www.josschuurmans.com

Blog routine v.0.6

And now for a bit of process mapping, here comes my blog routine checklist:

Take the pulse:

1. Check that my blog is live. Report any performance issues to my blog tool provider.

2. Check new comments and trackbacks to my blog.

3. Check my email for feedback to my blog.

4. Check Sitemeter for visits, referrals, search terms, entry page ranking. Scan for clues as to which parts of my blog people read most, how they find my blog, and assess where I could do a better job at helping them find the information they are looking for.

5. Check for references to my blog, e.g. Google Alerts, Technorati, etc. (See also: 'Google Alerts serve The Long Tail')

Produce new content (see also: blog entry creation v.0.6):

1. Respond to comments, trackbacks, email and references. Produce one or more new blog entries if relevant. Respond via email, comments or trackbacks.

2. Bookmark blog entries, referrals and interesting new-found sources for future reference.

3. Follow-up on blog posts "today a year ago". Assess if the one-year-old topics call for updates. Produce one or more new blog entries if relevant.

4. Blog the conversation. Check a number of sources on what's hot in my areas of interest. Engage where relevant.

5. Review mindmap of blog topics. Blog proactively. Own stuff.

Somewhat related op www.josschuurmans.com:

• Blog entry creation v.0.6 (February 24, 2006)
• Blog dev stuff that needs doing (December 26, 2005)
• 10 answers to "Why blog?" (June 5, 2005)

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogdev, content creation, process, process modeling

Blog entry creation v.0.6

Here's a process snippet, a checklist for creating blog entries:

1. Decide about topics according to the blog routine v.0.6.

2. Research. Fact finding. Bookmark relevant Web sources on del.icio.us.

3. Write blog entry. Headline. Body. Summary. Sub headers. Bold and italics. Quotes.

4. Add embedded links.

5. Find relevant image(s) under public or creative commons license.

6. Cut, scale, save, upload, insert image(s). Photo caption(s), attribution.

7. Add links: "Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com".

8. Add Technorati tags, using the Technorati Magical Seep Bookmarklet.

9. Link: "Bookmark this entry on del.icio.us. (will return to current page)".

10. Technorati ping: "http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping"

Somewhat related op www.josschuurmans.com:

• Blog dev stuff that needs doing (December 26, 2005)
• Meet version 0.5 of "About me" (December 2, 2005)
• 10 answers to "Why blog?" (June 5, 2005)

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogdev, content creation, process, process modeling

Observations about (social) bookmarking

(1) Capturing ranks rather high among my ten most pressing reasons to blog. Especially with the daily links now working, social bookmarking is becoming something of a "blogging-light" to me. It's a very time-efficient way to capture sources, references, information that I've read or scanned. I interpret the notes field in the bookmark popup as a mini blog entry. The space is limited, you can't insert links or images, and the headline of the "daily links" post is meaningless, but nevertheless. It's an economical way to blog.

(2) I've wondered about standardization of tagging before. Wouldn't it be oh so Web 2.0 if search engines, social tagging sites and online blog tools standardized on exchanging tags in the background? At present I'm typing categories and keywords in TypePad, tags on del.icio.us, and then there is Technorati drawing its own conclusions. Slightly frustrating. (although I heard Burks Oakley mention a slick tool called the Magical Sheep Bookmarklet in his podcast on Technorati and the Blogosphere - I'll have to test that.)

(3) Maybe I'll post this one on the LazyWeb: I'd very much like a searchbox on my blog that lets me search not only the full content of my blog (like the Google and Technorati search boxes on the left), but which also indexes the contents of all the URLs that my blog links to. One vision of blogs is that, as they evolve, they will contain (links to) most of the information a blogger has come across and found relevant. It's that vision of a memory prosthesis. So, as a blogger, I want to be able to search that repository of my own collected knowledge.

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking

Can I "claim" my del.icio.us page on Technorati?

Here's the Plan:

1. Post this entry on my blog.
2. Bookmark this blog entry on del.icio.us/josschuurmans.
3. Paste Technorati's blog claiming javascribble ino the del.icio.us bookmark's notes.
4. See if del.icio.us/josschuurmans appears on my Technorati profile.

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• Technorati blog claim succeeded (finally!) (February 2, 2006)
• del.cio.us' daily links suddenly work (January 3, 2006)
• Blog dev stuff that needs doing (December 26, 2005)

FOAFing the Semantic Web

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

FOAF on Wikipedia offers useful links to exploring the concept.

Edd Dumbill's article 'XML Watch: Finding friends with XML and RDF' provides some introductory insights into what FOAF can do.

It's an instance of the Semantic Web, really, described by Wikipedia as a project that: "intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by giving meaning (semantics), in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web. Currently under the direction of the Web's creator, Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Consortium, the Semantic Web extends the ability of the World Wide Web through the use of standards, markup languages and related processing tools."

Leigh Dodds' FOAF-a-Matic is a tool to create a FOAF description of oneself. As Leigh describes: "FOAF is a way to describe yourself -- your name, email address, and the people you're friends with -- using XML and RDF. This allows software to process these descriptions, perhaps as part of an automated search engine, to discover information about your and the communities of which you're a member."

'Click to the clique', Ben Hammersley's article for The Guardian, explains the concept further: "(...) the US sociologist Stanley Milgram who developed what he called the "Small World Hypothesis", which said, in effect, that everyone was connected to everyone else by six degrees or less (...)"

People describe their connectedness with others in a decentralized way, by uploading FOAF files to the Net. Software robots can access these FOAF files, and present the aggregated contents in an organized manner.

The projected result is that people can then view the chains of acquaintants between themselves and any other FOAFers. Jim Ley's FOAFnaut is supposed to be such a tool for "browsing the FOAF universe".

I haven't got it to work yet and, frankly, I'm wondering about the privacy implications and anti-spam protection.

Related posts on www.josschuurmans.com:

• 'TypePadVersusWordPress' on Wikispaces.org (September 19, 2005)
• Web 2.0 means participation, also in the mobile space (September 8, 2005)
• Submission to the Open Directory Project (ODP) (September 7, 2005)

Emily Robbins figures out how to blog

Emily Robbins runs a blog on 'How To Blog'. "I am teaching myself how to create weblogs, comparing movable type to typepad to blogger to b2evolution, wordpress, blosxom, etc., figuring out customizing blog templates, domain mapping, blogrolling, etc, and am posting all my findings here," her page header reads.

[UPDATE, March 12, 2006: Emily moved her blog from TypePad to WordPress, with a new URL: http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/ - see comments below - JS]

I haven't been altogether satisfied with the "tips & tricks" that TypePad offers in their "knowledge base". For example, I'd love to set up a blogroll that syndicates my favorite blogs' latest headlines, rather than just a static list of blog titles. Does that make any sense? Is that perhaps where the Outline Processor Markup Language, or OPML (OPML.org / Wikipedia entry), comes in?

Related posts on www.josschuurmans.com:

• 'TypePadVersusWordPress' on Wikispaces.org (September 19, 2005)
• TypePadVersusWordPress (September 14, 2005)
• Is it worth switching from TypePad to WordPress? (September 12, 2005)