January 16, 2006

Feed2Podcast

I blog about PODZINGER yesterday. It turned audio into text and archiving them. On the contrary, if you want to give your blog a voice, try Feed2Podcast.

You give Feed2Podcast a RSS feed, and it’d turn it into a Podcast. In other words, the web service use text-to-speech technology to read your blog feed to your subscribers. It’s a totally reverse conversion service to PODZINGER. One particular difference is, bloggers might not mind their voice to be converted into text and read/search, but getting a generated tune to read the text they wrote?

If you don’t mind the less-human tune to read your text out to the readers, try it out!

Comments (1)

January 14, 2006

Technorati is the most friendly web service to non-English blogger

At the mean time, Technorati should be the best ping service and blog search engine. It has millions of blogs ping to it and doing a good indexing job, except that sometimes you’d still seeing its searching temporary out of service (due to the heavy traffic).

Nevertheless, even if it’s not the best ping service yet, it must be the most friendly towards non-English bloggers. Checking all the other famous blog services and you’d probably notice most of them are English-centric. But Technorati’s doing a good job to normalize the blog-weight, you get to see all different language tag got into the top/hot tags and top search at the hour.

For example, if you do monitoring on the top searching tag/keywords on Technorati, you might find “Microsano” to be a hot keyword today. I was surprised I couldn’t find anything of this word on Google early morning, while I noticed this word at Technorati. Instead, Google was suggesting me if I am looking for “Microsoft”. This’s implicitly telling me if gonna search for any hot event in blogosphere, do go for Technorati first.

Out of curiousity, I’ve check against Google late afternoon and get some result. Via Google’s translation service, it’s translated as “microhealthy”. Not quite knowing what it means. It seem to be some Spanish organization is organizing an event to spot a keyword to be first appear on Google, and pushing it! (well, so this has something to do with Google). Whoever get the top of search result of “Microsano” by March would be rewarded. Interesting idea.

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Ping-o-Matic is down temporary

The RPC services in Ping-o-Matic! seem down temporary. My ping in these 2 days all getting error return. Checking the website doesn’t get any clue though.

So what’s the backup if you do want to ping to some blog-portal type of services. Some searches lead me to the following:

If you have the faith that ping-o-matic would be recovered soon, do the ping manually with the above webpages. Otherwise change the ping URL in your blog system, most of blogging system nowadays should have a place for you to input ping URL.

Comments (0)

December 28, 2005

New kind of spam

I was getting a new kind of “spam” into my previous entry (note: spam comments have been deleted). The spam comments are kind of comments none of program would filter it out, as it is posted by a real person.

Imagine this, somebody with some strong political opinions/views to express and he has the spare time to go all the related blogs to copy and paste his views on the comments. This is what happenning, though the comments made sense and do express certain views, they are un-related to the blog entry at all. I am not sure if all Malaysian blogs are flooded with this spam, guess one wouldn’t have so much spare time to go around and doing typing works.

The spam do have a pattern though: it doesn’t care what are you blogging about, it use different user name and email, but with the same source IP :); worse then, he tried to post 10 comments within 1 or 2 minutes.

Comments (1)

December 06, 2005

Captcha in comment

I activated the SCode plugin in the comment in this blog. SCode is Captcha kind of test given to verify whether it’s a human whom’s the website interact with, or is it just some machine program trying to access this website. In short, it either scrambled a text or display some numeric number in graphics format. So those bustard spammer can’t simply get through with their programs or scripts.

Nevertheless, Captcha is effective to filter out the spams. But it violates website’s accessibility. Rules No. 1: you always provide some alternative access to disabled users to your website. But nope, they can’t view your scrambled images or the number on the icons…there’s no other way a blind person would be able to comment on this site.

I am feeling bad with this even though I don’t think there’s any disbaled people would access to this blog. But I am tired to check out the comment list or reading emails for the approval of comments. Here’s the sacrifice.

Comments (2)

November 25, 2005

Mu Mu, Body Blog

A noticable scheme in blogosphere: female blogger with snapshot of her body — not necessary naked, and not necessary having text sexual-related, is easy to get famous, at least at Technorati. Damn Yang and XiaXue are the example. Now we have Mu Mu, a 25 years old Chinese lady, whose blog is very famous among China bloggers.

