WombatNation

If you are reading this message through my RSS or Atom syndication feed, please note that the URLs for my feeds have changed.

The new RSS feed is http://www.wombatnation.com/feed/rss2/ and the new Atom feed is http://www.wombatnation.com/feed/atom/

I decided to make the switch permanently from Movable Type to WordPress. While I am currently redirecting URLs from this blog to the new blog, I decided not to automatically redirect the syndication feeds. At least not yet. I may still give it a try and see if I can pull it off without causing too much havoc.

For now, please update the feed address in your news reader. I apologize for the inconvenience.

In the continuing fallout from the Movable Type 3.0 licensing debacle, I decided to tryout WordPress. My original list also included Blosxom and PyBlosxom, which I might also try out.

So far, so good. I wrote up my notes for installing WordPress on a DreamHost hosted website. I have a test blog up and running, and overall I have to say that WordPress compares very well with Movable Type.

I plan to migrate this blog's content and templates over from MT later this week, to make sure WordPress really would be an acceptable solution. If not, I'll check out Blosxom and PyBlosxom. Hopefully, I will be able to use some of the tutorials from the WordPress site on doing the migration and on redirecting URLs. No sense in starting over from ground zero with all the search engines.

Should I stay or should I go? Six Apart updated and clarified the license for Movable Type 3.0. The most important update for me was the removal of the single CPU limit. It appears that they accidentally forgot to delete that restriction when they copied the text from someone else's software license. The most important clarification regarded what constituted a weblog (for further clarity, let's use small 'w' weblog to indicate a weblog created within the MT admin tool and a large 'W' Weblog to indicate a logical website level Weblog). In the new license, the limit applies to Weblogs, not weblogs. This allows me to claim only a single Weblog, since my second weblog was just a test blog that appeared under the same http://www.wombatnation.com/ URL.

The author limits still stand, but my personal issue with them is admittedly an unusual one. When I was beta testing the newMediaObject XML-RPC call for Ben, I created a bunch of units tests with Python and PyUnit. In order to test whether MT's implementation of newMediaObject was properly obeying security restrictions, I created a couple extra authors with different security permissions. Since I'm long finished with the beta testing for them, obviously I could go back and delete the authors I created, or take advantage of the license change that qualifies them as inactive accounts. The only problem for me would be if I wanted to do any more testing for them in the future that required testing security permissions.

So, the remaining issues for me are:

• Still annoyed about the unexpected changes, though I'm sure I'll get over that soon
• Still seems too expensive for the value it provides to me

In the short term I will stick with MT and will likely upgrade to 2.661. However, I definitely plan to take a closer look at WordPress, Blosxom, and PyBlosxom. That will be a fun investigation, even if I later decide that the switching costs are too high.

WordPress - Visually the most attractive of the three. Seems the closest to MT in feature set. Written in PHP, which I know about as well as Perl, which I know as well as Dutch, which I don't know that well. Like MT, it would be a tool I mostly use, but don't hack on.

Blosxom - Like MT, written in Perl. Like MT and WordPress, it would be a tool I mostly use, but don't hack on. Blosxom's simplicity is very appealing for my personal blog, though I would more likely lean towards WordPress for a company blog.

PyBlosxom - Written in Python, which I do know better than Dutch. Most appealing if I decide I want to allocate some of my code hacking time to the blog tool that I use. To paraphrase what Ted Leung posted, there's a lot of value in becoming an active member of the communities that also develop and use your favorite tools. If a strong community doesn't develop, a tool may wither away and you will suffer switching costs again. PyBlosxom has a much smaller community than the other tools, but it benefits somewhat from the Blosxom community.

I'm really surprised by how much Six Apart is planning to charge for Movable Type 3.0, especially when you consider that the only significant new feature (comment management) is offset by new limitations on the number of authors, blogs, and CPUs (UpdateSix Apart has removed the CPU limit from the license, claiming it was a mistake). The cheapest version is $100, with a $70 introductory price. I can get a $45 discount off the price due to a donation I made for a previous version, but that still leaves me paying another $25 for not much more, and arguably even less.

