Wired – Russia: Dial ‘H’ for Hostage [via browsing started by Waypath plug-in] – a year old article about LiveJournal as an alternative to mainstream media.

It also says about LiveJournal: “Of the site’s 700,000 users, more than 6,000 are Russian.” I wonder what is the real number as Blogcensus shows only 900+ Russian language blogs.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/10/15.html#a800; comments are here.

• Knowledge management, weblogs and action research
• Blogger social network mapping
• Between cultures

I’m constantly finding myself in trouble when people ask what they should do to start blogging. I don’t have any good step-by-step approach and I don’t know any good text on it that would satisfy me. May be you know something…

The prerequisites are:

• Think of someone
  • thinking about starting professional or semi-professional weblog (=not a personal diary) in public
  • interested in using weblog for networking, so RSS is a must
  • non tech person (so no complicated install and preferably as less usability troubles as possible)
  • not sure if blogging will work for him/her (so paying for the blogging is questionable)
  • not an early adopter (so will likely to stop facing problems)
• My questions
  • What weblog software would you recommend?
    • At this moment I’m leaning towards TypePad
  • Do you know good introductory articles about how do you start blogging that such a person should read?
    • I’m not interested in articles about “what blogs are?” and “why blogging?”. In most of the cases people I’m talking about have some understanding of weblogs and some ideas about What’s in it for me? I’m talking about people ready to give it a try.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/10/08.html#a787; comments are here.

• Blogs vs Chat and Bulletin Boards
• Blogging: storytelling and listening
• The art of blogging: ecosystem is more important than content

During last few days I was browsing many BloggerCon-related weblogs (If you are interested, you can check BloggerCon webcast, aggregated blogroll (RSS) and Feedster BloggerCon buzz)…

Betsy Devine notes on educational panel

Dave Weinberger, JOHO: Is it the opinion of the panel that weblogging is a life skill, and everyone should learn it? Or is it like singing, that not everybody should do it in public? [...]

Kevin Marks, Epeus Epigone: Blogging is not selective by race, it’s selective by electricity. Also, you can’t really blog if you haven’t mastered the basic skills of reading and writing.

…and on Cluetran 2003 panel

Adam Curry: When you talk about what people are doing with the web now, think about the way the telephone was used when it was new–to call ahead and tell you that a telegram is on the way. [...]

Ted Henderson: People have compared weblogs to the telephone. I don’t know many people, except maybe teenagers, who pick up the telephone and dial random numbers to get their message out. [...]

Kevin Marks: The net is too big for us to see all of it. It’s like Caliban’s mirror, because you see what you’re loooking for. If you look for dark things you’ll see dark things.

Lis Riba

Blogging is just a technology. It doesn’t make us better people, doesn’t by itself improve our lots or say much about ourselves.

Lis again

I raised my hand to ask a question, and by the time I finally got to speak, began with a statement that garnered applause and I’ve now seen quoted on several other blogs: ‘We’re a roomful of people used to writing monologues trying to have a dialogue.‘ As somebody else pointed out, the key question is often who can speak when; with weblogs, it can happen in parallel.

Lance Knobel

I have never been to a conference where there was such easy intercourse between panel and audience: everyone was truly a participant, in the best sense of the word.

Part of the explanation was the generally high standard of topics and panels. But I think there is something more fundamental. Since everyone (or just about everyone — I found one exception) at the conference was a blogger themselves, everyone is comfortable with voicing their views, and is generally pretty cogent in the way they do it. It makes for a very potent mix.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/10/05.html#a780; comments are here.

• Found on-line
• Blogging: storytelling and listening
• Personal publishing vs. engaging in dialog

A few month old writing by Jim McGee:

Weblogs are interesting in organizational KM settings because weblogs are technologically simple and socially complex, which makes them a much better match to the KM problems that matter. One thing that we need to do next is to work backwards from the answer – weblogs – to the problem – what do organizations need to do effective knowledge management. We need to avoid the mistakes of other KM software vendors and not assume that the connection is self-evident.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/19.html#a756; comments are here.

