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Uhh Google is a search engine. What does that have to do with blogs?

Google owns Blogger.

"Glen" looks like he does in above photo, and claims to be 30. I am *not* looking forward to the big 30. Either that or Glen has some serious issues.

South Korea may not be as free as you think. A few weeks ago, I was surprised to learn (from a friend of mine who is teaching English there) that the government was blocking access to a number of web sites, including blogs hosted at Blogger (a.k.a. BlogSpot) and TypePad (a.k.a blogs.com).

The Korea Times and other news sources reported that this was done to frustrate the distribution of videos depicting the decapitation of South Korean hostage Kim Sun-il. But you hardly need to point out to Slashdot readers that blocking entire domains like that entails a lot of "collateral damage". My friend in Korea, for example, was unable to read his own blog, which consists mostly of his poems.

I submitted this as a Your Rights Online story, but it was rejected for reasons I still don't understand. This is the kind of story that I depend on Slashdot to keep me apprised of.

Where is the improvement to Google's blogging tool? From what I can see (I haven't grabbed it yet) Picasa looks very similar to Apple's iPhoto or any other photo management software.

If Picasa includes the ability to create online photo galleries, linked to a user's Blogger account so he can publish them on his blog, then it would be quite neat. Otherwise, I don't see what this announcement has to do with blogging tools.

The New York Times first opened up their archives to the bloggers over a year ago. At the time, I really wondered why the Grey Lady would give it away like that. Kowtowing to the blogosphere (barf), while ruthlessly nickel-and-diming all the poor schlubs who just wanted to do some research or get their work done.

But now it makes perfect sense! They were in it for the PageRank(TM)! (At least they didn't resort to a lawsuit, unlike these guys!)

However, in view of the upcoming IPO and Google's increasing attempts to work their grubby little fingers into every facet of your life, you have to wonder if Google is gaining more power than any publicly traded mega-corporation should have.

The software can be downloaded on the SimIndiana site, but requires Windows

First thing that came to my mind was "sure glad the government had that anti-trust thing going against MicroSoft before Indiana required everyone in the state to pay taxes for a system that requires Windows". First thoughts generally aren't all that well thought out, but I think it touches on the point in a nice brief way.

And, from scrolling down, I noticed people touching on google. Well, since I'm in a bad mood, I'll pick on them too. Why the heck doesn't their blogger site work worth a darn in FireFox? O.k. that's enough stupid ranting for today.

Here's what a loosing screen looks like on the Gmail Machine! I DID NOT get mine on the 3rd try, infact, I never got one. Now the lotto is between 0 and 100000!!!! Looks Like I will have to wait for Gmail to open :( So this is the number of Gmail accounts I have!!!!

Here's what a loosing screen looks like on the Gmail Machine! I DID NOT get mine on the 3rd try, infact, I never got one. Now the lotto is between 0 and 100000!!!! Looks Like I will have to wait for Gmail to open :( So this is the number of Gmail accounts I have!!!!

Google owns Orkut, Blogger.com, the largest search engine on the 'net, and is now offering free, high quality web-based email accounts with a gig of storage. Except for a few lone voices, I haven't seen any serious discussion about why this huge corporation is spending so much resources on providing these services for free.

The advertising revenue couldn't possibly amount to a significant fraction of the costs involved with these services. The value must lie in the personal information that people are donating to Google, Inc.. What are their plans for it? They obviously plan to datamine it - but how will and how can it be used? What new knowledge can be generated by correlating and cross-referencing your orkut, blogger, gmail and google search information?

It is troublesome that it seems to be popular and hip to be totally unconcerned about privacy. Attitudes like "we have none anyways" seem to prevail, and its funny to criticize those who voice some concern as tinfoil-hat-black-helicopter-seeing schitzos. It looks like people have forgotten that privacy matters. Like many other companies that try to collect personal information, Google's privacy policy is subject to change at any time. This makes it almost meaningless! It is effectively the same as saying, "We respect your privacy right at this moment, so have complete trust in us. Tomorrow we might change our minds."

