#blogging

What is Twitter?

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A cou­ple of friends and fam­i­ly have been ask­ing:

  • What’s up w/ the sta­tus updates I see quite often?
  • What’s w/ the “@” (at sym­bol) next to names on your sta­tus?
  • What the heck is a tweet?
  • etc.

Rather than point­ing them to Twit­ter’s site, I rather just show them this video:

YouTube Preview Image

I hope that makes sense. Thanks to Com­mon Craft. They have done a great job explain­ing it “in plain eng­lish” =)

Update
Some Twit­ter terms writ­ten by Peter Cash­more on Mash­able.

coComment Helps Us Remember What We’ve Said

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I was actu­al­ly think­ing of some­thing like this. I was going to make it my first RoR project but that might just be to ambi­tious. Any­ways, plain and sim­ple,

coCom­ment is the only ser­vice that allows you to enjoy the full poten­tial of blog com­ments on the web. Before coCom­ment, the blo­gos­phere was not a glob­al con­ver­sa­tion, but tons of frag­ment­ed, hard to fol­low, and untrack­able dis­cus­sions.

Using coCom­ment, you can now keep track of what you have been com­ment­ing on, dis­play your com­ments on your blog, and see what is new in the dis­cus­sions you are par­tic­i­pat­ing in (if oth­er users are also on coCom­ment).

One con (at the moment), is that “users can only track com­ments from blog posts that they have actu­al­ly com­ment­ed on, and only com­ments left by oth­er cocom­ment users are shown.“1 But this was a day or so ago. I have to check the new ver­sion out myself as I’ve just signed up a few moments ago.

Along with their news yes­ter­day about ver­sion 0.4c being released, the team also men­tioned the fact that there is now a Fire­fox exten­sion for coCom­ments. This addi­tion, for sure, will make things a bit eas­i­er than hav­ing to use a book­mar­let on the user’s com­put­er.

There might be one small gripe though. As I was tak­ing a look at coCom­men­t’s Blog Inte­gra­tion sec­tion which lists which browsers and blog/CM­S/site-plat­forms it sup­port­ed, I read that Mov­able Type blogs must have the fol­low­ing for­mat,

<title>blog name : article title</title> or
<title>blog name | article title</title>

Oth­er­wise, the com­ment (in coCom­ment) will show up as “(unti­tled)”.

So, see­ing that, there might be an issue of hav­ing every­one involved have a stan­dard way of tem­plat­ing their TITLE-tags. I, for one, see this as a big thing (so it ain’t “small” after all). If this is true, and has­n’t been addressed in it’s next iter­a­tion, coCom­ment is pret­ty much forc­ing every­one to do “this and that.” Then again, we’ll see how this plays out with Micro­for­mats. So if you are listening/reading this oh-Lords-of-coCom­ment, please do let us know. (Then again, I just signed up and haven’t got­ten to play around with coCom­ment that com­plete­ly yet.)

All in all, the ser­vice is prac­ti­cal and very use­ful for those that like to read and inter­act with dif­fer­ent blogs. It’s great for coCom­ment to have got­ten around and imple­ment­ed some­thing use­ful to the mil­lions that are very involved with interblog-inter­ac­tiv­i­ty. In it’s cur­rent state of ver­sion 0.4c, I just can’t wait to see the oth­er fea­tures it will have when it rolls out from “beta”. Pret­ty much, like all the oth­er “Web 2.0” appli­ca­tion-sites. =)

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  1. Michael Arring­ton, coCom­ment vis­it to Sil­i­con Val­ley [↩]

Services Like FeedXS to Reinvent Blogging?

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FeedXS

Oth­er than it’s bold ORANGE col­or, FeedXS launched yes­ter­day. A Nether­land-based com­pa­ny,

FeedXS gives every­one in the world and every busi­ness its own per­son­al feed. By cre­at­ing a feed, every­one who sub­scribes to your feed, will always be on top of your lat­est news.

It’s total­ly FREE!

Mean­while, while this looks like a promis­ing web appli­ca­tion, I won­der how it will effect the Blo­gos­phere. By read­ing the Per­son­al Feeds tour sec­tion, I under­stand that you pret­ty much just add entries and pub­lish them to your feed. Some­what like the work­flow on Blogger.com (or any blog­ging tool) but instead of pub­lish­ing your lat­est entry on a web­page, it updates/appends your lat­est entry to the feed.

Will we see a decrease in blog-site cre­ation in the future because of ser­vices like FeedXS? Peo­ple are always want­i­ng to take the easy route. I see this as one of those things. But, blog­gers are a dif­fer­ent class of their own. They seem to want every­thing they cre­ate and write under their com­plete con­trol; for me at least. Also, what would hap­pen to those blog­gers who get some cheese by writ­ing great con­tent (i.e. Om Malik, Andy Budd and Michael Arring­ton to name the least)?

Inter­ac­tion. What willl hap­pen to the com­mu­ni­ca­tion that blogs thrive on between the author and his/her read­ers? I guess this is a draw­back. Instead of just post­ing a com­ment on the entry page of the post, one will have to click on the entry’s archive page URL; that’s even if the author has a site. I guess I just see this prod­uct as a one-way ser­vice. Even though it’ll be easy for every­one to pub­lish an RSS feed, it does not pro­vide the read­ers a way to give a way to send feed­back or thoughts back to the author. Or does it?

Linkage Finds Interesting Treasures for the Mind

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One of the “weak­ness­es” that I have (oth­er than a suck­er for FREE food) would prob­a­bly be the fact that I like to learn a lot of new things. How can this be a weak­ness? Well, it’s kind of like play­ing sports. You would like to get into each sport you see on TV or the ones that your peers love to play. By doing so, you get to become a great ath­lete. How­ev­er, a down­side to that would be you not being able to become a great play­er of a par­tic­u­lar sport. Now, this might not be true for every­thing and every­one but col­lec­tive­ly, it is.

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