I, along with Derek Reynolds, have launched a new tech-oriented site. We ended up posting so many tech stories to our own blogs, we decided just to create a single blog for our technology news.
The Yelling Lizard will be our main blog for technology news. Visit often, hourly even.
A chicklet is a small graphic button that you see on everyones’ blogs. Usually for XML or RSS feeds or too promote a piece of software. Such as Firefox or Thunderbird. Well now you can make your own chicklet for your site.
These types of images are good, because they are small, and typically bloggers don’t mind placing a lot of chicklets of their site. They can be good non-intrusive form of advertising.
Banner ads are dead, long live chicklets!
A friend of mine, Derek Reynolds, was recently lamenting the non-existent spell checker for Wordpress. Due to a missing php library from his host, no spell check plugin would work. Well here’s the solution to his problem and possibly yours.
Google has released a toolbar for Firefox. Embedded in the toolbar is a spell checker that will check all the form fields on the current page. If it finds something it thinks is misspelled, it will highlight it in red. But that’s not all. You can click on the word and it will offer suggestions. Now how cool is that?
It’s not just for English either, it does German, Spanish, French, and more.
Other than that it’s just like the toolbar for I.E. excepts it’s missing the popup blocker. Since Firefox already has a excellent popup blocker, there was no need to add one. Also the spell check feature maybe in the Google toolbar for I.E. But I wouldn’t know, I use Firefox.
So I hope you are happy now Derek.
This is a general social survey of the greater weblog community being conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our goal is to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other. Specifically we are interested in issues of demographics, communication behaviors, experience with weblogs and other technology, and the meaning of various types of social links within the blogosphere.
The survey takes about 15 minutes to complete, and we are asking anyone with a weblog to participate. The larger the sample of individuals we can get, the better our picture of the community will be.
Help the blogging community and take the survey. Once you are done you can check the results.
According to a Euro RSCG/Columbia study, 51% of journalist read blogs. But despite using blogs for researching and referencing facts (43%) and finding sources (36%), only 1% of journalist said blogs are credible. Why would you use any source you didn’t deem credible? And it’s a little ironic that this is being reported in a blog. I find this number to be extremely low. And would count blogs (in general) as being just as, if not more credible than traditional media.
The study also says that journalist use blogs for finding story ideas and sources. This particular interesting since I was interviewed based on a article on my blog. (And yes I will keep bring that up, since it’s the only time I was ever mentioned in the newspaper without the words, “Still at large.”)
A good example of the media using blogs for sources and content is Open Source. An NPR show which defines itself as “Not a show about blogs. It will use blogs to be a show about the world.” Where they interview blog writers about political/social events. I particularly like the way Open Source defines a blog:
A blog is a way of thinking. It’s a way of recording the argument you are having with yourself, admitting that you may be about to be wrong, and ensuring that, when you are wrong, you make your wrongness available as a public record. A blog is Socratic that way; it knows that it does not know.
How long until blogs replace mainstream journalism? Well that’s anyones guess. But I think it will happen, as I read more blogs than articles in print. So there you have it, my 1%.
Learn how to add Delicious,Digg,Technorati, and Slashdot into your blog/site.
Wordpress Users: Here is the HTML if you are running Wordpress. Just download the images from the aforementioned site and you are ready to go.
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” title=”permanent link”>Permanent Link</a>
|
<a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>”>
<img src=”/wp-content/delicious.gif” alt=”book mark <?php the_title(); ?> in del.icio.us”>Del.icio.us</a>
|
<a href=”http://technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>”>
<img src=”/wp-content/technorati.gif” alt=”See this page in technorati”>Cosmos</a>
| <a href=”http://www.digg.com/submit” target=”_new”>
<img src=”/wp-content/digman.gif” alt=”submit <?php the_title(); ?> to digg.com”>Digg</a>
| <a href=”http://slashdot.org/submit.pl” target=”_new”>
<img src=”/wp-content/slashdot.ico” alt=”submit <?php the_title(); ?> to slashdot.com”>Slashdot</a>
Just update your post template (single.php) and post.php.
When I ask people about this site, they are always confused to what it is. So I am going to give you my explaination of Technorati.
Technorati is simply a search engine for blogs. It’s kind of like Google, but the content is updated more often. In fact, after I publish this blog post, a ping will be sent to Technorati.com tell them my page is updated. Technorati will then index my new post. Without getting into the underlying details, this ping is done by specifying “http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping” under Update Services in my Wordpress options.
In order to have Technorati index your site, you will have to first claim your blog. Sign up for an account. In Member Tools, click claimed weblogs, enter the URL (web address) of your site. It will then give you HTML to put on your site. Once Technorati sees you updated your site with the specified HTML, it will know that is indeed your blog. When I did this, it took a day or two to actually say I claimed my blog. So you have to be patient.
Once your blog is claimed, you can then (sorry I only know Wordpress, check your blogs instructions) specify “http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping” in your Update Services. Everytime you publish a post, this will tell Technorati that your site needs to be indexed. You can also do a manual ping here. This updating on your schedule is why it’s called the real-time web.
There are two ways to search Technorati. You can either specify a tag or keywords (i.e. works like a standard search engine). Typing in words like “Cincinnati” or “Bruce Campbell” will search the entire text of an article. Just like Google. But where the real genius of Technorati is, is in tags. Typing in “tag:Cincinnati” or “tag:Bruce Campbell” will give you only articles (and pictures from flickr.com and links from furl and del.icio.us) regarding that tag. A tag in Wordpress is simply a category, which you can specify multiple categories per post. You can also specify a tag with HTML only.
So if you want to increase your blog exposure or if you want to monitor what’s going on in blogosphere. Technorati is your solution.
While wondering if trackbacks were indeed working, and trying to figure out what exactly a trackback is, I came across someone in the same situation. So I decided to take the time to trackback this to his post to test Trackbacks.
In theory this message should appear as a comment in his blog. Which he first has to approve.
Now I wonder what would happen if someone trackbacks a trackback?