/alerts. Happy to be here
20:07:18 Nancy White: Hi, I'm a blogger who started blogging to prove it was a flash in the pan and got addicted. http://www.fullcirc.com/weblog/onfacblog.htm
20:09:33 sujamthe: I am mentor to startups and have one blog for entreprenuers
http://coolastory.blogspot.com
I am like Richard from the old web world. There are several
vesions of my homepages chached on the web. I have couple blogs for
past 2 yrs.
20:08:25 Richard Seltzer: Brent and Alfred -- I'm basically trying to understand what the difference is.
19:58:52 sujamthe: Alfred, maybe you can share your comments from MS blogger Robert Scoble
19:59:35 Alfred Thompson: ok. Robert sent me a list of 5 differences
he saw between blogs and regular static web pages. Robert's points are:
1) It's easier to publish.
2) It's discoverable (you don't need to tell AltaVista you exist
3) It's conversational. I know almost instantly when you link to me.
4) It's viral. Every post has a permalink.
5) It's syndicatable. Connectors can read hundreds of sites
20:06:48 David Sifry: the difference is the TOOLS
20:06:58 sujamthe: Brent, you wrote blogchat, do you see these 5 as differences really?
20:06:57 Brent Ashley: I agree with Scoble's points. The blogging tools that are available now make it much easier to blog than to maintain static pages. I use Wordpress - it installed in minutes and is configurable out the wazoo
20:05:44 Richard Seltzer: Alfred -- I'm still mystified by blogging.
1) For me, it's far easier to post simple text static html Web pages.
2) -- in what way are blogs more findable than ordinary Web pages?
I don't need to tell Google that my ordinary Web pages exist. Google crawls
my site daily.
3) I was getting the same effect 10-12 years ago, simply quickly posting
email responses to pages I posted.
4 What's a "permalink"? And what's viral about it?
5 -- How does the RSS stuff work? Do I have to do something to turn
that on for my blog?
20:06:42 Alfred Thompson: Richard, to be honest I'm not sure I buy that one (2). It does seem as though search engines weight blogs heavily but I'm not sure why Permalinks (4) is another one I am not sure I buy. Sites like Richard's (and mine) have links that are as "perm" as ny blog post.
20:44:33 Alfred Thompson: RSS is a light weight way to get at the content. Think about it as reading web pages using an email program or a USENET reader. The content seems to come to you. with a web page you go to the content
20:17:33 Richard Seltzer: The difference seems to be more social than technological. People build habits of frequently returning to a particular blog and of frequently updating their own blogs. But that frequency was the way the Web was to begin with before it became overlaiden with graphics and fancy effects.
20:29:45 Brent Ashley: I sat on a Web 2.0 panel at a conference last week, and it's true, the social aspects are more important that the technological advances.
20:30:19 Brent Ashley: Here's a permalink to the blog post I made about the sociological web: http://www.ashleyit.com/blogs/brentashley/?p=586
20:30:31 Kat Ortland: Brent - I agree about the social aspects, and I'd add (for the most part) design to that
20:30:50 Richard Seltzer: Brent -- That's a neat term "sociological web". Please elaborate.
20:08:30 Brent Ashley: The thing blogging does for me is that it allows me to maintain an online reputation. The two-way nature of the net as it is becoming allows each of us to build and maintain a global reputation where transparency is an asset
20:08:46 Kat Ortland: Alfred - blogs are search friendly... not necessarily weighted heavier
20:08:50 Richard Seltzer: I'm used to posting simple text-heavy, no-graphics Web pages -- which is actually easier than posting to a blog.
20:09:30 Kat Ortland: they're easily spiderable, they classify themselves, they're frequently updated, they link out a lot and get many links in return. Blog templates often do a lot of things right as far as search engines are concerned, while your basic html webpage might not. On the other hand, there are basic HTML webpages that do those things right, but most blog templates are better designed from the get-go
20:11:59 Richard Seltzer: Kat -- I never used templates for Web pages. Still just use Netscape Composer -- ultimately simple.
20:12:12 sujamthe: Kat: You are the SEO expert. Do search engines like blogs better? Or are blogs really linked to more pages making their rank go up?
20:12:56 Kat Ortland: Sudjamthe- Search engines don't "like" blogs better, necessarily, they're just set up better for search engine access. Links certainly help, yes
20:13:47 Richard Seltzer: I'm under the impression that blogs are easy
to find because Google has gone out of its way to find and index them.
