Archives for Personal Publishing

Visualising your last.fm listening... (September 16, 2007) I've been having enormous fun playing with Lastgraph over the last week or so. You tell it your last.fm username and it runs off and plots you a nice colourful graph that visualises your listening behaviour. I've been with last.fm...

On Andrew Keen... (September 5, 2007) Andrew Keen makes me furious but I don't write about him as a rule. Why not? Because you don't feed the trolls. And I don't think I've ever seen anyone so clearly acting like a troll. I mean, you only...

This is not a brothel... (August 28, 2007) As has probably become clear recently, I'm currently not particularly well-inclined towards people who work in public relations - particularly the particularly unscrupulous ones that spam me with press releases and work ardently to try and persuade me to talk...

Geotagging with Zonetag and Bluetooth GPS... (October 12, 2006) Disclaimer (added 3:15pm): Obviously I work at Yahoo and obviously I know the people who work on Flickr and Zonetag personally. Other clients for uploading information from your phone and capturing context do exist and if you're interested in finding...

Terahertz waves vs. Alexaholics... (FOO '06) (September 7, 2006) Wrapping up my coverage of FOO sessions, I just thought I should probably mention the two last I attended, even though I don't have so much to directly say about them. I've got one more post to come though, so...

On Ethical Weblogging (Part Two) (August 11, 2006) One of the issues I agonise most around on this site are the ethics of weblogging - what I feel is acceptable behaviour and what I don't. I've written about it briefly before a few years ago, but I've never...

On Carbonmade... (August 7, 2006) There's a site that I keep coming back to because it's so simple and well-constructed, and yet also represents so many of the visual and interface design principles of the current zeitgeist. It's a site that has design smarts massively...

On Robert Scoble and the BBC... (June 13, 2006) Let me be clear - I've met Robert Scoble and he's a decent man, and I think the impact of his weblog on the public perception of Microsoft has been significant, surprising and actually pretty important. But this front-page of...

What has been killing my server? (May 23, 2006) Today I was at work when Barbelith went down. MySQL errors everywhere, the community in uproar, IMs and e-mails. And it wasn't like I didn't have enough to do. So I explore in more depth. First step, see what's actually...

On being on television... (January 14, 2006) Television is such a strange enterprise! I don't really know how else to put it. I get an e-mail in the afternoon from Tim Levell at Sky News saying that they're looking for someone vaguely clued-up to talk about weblogs...

Any consensus on 'responsible' linklogging? (October 2, 2005) This is more of a query than a post, and it's about those most glamourous of things - linklogs on weblogs. I'm really interested in how people treat them. Linklogs as a semi-automated component of weblog systems 'distinct' from the...

A weblog in negative space... (September 24, 2005) When I first started keeping a link log, I ran out of things to talk about. I'd got so used to relying on writing brief things about other people's sites - and then occasionally writing longer pieces when I got...

A response to the rhetoric of weblog marketing... (September 22, 2005) The story so far... Ben Metcalfe takes a vague swipe at the Stormhoek wine that Hugh MacLeod is marketing through the blogosphere. The approach Hugh is taking is to offer free bottles of the wine to webloggers on the understanding...

Supernova '05: "Apps. for a Mobile, Connected World" (June 23, 2005) Hm. So I spent a good forty-five minutes yesterday writing the next post in my series on Supernova '05, only to lose it catastrophically when Safari collapsed under the weight of 150 open tabs. So this will probably be a...

Supernova '05: "Perspective: Jonathan Schwartz" (June 22, 2005) Since yesterday morning I've been hanging around at Supernova and I've been taking some fairly intensive notes, but I've not yet had the opportunity to write any of it up. Over the next hour or so, I hope to put...

Towards a picture of European weblogging... (June 10, 2005) Found via a referral and then a couple of moments later via Euan Semple, Loic Le Meur is attempting to put together a rough picture of The European Blogosphere on his wiki - with core questions about the country's main...

