[Updated 06/02/08 10:41:11 AM, added link to app.]A WordPress.com application in Facebook? My predictions weren’t that far off!
Tomorrow’s blogging platforms are likely to get increasingly like, say, Facebook.
Almost 30k (December 20, 2006)
Category Archives: Blogging
Joe the Ninja
He’s been called a rogue ninja. And I think he deserves a raise. Whatever he’s getting.
“Rogue ninjas”… I wonder if we can get that on our business cards.
Best compliment ever « whateverblog.
Well, these days, I’m doing “evaluation of quality” surveys over the phone so I often hear about people who apparently deserve praises and raises. Joe Cheng is probably one such person. Chances are that so do other people on the WLW team.
What’s WLW? Windows Live Writer, a blog editor developed as a Microsoft project. Mentioned it in previous entries about blog editors. It’s become the most popular standalone blog editor for WordPress.com:
Obviously some of you have already discovered the coolness that is Windows Live Writer because we found it was our most used blogging client,
Windows Live Writer FTW « WordPress.com
It’s in fact the app I’m using right now to post this entry. It has plenty of neat features including a nicer link management than I imagined.
So, a nice little app that can be useful. World-changing? Maybe not.
Now, why would I want Joe to get a raise? Simple: responsiveness. The keyword that I would associate with getting a clue.
This Joe Cheng character actually posted three (count them) comments on my blog about WLW. True, I had mentioned a bug I got and a report was sent somewhere. But, man, talk about dedication! Not only did he post three separate comments on my lowly blog but those comments were actually useful, straightforward, and at exactly the right tone
Added to this is the transparency of Joe’s own blog. Microsoft seems to have learned something from the Scoble era. Now, I’m clearly not a Microsoft fanboy and some of my comments about the company might have been a bit harsh, on occasion. In fact, I still think that some of Microsoft’s practises were, erm, beyond the pale. Not that Joe and the rest of the WLW team really change anything about this but, you know, I like to give credit where credit is due and I like quality work enough to reassess my opinion of a company based on some things that are done well.
So, for the record: WLW actually comes close to my dream blog editor in terms of accessing a browser history when adding links. If it could actually access my cross-browser history through Google Web History and social bookmarks (including links added to previous blog entries), I might really start singing the praises of that development team.
Until then, I may merely say that Joe deserves praises.
Hey, it’s something!
Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer, WLW, blog editors, responsiveness, Joe Cheng, Microsoft, praises, quality control, quality assurance, evaluation of quality, feedback, WordPress.com, XML-RPC, blogging
Blog Editors, Yet Again
Not that these things matter so much to me. I’m perfectly ok with writing posts directly in a browser. But I like it when there are better solutions.
As it took me almost an hour to refresh WordPress categories in Flock, I’ve taken this, my main blog, out of Flock. Too bad, though, as I have a kind of investment in this blog. Not that it’s likely that Flock will become my main editor but I did notice that I have a tendency to use my personal Blogspot blog more while I’m giving Flock a whirl.
I’m writing this in Windows Live Writer. Yesterday, it crashed miserably while I was simply switching blogs. As WLW is in beta, I wasn’t that surprised and I should have used this as an opportunity to help out the developers. But I kind of lost my patience with beta software. I used to love beta software and didn’t mind the occasional crash. But I need to improve my workflow and not be bogged down with bugged down software.
WLW does seem like a well-planned editor but I already see a few quirks. Like the fact that there’s no easy way to activate a “spell as you type” feature. I’m guessing the feature is there but it’s not very easy to find.
The categories menu for this blog doesn’t allow for direct addition of categories in the categories field. You can add categories by opening the list and adding categories from there. Makes sense for blogs which have reasonable numbers of categories but since WordPress.com blogs have categories serving as tags, it’d be useful to add categories directly. Of course, it’s easy to add Technorati tags and I’m guessing that commonly used tags are somehow kept in the interface. But I prefer to use WordPress categories as tags because they work as both links from WordPress.com and as actual Technorati tags.