Fortunately for me, they will offer a free version that will meet most of my needs. I've never needed support from them, I don't need their help with an install (see my MT install notes if you need help installing MT on a shared server at DreamHost), I don't use any of their fee-based services, I don't use it commercially, I'm the only author, and I have only two blogs. I use the second blog to test out major changes before I roll them out on my public blog. While my blog currently qualifies to appear the "Recently Updated List" because of my past donation, giving up that feature is no big deal to me.

I think this is a case where the really is such a thing as bad publicity. They've managed to piss off many of their most faithful and passionate supporters.

Obviously I don't mind paying money for good software, as I gave them money before when I really didn't have to. However, I do mind paying a lot more than what something is worth to me and I mind onerous new restrictions.

Well, in the short term I will probably upgrade to 2.661 and then maybe to the free version of 3.0, though I wonder if that time would be better spent checking out tools like Blosxom, PyBlosxom, WordPress, or TextPattern. I started blogging with Radio, but got frustrated with all the bugs, the lack of documentation, and the lack of support for Linux. Also, at $40 a year, Radio isn't likely to be much cheaper than MT in the long run.

I had previously advocating the use of Movable Type for blogging at work, but the price to get started has turned it into a major purchase. I was already facing an uphill challenge just to get people excited about it. Also, I was planning to use MT to set up a blog for a non-profit organization I volunteer for. Although it's an environmental organization, I doubt that qualifies as an "educational institution". Even then, you need to write them for pricing. I think this is a road I don't want to head down.

So, for any of you stopping by my blog because Dave Winer linked to it on scripting.com, just a heads up that PhoneBlogger doesn't yet support Radio. However, if anyone is interested in adding support for Radio, I would appreciate the help. PhoneBlogger is already modularized to support the differences between Movable Type and Blogger, so I hope it will be easy to add support for Radio. The Movable Type specific code uses the metaWeblog API, so, for all I know, support for a Radio blog may just be a matter of entering the right values in the XML config file.

If you need to install Movable Type on a DreamHost shared server, you might find my installation notes to be of use. They might even be helpful if you don't use DreamHost, but no promises. The web page for my notes currently comes up fifth when you google on "install movable type". It's a mystery to me.

Not satisfied with just upgrading Gallery, yesterday I also tried to upgrade Movable Type to version 2.6.5. Unfortunately, I broke my install while doing it. Internal Server Error pages with cryptic messages in the webserver error logfile. All was tainted and evil.

Was there a problem with the upgrade instructions? No. Did I FTP files as binary when I should have transferred them as ASCII? No. Did I have the permissions for the CGI files set incorrectly? No.

Oh, no. I couldn't leave well enough alone while doing the upgrade, so I also moved a couple plugin files unrelated to the upgrade at the same time. The upgrade didn't break anything. My moving the plugin files around broke things. Lesson learned (for the 87th time, so maybe the training isn't so effective) - don't make unrelated changes to a software installation without testing between every change.

I got started down the bad slope when I was checking the permissions on the CGI files in the MT directory. I noticed that there were a couple Perl files for plugins in that directory. I assumed these files all belonged in the plugins sub-directory. And yes, many of them did. But not one of them. While sorting things out today, I started moving those same files out of the plugins directory one by one. As soon as I moved trans-tiki.pl (and no, this has nothing to do with cross-dressing Polynesians) out of the plugins directory, life was pure and good again.

A couple new fake weblogs, along with a few previous ones, showed up in the referrers listing in my website logs from yesterday. Today's harvest of bogosity includes:

• www.malixya.com - Opening Pandora's Box
• www.kwlablog.com - L. A. in the news
• www.worldnewslog.com - War News Blog

Like some of the previous ones, two of these fake blogs appear to have older posts. However, if you look at the HTML source for any of the alleged monthly or weekly archives, you will see that they lead to the same set of entries on the main page.

Lots of other bloggers are seeing this, too.

This looks like yet another spammer/p0rnsite trick to boost a site's Google PageRank. It will be trivial for Google to foil their attempt, but I suspect this is only the beginning.

As I pointed out yesterday, they will get some traffic from webmasters who bother to check out the referrers in their site logs. However, most webmasters who look into this will immediately view source and catch on to the link to a porn site. No, that's not the real angle.

