Chris Gulker: Weblogging

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 05:44:24 GMT

Microsoft's MSN blogging site auto-censors new blogs. Xeni Jardin, arguably among the keenest observers in the blogosphere, found herself incapable of creating any number of blogs on MSN. Bathroom humor got through, where possibly important cultural titles were nixed. In Ms. Jardin's words:

"The conclusion? A mixed bag of results that manages to do what most attempts to automate censorship do -- make fools of the censors."

It's hard to avoid the effects MS' ubiquitous products have already had on culture - I dread the notion that they are building their 'morals' into software. Do we really want these guys anywhere near our TV and DVD player and stereo?...

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 16:15:48 GMT

A fundamentally different way to blog is what I have in mind: actually, a better way to display content, especially visual content, and I'm not just talking about replacing Radio with Movable Type. We'll be moving gulker.com to a higher bandwidth connection soon: and hope to begin work on some prototypes of the new thing...

Thu, 02 Oct 2003 23:33:03 GMT

The $300 million blog: HP is using a blog as a key part of a $300 million campaign for its digital cameras and other consumer markets - $300 million is a pretty sure sign that blogs have fully arrived as a credible medium. Especially interesting that it's a community blog, featuring the photos of HP customers. Two points here: one is that marketing is increasingly becoming a one-to-one affair and media like this blog make it affordable for a marketer to reach millions in a more personal way than "broadcast" media. The other is that customers are willing to do quite a bit of work - taking and uploading photos in this case - to help spread the word about HP's products. Interesting to see what's next in mass personalization...

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 22:36:23 GMT

Andy Goldberg quotes me in his Independent piece on 'blogging. Andy started a 'blog as part of the exercise, but he's not too sure 'blogging is for him...

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 16:59:55 GMT

Should news organizations edit reporters' 'blogs? A teacup tempest, reported by a newspaper, of course. Nobody else cares...

Thu, 18 Sep 2003 06:19:32 GMT

BloggerCon is looking for Republican bloggers. Ok...

Thu, 11 Sep 2003 04:45:42 GMT

"Roger" has moved his blog to Moveable Type: OK, OK, I know MT and its easy-to-use offshoot Typepad are good. Lots of you-all have told me that. And Roger's still annoyed that Radio crashed, badly, and took all of his blog with it. But I'm a Radio/Manilla guy, OK? I like 'em, I love the scripting-language-cum-database internals and I ain't budging. OK? Easier to argue my politics and religion with me than platform choice...

Tue, 09 Sep 2003 15:49:22 GMT

Baghdad blogger 'amazed' by success. The author of an online diary covering events in Iraq during the recent conflict is astounded by his popularity. From BBC News...

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 15:44:35 GMT

Netcraft has an analysis of the SCO outage this morning. Netcraft uses a blog to market its services... one of the best commercial uses I've seen...

Mon, 28 Jul 2003 17:17:05 GMT

The G4 Cube Blog is a good example of how markets can self-assemble around products. The trick for merchandisers is to figure out how to use blogs. One easy method would be to advertise on the blog - I'm surprised that Cube upgrade makers PowerLogix, Sonnet et al don't seem to be advertising directly on CubeOwner.com (though a reseller is), the way used Mac resellers advertise on Low-End Mac, a Mac site that includes a blog and forums.

Another way for vendors to go would be to start their own blogs - product blogs run by product managers or other knowledgeable people. It would require somebody who 'got it' about blogs, but these could link out to, and be linked back from, the afficianado sites if they did a good job and provided useful and interesting stuff (not just product pitches, though those would be OK). This might be a cheaper, and more effective medium.

Macromedia's Flash MX technologies have a blog, Safari has a blog and OS X once had a developer's blog - all of which are (or were) well-read and much linked to. The key to using blogs for marketing is having a good product, writing and maintaining a decent, useful blog and identifying a few enthusiastic users who also have blogs...

Thu, 24 Jul 2003 21:18:25 GMT

Sparkpod joins Blogger, Bloxsom, Conversant, Drupal, LiveJournal, Manilla, Movable Type and Radio as a blogging platfom. It's written in Web Objects and hosted on Xserves...

Thu, 24 Jul 2003 20:04:57 GMT

RadioExpress, spotted on Phil Ringnalda's blog, looks very cool. It's a toolbar bookmarklet that lets you post directly from the browser to your Radio blog...

Thu, 24 Jul 2003 17:14:05 GMT

Thank you, Comments 'beta testers': Nolan feels my pain, and I note he has a new book, Visual Quick Start for Adobe's nifty Photoshop Album; Gavin and Philipp say 'move to MT' (not likely guys, as nice as MT is); and Andy over at deadjournal.com says my RSS feeds are screwing up (dunno if that's from reattaching Radio, which generates this blog, to a different Manilla comments server or not.