But WLW has some cool features. Like the link glossary which seems to be relatively close to what I was wishful-thinking about yesterday. Actually, I quite like the “Insert Hyperlink” interface as it’s very elegant, it’s just a keystroke away (ctrl-k), it’s fully keyboard-operatable, it has access to previous posts on the author’s blogs (including entries posted by other authors on collaborative blogs), and it can add some link properties like XFN. Good job! Now, if I can just have access to my complete Web history and favourites using some kind of cross-platform synchronisation mechanism à la Google Browser Sync, I’m happy.
WLW also has some neat features like blog stats and comments. This might explain why so many WordPress.com bloggers use it as their main blog editor.
We’ll see how this goes.
Technorati Tags: blogging, blog editors, blogging tools, Windows Live Writer, Flock, WordPress.com, Blogspot
Flock as Blog Editor
Now that Flock has a “spell as you type” feature, I can give it a fair shake as a blog editor.
Flock 0.9 Beta Release Notes | Flock
Thing is, though, it seems to have a problem with my main blog‘s extremely long list of categories. When I tried posting a blog entry with my WordPress.com blog account listed among the others, Flock became unresponsive as it was trying to download all my categories (all 2,751 of them). Maybe I could have waited longer but after a number of minutes without being able to use my computer at all, I decided to let it go.
Still, it made me a bit cranky. So the rest of this post will sound like a rant. It’s more like wishful thinking, though. I like wishful thinking.
I don’t like the way Flock’s blog editor handles link insertion. Sure, like any WYSIWYG editor out there, it has a button on which you can click to add an appropriate URL to text you’ve selected. But there’s no clear shortcut for this button and it could be much more powerful than it currently is.
Qumana has a better way to handle links. For one thing, it automatically inserts the clipboard’s content in the URL section of link insertion dialog box. And since it keeps published blog posts, it makes it easy to copy the “permalink” to another blog entry (for those bloggers, like me, who tend to be self-referential). Can’t remember off the top of my head but I’m pretty sure ecto and Windows Live Writer have similar features.
Ok… Flock does have this drag and drop interface for “media streams” (basically, Flickr or PhotoBucket accounts) and for “Web snippets” (local content, including text and links). Good idea and I guess I could make my “bloggable content” available to me while blogging by adding lots of content to my Flock installation and Flickr account. Makes a lot of sense for those who mostly use blogs as placeholders. But it’s still not the ideal method for blogs which rely on more extensive writing. Or for message writing.
What I want is pretty obvious but I haven’t found it yet, even in dedicated blog editors. I want my blog editor to have access to all of my links (Web history, favourites, social bookmarks…) and make it easy to work with those links while I’m writing. Sure, a “Web Snippets” feature is useful. But it still requires a fair amount of mouse movement to simply insert a link. Call me lazy but I prefer limiting my mouse movement while I’m writing.
My dream editor would integrate all of my social bookmarks, Web histories, and address books in the same interface. I could use a keystroke and start typing to get access to those links and addresses that I use frequently. Why addresses? I want to use the same editor for writing blog posts and email messages. Why not? Messages and posts end up having very similar features anyway. As many sites label it, it’s all about “sharing content.”
(I’m not really into IM but, as logic would have it, the same features should work with IM as well.)
To me, the “killer feature” in modern browsers is that auto-complete in the URL bar. I want to go back to a site I’ve visited recently, I just start typing the URL in the URL bar and the browser shows all related URLs. Same thing in Gmail: start typing an address and Gmail auto-completes it. So simple that nobody ever talks about it. But this simple feature is yet completely absent from blog editors, AFAICT.
Oh, sure, Flock does auto-complete in the search field. In fact, it supports incremental searches, which is really nice. But I need auto-complete for links and addresses.
What makes auto-complete even nicer is that it’s now possible to synchronise browsers through Google’s Browser Sync extension for Firefox (it might work with Flock too). Google also saves a Web History. And Gmail users get easy access to their address books from Google applications like Google Docs. And Google has toolbars for most browsers. So I guess Google could easily implement my dream editor.