Sign up for a Blogger.com account. That's where I got my invite.

Everybody who uses Blogger gets an Atom feed.

The RSS 2.0 specification is woefully underspecified, and frozen so no improvements can be made. It specifically tells people if they want something better, they should do it themselves and not try and improve RSS.

Correct. Google own Blogger, which already produces Atom feeds.

This discussion of Google using RSS for Blogger is all well and good, but what about the broader question of integrating RSS into their mainstream search services? By comparison, Feedster searches RSS, and provides its results in RSS. But to get an RSS feed for a Google search you need to use the 3rd party GoogleAlert. Not to mention that Google recently shut down a third party news-to-RSS service. Aren't the guys from the Googleplex supposed to have technological vision or something?

And on the Java side there is also BlogEd James Gosling's Client Side Blog Editor

which just ftps the html to the server. A very useful tool for thin servers.

.. and Blog This.

I'm starting to think you're on shaky ground now..

Evan Williams and his team, of Blogger fame (bought by Google last year), developed a 'Plogging' app called Pyra back in 2000. Work on it got halted when Blogger started to take off, but I remember trying out a beta version and it rocked. There's a little info still around on Pyra, but not much, and people seem to miss it; the Pyra.com site is now just a brochure for their company, which was also called Pyra.

I guess the market just wasn't ready for this app in 2000. Credit to Williams and his team for their vision, I guess!

Yes, there are options, but not having to rely upon an outside service for updating the content in your blog or gallery is what MovableType provides.

I agree that MovableType (and sixapart) should have the right to charge for their program. But going from free to crippled 70-600 dollar licenses is a bit of a shock to those of us who didn't see this coming.

Blogger or livejournal, etc are of course for people who don't want to get their hands dirty with setup and maintenance. It's a great service. But what happens if the service goes belly-up? Think mp3.com and the artists. While there's a great deal of minless drivel on many blogs, still others provide witty, insightful, funny, local, or even newsworthy content.

It's a shame that MovableType has deliberately alienated their community support and likely will end their own dominance over the weblog content management software.

For people starting out on weblogging, I agree that multiply, blogger, livejournal, or some such service is definitely worth a look.

For those of you already using MT and looking for alternatives, the ones that have been commonly mentioned in the past day may be worth checking out. For example, TextPattern, Drupal or Wordpress.

Don't like the free alternatives? MT's success came from community support. Do the same thing for these. Test them, report bugs, develop them, use them. Show MT that they're not the only game in town, just one of the most expensive.

• Uses the file system (folders and files) as its content database. blojsom can support any backend storage mechanism through a specific implementation of the BlojsomFetcher interface.
• Allows you to configure the file types that blojsom treats as blog entries (defaults to .txt and .html).
• Permalinks which point to individual blog entries.
• Calendar-based (i.e. year, year/month, year/month/day) navigation of your blog.
• Configurable set of blog directories (per flavor) that get aggregated for the default or / category.
• Customizable flavors. blojsom, out of the box can generate html, rss, rss2, rdf, atom, and text flavors.
• Configurable comment and trackback support for users to leave comments and trackbacks on blog entries.
• Plugin support so that you extend the capabilities of blojsom.
• Web-based Administration for blog functionality such as editing blog properties, categories, and templates.
• Remote posting via XML-RPC and the Atom API. Support for Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and Atom API.
• Customizable template mechanism. blojsom is very powerful in this area in that you as a developer are allowed to decide what display technology is appropriate for the requested flavor. blojsom currently offers a JSP Dispatcher and a Velocity Dispatcher and .jsp and .vm templates are provided for the HTML and RSS flavors.
  • This allows you to mix-and-match display technologies for your blog. For example, you might want to render HTML through the JSP for that flavor while you might want to render RSS through Velocity for that flavor.
  • Have another display technology youd like to use? Simply extend the BlojsomDispatcher interface and configure a mapping file so that blojsom knows how to map the template extension to the proper dispatcher. Thats it!
• Themes allow you to select a new look for your blog.
• Multi-user support with a single blojsom installation. Multi-user options specific to each user include:
  • Authorization properties for users who can post to an individual blog via XML-RPC.
  • All the blog properties such as blog directory, description, owner, default category mappings, etc.
  • Supported flavors.
  • Flavor-based plugin chains.
  • All the individual plugin configuration files are separate per-user.

