onfocus

I added rel=nofollow to my comment links. More info at Six Log: Support for nofollow.

Update: John Batelle weighs in on nofollow—

My gut take on this yesterday was "We're making a decision without thinking through the implications." My second gut take was "We can't possibly imagine all the implications." So my third gut take is "Don't do it if we can't imagine what consequences it might have."

I think John's reaction assumes that the big search engines are the only "processors of our collective reality," and that any change in how they operate represents a major change in our collective reality. I think the nofollow tag puts more control of search engines into the hands of content-controllers. (eg. hosted weblog services, ISPs, etc.) This means there's less control for people who contribute content, but don't own and control their own web space. I'm not sure how I feel about the implications of that (not good right now), but I also know that comment spam is a serious problem and something needed to be done before all discussion stopped.

Last night I played around with worldKit—a Flash mapping program. (You may remember this from such flash maps as The World as a Blog.) Their tagline is "Easy Web Mapping", and that's very accurate. I decided to build a geographic map of recent posts by Oregon bloggers, and I had it up and running in about an hour. worldKit has a simple XML config file, and it accepts geo-tagged RSS as input. Using their MapProxy, you can build custom images based on satellite photos, topographic maps, or the tiger census maps. With a few tweaks to the tiger URLs the MapProxy provides, I had the map I wanted. And "Oregon as a Blog" was born on the ORblogs Cities Page. (Of course you'll need Flash installed to view it.)

Check out the cover of the forthcoming Mapping Hacks—full color!

Somewhat related, a weblog about maps: The Map Room.

Brad has resurrected sxswblog for 2005 in the form of: sxswbaby! Due to changing servers and changing plans, the old sxswblog is no more. It's great to see Brad keeping the tradition alive. If you want to get an off-the-record, unofficial view of South by Southwest Interactive—and meet some folks virtually before you meet them in person—sxswbaby will be the place.

Unfortunately, it looks like I'm not going to be able to make it to Austin for the conference this year. But I'll be eavesdropping on the site and living vicariously through everyone else. :)

b!X is fighting the good fight for bloggers in some comments on a list of participants for the invitation-only "Blogging, Journalism & Credibility" conference at Harvard. b!x says:

There is a difference and distinction, however, between people who code the technology which makes blogging possible, talk about what the technology and the form make possible, or journalists who happen to also blog (on the one hand) and the many and varied people across the country who are not technologists, media observers, or traditional journalists, and who have been spending their time actually practicing the intersection of weblogs and journalism itself.

With a word like credibility in the title, I think b!X is right to question the credibility of the discussion itself. [via Brad Stenger's Tech Blog]

In a blatent ripoff of er, homage to Matt Haughey's Ask Metafilter and Ask PVRblog, I put together a site for Oregonians called Ask ORblogs. The idea is the same: anyone can ask a question, and hopefully someone reading will be able to answer the question or provide some info. Ask ORblogs won't have the sheer number of people that Ask MeFi has, but if local bloggers tune into the site once in a while, I think the concentration of local Oregon knowledge would be much higher than you'd find at Ask MeFi. Of course the questions don't have to be Oregon-specific, but I think that's where the site will be able to help people the most.

Asking the ether for tech support: Does anyone know why the changes.xml file at weblogs.com is requesting a user/pass?

oh lazyweb, why do you mock me? I'm trying to comment on a post at lazyweb, but it says:

Your comment was denied. It contains content currently banned by my blacklist.

oh yeah? Well now you're on my blacklist, lazyweb! fwiw, here's what I was trying to say—

It's not easy. I hacked my Amazon RSS tool to do UK feeds: Amazon UK RSS. A better way would be to write your own Amazon UK XSL stylesheet. People have been asking Amazon to add UK feeds for a while now. Alan Taylor put together the RSS for Amazon.com, but he has moved on, so this feature may be on the back burner for Amazon UK.

That doesn't look like comment spam to me.

blogfodder.com was a project I worked on in 2003 that tried to inspire weblog authors each day with a word or phrase, and then point to the results. The domain is expiring, and I'd rather see someone use it than have it go to domain squatters selling whatever domain squatters sell. If you're interested in doing something with blogfodder.com (beyond selling ch3ap v1agr4), contact me.

Update: Someone has claimed blogfodder.com. I'll post more details when I can.

I received a thoughtful response to my silly post about timestamps and weblogs the other day—

The main reason I (and, I'm sure, plenty of others) don't use timestamps is that I sometimes blog from work and don't want the higher-ups knowing about it or (worse) being able to "prove" that something was posted during work hours.

With the cases of people being fired for their weblog, I understand why bloggers want to be careful. (We never hear about the stories where people are promoted because of their weblog.) I still feel like a weblog without timestamps cripples one of the weblog's primary functions. I think this problem points to the need for employers to clarify their stances on weblogs, and personal use of the web. Ross Mayfield wrote about this in his post, Standard Weblog Employee Policy—

Employees want to do the right thing. They want to have a voice, get approval and use it for the benefit of their company. Right now, they can point to the Sun Policy on Public Discourse, Groove Weblog Policy and the evolving Corporate Weblogger Manifesto as examples. They can talk their executives into considering it by pointing to Jonathan Schwartz, me (heh) and Bill Gates any day now. But its still an emerging issue.

It's a bit different when employees are posting to their personal weblog on company time, but people send personal email all the time. (Which employers can easily track.) Weblogs shouldn't be treated differently.

Well, my weblog prediction for 2004 didn't come true as far as I know. I thought a prominent blogger would be sued for libelous comments. Awareness of legal issues related to weblogs definitely grew in 2004, and Dan Gillmor devoted an entire chapter of We The Media to blog law. I'm hesitant to make another prediction, but I agree there's a weblog backlash on the way. I guess my prediction is that a major old-media (TV, Newspaper, Magazine) personality will start a crusade to discredit weblogs. Rather than stopping existing bloggers, a campaign like this could discourage new people from writing weblogs. (More professionalism in weblogs could have the same effect, ironically. Maybe someone should start a "keep weblogs weird" campaign this year.)

Aloha! sk and I just got back from our Christmas in Hawaii. We went to Honolulu and stayed in one of the many, many hotels in Waikiki. (Our room had an amazing view of the beach.) It's the closest I've ever been to the equator, and as you might expect the weather was warm and humid. (Not quite as warm and humid as Nebraska in late August, but close.) The city seemed like it was inhabited only by tourists, and it was rare to see a Hawaiian going about their daily routine that didn't involve tourism. (Especially in Waikiki.)

Of course news of the tsunamis cast a shadow on our trip. The ocean is ever-present in Hawaii, and it's hard to imagine something so beautiful causing incomprehensible destruction. The local news assured everyone that a tsunami wouldn't be as destructive in Hawaii. I feel strange posting tropical vacation photos in light of the worst natural disaster of our lifetime. Even though the pictures and videos we're all seeing of waves, palm trees, and the ocean are devastating—there is a peaceful side.

Now my feet are back in their sock-prisons, I'm re-learning what day of the week it is, and I'm getting used to seeing the outside world through windows. Here are some photos from the past few days.

I had a great time in Hawaii—hopefully I'll get to visit again sometime. Happy New Year!