Mu Mu named her blog dancing and body blog. I have a glance and she did have attractive photos on her blog, with nice thought out text. Her blog made it into New York Times : A Party Girl Leads China’s Online Revolution, and made it into Top 10 search of Technorati.

Comments (1)

November 22, 2005

Simple Sharing Extension

Microsoft published an extension for RSS and OPML: Simple Sharing Extension . The SSE specification is licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike License 2.5.

Its usage model looks to me the SSE is targeting mutual syncing and subscription amongs publishers (websites/blogs). There is more interaction could be imagined with introduction of sx:sharing, sx:related, sx:sync. I didn’t see anything get it more content-rich, would it matter for more data exchange among publishers? Would more interaction helps web growth? The success of protocol always depending on its stability, widely-spread and stable. Licensing SSE under CC doesn’t necessary make it stable or widely adapted, it’s at least sounds encouraging though.

We have Atom being developed over 2 years. How far would SSE go?

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Your Blog at WordPress.com

The beta is over, it’s opened!

Go get it, NOW

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November 04, 2005

Adsense

It is Deepavali and Hari Raya holiday this week at Malaysia. I got a long vacation. Been Melaka to relax for 3 days, come back, I feel like playing around with blogging again.

Look at my blog, it’s aged, outdated. But googling around just get me felt that I wasnt’ able to catch with all those happenning stuff. At last, I only could make one change: make Google Adsense enabled for my blog — just for experiment. Since it’s a very low volume blog ever since I decided this should be a place only for my very random writing (and write for what? self-complement?), the text-ads put up on each individual page wouldn’t get much click-through. Anyhow, let’s start with a small step to revamp my weblog.

Other notes

It’s sure feeling lonely when nobody care/read what you are writing. Is that the reason why I can’t get back the passion of blogging of 2 years ago? (anyway, I was then only actively blog for 3 months.)

Weblog, or blog, has been widely known and recognized in Internet for years. There are probably over few thousands new weblog created in every single day. So why should I care to create one? I found my brain stuck when I was away from the writing activities, there’s no juice when I figure I should have some idea to put on my blog. That’s the only reason I should back to blogging and help myself to build up some good habit.

My wishes is:
* Wake up early at specific time everyday
* Do some light blogging at week day, as the day job takes up most of my time —- well, this bother me a lot because my job came to the stage when I started feeling like run away from it
* Do some deeper study into any topics at weekend, write it out for better understanding of it

Comments (0)

July 10, 2005

MT 3.17

Having stop blogging for more than one year, I never expected the upgrade of MovableType could be that easy. First I download the full package and uploaded, found it’s the wrong tar file later on and re-download the upgraded package —- upload again and re-configure MySQL option. That’s it, done! Everything just works!

Well, not everything in the actual fact, some old-dated plugins didn’t function anymore (like RelatedFromWaypath). Of course, I have been out of all these for a long time, so never did the follow and catch up. But I am truely happy the main and core function just works painlessly. Great work, MovableType.

Comments (0)

February 09, 2004

blogging feel

My last post was on September, 2003. In fact, I stopped actively blogging since July last year. It’s been 7 months! Seven months in blogging could mean a decade. Anyway, I lost track of what happening in blogland, didn’t mind what version MT is nowadays, and I even forgot my MT userid/passwd!! That’s funny, I have to go to my ISP control panel and access to the MySQL db, checking the mt_author, and then realizing for security consideration, I did choose a tricked username instead of my familiar id. The rule is: it’s always a trade-off between security concern and convenience of users.

If you’re going to leave your blog for a long while, be sure to put all necessary access in place (e.g. utilize Mozilla password manager).

[Update] Amazing, most of the stuff still work: the pinging, related entries/blog plugins.…etc. Yeah, the software is reliable. :-)

Comments (1)

July 15, 2003

Weblog Metadata for download

NITLE Blog Census is another metablog that find as many weblogs as they could, crawling and store them. They licensed their works under Creative Common licence. You could get their full database over here, as well as the URL and metadata of known weblogs.

