onfocus

Congratulations, Jason!

One of the best things to come out of the Gazette Times interview a couple weeks ago has been the increase in Corvallis weblogs at ORblogs. It's now the 3rd most blog-populated city on ORblogs behind Portland and Eugene. (Take THAT Beaverton!) Hearing more voices from my local community on a daily basis paints a more complex, detailed picture of this place. I hope it continues to grow.

I bet a similar jump in blog-population would happen if traditional media pointed their local audience to the ORblogs page for their town. (I'm looking at you, Bend and Salem.)

If I could embed a sound file of crickets chirping in this post, I would. My non-web world is busy at the moment, so the blog suffers.

Google Maps really is all that.

Here are some weblogs I read regularly, but aren't on my sitegeist sidebar:

• Whiskey Bar
• Cool Hunting
• we make money not art
• Spin of the Day
• CoolGov

There are many many more, but that's a start. Back to the crickets.

You've probably seen tags in action at del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, and Metafilter. (The kids are calling them folksonomies.) I set up a similar tag folksgeist page at ORblogs called ORblogs tags. The difference between del.icio.us et al, and ORblogs is that the Oregon Weblogs tag page is using categories that were found in RSS feeds. So while not technically tags, the effect is similar. And I think if people started aiming their weblog post categories toward a group goal, interesting things would happen.

I talked with Mary Ann Albright from the Corvallis Gazette-Times yesterday morning. She called and asked for the interview because of the PC Magazine thing, and she wrote a very nice article from our conversation: Blog days are here.

I'm especially glad she mentioned a project I put together called ORblogs. (If you read this site regularly, you probably already know what it's about.) I think localized blogging is something that's going to be important to communities, and it'd be great to see this idea gaining ground. I really would like to see more people in Corvallis blogging, if only for my own selfish need for information. But I think there are lots of people like me who read the local paper, watch local news, and still want to hear more. (Especially since Corvallis doesn't have its own local radio and television stations.) If everyone in town had a weblog, I could learn a lot about different parts of the community.

It was also good to meet Gazette-Times photographer, Ryan Gardner. (Who also runs VisualPeople.com with his wife.) Now I know what it's like to be on the other side of the camera. It was something like this—



Speaking of local blogging... If you're in Corvallis, you should definitely tune into the Bigha weblog. They're a local company that makes outdoor gear, and they've been at the center of the green laser stuff you've been hearing in the news. They're using their company weblog to respond to the press. It's great to hear unmediated voices like this!

Anil has a theory that no one has been fired for blogging, really. I think it'd be interesting to compile a list of people who have been hired because of their blog. I know I've made contacts and received work through this weblog. I've heard about journalists being "discovered" via their weblog, and hired by a media company. I think the positive, hiring end of the spectrum is much more common than the negative that people seem to focus on. And a list of real stories gathered together somewhere would make that apparent.

I was thinking last night that the nofollow tag creates the ability for inverse google bombing. This would be where everyone links to a specific site, but they include the rel=nofollow in any link to that site. You'd have a situation where thousands of people were linking to something like mad, but it never shows up in Google or any of the major search engines. Hate Microsoft? Want to link to them, yet not give them a pagerank boost? rel=nofollow.

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.)

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]

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.)