I started my own blog (using WordPress) about a month
ago, and the traffic to my site has gone up about 25%. 20:15:06 Richard
Seltzer: Thanks to that increased traffic, I now have to pay my Web host
nearly double
20:14:58 Kat Ortland: Richard - I'm not sure it's that Google goes out of its way, I think they're just easy to find because of the way content is presented.
20:38:11 Nancy White: There is something too, about how blogs help us find each other. It is not quite community building, but a part of community building.
20:09:14 Nancy White: Permalink value is that there is a direct link to a specific BIT of a page, rather than just the page. Makes discoverability a little more granular, no?
20:10:07 Richard Seltzer: Nancy -- Can you please clarify? I thought that you could only link to a specific item in a blog. Can you link to a piece of an item?
20:10:35 Nancy White: I don't know why, but adding blogs to a site can cause it to go way up in search engines. We had this happen when we added blogs to an online community, brain fart http://www.shareyourstory.org. HUGE increase in SE generated hits. 100X
20:11:04 Nancy White: Permalink is to a blog post, rather than a whole set of posts (though you can link to a set too). So it is granular - to a point! :-)
20:10:04 Alfred Thompson: granularity is important. Those of us who have used HTML for a while have coded more graualar links in our pages.
20:10:49 Richard Seltzer: Alfred -- Sorry, I'm a bit illiterate... What do you mean by granularity? Is that something I can add to my blog? Or does it happen automatically?
20:11:37 Nancy White: granularity: ability to zoom in to a particular level. More granualirty means going down to a finer, more specific level.
20:12:35 Richard Seltzer: Nancy -- Sorry, I don't know what you mean by "level" or how one implements what you are referring to. Please explain for a beginner. Thanks.
20:14:11 Nancy White: First, Richard, by level I'll give an example.
If I link to your web page, it goes to everything on it. Top level. But
if I could link to
a specific paragraph (which you can do in an HTML web page, but we
don't often do it) I can link right to that specific level. Viral - easy
to pass along with specific pointer and
hopefully relevance
20:16:52 Richard Seltzer: Nancy -- Can't I just include a URL in an email? Can't I just add a URL to my Favorites?
20:17:32 Nancy White: Richard, yes you can. But consider a cook book. You could point me to a cook book and say there is a great chocolate cake recipe in it. Or you could point me to the recipe directly.
20:18:02 Nancy White: Permalinks allow pointing to the more precise place. Anchor links (I think that is the term) do the same thing.
20:19:17 Richard Seltzer: Nancy -- How do I put "anchor links" in a blog posting?
20:20:53 Nancy White: Richard, you don't have to. That's the easy part Dave mentioned. The software does it FOR you.
20:21:57 Richard Seltzer: Nancy -- But what do I have to do? How can I access a piece of a blog posting? And who can I make a blog posting accessible that way?
20:22:55 Nancy White: Richard, look at this page on your site: http://www.samizdat.com/bootcamp8.html
If there were links directly to each subheading, then you
can point to specific pieces. Now I'm NOT saying you would want to
publish this via blog software. You could, but the point is the blog software
puts in those
links automatically.
20:24:42 Alfred Thompson: granularity is important. Those of us who have used HTML for a while have coded more graualar links in our pages.
20:17:17 Richard Seltzer: David -- That's my sense -- that they are pretty much the same (except for RSS, which I don't understand).
David Sifry: the KEY difference is the ease of the tools to turn anyone
into a publisher. Back in 1996 I jumped into Geocities and then learned
that I had to buy a book on HTML to learn
how to make a web page. and then learn what FTP was. and then
learn what SSH was. and so on and so on
20:17:33 sujamthe: David: So the web grew and tools evolved to make blogs?
20:20:21 Richard Seltzer: David -- Netscape Composer (10 years old) is simple and intuitive. You don't need to learn html or the rest.
20:20:35 Kat Ortland: true, when I wanted to make a geocities webpage back in 1997, I had to teach myself HTML or purchase an expensive program like Dreamweaver
20:21:19 Richard Seltzer: Kat -- I never learned any of that stuff. And stayed away from the templates. Keep it simple and it's easy.