This is nice and generous! It save months of hard work if you’re going to do some weblog analysis. They have crawled over 623,416 weblogs (across all languages), which should be good enough to be based for your topology study or any sort of discovery. Download the data, put your creative on it.

Moreover, based on the data, they have a statistic of market share of weblog tools. Market share of standalone tool like MT is way behind blog hosting service like blogspot.

July 10, 2003

Adam's stand on RSS

Here’s how Adam Curry voice his objection to (N)echo project: he would pay $10K to spread among aggregrator developers, for who to adhere RSS 2.0, and kick NEcho out of view.

Why is he doing this? Simple. He is economically hurted by the project. He spent $10,000 to get pre-listed feed on Userland Radio. And hence his investment and commitment on the RSS. And then he speack out with the same trick to object to the new format.

Come on, Adam. We read your blog not just because of the default feed on some aggregrator or your fame (though I agree it’s a smart marketing). It’s your writing, and you, who to be known/accessed by your writing, to attract readers to your blog. The aggregrator world ain’t going to leave out NEcho just because some objection. It won’t reduce the effort on developing the new format either, so if you (aggregrator developers) don’t support it, you are left out, you lose your customers. As a user, there’s nothing to lose, you got your choice, all the time.

July 07, 2003

Making money with Blogging

Are you wondering on blogging for buck? Here’s a chance: Blogging Network. These people are paid to write! It basically is a subscribing idea where you need to sign-up an account to read all the blogs, and paid by monthly or yearly for your subscription. How’s the blogger get paid? Half of the readers’ subscribing fee is divided between the writers they read.

I am not sure how’s the idea working out. Back to the dotCom era, there’re implementations of micropayment mechanism for popular writers who used to publish on paper or books. But it didn’t succeed and Internet users were just too used to free stuff. May be blogging activity could achieve it, when there are more good writing and pepole more used to blog reading.

Would I write better if I was paid? I doubt it. Somehow I’m trying my best and hoping my writing get improved day by day.

Would you pay to read your favourite blogs? Guess it’s OK for me, there’re brilliant writers out there. And it’s like paying for magazines. I don’t read magazines nowadays, I read the web.

July 02, 2003

The Blogger Code

In the old days, I used to keep my geek code in .signature of my Unix Id or email signature. I’ve losted it ever since my Unix account closed (or email losted? can’t remember though). I missed it but I am no more consider myself as a geek, not bother to own the other one.

So, geek has the geek code, it’s obvious that blogger has the blogger code. You need to manually compose your geek code by following the instructions (as Dinesh pointed out, there’re actually several geek code generator — this online generator and this console application). But to generate your blogger code, you need only to go through the survey, identify the most closed description of what kind of blogger you belong to, there you are, your blogger code generated. Moreover, to these mythical code, there’re decoders (and this)

Here’s my blogger code:

B5 d t+ k+ s+ u f i o x- e l c

Comments (4)

June 29, 2003

Communication

Tim Bray: Explosion!, Stamp out Creativity Now, Escaping and Learning

Dave Winer: Tim Bray is worried, Dave Winer is angry

Sam Ruby: No Inventions

June 26, 2003

Apple Fame

One thing that always puzzle me, are most bloggers Apple fans? Check out these metablogs:

Whenever there is any news from Apple, it would sure getting lots of attention in blogland. Isn’t Apple just having 10% share of the computer market, or less? That’s weird. But that prove they are in fact really selling innovation, building reputation, selling images, selling brand… It’s amazing to look what they’ve achieved.

Or could it be just most of the bloggers using Apple? I don’t get the statistics. I’d rather guess may be there are lots of admirers too. I have to admit I am just one of them. I really want to own a Mac ever since Mac OS X released (well, it’s just way too expensive, if you earn a living in Malaysia). And of course it’s always cool when you’re holding a Powerbook/iBook, handing around in happening places within cities. Well, that’s how we people think, and that’s what Hollywood wanted people to think. Didn’t you see there’s always just Apple in movies?