On how journalists write about webloggers... (May 29, 2005) There's an article in the Sunday Times today called Golden rules for blogging clever which features a few choice morsels of salient quotage from some bloke not a million miles away from this weblog. For this reason alone I recommend...

You will not tell me what to post... (May 28, 2005) Okay, this is not a big rant, but it had to be said. Some weblogs actively appeal for people to send them links to stuff that they might like to post about. I do not. No doubt some people are...

The Horseless Carriage... (April 28, 2005) This is a slightly rewritten and polished up version of a talk I gave to a Six Apart event (cf. On being on the panel at Blogs in Action) at London's Polish Club a few weeks ago. It's kind of...

Trackback is dead. Are Comments dead too? (April 27, 2005) I think it's time we faced the fact that Trackback is dead. We should state up front - the aspirations behind Trackback were admirable. We should reassert that we understand that there is a very real need to find mechanisms...

On being on the panel at Blogs in Action... (March 25, 2005) Last night I was the opening act of a sexy little conference about how people might use weblogs that Alastair Shrimpton of the UK branch of Six Apart was hosting at the Polish club near Imperial College. I was a...

Three things I wrote ages ago on weblogs, publishing and community... (February 15, 2005) For a variety of reasons I've been digging up some old stuff on the publishing of weblogs that I've written on this site of for conferences or whatever, and I thought I'd reference them again here because I was surprised...

On hybridised RSS feeds as evidence of a need for weblog refactoring... (February 2, 2005) Right then - I feel a bit like I've got the wind behind me and it might not last so I'm going to plough right on into another subject before the demons of fear crawl up my leg. Dave Shea's...

On Six Apart and Livejournal... (January 6, 2005) So Six Apart have bought Livejournal after all. Here's a brief story about how I didn't find out about it... I was chatting to Mena yesterday about something else and couldn't resist querying her about the rumours. Very patiently, and...

Visualisations lead to self-knowledge... (November 7, 2004) This is absolutely the last post on visualisations of plasticbag.org data unless someone sends in something else really cool - and this one is more of a clarification than anything else. Daniel Boyd created this really cool model of post...

Three more sets of visualisations... (November 7, 2004) Wow, so it's nearly three in the morning, which is basically four in the morning since the clocks only changed a week ago, and I still appear to be up and awake and completely uninterested in sleep. I may as...

Five years of plasticbag.org: The Visualisations (November 1, 2004) Five years of plasticbag.org - it has passed in a flash. It's seen me move from temp jobs, through journalism school to more temp jobs, from multiple roles at Time Out, to working at emap, designing UpMyStreet Conversations (among others)...

Five years of weblog data to rip apart as you please... (October 28, 2004) This weblog - originally located at barbelith.com but which subsequently moved to its current location at plasticbag.org - will hit its fifth birthday on Monday. That's five full years of random plasticbag.org posts - 4175 of them in fact, plus...

More about the onlineshop.us.com comment spamming debacle... (October 1, 2004) Another response has come through to me via Cory from the people at Amazon Associates about the comment spam problem I was having a while back. It's actually fairly interesting how little response I've personally had from Amazon (ie. none),...

Let's help Amazon shut-down comment-spammers... (September 26, 2004) From an e-mail I sent to Amazon today: I don't know if this is the right e-mail address to contact you on, but I just thought I should mention that onlineshop.us.com - a site that is using the Amazon affiliates...

Off the top of my head: linklog refactoring required... (September 12, 2004) So Paul Hammond created webkit2png which is a lovely little command-line script for a Mac that goes and grabs a full screenshot of a web-page - full length on the page. It can also do a variety of other whatsits...

Sharing multiple digests could be kinja's killer app... (April 5, 2004) So I looked at Kinja and I was pretty impressed. I looked at it and saw something clean and simple that would hopefully appeal to people who find the morass of weblogs out there to be overwhelming. I thought it...

Why do bloggers kill kittens? (March 7, 2004) A couple of days ago I posted a rather aggressive link through to 2lmc the other day complaining about their post Most read blogs least original which cited an article from Wired News called Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious (itself...