The spammers are trying to find the real ego freaks (I say this only because I don't have enough non-search engine referrers to justify doing the same thing) who use an automated tool to display their most current referrers on the main page of their blog. Plenty of people do that. Google on a couple of the domain names for the fake blogs I listed and you will find many victims of this scam.

I just googled "jennifersblog" and skipped through the search results to discover there were already 205 entries. Pretty good for a one page fake blog that has been in existence for only about a week.

I've gotten a few suspicious URLs in my website referrer logs today, but the number this morning was much higher than usual. For those unfamiliar with the personal website egomania revelry of scanning your referrer logs for evidence that people like you, they really like you, ... here's the scoop. Of course, the real world is more complicated than what I am about to explain, but I don't have time to write a book and you wouldn't read it anyway.

When you click on a link on a web page, your web browser sends a request for a resource to a server. For example, when you click on the Wombat Nation banner on this page, your web browser sends a request for a resource identified by the URL "http://www.wombatnation.com/blog/index.html" to the web server that hosts my website. Typically, the resource is a web page.

The request (technically, an HTTP request) that your browser sends includes a couple pieces of identifying info. One bit is called the user agent. The user agent string can be used to identify the type of web browser you are using, for example, IE, Mozilla, Mozilla Firebird, Konqueror, Safari, Opera, etc. The user agent often includes info about what operating system you are using. Here's the user agent for my favorite browser on my Linux system. Try to use it to determine my astrological sign.
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7

Another bit of info in the request is the referrer. The referrer is the URL for the page you were on when you clicked the link. So, unless your web browser allows you to disable this, the webmaster of a site can tell how you got to her website. She can also use it to track how you move around her website.

Yes, I also immediately thought of Poindexter and Cheney. No, they didn't think this scheme up, though they wish they did. And, no, referrers aren't pure evil, unlike those two. Referrers can be used for good or for evil, so they're sort of like nuclear reactions.

Back to the egomania. Every day I briefly check out my referrers log. That report tells me what links on other websites people have followed to get to my website. This is how I found out about a story in German at Der Spiegel Online that linked to PhoneBlogger.

Every now and then I check out a URL in my referrer log only to discover that it points to a page that contains no links to my website. Usually, it's some kind of fly-by-night online retailer.

Since the bit of code in a web browser that sends an HTTP request isn't exactly rocket science, obviously it's possible for a knuckle dragging spammer to write a program that requests web pages, but sends a phony referrer. Okay, the spammers probably pay a college intern to write the code, but it gets written somehow. So, the spammer could then use such a program to send a request for a page from my site and fill in the referrer section of the HTTP request with a URL for the spammer's site. I see the URL in my referrer log, I'm overcome with curiousity, and I go check out the site. The spammer now has her foot in the door.

So, what happened today that was different? I saw a bunch of phony referrers in my log that looked very suspicious. Each URL led to a weblog with a different layout. But, there were a couple striking similarities.

• Each blog is brand new
• Each blog consists of a series of short posts, usually summarizing other news articles from legitimate news sources
• Each post is on the same day at the same time, or offset by a repeating time interval
• When you view the page source, one of the last lines is something like <a href="http://www.example.com/adult-webcam/"><img src="/adult-webcam.gif" width="78" height="24" border="0"> with example.com replaced with the domain name for each site
• Every link includes onMouseOver='window.status=" ";return true; in the <a href>, so the status bar won't show the URL
• Each site has a list of links or referrers. Some of the referrers are legitimate websites and some are ad tracking sites or porn sites
• Some of the sites have a small blogroll. Many of the blogroll entries are popular, legitimate weblogs.

Here's a couple of the URLs of the spammer blogs that showed up in my referrer logs today.

• www.jennifersblog.com - Jennifer's blog
• www.saulem.com - Saulem.com
• www.wr18.com - UFO blog
• www.bongohome.com - Art News

A little research at my favorite sites for quick, basic domain name research, Whois Source and InterNic Whois Search led to the discovery that all the sites are hosted at stargate.com and the domain name registry entries were created on November 8 and updated on November 10.

I'm amazed by the detail put into creating these phony weblogs, but I should probably be more amazed that I spent so much time writing about it.

I just made the PhoneBlogger 0.2 release available from the SourceForge project site. The biggest highlight of the new release is that you can now run PhoneBlogger on a different server than where your weblog is hosted. This means that someone can now run PhoneBlogger as a hosted web service for multiple bloggers.