I am not seriously into blogging, but so far I've been using Blogger's free service to edit Blog posts on-line and then publish them to my free web storage at my ISP. This works well for me because I have limited storage space (about 10 Mb) at my ISP and I'm not able to upload software to run on their server. I could of course pay some other business for web site hosting, but hey, this is still just a hobby for me at this point.

So my question for the Slashdot community is, do any of these free and open source blogging packages (like WordPress) let you edit posts, etc. on your PC and then publish the (static) pages to a remote web site? I understand that this isn't the ideal setup, that one would prefer that the blogging system would be running on the web site, but that's not really an option for me.

Here's the story with the blogger redirects Hint: they prevent comment spam and promote PageRank fairness.

Quite funny :)

I noticed that Blogger has done a complete redesign using standards (backed by many of the Big Names in the buzzing site-design industry, including my favourite)

I remember A List Apart did an 'Extreme Makeover' on our beloved frontpage, wondering wether we'll ever get to see it happen! (must be a hell-uv-a job...)

Quite funny :)

I noticed that Blogger has done a complete redesign using standards (backed by many of the Big Names in the buzzing site-design industry, including my favourite)

I remember A List Apart did an 'Extreme Makeover' on our beloved frontpage, wondering wether we'll ever get to see it happen! (must be a hell-uv-a job...)

They were offering them on blogger.com (owned by google) to existing users.

Thanks for the blogger.com tip - I too have a gmail account now.

I know a bunch of people who use blogger regularly to maintain their web logs who got invited into the service.

Is it wrong to be jealous of people maintaining web logs there. Hmm.

I've been using Blogger for many years. It's very simple to use but the one thing it lacks is comments. People usually use third party scripts to do commenting but it's really not that hard to write your own if you know a little PHP.

It occurred to me, as I type this with my Microsoft Natural Keyboard (TM) (R) (btw, only 23.95 at Fry's (TM) (R)), that product placement in blogs, such as Blogger (TM) (R), Livejournal (TM) (R), and Diaryland (TM) (R) may be one of the things in store for the future.

"I've never contemplated writing a virus before. Even if I had, I wouldn't have known how to do it. But thanks to a teenager in Austria, it took me less than a minute to master the art."

I never contemplated writing a nationally read journalistic article before. Even if I had, I wouldn't have known how to do it. But thanks to Blogger, it took me less than a minute to master the art.

Mr. Thompson, don't flatter yourself. You couldn't code your way out of a wet paper bag with a hole in it.

You'll have GSM access throughout Italy, and I'm sure the local mobile phone carrier provides GPRS (high-speed data).

Then just send your pics to a picture blogging service via MMS, most of which also have text blogs you can update from your phone:

CamBlog + a Blogger account
mLogs
RareWindow

For many, many more services and tools for Mobile Text/Picture Blogging, check out the left column on this site ("Moblog Hosting Companies"), and the right column on this site ("Software" and "Hosted Services").

Cool, a flame war! Can I join in?

Thanks a lot for being such a childish jerk. What's wrong, Mr. Anonymous Coward, afraid to call me lame and stupid and actually admit to who you are?

AC attacks are pretty lame, aren't they. But here's the strange part:

And then you have the gall to suggest that I actually subscribe to slashdot?

An AC says you should subscribe? That's a laugh.

Why should I if idiots like you are going to bash me for submitting interesting articles?

Dude, if your article was boring, the AC wouldn't have bothered to bait you.
1) Troll
2) Bite
3) ???
4) Profit!

The only reason I can guess is that you'd be getting that money (at least some of it), which really makes you all the more pathetic. First you have to bash people then you beg them for their money.