20:21:51 David Sifry: Richard, congratulations, you are in the top 1% of the 1%. Blog tools aren't for you, you've got a process that works for you
20:21:24 sujamthe: I think with blog software, you don't stop to think about pages and can just focus on the content.
20:18:18 David Sifry: The key difference in 2006 from 1996 is that now the tools to make anyone a publisher are easy, free, and as easy to use as writing an email. and as a result, one of the original promises of the web - that anyone can be a publisher, has been fulfilled for a MUCH larger group of people. The additional cool thing from my point of view is that because we are now all using TOOLLS to create web pages (our blogs) those tools can also create metadata AUTOMATICALLY as the exhaust of the publishing process, like RSS; also, something called an XML-RPC ping, which is fundamentally a notification process built into all the major blog CMSes. The nice thing about using a standardized CMS is that all these other nice things get built into the TOOL to allow an ecosystem to grow up around it http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsifry/123853013/
20:21:50 Nancy White: ::nodding in agreement... until you want to get geeky. Then it gets complicated FAST! ::
20:19:47 sujamthe: Richard: I agree with David - Blogs bring the promise of the web, anyone can be a publisher.
20:21:35 Kat Ortland: blogs are viral and easily marketable: setting one up requires no thinking. you don't have to worry about having your own webdomain or ftp service.
20:22:57 Richard Seltzer: Kat -- That's a good point -- not needing your own webdomain. (I've come to take my domain for granted).
20:23:49 Kat Ortland: Richard - I certainly prefer my own as it adds to authority, in my opinion, but it's nice not to have to pay for it, or host it, or anything like that
20:27:06 Richard Seltzer: It feels like this is mostly a return to the roots of the Internet -- lots of text, and interaction, and lively interchange.
20:28:41 Alfred Thompson: Richard it is a return to the early days of the webwith one exception. When you and I started 10+ years ago only the geeks could publish. You had to know HTML and you had to have access to a node on the Internet which was hard to come by.
20:28:47 Richard Seltzer: Gradually, I'm getting some sense of the difference. Search, no need to have a domain to post, and RSS.
Alfred Thompson: Now everyone can publish and access to a place is free and easy.
20:29:47 Richard Seltzer: Alfred -- Sometimes I forget that I was spoiled, working at Digital. It was easy in early 94 to post inside Digital, with no fancy publishing tools.
20:32:05 Alfred Thompson: Digital almost was the Internet back 12 years ago or so
20:31:51 Richard Seltzer: Alfred -- I have my blog (Blogging about Books) set up at my Web site, with a Web host. so I haven't yet had the experience of creating a blog in public free space. Do you see differences?
20:33:57 Alfred Thompson: I have several blogs. Two on different free sites, one on a company hosted site and one on a site hosted by a student I know. All are a little bit different but it is mostly in the details.
20:18:52 Alfred Thompson: RSS is a light weight way to get at the content. Think about it as reading web pages using an email program or a USENET reader. The content seems to come to you.
20:18:58 Brent Ashley: RSS is to blogs as UPI or reuters is to newspapers
20:24:30 Richard Seltzer: Brent -- I really am blog illiterate -- what is CSS?
20:25:08 Nancy White: CSS: Cascading Style Sheets. Language used to describe how an HTML document should be formatted. www.orafaq.com/glossary/faqglosc.htm
20:26:24 Brent Ashley: CSS is Cascading Style Sheets. My blog as you see it today is displayed as basic content. By applying stylesheets, I can make it look different without affecting the meat. example to follow
20:26:58 Kat Ortland: CSS allows a good degree of design flexibility: see http://www.cssbeauty.com
20:27:36 Brent Ashley: go to http://csszengarden.com and select some styles from the list on the right - the content remains the same but the site's presentation changes drastically
20:28:32 Kat Ortland: Richard- Also, You can control general aspects of a page's design with one style sheet, so it makes updating sites easier, especially when making large overall changes
20:37:55 Brent Ashley: richard - if you visit my blog again, you'll see it with full style
20:38:39 Richard Seltzer: Brent -- I will check. Thanks again. I've
got a lot of homework ahead of me.
20:25:07 Richard Seltzer: David -- Please help a beginner like me -- What is Technorati? In what way does it understand time?