PhoneBlogger has two main components

• Static VoiceXML, JavaScript, grammar, and XML configuration files
• Python CGI scripts

In the 0.1 release, you could host the static files on a server other than where your weblog was hosted. The VXML files access the configuration info for everything else from a local XML file. This XML configuration file can contain info on as many blogs as you want. The configuration file does not include usernames or passwords. That info is collected during each phone call.

Therefore, one person could configure PB to post to more than one of their blogs. Also, you could configure PB to let more than one person post to more than one blog. A limitation of the 0.1 release, though, was that the Python CGI scripts had to be on the same server as the weblogs. I used an operating system file copy command to place the incoming WAV file directly into a sub-directory of the weblog before converting it to an MP3.

In the new release, I added support for the newMediaObject XML-RPC call. That allows PB to upload the recorded audio file to your weblog over HTTP. If you do host your weblog on the same server as the CGI scripts, though, you will want to configure PB to continue to use the file copy command for performance reasons.

So, the flow of a phone call to PhoneBlogger now goes something like this

• The blogger/caller calls a phone number at a hosted VoiceXML Server provider
• The VoiceXML Server looks up the URL of the VoiceXML application and begins to run it
• The VoiceXML app prompts the caller for the blog name, their user name, and their password
• The VoiceXML app then records the audio the blogger wants to blog
• The VoiceXML app uses an HTTP GET to send the recorded audio to a Python CGI script
• The Python CGI script converts the audio to an MP3 file and returns a path identifier for the file
• The Voice XML app informs the blogger/caller of this success and then uses another HTTP GET to send the blog name, the username, the password, and the path identifier of the MP3 file to another Python CGI script
• The second Python CGI script makes an XML-RPC call to the weblog to upload the MP3 file
• The Python CGI script then uses a different XML-RPC call to post a new entry to the blog that includes a link to the MP3 file

The communication paths and protocols are:

Finally, I've decided to release PhoneBlogger 0.2 under the Apache Software License, as well as the GPL. Pick the license you like best.

The Sacramento Bee ran an article this week by Rachel Leibrock on moblogging. She interviewed me by email for the story.

"Moblogging is still in a very early growth stage, mainly due to a general lack of awareness of the power of technology and a lack of access to the necessary tools," explains Oakland-based software architect Robert Stewart.

Unfortunately, the "this" from "power of this technology" in my emailed answer to a question somehow got cut out on the editing room floor. I think it makes it sound like I believe that people aren't yet moblogging in large numbers because they are oblivious to technology, in general. Of course, I was referring to just the specific technology surrounding moblogging. Honestly, I don't think people are generally clueless, just mostly.

It's amazing how much Calvin and I have in common, although he has a better haircut.

UPDATE: I used to have a link here to a very amusing Calvin and Hobbes strip about Calvin starting a journal, albeit a paper one. Unfortunately, uComics.com leaves just two weeks of a comic strip available online for free at any single time. However, a premium membership at uComics will give you access to all the older strips, and it's just $10/year.

Get your daily fix of Calvin and Hobbes from uComics.com.

The Digital Mix benefit last night for EFF was a highly entertaining mix of music, art, education, and motivation.

Ray Beldner, a local artist and educator, talked about the Illegal Art exhibit that has been showing at Fort Mason for the last three weeks. Unfortunately, today (Saturday the 26th) was the last day. Ray has created some very cool art works using US currency to emulate works by artists like Duchamp, Picasso, and Warhol. It turns out that defacing currency actually isn't illegal, at least not seriously so, unless you do it with the intent to defraud someone, e.g., by making a $1 bill look like a $100 bill. I wonder if he was disappointed when he learned that he wasn't as much of an outlaw as he thought he might have been. Of course, he's still under potential legal and financial pressure from the estates of the artists he has copied. Ray showed photos of some of his work and work by other artists at the exhibit. He told several cautionary tales about how many of the artists involved with this exhibit have been threatened with legal action that has forced them to destroy previous works and alter their plans for future works.

FreshBlend performed before Ray spoke, but I had arrived too late. The first musical performance of the night I did see/hear was the polka electronic death country musical stylings of Mochipet. Unfortunately, the sound level was way too high for the acoustics of that room, and most of the audience quickly made their way back to the front room. You can download some of David's music from his website.

