Posts tagged as: blog
Flipping blogs instead of burgers
Posted on Thursday, December 22, 2005
at 5:16 PM (permalink)
It is amazing how often I stumble across entire markets on the Internet that I never realized existed. Today I learned about the market in small scale blogs. I've known about selling high volume sites, and joining blog networks, but this segment of the market is new to me. Here are posts from the buyer of The Poker Blog, the seller, and a link to the site where the transaction took place. According to the buyer, he paid $2,400 for a blog that was 5 months old with 1,000 page views a month. The seller's post is well worth reading. He is a student at Ohio State who built the blog with the intention of flipping it. He describes himself as an entrepreneur, and that is certainly the case. He made his $2,400 for just 100 posts, plus the work of building the blog.
In search of an RSS social contract
Posted on Monday, December 12, 2005
at 7:15 AM (permalink)
Imagine a world where people leave all their possessions outside their door and expect strangers to use these things. It would require a gifted science-fiction writer to construct a viable social contract around such a culture. RSS is creating just such a world in the blogosphere, and there are signs it isn't all going well. Steve Rubel's complaint that splogs are stealing his content, and the associated comments, are a graphic example of the fuzzy boundaries that now exist in the area of RSS republishing. What is the proper definition of a splogger? Is Mark Cuban right in claiming that "Aggregation is not value add." What about Tech.Memeorandum or Technorati? Where is the boundary between a search engine for RSS items and an aggegator? If a splogger hires an A-list blogger to select the RSS items that are posted is this still splogging? What if a splogger uses Mechanical Turkers to select the posts for publication? What if the public is used to select posts? Trying to stuff all those billions of little RSS feed items back into their original bottles is going to be impossible.
Are bloggers like worms?
Posted on Saturday, December 10, 2005
at 11:33 AM (permalink)
Here is an analogy that my namesake would have been proud of. Darwin spent an inordinate amount of time studying worms and the accumulation of their waste. He showed that the remains of ancient civilzations didn't sink into the earth, rather the worm "castings," which they produced as they burrowed through the earth, actually raised the soil level and drowned the ancient buildings. I've been thinking about worms as I plan an RSS aggregator for a Ruby tutorial I want to write. What RSS based websites really resemble are worms burrowing through a rich substrate of feeds, excreting modified versions of their input as RSS feeds in turn. The functional analogy to worms is clear, the metaphorical warning for society is open for discussion.
The importance of being unique
Posted on Thursday, December 8, 2005
at 5:22 AM (permalink)
The essential ingredient in a microcontent data model is a unique id for each post. I had been assigning unique ids to each post from the beginning, (Hey, I'm a database guy), but I didn't use them in generating the blog pages. Instead I used the date and time of the post to identify it in URLs, so a post written in the early morning on December 5th would have an address of:
http://darwinianweb.com/archive/2005/1205.html#6:47AM
Now it has a URL of:
http://darwinianweb.com/archive/2005/116.html
David Weinberger has just written a useful essay on the benefits of unique ids for each blog post.
Breaking down the blog into microcontent
Posted on Thursday, December 8, 2005
at 5:03 AM (permalink)
Today I started producing blog pages using a model based more completely on microcontent. What this means in practice is that each post now has its own page. I originally wrote the code to produce this blog with a daily organization of posts: the home page held seven days of posts grouped by date, and there was an archive page for each day with all the posts for that day. I realized after a month or so that I don't really write in patterns that fit a day, perhaps because I'm minimally autobiographical. I tend to write 2-3 multi-paragraph posts on different subjects each day. So it makes more sense to treat each post as a separate bead on the string, and move from one post to the next, instead of one day to the next. The internal advantage, is that I can now track the readers' collective attention more easily. Incoming links will be directly to the post, rather than the date, so my readership stats will reflect what is read on a post-by-post basis.
Pinging merrily away
Posted on Friday, December 2, 2005
at 7:49 PM (permalink)
OK, pinging is working on both this and the Ruby blog. I can really expect the visitors to start pouring in now. Once again, I am amazed by the inability of most technical people to describe anything completely. I wish people who are trying to "document" something would stop for a minute and ask, "If someone really needs this explanation, what are they likely to know?" I now have a long list of bookmarks at Del.icio.us on ping servers, and the vast majority say they are providing an explanation of how to use ping servers, yet say things like "Use this url the same way you would with any other ping server." If I knew how to use other ping servers, why would I be looking at your post on how to use ping servers? The only thing funnier is source code libraries where the author has obviously slaved over his code for years, and yet is unable to even write down the arguments for each method, let alone a single working example.
The urge to scale
Posted on Saturday, November 19, 2005
at 8:26 AM (permalink)
I guess being a dot-com CTO is in my blood. I like to think through various architectures for managing groups of websites. You need to lock down a model for scaling early or you face big problems if you ever need to handle large amounts of traffic. The real key is a logical architecture for domain names. For example, if I thought I was going to serve a lot of podcasts, I would create something like data.darwinianweb.com or podcasts.darwinianweb.com. That would allow me to move that part of my content where it could be best and most cheaply served.
Right now I have darwinianweb.com to handle this main blog where I plan on covering general issues on the changing form of the Internet. I also have ruby.darwinianweb.com, which is a blog that allows me to go into as much depth as I want about learning the Ruby programming language.
I don't want to have too many subdomains, categorization can be handled more easily and on a larger scle with tags, which I am working on adding. At the same time, a separate domain creates more of a distinct place or channel of thought for the user. People automatically switch contexts when they change to a new site, just like a new TV channel.
I plan on having only a few more content subdomains, such as ajax.darwinianweb.com, and xml.darwinianweb.com. Programming languages or standards like XML are so broad and have so many supplementary tools and resources that they work better in their own site or subsite.
I'll also be creating separate domains for exchanging data with other servers. I don't know what will happen with my API experiment, or if that will become a target for abuse, so I'll also create api.darwinianweb.com to serve API calls. It isn't a matter of large amounts of traffic. I want to be able to shut down the API server easily. Of course, that brings up the issue of dependency on critical servers in a distributed environment called for by Web 2.0.
One solution, which also comes easily in an XML/RSS based communication model, is cache the most recent messages as text files, so the most recent result of an API call can be reused instead of calling the API again.
These issues will be played out on a much larger scale throughout the web. Chains of API dependencies will play interesting roles in the future.
If you make it a community they will come
Posted on Tuesday, November 15, 2005
at 6:43 AM (permalink)
I went to the reception for The Symposium on Social Architecture at the Harvard Faculty club last night. The people I met were mostly planning on selling pickaxes and shovels in the Blog gold-rush. The assumption is that companies are going to have to build "community-based" systems around their products, and these people are building the tools to do this. I agree with the basic premise, but the dot-com bust showed that not everyone was able to make money selling infrastructure. There is usually a slower adoption rate by businesses than the bleeding edge predicts. I'll report back tonight on the actual conference sessions.
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