Thing with my wishful thinking is that it’s often obvious enough that it becomes concrete very quickly after I say it. For all I know, this feature may exist somewhere and everybody else knows about it. But I’ve been missing it for a while now.
Ah, well.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: blogeditors, Flock, browsers, wishlists, Qumana, Windows Live Writer, ecto, address book, web history, social bookmarking, links, Web content
Courses on Blogging and More (Montreal)
Montreal blogger extraordinaire Hugh McGuire (also the founder of LibriVox) is looking for people to give courses on diverse online activities, at the Atwater Library.
hughmcguire.net · wanna give courses on blogging (etc)?
Sounds very interesting and 15$/hour is reasonable for this kind of gig. Wish I had time to do this. Perfect community-outreach project for teaching geeks.
Defining Useful Information
From pizza orders to baby showers.
Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death –
The new regulations (and their author) take an unusually expansive view of what kind of unclassified information a foe might find useful.
Yulblog le 4 avril: qui est game?
Bientôt le Premier mercredi d’avril, donc rencontre mensuelle yulblog. Patrick nous conseille de mettre au défi des blogueurs alors, allons-y franchement. (On est encore le premier, fa-que…)
Alors, Martin Lessard, tu t’occupes juste de Yulbiz ou tu viens voir les vrais blogueurs aussi?
Pis, Robin Millette, Yulblog c’est pas assez camp pour toi?
Vincent Collard, t’attends que le monde vienne vers toi?
Fred Fortin, t’es trop gratteux pour venir à Yulblog?
Komtois, tu vas t’ouvrir un blogue à chaque mois?
Andi, ‘A’ is for April. Are you in town for Yulblog?
Randy, are you so busy brewing that you can’t come meet some fellow bloggers?
Views and Feeds
Yep! One of those blogposts about blogging.
This is somewhat interesting. For some reason, I’m getting much fewer daily views on this blog but I’m getting a lot more feed views, a good proportion of which come from Google Feedfetcher. Maybe WordPress.com has changed its usage statistics to switch Feedfetcher to feeds instead of views or maybe it’s just a coincidence. But it’s fun to think about what happens with this blog.
Actually, I feel I’m getting more interaction with readers, which is what I’ve been missing. I still won’t constrain myself to writing very short blog entries, but I like what this blog is giving me, at this point.
OTOH, I have been posting just a bit more than I used to on some of my Blogger/Blogspot blogs:
- The Linguistic Anthropology collective blog about our discipline:
- My blog for our Anthropology of Music course:
- My Blogger Beta blog:
Part of the reason I blog there more is because of ease of use. Since Google is so ubiquitous, some sites make it very easy to blog an item on Blogger. I mostly tend to use bookmarklets but I’ve been trying the “BlogThis!” buttons on some services, like Flickr and DailyMotion.
Of course, none of this should get in the way of the work I have to do (which is, in fact, quite a bit). And it still doesn’t.
I’ve also spent a bit more time on Facebook. Not much (maybe an hour a week) but it does shift my online activities a bit.
All of this relates to my notion that blogging and other participatory aspects of the online world should merge. In fact, I kind of like the fact that I can insert blog feeds in Facebook and Moodle
Small World? More Than an Experiment
Should have known this would happen eventually. One of my wife’s good friends’ ex-boyfriend had been on my mind for diverse reasons. Had pretty assumed that he might be blogging as he’s a technical writer and had been at the Montreal Mirror for a while. As Montrealers might know, the Mirror is a good source of bloggers (and fiber). Turns out, he’s not only a cool blogger (putting words into The Tinman’s Thoughts) but he also knows Blogmeister Blork quite well (despite some hiatus in the 1990s, it seems).
Also spent time talking with, among others, open-minded music educator Prof malgré tout, intriguing Cameroonian political scientist Waffo, enthusiastic and rational environmental geographer Benoit, outgoing and friendly Houssein, as well as a bunch of people I had already met (and blogrolled 😉 ).