Glenn Brown, the executive director of Creative Commons, gave an excellent summary of what Creative Commons is all about. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend watching the animated short at the CC website. That will give you a similar overview of the basics, at least.

Check out my previous post for an experiment with PhoneBlogger at the Digital Mix show. I tried to phoneblog one of the speakers, but the sound level wasn't high enough from where I was sitting. Obviously cellphone designers design the mic placement to pick up just the person speaking into the cellphone from a very close distance. In this case, what would normally be considered background noise was the desired signal.

I wish I had tried to phoneblog part of Cat Five's performance later that night. However, I didn't think my attempt with Uprock had succeeded, so I didn't even try. The audio quality of my telephone recording of Uprock isn't that great, but it will give you a decent feel for their music. The heavily saturated visuals were pretty cool, but they really needed more material, as the images repeated a little too frequently to keep things interesting.

Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney with the EFF, gave a very educational and motivational speech about why it is incredibly important that each of us act now to defend our digital rights. He's a really great speaker, which is obviously extremely important, given the vital litigation work he performs for the EFF. If you haven't donated to the EFF recently, do it soon. That means me, too. I was member number 323 when I joined back around 1990, the year the EFF was founded. I still have a 3.5" floppy disk labeled "EFF-Austin InfoDisk version 1.0 August 1992" that I picked up at a meeting along with a floppy disk Bruce Sterling gave me that is stamped Garbage In Garbage Out. EFF accidentally fell off my list of charities to donate to one year, and I kept forgetting to put them back on the list. Lazy, lazy, lazy. I won't forget this year, though.

Meanest Man Contest definitely stood out from the other performers, if for nothing else because of the vocals and the guitar, though the guy on the left didn't happen to be playing it when I took this photo. Check them out if you like intelligent rapping over sampled, cut-up music.

One downside of seeing a live performance of laptop music is that most of what you usually see are a couple people seated at laptops with the backs of the laptops facing you. Other than watching them move around a mouse and tap on the keyboard, they might as well be behind a wall. Mochipet's performance would have been a lot more interesting if I they had projected the image from his laptop up onto the big screen. Some of the other groups has some interesting videos projected on a big screen behind them, which leads me to...

Cat Five walked out wearing fright wigs, settled in behind their Mac laptops, cranked up the dry ice smoke, and launched into "American Military Operations". The visual collage projected during their performance was a great backdrop for their music. This was definitely my favorite performance of the evening. The above photo has some weird artifact in between the two guys on the left. This is not a UFO, a ghost, a dinner plate, or a part of the show. Stuff like that sometimes happens with my camera when I try to take photos with way too low light levels. I had to crank the brightness way up from the original image. Anyway, Cat Five were very cool and you should definitely check them out if you get a chance.

This post was created with PhoneBlogger. Click to listen to the recorded message.

This was an experiment in audioblogging a live music performance. The music you hear is from a performance by Uprock at Digital Mix, a benefit for EFF.

I don't think that bands need to worry too much any time soon about people bootlegging shows this way, although my setup was by no means ideal.

1. I wasn't getting a strong signal from inside the performance space
2. I have a 3+ year-old Sanyo SCP-4000 cellphone
3. The acoustics in the performance space were not that great
4. I could definitely have picked a better spot from which to take the recording

and, of course, there's the roughly 4 KHz bandpass filter imposed by the telephone network. Nonetheless, I think this was a very promising experiment. Most importantly, I think it is a good justification for investing in a newer, better cellphone.

It appears that the friend of a friend was the driver in the terribly unfortunate tragedy in Santa Monica. I've been thinking about possibilities for Friendster and FOAF lately, and for some reason this sad event triggered a tangential idea - automated tools for tracking news about friends.

If many of your friends maintain weblogs, subscribing to their syndication feeds would obviously go a long ways towards keeping you up to date on their activities and ideas, or at least the ones that they considered blogworthy. Info in a syndication feed is fairly structured to begin with, and will likely become even more structured as Atom/Echo/Necho/Pie evolves and takes hold.