Are you suggesting that CmdrTaco's krew is posting AC just to harass you into subscribing? I think you've gone over the edge on this one. If they had time to putz around like that, Slashdot would be little more than "CmdrTaco's Blog."

Next time try being a man and don't post anonymously.

Don't be a fool! There's enough men (and overgrown boys) on Slashdot already. Next time, I want the AC to try being a chick!

I got an email inviting me to visit this link to claim my free sweatshirt. No offer of a cash refund though.

I am so going to blog about this.

According to an item in the LJ FAQ, LJ was started sometime in March 1999 while blogger.com says it was launched in August 1999. Those are the two older ones I can think of and if they really are the two oldest it appears that LJ beat blogger to the punch.

Google is working on a separate search for blogs only. Rumor has it that blogs will be removed from the primary search results once this occurs, but it remains to be seen.

This has nothing to do with the fact that Google purchased blogger.com, I'm sure. ;)

Plus anyone with a webhost that supports perl or php can setup their own personal blog or even a community of blogs.

If you think that AOL will win because of "Exciting Software" to ease updates then you might want to take a look at this page. With livejournal being opensource I can't help but think that AOL won't take the time to re-invent the wheel, they'll just use what's already widley available.

Anyone know if the LJ crew has been approached for a "buy-out", I mean remember when AOL was going into the net radio business and bought WinAmp and some streaming service?

As always, only blog when you have something to say. I posted once every few days. This gave me time to see things and made sure I had some news worth posting.

Tell your readers about the places you've been to but also what you thought of the places. If you found something was worth checking out, or if you wasted your time seeing something that turned out to be dull, say so. But keep it concise, and make sure that you've said everything you want to say in a few paragraphs.

Don't bore your readers with accounts and descriptions of the people that you met/hung out with/got drunk with/kissed/whatever! No-one really cares about Eddie's Personal Soap Opera except Eddie. Just keep your blog focused on your travels.

Always include links for places or areas of interest so that people can get more info. A quick set of Google searches will make your blog much more interesting and accessible.

Make sure you use a cybercafe that allows you to pay after you've used the machines (i.e. not one where you have to buy 'credits' and where your time is being counted down on the screen all the time). It sucks to be pressured to write because you're running out of time.

Perhaps an obvious one, but use weblog software that won't break. You may not be able to telnet into your box to rework the config files when you're travelling, and it's so frustrating when you're not able to post that all-important account of your experiences. I use Blogger which is an online weblog service and is free for the basic version.

If you're in a city for a while (e.g. a few days), don't use mainstream cybercafes. They often have software that restricts your use of the machine. Spend some time searching for a facility that may be off the high street or smaller, but that offers the same deal without the restrictions. The best places I found were not cybercafes at all - they were travel shops that had a few internet-connected PCs. The advantage is that, in these places, the owners are less tech-savvy and you'll have a machine that you can install things on (e.g. software for processing and uploading photos - see below). Plus you won't be restricted because of firewalls etc. (e.g. for FTP).

Photos: I uploaded my photos once every few weeks. I regularly dumped them to CD in a photo store, made a selection, processed each image in Photoshop, created thumbnails and HTML files with Express Thumbnail Creator and uploaded them to my site with WS FTP LE. Photoshop is obviously not free, and I had to find cybercafes that had it pre-installed (wasn't always easy). Express Thumbnail Creator is shareware, and WS FTP LE is free. The best thing would obviously be to have all this stuff on CD before you sit down at the PC.

Be aware that some cybercafes will charge you for upload bandwidth (never very much though).

COMMENT all your photos! It takes time but it's worth it. Express Thumbnail Creator has this feature built in. Nobody really wants to go through pages and pages of unlabelled thumbnails of sunsets and mountains. Also, commenting your photos is a good test for yourself to ensure that you're only putting interesting photos up.

As soon as your photos are up, announce it in your blog and send out a mail to everyone in your address book who may be interested (mail to yourself, BCC everyone you're sending to).