20:25:36 David Sifry: Richard, to grossly oversimplify, you can think of Technorati as a search engine for blogs but we do a LOT more than that. 20:26:06 David Sifry: to be perfectly frank, the interesting thing isn't just blogging. Blogs are a symptom of somthing much bigger happening on the Internet.
20:26:24 Richard Seltzer: David -- Please tell me more. What more do
you do? And what is the bigger thing blogs are a symptom of? It is
about the growth of the end user picking up tools
and becoming producers, not just consumers.
20:26:43 sujamthe: David: I think of Technorati as a google for blogs, but you know the pulse of the blog world. How?
20:27:04 David Sifry: sujamthe, it is based in how blogging tools are constructed. Google fundamentally works because it goes out and crawls the web brings it all back inhouse, 20 billion documents or so and then tries to make sense of it.
20:27:58 Richard Seltzer: David -- if you don't crawl the Web, how do you find blog postings?
20:28:10 David Sifry: Richard, ah, that's the trick, and that's
why the tools are SOOOOO important. Built into these blogging tools
is something called a ping, which means the tool notifies services like
Technorati that a blog has just been updated. If you're an
engineer, it is the fundamental difference between being polling-based
and event-based, which means that we can go out and index your blog almost
instantaneously, which also means we understand WHEN things happened,
down to the second, as opposed to Google or Yahoo, which are polling-based.
20:30:26 Richard Seltzer: David -- Please explain "event-based". How
are you
aware that an "event" is taking place?
20:30:53 David Sifry: Richard, the notification (the XML-RPC ping) is
built into the blog publishing tool. Basically, they send us a little message
every time you post or update your blog (as long as your blog isn't private,
of course). Think of it this way as an author, you want to be indexed
into search engines quickly, right? So we created a "high-priority" indexer
hat will immediately index your blog if you tell us
you've updated
20:32:33 Richard Seltzer: David -- How can I check to see if my blog is sending you those signals? And if it isn't, what can I do about that?
20:32:44 David Sifry: http://technorati.com/ping
20:32:47 Brent Ashley: Whenever I make a blog entry, my blog software tells technorati about that event.
20:33:05 David Sifry: you can even do it manually if you aren't using a blog-posting tool
20:33:18 Richard Seltzer: Brent -- What did you have to do to set up to notify Technorati?
20:33:32 David Sifry: Richard, the instructions are all on that page
20:33:44 Richard Seltzer: David -- I'm using WordPress. Does that software have that capability built in? And how would I do it "manually"?
20:34:05 David Sifry: Richard: yes, it is built into wordpress
20:33:55 Brent Ashley: Wordpress does it automatically. I don't think I had to check the box by default
20:33:56 David Sifry: you can do it by simply sending an HTTP GET to that page with your blog in the URL
20:34:04 Richard Seltzer: David -- which page?
20:34:10 sujamthe: Brent, thanks for sharing the web 2.0 panel about sociological web. In fact, Cluetrain Manifesto folks in this chat (in its earlier version as web chat) almost 10 yr back.
20:34:14 David Sifry: Richard http://technorati.com/ping As long as your blog is a "public" blog, Wordpress should automatically notify us whenever you post. Richard, what is the URL for your blog?
20:35:45 Richard Seltzer: David My blog is at http://www.samizdat.com/blog Can you tell if Technorati knows of its existence?
20:36:57 David Sifry: Richard, oh yes, you're in!
20:37:34 Richard Seltzer: David -- Good. That may be partly why I'm getting lots of additional traffic, after only blogging for about a month.
20:35:12 Alfred Thompson: Richard you will want to create an account at Technorati and "claim" your blog. That will let you get information about it more easily.
20:36:59 Richard Seltzer: Alfred -- I will certainly check Technorati. Is there a charge for "claiming" a blog? And what does that mean?
20:37:08 David Sifry: Richard, no charge! It is a way of getting better publicity for your blog. For example, when you claim your blog, you can get your picture to show up next to all search results that mention your blog
20:37:12 sujamthe: Richard, you can type your blog on technorati and can see the results.
20:51:47 Brent Ashley: I concur with that, Richard. The more you link and are linked to, the stronger your web presence becomes, and technorati is a part of that
20:51:56 David Sifry: Richard, I make you no guarantees about the projected increase in traffic but that's definitely what we're seeing in the past, yes
20:52:17 Richard Seltzer: Google links and ranking have revenue implications (for advertising). But I don't think that is the case yet for Technorati. (Please prove me wrong :-)
20:52:40 David Sifry: Richard, YOU prove you wrong! :-) Check your referers. Also do you want to know who is linking to you or talking about you?