But, news sites typically contain less structured content, or at least the structure is wildly inconsistent from site to site. There are a few proposed XML standards like NewsML, but they are a long ways off from common adoption. Even once adopted, these standards will likely just simplify somewhat the search of the content. Of course, if enough of the news sites you want to search have syndication feeds, you could at least start with them.

Obviously, an incident such as the one in Santa Monica will draw a huge amount of publicity. If a friend of yours is involved in a major news event, you will likely find out soon enough. But, what about the smaller news stories? I want to know if any of my friends from high school or college are in the news, especially if it is good news, and even more so if it is a friend with whom I have lost close touch over the years.

On a less happy note, I want to know about the bad news, too, primarily to avoid putting my friends' families and housemates into uncomfortable situations. I would hate to call up an old friend in a cheery voice, only to have his or her spouse/partner/children/etc. have to explain to me why my friend won't be coming to the phone. It's not like this happens often or has actually ever happened to me, but I suspect when I get much older it will become more common. Maybe I'm just being paranoid. Don't worry, I don't lay awake at night worrying about things like this.

In addition, I don't want to manually search these feeds. I want a tool that will automatically search a large number of feeds. Feedster and other tools like it could be part of the solution. Google via the Google API could also play a role for sites that don't have feeds, but you will need to separate old news from new news. If you can use the API to search just Google News, that might help.

So how do Friendster and FOAF come in? Well, if you currently use them, you've already gone to the trouble to identify some of your friends in a very structured way. The tracking tool I'm imagining could use that info for the source of names. Of course, if you have a friend named Joe Smith, you'll probably get a lot of hits that aren't about the Joe Smith you know. So, the tool would use the profile of your friend to estimate the odds the story is actually about your friend. If a threshold is exceeded, the news story is included in your "Daily News about My Friends" page.

One relatively simple piece of useful data is geographical address. Let's say the Joe Smith you know lives in Des Moines. If the news story appears in the Des Moines newspaper, the score for this article would be increased. If you have included your friend's address in their profile and the story also mentions the street your friend lives on, the score goes way up. Any other matches between your friend's profile and the story would also add to the score.

Now, we can throw in some technology made famous by the war against Spam email - Bayesian filters. Next to each story on your "Daily News about My Friends" page, there would be a control for you to indicate if the story was or was not about your friend. Over time, the system would get better at distinguishing the Joe Smith you know from all the Joe Smiths you don't know.

So, is this a good idea, a scary idea, or a good and scary idea?

Tim Bray writes:

Adam Curry posted a note on Monday that I found pretty surprising. In the future, will you have to pay to get into RSS aggregators? Ouch.

Apparently, about a year and a half ago Mr. Curry purchased Radio and Frontier licenses, and then paid Userland $10,000 to be included in the feeds that the products come pre-loaded with.

...

I was emailing with Brent Simmons about this (by the way, his NetNewsWire comes with no paid-to-play entries). We both seemed to think that this kind of thing is OK, as long as it’s clearly marked as such, like the little labels in your newspaper that say “advertisement” when there’s an ad dressed up to look like a newspaper story.

When I originally started using Radio for a blog tool (since replaced with Movable Type) and a news aggregator (since replaced with NewsMonster and NewsDesk), I wondered why Adam Curry's feed was one of the built-in feeds. His feed was one of the first feeds I deleted.

I'm sure someone finds Adam's blog interesting, but I found the signal to noise ratio to be even lower than for Dave's blog. Way too many posts consisted primarily of fawning worship of Radio and Dave. Of course, the ego stroking from a celebrity might have been enough for nearly any news aggregator developer to make it a built-in feed, but there are several other blogs that highly praise functionality in Radio that didn't make the cut. So why this one?

Now that Adam reveals he paid $10,000 for what was essentially an advertisement that was not marked as such, everything makes sense. Whether or not Adam thinks Radio is any good (and I don't question that he does appear to sincerely like it), he needed to protect his investment. If enough people claim Radio is great, that will create a buzz that will lead more people to try it. That, of course, leads to more consumers being directed to Adam's "cult of personality" blog. Again, that's fine. I'm sure that some people are extremely happy to have discovered his blog via the built-in feed. But, the disclosure of the payment has come far too late.