M.

Have you ever read Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, how about ? How about any of the good weblogs? Or KSR Mars trilogy, Jules Verne

People don't care about science, they don't understand science for the most part. People understand people, they like to read stories about normal people in extraordinary circumstances, that's why `reality tv' is so popular.

The first (hu)man on Mars landing on Mars would be hugely important for human curiosity, the journey to Mars would be even more important, imagine doing a part `reality tv' show and part science/education show from the Mars-bound shuttle. Do it right and everybody would watch.

The probes would still do the science, people haven't done any scientific measurements for a while now, since the invention of computers, people don't measure accuratly enough for our level of understanding anymore.

When your probe says gravity 0.4G, pressure 15mbar, T=259K, F=22.5W/m2, your scientists could tell you the probe was broken, very few places on mars would get those conditions anyway

...but you'd likely get images of astronauts jumps about with suits weighing twice their body weight with silvered visors and planting flags, that's the money shot, as long as it's not a Nike flag (unless they pay for the whole damn thing) nobody would really care which flag it was, it was manmade

One of the most important things to come out of the Moon landings didn't involve landing on the moon, it was Frank Borman's photograph of earthrise. The probe wouldn't think of doing that.

For the scientists, who do care about the science. The people who land on Mars would do so in the knowledge that they are there for about a year until the planets align again, keeping 6 people alive without any external help for 24 months isn't easy (or possible yet). The biosphere project wasn't completely succesful because of the leaky window seals and the double glazing which blocked too much sunlight.

On Mars, we won't have the luxury of pumping more oxygen in, it'll will likely need to be extracted from the ferrous soil or grown in inflatible greenhouses. The technology to maintain this human habitat in an environmentall neutral way would have huge impact on the way we live on Earth...sustainable farming and production, recycling waste products, space ice cream (well I like it :)

BB

Another entry into programming is creating web pages, by tweaking them with JavaScript, and eventually CGI scripts. Really anything that allows tweaking is good, such as tweaking Mozilla or the computer desktop. Programming is about tweaking the world.

Once they feel ready to transition to a full programming language (Java, C++, etc.), there are ways to ramp up to that too. JavaScript is a great way to learn object-oriented concepts. Learning game programming really motivates kids and they learn about 3D graphics too (Nehe and GameTutorials). For building real desktop applications, NetBeans and the free JBuilder edition let you visually design java user interfaces, but something like Thinlets simplifies java development greatly (and introduces you to XML, see also other XUL-based development tools). Of course there are thousands of resources out there for learning java, see Sun's New to Java center.

Lastly, I think kids should keep a blog or a journal somewhere. If you have webspace, set them up a MovableType blog and let them tweak everything they want (adding commenting, shoutboxes, javascript goodies, etc.).

I think that these issues are important. Google is probably the most significant reference work in the world. It's made very fundamental changes in the ways people do research. news.google.com is already one of my main news sites -- I use it all the time.

Yep! And it's even more important.
The last year Google have expanded from "just being" a search engine to something more.

1.They started their news section. news section which in a way gives them some editorial responsibillity.

2. They bought Pyra Labs so they could get Blogger.com. This gives them 200.000 active blogs which they a. Have some kind of responsibility in. b. "Have to" search trough an index in their search engine.

3. Google have like everyone else started to run services for advertisers whom pays to get their ad when people search for "Britney Spears". But what if the RIAA companies and other businesses in the future trie to pressure google into not displaying links to for example P2P-services or alternative music pages?
I mean, right now, Overture and Google's way of dealing with this is probably ok, but if its possible to earn some cash on letting out certain results than it's an option for any business.

How Google deals with these questions is important now and its likely to become even more important when google expand their buisness to even more news, blogging and "pay to click".

So sad I did not know what a blog was till today. I thought it was still called a weblog. Anyway in my goggle search I see where goggle purchased Blogger (one of the the biggest names in "blogging". Ick!

It will be interesting to see what they play to do with this technology.