20:53:39 Richard Seltzer: David -- What I mean is I have advertisers at my site who pay at a rate based on my "6" ranking at Google. If I go up to 7 or 8, I get more money, automatically.
20:54:02 David Sifry: Good for you, Richard! http://technorati.com/search/http%3A//www.samizdat.com/
20:54:27 Richard Seltzer: David -- do you mean check "referers" in Web stats? That's often indecipherable. How do you suggest finding out who is linking to me and talking about me? In the days of AltaVista, there were some simple commands to find out all of that (albeit in an index that was a bit stale).
20:54:32 David Sifry: you can see Alfred's link 14 hours ago! Use Technorati. Then put your blog (or really, any!) URL into Technorati to see who is talking about it, in real-time. Think of it as live backlinks or another way of looking at it is thinking about the web as a conversation, with links being a new form of social gesture,a "tap on the shoulder" so to speak
20:55:36 Richard Seltzer: David -- clearly I have to spend some time at Technorati checking out what you have to offer. I can imagine links being a form of social gesture. I just need to learn the right way to do it (both socially and technically).
20:56:34 David Sifry: Richard, we've got some great FAQs and a whole bunch of our users have contributed awesome documentation
20:56:39 sujamthe: David, Richard, I tested by adding that WaPo article to this blog.
20:39:24 Alfred Thompson: Technorati doesn't have 31 million blogs. It indexes blogs that are elsewhere
20:38:32 David Sifry: sujamthe, we make money from advertising on the site, and also via syndication relationships with mainstream media, like Newsweek, The Washington Post, The IHT, Nation Magazine, etc
20:39:28 Richard Seltzer: David -- Do you do any tiered syndication, so blogs that you connect to can share in some revenue :-)
20:40:06 sujamthe: I didn't realize the syndication part. How does it work? I am aware of a content site syndicating content. I am curious to find if its just content syndication made easy with blogs or are there any new b-models around content with blogs?
20:40:07 Alfred Thompson: publishing to a blog is generally as easy
as filling
out a form and hitting send. More like sending an email than editing
a web page.
20:40:12 David Sifry: Richard, great question. We don't currently
share sndication revenue, but what we
do is send lots of traffic to the blogs. We only syndicate excerpts
20:41:25 Alfred Thompson: For most people getting the traffic is almost as good as sending money.
20:41:28 sujamthe: So the receiving blogs can have their own b-models based on traffic.
20:41:52 David Sifry: We very much want to help get more traffic to bloggers
20:42:12 David Sifry: and it is pretty nice to know that if you like to a Washington Post article and comment on it that the WaPo will linkback to you
20:42:17 Richard Seltzer: In the old days, even if you were well-known and well-linked to, and even if the search engines did a good job of updating their indexes, it could take a few days, a week, even months for your new content to become findable.
20:43:16 sujamthe: Richard, that was dependent purely on Altavista.
20:42:26 David Sifry: Richard: YES! Now make that a few MINUTES
20:43:29 Brent Ashley: short / medium / longterm memory == technorati / google / wayback-machine
20:58:25 sujamthe: David, I had thought technorati was more like google, because of the ranking by more people linking to us. The real-time aspect is mind-boggling.
20:42:42 sujamthe: David, do you have an example of a famous blog you syndicate out to other sites who makes money mainly from your traffic.
20:44:26 Richard Seltzer: David -- how does it happen that your commenting
on a Washington Post article leads to an "automatic" link back to you?
What do you
need to do to make that happen?
20:43:14 David Sifry: let me show you what we do For example, go here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/04/AR2006040400513.html
Scroll down about halfway down the article page. You'll see a box that
says, "Who's blogging?" Richard, all you have to do is link to that
article, and we do the restHere's the details page on the WaPo site:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/04/AR2006040400513_Technorati.html
20:47:29 David Sifry: Richard: All you have to do is post something that also links to that article in your blog and then technorati indexes it, and then it shows up on the WaPo!
20:46:27 Richard Seltzer: David -- I'm confused -- what do you mean that all I have to do is link to that article? do you mean link to it in a posting in my blog? Couldn't I do that anyway, even if I didn't post a comment there?