Now, he feels ripped off because he is afraid RSS will die out and he will lose his captive audience. So, he's launching a personal campaign to reward aggregator developers only if they refuse to support the newer syndication format that frightens him. Wouldn't it be simpler and more reasonable just to add another feed for the new format?

Back in April I mentioned that Norri Kageki interviewed me for a column on Silicon Valley engineers who use weblogs for personal and business purposes. The June issue of IT Professionals containing this column came out about a month ago, but I have been slow about getting the text translated by a friend and then scanning in the relevant bits. Thanks to Norri for sending me a copy of the magazine and thanks to my friend Atsushi for the translation!

The column that Norri writes for IT Professionals covers interesting trends in the USA. Below is the table of contents entry for this month's column. I'm not the person pictured in the column.

My name as written in Japanese is highlighted in the passage to the right. Atsushi's translation (with a few minor edits by me) of this section of the column is below.

Great news from Six Apart, the company that develops Movable Type. I'm really happy to hear that Neoteny has invested in them. I think that will prove to be a very smart move on Joi Ito's part.

Movable Type is without question the tool of choice for blogging power users. The only other tool I would consider is one of the Blosxom variants (Blosxom being the Wiki web of blogging tools), like PyBlosxom.

Norri Kageki, a staff writer for Nikkei IT Professionals interviewed me on Monday on how I use weblogs as an engineer. She asked a lot of great questions about how I use blogs personally as news sources and how I use them at work. The interview should appear in the May 27 issue. Hopefully, the editor will include the photo of me holding an MLS soccer ball and standing next to my Korea/Japan World Cup 2002 poster.

I gave her a quick tour of this blog and a demo of Movable Type, and I did my best to explain RSS and News Aggregators. Since I've mostly been using SharpReader lately, I used it for the demo.

Thanks to Dan Gillmor for providing the connection.

Last night's weblog panel at the Cal Journalism School was very cool. I talked very briefly before the session with Dan Gillmor about PhoneBlogger.

Unfortunately, Donna Wentworth and Ed Felten couldn't be there in person, so they had to join by teleconference (keeping them up until midnight on the East Coast!). If anyone in the room made the slightest noise while Ed or Donna were talking, the feedback through the phone and the sound system was overwhelming.

Ross Mayfield gave a very interesting presentation on Social Software. The challenge he sees is getting people in organizations to participate as editors. He thinks you can do that by deploying tools that are easy to use, provide a sense of ownership, promote social engagement, and are socially rewarding to use. He also talked about how social connections form an emergent network, turning people into editors. He also talked a lot about the Social Capital of Blogspace. Great stuff.

John Battelle, Director of Business Reporting at the Journalism School, moderated the panel. After introductions, he asked the panelists how blogging had most changed their careers. I probably didn't do them justice in these brief notes, but I got behind in my notes quickly.

• Donna - others perceived a greater separation of identity of her as a person from her as an employee
• Ed - blogging gave him a new set of people with very different perspectives to communicate with and get feedback from
• Scott - precipitated a move from being a writer to more of an editor
• Ernie - fellows of the Information Society Project at Yale Law typically did academic research. LawMeme and blogging allowed him to take the more informal role there that he wanted
• Dan - the more voices and info, the better. He has participated in many great conversations that he thinks he would not have had without his blog.
• Ross - no need for a PR agency at his current company

John also asked some of the panelists whether they communicate with co-workers via blogs. Ed said co-workers at Princeton tend to use his blogs less often than in-person communication. He also mentioned that his blog readers/commenters come from a much more diverse background and have a wider perspective.

Several panelists agreed that reading blogs can give you a huge advantage in your career. Colleagues who don't read blogs miss out on the extra conversations you are having.

In case you were there or watched the webcast, I was the guy at the end of the session who asked the panelists what they thought about the future of blogs as a person's interface to companies with respect to communication preferences. One aspect of this would be the blogger's ability to own the rules by which she wants companies with which she does business to contact her (e.g., you can email at me this address 9-5 on weekdays, use this other address on weekends, you can IM me if I am online on this network, and you can call me at this phone number between 7:30 and 9 pm on weekdays) as well as exposing presence info. I'll elaborate on this idea in a future post.

The University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism is organizing another weblog panel at North Gate Hall Library on Thursday, April 10. I plan to be there, but I probably won't try to blog it live. I will probably post some notes afterwards, though.