Anyway, after I figured out how to get Manilla's Web server to behave and stay on its own port, I found a mysterious firewall glitch that was blocking that port. Fixed now... so, in theory comments will now be served from the local Manilla server rather than UserLand's... and comments that were posted to this page while connected to UserLand are gone (but archived pages' comments persist)...

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 20:55:14 GMT

Op-Ed blog at The Dallas Morning News... Tip from Dan Gillmor and Tim Porter... It has a few readability/usability bugs, but kudos for trying...

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 16:30:14 GMT

Salon: "George Orwell's wartime columns have much in common with today's blogs: They were often trivial and idiosyncratic, but bore within them the seeds of something greater." Blogs continue the tradition of journals... the original meaning of 'journalism' was the practice of keeping a journal...

Wed, 07 May 2003 17:14:19 GMT

Slashdotted! Daved! Guess the Cyveillancebot rant touched a nerve... good news on the log analysis front: the greater activity and inbound linking mean that some patterns are easier to discern.

I spent some time reading the Cyveillance Web site, and then reading cached versions of previous press releases it has since deleted, in the hopes of understanding just what their technology does, the better to see if patterns in my Web access logs fit various theories.

One theory that's emerged is that Cyveillancebot is particularly sensitive to certain hubs, one of which is almost certainly www.scripting.com. A quick eyeball of the logs seems to show a correlation (and one other blogger noted this) between being linked from Dave's site and being crawled by Cyveillance.

It's as if Cyveillancebot regards certain sites as 'evil' (or maybe it's 'good') and hurries to see what they're linking to. It would be informative to analyze logs at scripting.com and a couple of other high-flow zeitgeist sites and see if there's a discernible pattern.

Cyveillence touts its proprietary Extraction Agents and Data Transformation technology claiming that it delivers 100% relevant results (and call a salesperson for a demo). However, knowledgeable people who hang out at Webmasterworld and Slashdot describe Cyveillancebot as 'stupid' and 'badly behaved'. Not only is it unusually aggressive (it routinely completely saturates my modest Net connection), it gets caught in loops on database-driven sites that most other crawlers have long since been programmed to avoid.

While a 2000 press release bragged of indexing every one of the Web's then 2 billion pages, I note that, as far as I can tell, there are only 4 or 5 Cyveillancebots versus the dozens (or more) that Google runs. Napkin math would seem to indicate that you'd be hard pressed to crawl 3 billion Web pages - including the 7 million new ones every day - at anything like a level that would provide Cyveillance clients with the sort of immediate warning of misappropriation of assets or brand that Cyveillance marketing seems to promise.

Anyway, I've set a couple more 'bot experiments in place: be fun to see what, if any data can be gleaned. Despite the Slashdotting, and the presence of the name of many of Cyveillance's major customers' names in close proximity to hot-button terms in this document, and a word list likely to be very interesting to RIAA, Cyveillancebot has not visited since it came in on a link on Monday. And please do continue to send me 'GREP sightings' of Cyveillancebot: you can find it in your access logs by typing at the command line:

grep 63.148.99 access_log

...if you're equipped and inclined to do the analysis, I'd be interested in correlations between its activity (especially the intense sessions where it downloads every page of a site) and inbound links. Do links from certain sites seem to trigger it?

Thu, 24 Apr 2003 18:58:39 GMT

The lone genius Weblogger, a thought experiment: last December I wrote about the power-law distribution of referrers and hits that may describe the distribution of traffic on Weblogs.

In a power law distribution, the highest-rated and lowest-rated members enjoy an inverse-power relationship: e.g., if one site gets 1 million hits a day, then there are 1 million sites that receive one hit.

Most of the time, people ('bloggers anyway), are interested in how you become the site with the 1 million hits, and the answer varies, but probably has a lot to do with a concept called preferential attachment.

I've been interested in the other end of the curve, the 1 million sites that get one hit apiece. Conventional wisdom would hold they must not be very interesting - preferential 'disattachment' - but that's not necessarily the case.

One million bloggers is sufficiently large a 'universe' that there must be someone writing (or drawing or photographing) something interesting. In fact, there could be what I'm calling a 'lone genius' in a set that large - someone whose ideas and insight are way beyond the normal range.

But how would the lone genius be discovered? Presumably, once such a resource were located, preferential attachment would quickly drive the site's traffic to some other place on the curve. But, lacking promotion, mass linking from other sites or some other discovery method, lone genius might languish, unread.

The typical discovery - search engine indexing - wouldn't work if there were no existing links to lone genius. Indeed, many low-flow Weblogs (and other Web sites) are indexed in lots of search engines, but receive very little or no human traffic because they don't show up in the first couple pages of hits.

