The World According to Scoble: Robert Scoble realizes his value-add to the blogosphere: his editorial control.

It was that moment that I decided to moderate my comments here. Yes, I am now approving every comment here. And I will delete any that don’t add value to either my life or the lives of my readers.

Next, he’ll acknowledge the success of AOL’s secret sauce: its programmers.

Tags:
blogging,
Robert Scoble,
AOL,
media

Just a quick note before I really start my day … Niall Kennedy points out that Stanley Burrell, the legendary Hammer (or “MC Hammer” as he was previously known), is now blogging on the MC Hammer Blog. He’s also doing some podcasting and moblogging too, but start by reading his first entry.

Spike Lee really gets it when he tries to spread the message that we should be celebrating the good stuff in life. Of course we all have bad stuff happen all the time, but why should rap and hip-hop degenerate into a massive pity-party for black people? I think Hammer gets this when he writes:

[…] Through the blog I will eliminate sensationalism. You will have access to my many thoughts and truly get to know me without an intermediate.

Video on demand will allow you to see my art, my life and work on demand and without the infection of those who have hidden agendas. This is the revolution and it is on demand. There is no stopping this movement and you can’t contain it. The music was built from the vibrations and the call of the people.

We will dance.

There will be many steps in this dance. Learn the movements. Respect my get down. Notice the strength of the women in these videos. See the joy of the kids. The young man at the end of the first “Look” video is my ten year old son Stanley Burrell Jr. I turn them loose and lift them up. They are strong and beautiful. I applaud their strengths and I create an environment that focuses on their gifts. When I launch The Look Tour you will witness what the power of music, dance, technology, God and community truly is on another level. Witness the maturation of Hip Hop.

I won’t be just performing but we together will be celebrating the Art Of The Dance.

Yeah, he gets it. “Through the blog I will eliminate sensationalism.” “Witness the maturation of Hip Hop.” Nailed it. Almost makes me wonder if Hammer’s read Naked Conversations.

Anyway, MC Hammer’s music was a big part of the soundtrack of my childhood, and I’ve always been surprised that he steered clear of the whole gangsta mess. Now, he’s once again entering my life in a big way, this time through his blogging and transparency, and his positive outlook and message. Maybe he’ll be a big influence on my own childrens’ childhoods as well. I think I’d quite like that.

Tags:
blogging,
niall kennedy,
hammertime,
stanley burrell,
spike lee

I’ve been reading Jason Kottke’s blog on and off for a while now, but I never had a real reason to link to what he writes mostly because most of it didn’t interest me much. However, he just pointed out William Safire’s “web logs” blooper, reminding us of his own blog entry from August 2003 that web logs are not weblogs. To help illustrate the point, I’m posting a recent web log entry for my blog in this weblog entry:

x.x.x.x - - [21/Feb/2006:21:23:10 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 53648 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1" 1.990597 "[cookies removed]" "dossy.org"

I sanitized it a bit to mask the IP address and the cookies that are logged, but otherwise, it’s a real live example of a web log entry.

I don’t know if I’d call a “web log” a chronologically-ordered and frequently updated website … it is chronologically-ordered for the most part (sometimes slightly out of order if your web server is multi-threaded and does asynchronous writes to the web log, like I know Netscape Enterprise Server did back in version 3.x) and as long as you get reasonable traffic, it’s updated frequently … but I don’t think posting them to a website would be very interesting, unless you’ve got a data mining fetish.

Tags:
blogging,
language

You might think I’m kidding, but no, I really would like to see Scott Adams elected President of the United States in 2008. Why? Just read his blog and you’ll see that he really “gets it” when it comes to so many of the world’s problems. For example, in his latest entry titled Defeating Terrorism with Good Mileage, he writes:

If someone is fanatical enough to fund terrorism, do you think THAT’S the part of his budget he cuts first? What part of “living in caves in the mountains of Pakistan” is compatible with “we’ll only do this as long as the money comes easily”?

And how expensive is terrorism anyway? Their last attack could have been accomplished with Bonus Miles and a few box cutters. Is there somewhere a would-be terrorist on a tight budget who is thinking “As soon as I save enough money for a box of nails, I will complete my exploding belt”?

The corresponding full-color illustration of this point ran yesterday, on February 19, 2006.

Don’t be a fool. Learn what “fungible” means, and make sure you help elect Scott Adams for President in 2008. It’s your civic duty. Don’t let the terrorists win and all that jingoistic yadda-yadda bullshit.

A kind stranger at work named Holly IM’ed me out of the blue after she spotted my name in the acknowledgements for Shel Israel’s and Robert Scoble’s new book, Naked Conversations. She’s going to the book’s launch party and offered to try and get me an autographed copy — how sweet of her! Turns out, she blogs too.

By now, everyone’s heard of “Engrish,” that dialect of English that’s spoken by Japanese translators and marketing people … but what about the Chinese? Holly puts forth the suggestion that they speak “Chinglesh“, and not “Chingrish.” What do you think it should be?

Tags:
blogging,
books,
engrish,
chinglesh,
chingrish

Four months ago, I blogged about Samantha Burns, who was then a new Canadian blogger and back then I knew she was going to make it big. Well, she’s kept it up and is now serving ads on her blog, so I hope she’s making some good money off her hard work.

She recently posted about Penn Jillette’s NPR essay, the same one I blogged about back in December. I started a conversation amongst a few of the readers there: I won’t reproduce them here. Instead, go check out her blog and the comments and leave your own thoughts on the matter there. Or, you can leave a comment for me here, if you like.