Dan Slagle
Keeper of the "Unofficial iMovie FAQ"

I believe you are looking for the Blogger API.

It wasn't so long ago that people were touting text ads as a bandwidth-friendly and clean solution to the banners mess. A lot of major sites (Google...) and other popular sites (fuckedcompany, blogger) adopted them. What happened?

We have found the cause of the vulnerability and have patched it. Everything is back restored and back online with the exception of the API server and bSTATS.

Sometimes I walk into ReadMeDoc.Com and ask - did a tree really have to die for that subject? Not to disparage the writer, but I have to categorize this one under the "DUH" section along with "MacIntosh for Dummies."

Blogging can be learned two ways. Visiting blogs. Its easy, there are tech blogs, there are pundit blogs, there are blogs for dogs and blogs4God. There are even nichy topical blogs, such as how to fix your church's web page.

Then there are a variety of free or next-to-nothing tools to get the job done. For the absolute newbie, there is Blogger.com. Once you've figured it out a bit, you can graduate to MovableType. And if you're really afraid of HTML, you can spend $49 and do it brain dead with Radio Userland. There are also a gazillion of choices inbetween.

The point is, blogging is simple. Its not more difficult than back in 1995 when we all posted our first kitty-kat pictures using notepad or VI. Writing good content for blogs is the hard part.

Drupal is an open source content management app run by sites such as DebianPlanet. A couple of examples: if you have a Jabber account, Drupal can authenticate through XML-RPC and through a Jabber server. Also, Drupal allows for utilization of the Blogger API for the posting of content.

Quoth the poster:
i think "do it yourself" very often misses the point. not everyone has the skills or time to port every software / convert data from one format to another.

im a developer myself, and i only have time / resources to work on a few projects. when i spend my spare time i want to make sure its maximally useful. i personally consider converting data / code between platforms / applications not the best or most satisfying use of my time :)

re: levels of interop, i believe 20% (to pick a number) is worth it. another consideration for the adoption of standards is how much effort it takes to implement them, and what implementing a standard gives you. a example: i implemented the blogger api for postnuke. it was very simple to do. it took me about one evening, with no prior experience with XML-RPC. the payoff is that i can now use various nifty tools to blog from the desktop, or from a PDA / mobile. Standards should have these characteristics in my opinion.

I hope this technology makes it over to weblog sites like Blogger and Xanga. Both of those sites have excellent tools for IE, but the Mozilla versions of the same tools completely blow goats.

Of course, there are always XUL-based alternatives like mozBlog and LiveLizard, or the very excellent Composite. Composite's great - it gives you a WYSIWYG editor for any <TEXTAREA> that Mozilla encounters... using it to make this comment :-)

in my opinion, if they have the webcam, the should also have the blog, so that we would be able to read their comments about their experience in space! =)

What about, for instance, weblogs, especially those powere dby Blogger? When Blogger "publishes" a weblog page, the page may have several days of posts on it - so the original post may have been uploaded to the server a month ago, but it just got re-uploaded when the user published a new entry.

Hmmm.

The users have found a way to "bomb" Google to improve the rankings of particular webpages, and ensure a site is near the top of the results for particular search phrases.

Well, yes, but it's not easy. The article describes several dozen to several hundred bloggers working together to drive a certain word or phrase toward a certain URL. In other words, it takes a large, concerted effort to deceive Google's engine, and this fact alone provides reassurance that Google is working according to plan.

Somewhere else, on this site, Scientology has been accused of using their large network of sites and members to do the same thing, driving searches for "Scientology" and related words to their own sites rather than those of debunkers. Again, this takes a large and concerted effort, which is a virtue of Google rather than a vice.

Is Google on the verge of breaking because such a thing is possible? Of course not. But there are people powering the search engine on the back end, making improvements constantly in response to issues like this. And their cross-linking approach to ranking pages, while not perfect, remains the most reliable way yet found to judge a match's relevance.

If it works correctly 99% of the time, and Google is constantly working on the last 1%, that still makes it better than anything else out there.