20:48:08 David Sifry: Richard: nope. Not unless you also ping us. Otherwise we have no idea you updated your site.
20:48:47 sujamthe: David, so bloggers link to a Wapo article, and you track their linking as update to their blogs. So thats real-time web, deadly!
20:49:44 David Sifry: exactamundo :-)
20:49:03 Richard Seltzer: David -- How do I "ping" Technorati?
20:57:09 David Sifry: General help: http://technorati.com/help/
20:50:19 Richard Seltzer: David -- If I understand this right, if I were to post lots of items at my blog, linking to other popular blogs, and were to ping Technorati to make sure you know I have, that could significantly impact my traffic. and once Google catches up (probably in about a day), Google may well revise my "ranking" because of those links??? (Or is it only Technorati that will interpret what I've done as links from places like the Washington Post to my blog?
20:40:35 Richard Seltzer: Gradually I'm getting a sense that what we have here is a difference in quantity leading, unexpectedly, to a difference in quality -- to a sea change of sorts
20:40:57 David Sifry: Richard, yes I think so. Also don't forget that it is largely about a difference in PLATFORM that allows all this stuff to exist.
20:41:09 Richard Seltzer: Yes, the content isn't much different from ordinary pages on the early Web. But the fact that the postings are almost immediately findable changes the social dynamics.
20:59:25 sujamthe: David, beyond simple content syndication, I see lots of possibilities built on real-time access to worldwide info.
sujamthe: David, I am curious, what technorati's b-model?
21:00:16 Richard Seltzer: David -- Do you know of new revenue models based on blogs?
21:00:52 David Sifry: Richard, that's a HUGE question, way too much to discuss in this forum right now. There's a LOT in the blogosphere about it
21:01:27 Richard Seltzer: Maybe blogs and revenue would be a good future topic.
21:01:59 David Sifry: I don't know if there are any fundamentally new business models, but I think that blogging and real-time information understanding and indexing is an enabler of a enormous set of existing biz models
21:02:00 sujamthe: I'll have to find experts who are making money off blogs! who are they?
21:02:14 Brent Ashley: it ain't me!
21:02:32 David Sifry: sujamthe: That's like asking to find people who are making money off of the telephone
21:02:58 Brent Ashley: you're right, David. there's no direct ROI, it's all about improving your chances at succeeding
21:04:01 Richard Seltzer: David -- but there are revenue models directly related to the telephone, such as telemarketing and customer support. Are there similar niches that make sense for blogs?
21:04:02 David Sifry: There are so many green field opportunities here. But fundamentally, it is still about the core promise of the web in 1992: Giving the power to publish to anyone
21:04:47 Richard Seltzer: David -- Amen.
21:03:10 sujamthe: David, I am so excited about the implications for so many existing businesses, I'll follow up with you more on this later. You've created something truly innovative with the real-time access thing.
20:59:24 Richard Seltzer: Alfred -- considering the pace of a conversation like this, and the volume of info transmitted, do you know of instances of an application like this being used for education?
21:00:30 Alfred Thompson: Richard, I know that some distance learning
programs use Chat but I don't know much about how or what tools they use.
Education is behind in a lot of ways.
20:04:03 Brent Ashley: Pat Delaney, a bay area education expert has
been for years, as has Peter Ford, and educator in the UK. The edublogging
community has used blogchat fairly
heavily off and on since 2002
20:41:20 Nancy White: Brent, can you say more about this app? Can you pull transcripts easily? (it was easy to use)
20:41:45 Brent Ashley: There is a host side to the app that is slightly different to the visitor side. You can get history from there and you can see who is on and more about them. you can kick off miscreants, too
20:42:02 sujamthe: Getting the transcript for this chat is not going to be easy for Richard.
20:44:46 Brent Ashley: you see people's ip addresses in user-agent strings when they arrive. You also have a history button where mere visitors do not
20:45:25 Richard Seltzer: Brent -- yes, I forget that I'm "privileged" as the "host". That I can see some stuff that others don't (like the ability to save the "history".
20:46:26 Brent Ashley: you can use your browser save..as functionality to save it as html so you can cut and paste with colour. When you use the history window, you can change the number of hours of history by modifying the url where it says h=2
20:47:44 Richard Seltzer: Brent -- saving as html creates huge problems for me in trying to edit. Maybe I'm missing something. It find it far easier to save as text and paste it into Netscape Composer.