OK, movies doesn’t mix with reality. I don’t judge movie by the computer they used. And yeah, I feel I like it, the Apple Power Mac G5.

June 25, 2003

Syndication Reloaded and Revolution

Sam Ruby started a Wiki on The Conceptual Model of a Log Entry. On the issue of proposed new syndication format, which I presume it would be more than just syndication, there’s a Roadmap to New Log Format. The idea is to develop a new syndicate format, where it’s

  • 100% vendor neutral
  • implemented by everybody,
  • freely extensible by anybody, and
  • cleanly and thoroughly specified.

I am positive on the move. To me, vendor neutral is the key point. I’ve wondered why RSS didn’t standardized as like SOAP did. It’s something should done long time ago, before it goes out of control. I think a new syndication format is at least good for following reasons:

  1. Standardization
    Standardization give a chance to explain syndication in-depth, in a less-confusing way, and more-specified. Besides, it looks like different versions of RSS could be claimed by different group by people. And though it isn’t sound a big deal to most RSS developers, it brings confusion, argument and sometimes FUD. Technically speaking, we really need a well-explained specification.
  2. Too many variants
    The current RSS world is just messy. There are too many different versions. And when you come to RSS, you have to know which side you’re going to stay: which one support date/time? to use or ? put my entity encoded HTML in or ? what is that GUID?… There are so many choice and most people depend on their blogging tools to generate one for them. It was worse that different tools generate different version of RSS, and not all of them generate validated RSS! So, putting on the effort for new log format, might be good to be out of this mess.

Alright, it looks good. It hasn’t been named. No matter what it would be named, how about compatibility? Is the new format going to be backward-compatible? What if it’s a totally new stuff and not backward compatible? Would all the blogging system vendors supporting it? Would users switch? I don’t know. I think vendors would be happy to support it if there’s a clear instruction to interpret/compose the syndication, and it’s more extensible and interoperable. On users side, to give enough time, people who didn’t switch would be out-numbered and force to switch.

I don’t know. I’m just being positive.

[update] More reading:

June 21, 2003

History of RSS date formats

Mark Pilgrim: History of RSS date formats. As usual, Mark’s great essay is clear and resourceful. It’s really helpful on remember how’s it come to today’s argument on pubdate v.s. dc:date.

When there’s people writing guideline on RSS, pointing the confusing parts, there’s still confusing RSS feeds (as Simon pointed out there’re some feeds that have a pubdate element use ISO8601 date). I don’t get it. Did these people hand-code their feed? Or did it generate by some legacy tools? How to fix those bugs in tool generating bad-formed XML? Getting 99% RSS feed upgraded, so aggregator don’t have to parse at all cost? The development of all these XML formats went through what HTML has been there, the difference is there are less players (browser) in HTML world.

More:

The Blog Celebrity

We have Scoble’s listed A-List Bloggers, and the most influential blogs. These are the celebrity of blogland. They wrote influential pieces, inspired people, hinting the direction of where to go, definitely these are the blogs worth to note of.

Albeit admiring what they’ve achieved, it’s just too difficult for most of us to simulate, at least for me. I’ve been pondering how to attract more people to read my blog, and to generate more conversation. But I couldn’t care less 2 months later. To me, blog is about personal publishing, which have a loose definition of what should you publish (it’s personal anyway). People who wrote great essays pull eye balls over, blogger blog on breaking news/heat events of course get the attention, bloggers who having specific expertise on certain topics attract the fan groups, bloggers treat blog as their diary has the supporting of friends… There are so many scenarios, and all I could say is, the personality made the difference.

So, don’t follow leader. You got your own footstep. My English writing skills isn’t good, but it’s improved over 2 months blogging. I blogged over several categories, may be it’s time to try consistently blogging on some certain topics…

Wait, when I was writing this, I suddenly it isn’t sound logic to go from blog celebrity, come to my reviews of my blogging. I am just curious to how they’re doing it, and at the same time, telling myself to improve my writing…

[update] Err…I shouldn’t blog when in sleep, just damn tired after few hours shopping.

>>The Hulk