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!

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.

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:

• Pings.ws : its allow the manual blog-pinging to around 16 blog ping services (Weblogs.com, Technorati, Blog.gs, My Yahoo…)
• If you think only Technorati make sense to you (well, it’s the most famous and “most-ping” service), it has a web page for you to ping manually. Or point your blog system to http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
• The other xml-rpc ping URL that was handled by ping-o-matic automatically: A2B (http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b), original Weblogs.com (http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2), blog.gs (http://ping.blo.gs/)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Go get it, NOW

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

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.

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. :-)

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.

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.

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.

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