20:48:06 Brent Ashley: you can do that, yes
20:24:06 Richard Seltzer: Brent -- Do you have some good "community" examples, using your software?
20:25:13 Brent Ashley: http://www.bayareawritingproject.org/
20:26:01 Richard Seltzer: Thanks for all the examples. I'll check them out when I'm going over the "history" of this and getting it ready for posting.
20:59:49 Richard Seltzer: Brent -- I meant to ask before -- what's the limit of this app in terms of simultaneous chatters?
21:00:49 Brent Ashley: I haven't reached a limit yet. We're watching cpu here and it's insignificant. so the limit is more due to handlling so many people typing and following the conversation.
21:01:20 sujamthe: I researched a lot before I found blogchat, its the only blog based chat.
21:04:31 sujamthe: Thanks Brent, for coming, your comments and for blogchat
21:04:51 Brent Ashley: you're welcome. it's been running without a hitch since 2002
20:36:10 Richard Seltzer: Kat -- take a laptop, and reconnect over lunch :-)
20:36:37 Kat Ortland: I wish I could! I'm not sure there's wireless and the others might feel neglected ;)
20:36:38 sujamthe: Richard, talk of social implications!
20:36:53 Kat Ortland: in any case, enjoy the chat and I'll see you soon :)
20:35:14 Richard Seltzer: This is a quick education... 30 minutes and I might not have gotten as much information in a book.
20:57:03 Richard Seltzer: All -- I've learned a lot in this hour, and
will probably learn a lot more trying to straighten out the transcript.
I hope to post it tormorrow. Please post your emails here before
you
disappear, so we can stay in touch.
20:58:02 David Sifry: Blogging Basics: http://technorati.com/help/blogging101.html
20:58:02 Brent Ashley: brent@ashleyit.com
20:58:06 Richard Seltzer: All -- It feels to me like this topic has a lot more too it. Would you like to revisit it sometime soon? seltzer@samizdat.com
20:58:34 Alfred Thompson: act2@acthompson.net
20:58:55 Alfred Thompson: Technorati is also fun.
20:59:11 David Sifry: Alfred, Thanks!!!
20:59:31 David Sifry: dsifry@technorati.com
20:59:40 David Sifry: sujamthe, yes!
20:59:49 David Sifry: Me too!!! :-)
21:00:51 Richard Seltzer: All -- thanks very much for all the info and the lively discussion. I really would like to continue this sometime soon (after I've done my homework).
21:02:08 Alfred Thompson: Richard it is a return to the early days of the web with one exception. When you and I started 10+ years ago only the geeks could publish. You had to know HTML and you had to have access to a node on the Internet which was hard to come by.
21:03:07 Richard Seltzer: Alfred -- yes, indeed. It's great that so many people can be involved today. (And it's high time I really learned how to blog...)
21:02:15 Richard Seltzer: Thanks again. I'll email the URL for the edited transcript and will also post it as a comment to the chat announcement at this blog.
21:04:25 Nancy White: email for the transcript link please - nancyw@fullcirc.com
21:04:45 sujamthe: Transcript will also be posted on this blog.
21:04:55 Richard Seltzer: Thanks again to all.
21:04:56 sujamthe: You can come and post any new thoughts later.
21:04:56 David Sifry: My pleasure, thanks for having me
21:05:23 Brent Ashley: Nancy, your blogchat req is being filled
21:05:24 Richard Seltzer: Or, if you like, you could send me followup thought by email for inclusion with the transcript. seltzer@samizdat.com
21:05:34 Nancy White: Thanks, Brent!
21:05:39 sujamthe: See you all next session Apr 19th same time.
21:05:47 Nancy White: Thanks
21:05:54 Brent Ashley: see you then. thanks, folks.
21:06:23 sujamthe: Bye everybody, thanks for coming.
This site is Published by Samizdat Express, 213 Deerfield Lane, West Roxbury, MA 02132. (203) 553-9925. seltzer@samizdat.com
My
Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities
by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes five books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter
issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you
need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping
you to become a player in this new business environment.
Other articles on community
and collaboration
Other distance education
articles
Check our sitemap page www.samizdat.com/sitemap.htmlfrom which you can get to any other page at this site in one click.