• Knowledge management, weblogs and action research
• Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing
• Author-centred vs. topic-centred blogging

RSS A Love Story by Brian Lamb [via Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

A Beginner’s Guide to Blogs by David Wiley [via Brian Lamb]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/08/08.html#a709; comments are here.

• Weblogging is merging with…?
• Blogs in Russia
• I-KNOW: morning thoughts

More pragmatic questions: what site statistics could you recommend to use with a weblog?

I’m most interested to know the following about my weblog:

• history of referers and tracking changes (quantitative, for the rest there is Technorati :)
• search strings and their change over time
• most popular visited pages (I have some insight about popular linked pages from Blogdex)
• RSS requests/traffic vs. pages requests/traffic
• visitors that are RSS readers (this comes down to knowing how many people are subscribed to your RSS)

It’s also interesting to know usual things (e.g. hits and visitors), but as far as I don’t have ads it’s not important :)

See also: RSS Flow, Measured

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/08/07.html#a707; comments are here.

• How Technorati works? (2)
• Categorizing weblog usage
• Waypath plug-in installed

My brother is very pragmatic young person, so after I had explained him how my weblog works he said that I should try to earn some money with it. This was never my goal (I thought only about reputation :), but his suggestion made me thinking. I may go for a couple of “ad” things that bring some money to cover my hosting if they fit what I do. But I’m not sure if this “commercialisation” effort is worth it.

So, my questions for bloggers (A-list bloggers are not counted :)

• Do you have any experiences with partner programs (e.g. Amazon Associates)? Did they bring anything tangible?
• Have you tried “Donate” buttons (e.g. PayPal) to let people support your weblog? Any results?
• Do you have “wishlists” (e.g. Amazon wishlist) and are there many people sending presents to you?
• Have you tried advertisments (e.g. Google AdSense or BlogAds)? And what…?
• Something else?

Here I’m interested in direct use of your weblog for earning money. Cases of getting a job/project because of your on-line reputation or providing products/services are something else.

And finally – what do you think about these ways of earning money with your weblog? Would you do this? In what cases? Or would you prefer to have it pure without spoiling your design/reputation with money issues?

See also: comments, In Search Of Blog Business Models [via Marc Canter], How to make money from blogging – by acting as a miner and getting domain specific nuggets [via Roland Tanglao: KLogs], The Economist: Golden blogs [via Blogads]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/08/07.html#a706; comments are here.

• Matching?
• Categorizing weblog usage
• Weblogs spamming Google?

The Death of the Webmaster: Why Weblogs Bring a True Revolution to Internet Publishing [via Thomas Burg]:

The future is in the hands of those who not only own a press, but that can also operate it.

Later: the post above was the one of many in my news aggregator linking to the web-site of Luigi Canali De Rossi. I’ve subscribed to his RSS, reading about Communication Agents Initiative and enjoying great quotes like this one:

Stop surfing, Start Making Waves!

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/08/04.html#a701; comments are here.

• Blogging: storytelling and listening (2)
• New blogs: Denham Grey and Elliott Masie
• Links

Evan Williams [I lost track of how I came across this post]:

Most of the people who I’ve heard, anectdotely, say that they think blogs sometimes get undue ranking, mention coming across their own blog for searches. They don’t necessarily complain about about coming across other blogs. Could that in part be because: a) They’re using phrases to search that are natural to them (and, therefore, the words they use to write) but that aren’t quite as likely to be used by others as they might think? b) They’re not going to learn anything from their own blog, so they consider that result useless, while another blog’s contents they may find valuable?

This confirms my feeling that weblogs are not at the top of all searches people do. Probably they are at the top of many searches bloggers do :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/28.html#a699; comments are here.

• You never know where you can find your own words :)
• The future is in the hands of those who can operate a press
• KMSS02: Day 4 follow-up – introducing blogs

Jim McGee with Rory Perry summarizes emergence of weblogs as mainstream content platform and an observation I loved (bold is mine):

One advantage of letting things pile up in your aggregator is that more efficient folks like Rory come along and organize stuff for you. I knew that eventually procrastination would become an important knowledge economy skill!

:)))

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/25.html#a697; comments are here.

• Sweeping in front of your doors
• Blogs in Russia
• PhD conclusions in a thousand words: blogging practices of knowledge workers