Tags:
blogging,
religion,
npr

Recently, I found some time to revamp the comments section of my own blog after being inspired by Christian Watson’s suggestions on how to improve the comment section of a blog. I implemented anonymous comments, added a CAPTCHA (you know, that image you’re asked to read the letters in and type in to try and stop spammers), styled the comments and provided permalinks to each comment, added Gravatars … I did a lot. Why? Because I wanted to encourage readers of my blog to leave comments. Why? Because I like to hear what people have to say.

I just wrote some thoughts about Russell Beattie’s recent removal of comments from his blog. Mobile Jones called the move “antisocial” (as a pun on “social media”), while Ben Metcalfe says, “[…] a blog isn’t a blog unless it has comments.” This got me thinking: exactly what is a blog, then?

Right now, the beginning of the Wikipedia entry for blog reads: “A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. […] A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files).” Comments are only later described as a “feedback comment system.”

So, is Wikipedia wrong here? Exactly what is sufficient and necessary for a web site to be a blog? I really can’t believe that comments are necessary and it’s certainly not sufficient, because you can implement a comment system for any page on any web site and that doesn’t make that site a blog. More importantly, why do we even care what color the bikeshed is?

Oh where, oh where can they be?

Yesterday, Russell Beattie pulled the comments off his blog. Since I read his blog through an RSS aggregator called Bloglines, I normally didn’t see comments to his blog, anyway. I only noticed the comments were missing when I wanted to leave a comment on his recent entry about Opera Mini (which, I guess I’ll now do as a post to my own blog). Was I upset that he removed comments so that I couldn’t leave one on his blog? Sure — for all of about, 15 seconds, during which time I checked some other entries on his blog to make sure that it wasn’t just the one entry that he’d disabled comments on, but rather was a change across his whole blog. Then, I went back to Bloglines and kept reading the rest of my subscriptions.

Was I annoyed that I couldn’t leave a comment on his blog? Sure, as I said, for about 15 seconds, because I wanted to just pop in and leave my comment and move on with my day. Was I annoyed at Russell? Of course not, that would be silly. Why was I annoyed, then? Because I’m lazy and leaving comments is generally a fast and easy way to respond to someone’s blog entry. For some strange reason, I can leave a one-line comment in someone else’s blog, but have a hard time posting a one-line entry in my own. Maybe I just need to come up with a “format” for blog entries in my blog that serve as comments to other blog entries where I feel there’s enough context for my own reader where my one-liner comments won’t seem so out of place. I’m also partially afraid that if I comment on someone else’s entry by posting to my own blog, they won’t see it: part of the reason why I comment on people’s blogs is because I want them to read what I wrote.

Of course, Russell publishes an email contact address on his blog, so I could just send him an email. I could even post my comment to my blog and email him the link, if I wanted my comment to be public. It still doesn’t mean he’ll read my email, or if he does read my email, read my blog entry … but, how is that different than if he didn’t read my comment on his blog? None at all.

The irony of it all is that instead of thinking “Russell is evil, he won’t let me comment at his blog,” during my 15 seconds of annoyance, I thought, “He must have gotten overrun by comment spammers and got sick and tired of them, so he turned off comments. That sucks.” I know I was getting hit by comment spammers on my blog once I turned anonymous comments back on, thus my implementing the CAPTCHA, so I figured he was in the same boat. Why did so many other people decide he was evil, before he even made a public statement to his blog as to why he removed comments? I don’t know him personally, but I’ve been reading his blog for a few years now, and I’ve never gotten the feeling that he’s an evil kind of guy.

Russell, if you read this, I just want to say that I do wish you’d turn comments back on for lazy people like me, but that’s just a favor I’d be asking. You’re absolutely right that it’s your blog and you should do with it whatever makes you happy. As you pointed out, “being cluetrain” is about the open discussion which can happen either in comments or between blogs, and you have yet to prevent people from linking to your blog. (Maybe it’d be evil to refuse to serve content to people based on the HTTP referer, preventing bloggers from linking to you, but you wouldn’t do that, right?)

Maybe it’d be cool for you to post about what ego feeds you’re using so we can check to make sure we know how to tag our posts so that they’ll appear on them, to increase the chances that you’ll see responses? Just a thought.

Tags:
russell beattie,
cluetrain,
blogging

(Alternate title: OMG, Wil Wheaton blogs and plays poker online!)

Wil Wheaton, who most people know as either Gordie in Stand By Me (IMDb) or Wesley Crusher on Star Trek, has long since left those roles behind. These days, he’s got his own blog (which, after experiencing technical difficulties, has been moved here, to TypePad). He’s also written two books (Just a Geek and Dancing Barefoot), and actively plays online poker at PokerStars.com. He’s even started a podcast recently called Radio Free Burrito Episode Zero (MP3 [27.3MB]) where he answers some questions asked by his blog readers.

Why am I blogging about him? Mostly out of awe and admiration, I guess. I mean, he’s a father like me, he finds the inspiration to write, he finds the time for his geeky interests and to play poker online. On top of it all, he seems like a really nice person, someone I wish I could be friends with in meatspace. (If you knew me, you’d know why that’s a compliment, considering I’m patently misanthropic in nature.) Alas, he lives out on the West Coast and I’m all the way on the East Coast.

Anyway, I say he’s cool and if you’re curious as to what he’s been up to since he disappeared from the Hollywood limelight, you should go check him out. He’s been busy and it all looks like good stuff.