The list of esteemed panelists includes:

• Dan Gillmor - technology columnist and blogger at the San Jose Mercury News
• Scott Rosenberg - Salon's managing editor
• Donna Wentworth writes and edits The Filter, writes Copyfight, and is co-editor of the Weblogs at Harvard weblog.
• Ed Felten - Associate Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and writes Freedom-To-Tinker
• Ernest Miller - fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and founder and former editor-in-chief of LawMeme
• Ross Mayfield - CEO of Socialtext

SharpReader is my new favorite 3-pane news aggregator for Windows. NewsDesk and Syndirella just have too many undesirable quirks. SharpReader has a cleaner UI and significantly better usability.

Too bad it is a .NET app, as I would like to use it on Linux, as well. However, this is the first .NET app that makes me think the Mono project is a worthwhile effort.

Update 7/29/03: While SharpReader remains a very nice news aggregator, the newest release of NewsDesk is also quite good. I'm currently using NewsDesk primarily on my work laptop and NewsMonster on my home machine, both under Linux and Windows.

Whenever I see the name Ivan, a little voice in my head starts singing the refrain from "When Ivan Meets G. I. Joe" by the Clash from the album Sandinista!.

Joi Ito has written a brilliant little story that succinctly explains what goes on under the covers as an idea moves through the blogosphere. I've tried to explain these concepts to others before, but now I will be quite happy to simply point them at this story. In addition, his story has convinced me to finally go ahead and do the blogrolling thing.

Given my disturbing predilection for proofreading everything I read, including breakfast cereal boxes, I couldn't help but notice a couple minor typos. My favorite was the presumably accidental switch from BobsBlog to BlobsBlog. Even better would have been BlobsBog. If I went by Bob instead of Robert, I would be seriously tempted to change the name of my blog to BlobsBog.

Even if you are one of the tiny fraction of the public cursed with proofreader's disease (maybe I can get Sally Struthers to help save us), you need to read Joi's story.

Of course, just because I proofread everything I read doesn't mean I proofread everything I write, so please spare me the shame of pointing out the fact that I am throwing stones, albeit tiny little happy fun pumice pebble ones, in my own glass bloghouse.

In the last couple months, and especially the last few weeks, new news aggregators have been coming out of the woodwork like stolen credit card numbers out of Data Processors International. While there were plenty of browser-based (Radio, Amphetadesk, etc.) and three-pane desktop app (NetNewsWire, Straw, NewsDesk, NewsCrawler, Syndirella, spaces, etc.) aggregators, now we have tools that fit into Mozilla (NewsMonster), Outlook (NewsGator), and good ole nntp news readers (nntp//rss).

I primarily use the Radio Userland aggregator. It's pretty basic, but it's got the main features I want. I especially like being able to delete items that I have read or am not interested in, while allowing items that I want to eventually read to pile up at the bottom. The downside of this feature is the immense self-loathing that ensues when the list of items that I imagine I will find interesting grows at the rate of the US public debt.

Anyone want to place bets on how long it takes Microsoft to release Microsoft News? News will probably start out as a really nice news aggregator and will grab huge market share because it will ship as part of Windows. However, just like Internet Explorer, they will let it atrophy into a functional also-ran once it achieves high enough market domination. Hopefully, there will then be a rebirth in news readers, like we are seeing in browserville with Gecko and KHTML-based browsers, so that people won't be stuck with the mediocrity of an application like what IE has become.

Back to the aggregator parade - I recently tried NewsDesk, mainly to check out a .NET CLR app, but it was pretty disappointing. Not bad for a 1.0 release, but it failed to handle RSS feeds that worked with every other news reader I tried. I installed NetNewWire on Sandra's PowerBook, and I really liked it a lot. However, since I frequently move between Linux, Windows, and OS X, I need a cross platform reader. I checked out NewsMonster last night, and it stays on the short list with Amphetadesk, spaces, nntp//rss, and HotSheet.

If you find the usage of Java Web Start in the NewsMonster aggregator interesting, you might also want to check out HotSheet.

Well, now, I've gone and used up my daily quota of hrefs.

Update - August 16, 2003: RSSJobs has a convenient listing of RSS readers by platform, along with short descriptions.

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