Possibly the funniest interaction for me, during this blogparty, was when I went to talk with someone who was just leaning at the back of the room. The usual introduction to a new blogger is “So… Where do you blog?” (in French, «C’est quoi ton blogue?»). I do use it fairly often during blogging events but it’s the first time I get “Yup!” as an answer. Turns out Robert blogs at the equivalent of a site which would be called “Where Do You Blog!” Of course, “CKOI” is both the name of a local radio station and an IM-like way to say “What is it?,” in French.
Speaking of languages. There was probably a higher proportion of French-speakers at tonight’s party than at the usual Yulblog event. This was the 7th anniversary celebration of this local blogging community.
Again: bloggers have more fun. Than whom? Erm, I don’t know. But they have fun. Good, extrovert, talkative fun.
Shan’t we all be on Facebook, now?
Bookmarks and Tags
In response to Jess on organising one’s information.
FavoUrites: Social Bookmarking (PART)
My own use of social bookmarking isn’t that social nor that efficient. At this point, I tend to simply add things to my del.icio.us account as a way to remind myself that I would eventually like to blog about those links. Sometimes they’re academic items, but more often than not, they’re not.
On the other hand, I do tend to blog as a way to keep links handy for later reference. It reminds me of what I was thinking about when I approached the material at first. Those can be academic, especially if they come through academic mailing-lists, but they’re often ideas which connect to my research interests in some ways.
Reading notes, to me, are different. I tend to take notes on my Clié, with page numbers. I can then search through my Clié for a specific idea I was thinking about. I also take a lot of notes about different projects, usually linking them in different ways. Instead of sorting my references, I prefer to search through them. After moving 19 times since December 2000, I wish I had all my books and articles online.
Reference managers can be very useful and some of them are getting to feel a bit like social bookmarking. For instance, RefWorks is online (so you always have access to your citation data) and you can share those references publicly. In fact, you can even use RSS, comment on the references, and have some tagging “descriptors.” What’s more, there’s a RefGrab-It bookmarklet to help you insert references from webpages you visit. Especially useful if people use DOI.
In terms of database design, tagging is almost a revolution. In fact, the “Web 2.0” concept has a fair bit to do that information may be non-hierarchical because you can tag instead of taxonomise (as in “classify in a taxonomy-style hierarchy of paradigmatic concepts”). Of course, your tags can be in a taxonomy. But they don’t need to be. And the taxonomy can be completely ad hoc (yes, yes, “folksonomy” is the term used for those ad hoc taxonomies). Think Technorati and the benefits of tagging blog entries (which explains why my WordPress.com “categories” are really thought of as Technorati tags).
As for bookshelves… Mine are well-disorganised. I still wish I had everything online instead of having to go through shelves, all the time.
My Mac desktops have always been known to represent chaos, to other people. Yet I could always find what I was looking for, and I would only resort to folder hierarchies for very broad classifications (academic texts vs. homebrewing resources, for instance, though I still plan on publishing on homebrewing culture). Different courses usually have their own folders but folders for current courses were usually on my desktop and I would move between different things by using the outline view. Searching was always very efficient and Spotlight almost makes folders irrelevant. Metadata elements are more powerful than any folder hierarchy. Even the Piles interface is less needed now. Especially since desktop files and database items (including email messages) are integrated in the same search.
Having switched to a PC, I tend to have a harder time making my way through things, for several reasons. Cramps my style. I can’t be as “chaotic” as I used to be. Yes, there are “Desktop search” solutions. But they just don’t do it for me. And the lack of a high-quality outliner makes my life less fun than it was with OmniOutliner. I’m slowly discovering OneNote but it’s not the ideal solution to repurpose data.
So I end up keeping many things online. Especially on Gmail, actually. Or in Technorati-tagged blog entries. Or in del.icio.us. Or in Zoho documents (looking forward to Zoho Notebook!). Or in Refworks.
Well, to be perfectly honest. Many things I tend to keep in Scrapbook, with the firm intention of going back to them if I ever get a chance. I never do. I also use browser tabs as reminders that I should do something with specific pages. But I eventually end up keeping them on the back burner anyway.
Ah, well…