Which raises the question of linkage between the quality and usefulness of a site and Web search engine rankings. Word frequency algorithms are likely to be a poor judge of genius, which is why many search engines also look at the number of inbound links. A number of observers have pointed out the value of the trick of co-opting human judgment to assess quality - things like the MIT spin-out Firefly and Amazon's 'suggestions' feature use this mechanism.

But it's also instructive to look at realms where preferential attachment drives to the middle, not the ends, of a theoretical 'genius curve'. Take music: mass appeal tends toward choices like Britney Spears, who, for all her popularity among people of a certain age and economic status, would not be described as a musical genius by many serious musicians.

So, even if lone genius gets indexed on Google, she's not particularly likely to be 'discovered' and promoted onto the other end of the curve. So a 'genius discovery engine' might do better by trolling sequential IP addresses, rather than looking for massed inbound links. Alternately, if there were a 'certified genius index', presumably a Yahoo-like human-moderated construct, then the genius engine could look at the outbound links of that group. And the sequential troller might be the input for the moderators... Rainy morning thought...

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 05:03:14 GMT

Slashdot: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Your Given Name. Now, there's an interesting intersection of domains...

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 17:14:13 GMT

kotke.org: Screw the power law.

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 21:03:44 GMT

Weblog 'gravity': the Power Law redux. It seems like Power Law distributions are quite the topic lately, and I'm trying to get a column out and write something that reflects current thinking and some related findings here at gulker.com. For those interested, here's my post from a year ago on Huberman's work, my essay Roots of Inequality from last December (originally posted as a comment on Azeem Azhar's blog). And this essay was the basis for a column I wrote in "The Independent" last year. With the catalogging out of the way, a few thoughts: Power Law distributions in blogs and Websites are self-similar (big ones, little ones tend to the same N vs. 1/N distribution). My hits and referrers graphs look the same on slow days and on Slashdot days. Fractal patterns are self-similar: and fractals have some very interesting qualities, some of which appear to pop up in hits and referrer log patterns. Power Law is among the most, if not the most common distribution of any resource in nature. Think about it for a moment: the Solar System has all its mass in the planets and Sun, and they acreted in a fashion that looks a lot like preferential selection (the NEC team called it 'rich get richer') - areas in primordial gas that had slightly higher density would have slightly more gravity and thus would grow over time at the expense of areas of lower density. It's interesting to think of a Weblog as having 'gravity'. I've been able to think of a few linear or constant distributions - air in a room for example, but they always break down as you scale. Air around the planet looks like some approximation of a Power Law, with most of the air stuffed into the bottom few thousand feet of the atmosphere. Anyway, I've been keeping these things on a dedicated blog: Weblog Metrics, that is in itself part of a linked set where I've been observing the real world dynamics of links and referrers. Hopefully, I'll find time to publish some of that stuff soon...

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 00:50:45 GMT

More on Power Law and Blogs: Ross Mayfield wades in (again), this time to interpret Clay Shirky's thoughts, as does Kevin Wehrbach. Stay tuned for a long gulker.com post on same...

Mon, 10 Feb 2003 18:35:58 GMT

Dan Gillmor's eJournal: Blogs, Links and Readership. Clay Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality. Dave Winer pushes back. I offered a related opinion last month...

Mon, 10 Feb 2003 05:11:26 GMT

Jason Kottke on Weblogs and power laws... Many links, and opinions...

Wed, 05 Feb 2003 03:28:41 GMT

StagNation: friend Brad Schrick has been unflinching in his honest criticism of technology and large systems for as long as I have known him. His StagNation page points to what he feels is the obvious lack of progress in aeronautical design (and Brad is in a position to know). It's not just airplanes: look at automobiles. We have Corinthian leather, 6-CD changers and cup holders, but otherwise, automobile technology (read:internal combustion gasoline engine) is about the same as it was 100 years ago. Interestingly, Richard Dawkins writes that large, successful Darwinian adaptations seem to resist change. It would seem that technological adaptations do the same (e.g. Microsoft). I become increasingly convinced that there really are a small set of governing principles that operate in every successful large system...

Tue, 04 Feb 2003 23:39:30 GMT

Just came across an interesting 'Power Law' paper, published by a team at NEC, which offers some thought-provoking data: "NEC researchers discovered that the degree of "rich get richer" or "winners take all" behavior varies in different categories and may be significantly less than previously thought." The key is competitiveness: in very competitive scenarios (NEC looked at ecommerce sites) 'preferential attachment' resulted in distributions that were very close to power law. But, in less competitive environments, the distributions moved steadily away from power law. In fact, deviation from power-law distribution becomes an index for competitiveness. I wonder what the Weblog index looks like? The team also pointed out that 'preferential attachment' did not prevent the rapid rise of a new star (they cite Google)...