On DowningStreetSays.com... (March 1, 2004) So here's a useful and interesting application of weblog-style publishing using Movable Type: downingstreetsays.org - yet again demonstrating how useful it is to have a relatively standard format for publishing date-organised sites. The site contains transcripts of the daily briefings...

ETech Adjunct: Weblogs and Journalism... (February 9, 2004) I'm watching the panel on the role of journalism as part of the Digital Democracy and it's the first teach-in of the day that feels like a teach-in. Nonetheless, I'm not sure that I'm finding it terribly useful - probably...

On Wonkette and the rest of Gawker media... (January 24, 2004) So Nick Denton's Gawker media has released its latest offspring into the world, and so far (particularly after the enormous success of fleshbot) it doesn't look like much of a contender. Wonkette has been described as Gawker for DC (by...

Using Wikis for content management... (January 9, 2004) So here's a thought partly inspired by an e-mail from a work colleague and partly by Haughey.com. Creating and editing wiki pages is extremely simple and elegant once you get past the first 30 minute learning curve. And essentially you...

On the Guardian weblog competition... (November 28, 2003) I promised myself I wouldn't comment on the Guardian's Weblog Award this year, as my opinions last year caused a good few fights and didn't really seem to do that much good in the end. Some people entered and didn't...

On the political contextualisation of weblogs... (November 8, 2003) I'm really interested in the attempts to collate and analyse webloggers' responses to The Political Compass, which is doing another one of its periodic rounds across webloggia. I first posted about it a little under two and a half years...

On conversations with Cameron Marlow... (October 6, 2003) While BloggerCon has been ongoing in the States, I've spent most of the weekend attending mini events with the charming Cameron Marlow of Blogdex infamy. Cameron came over to the UK to talk at a conference at the Oxford Internet...

(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything... (September 3, 2003) 1// Before the world of the weblog was the time of the homepage. Back before we knew any better, it was the homepage that was going to transform the world. Everyone was going to have them. They were going to...

On the 'one big site'-ness of weblogs... (August 28, 2003) Here's a weird quote about weblogging: "I believe in my heart that people should come up with their own publishing methods. Frankly, it's boring to surf the blogosphere and see so many sites using the same, tired weblogging tools. The...

On "plogging"... (August 27, 2003) There seems to be a current obsession with the language of weblogging coursing through print. First things first we got Technobabble in The Times being all random, and now we have "ploggers" (from the Guardian's Backbencher e-mail): Readers who have...

Guardian launches new weblog... (August 18, 2003) If you go to the front page of the Guardian today, the third story down isn't a story at all. In fact it's nothing less than a link through to a new weblog that the Guardian are supporting - KickAAS...

On 'two years' of weblogs... (August 11, 2003) Every single time I get asked by someone for my opinion on the whole "weblogs as journalism" thing, I give pretty much the same response. First things first - there are differences. That should be pretty obvious. One clear difference...

An introduction to weblogs for radio listeners... (August 6, 2003) Hmm. That was a bit of a disappointment. I mean all things considered, that could only be described as a little bit of a disappointment. Basically, FiveLive's morning show was over-running and the weblog feature was stuck right at the...

The Balkanisation of Blogdex... (July 29, 2003) The last couple of days have seen a Daypop and Blogdex Top 40s that are totally overwhelmed by political articles from the States. If it wasn't for the fact that many of these articles are concerned with the war in...

On empty, dreary bitching... (July 15, 2003) Two people who - as usual - have managed to find specious grounds to bitch about the weblogging event at the House of Parliament yesterday: (1) Andrew Orlowski (2) Simon Kent (hitherto) from 2lmc.org. Some people seem to be able...

Things to do with RSS readers... (July 13, 2003) When I was in Helsinki, I started thinking about RSS aggregators like NewNewsWire. More particularly I started to think about what extra functionality they should be able to provide. Personal Blogdex: Here's the most obvious idea. You have a whole...

Can weblogs change politics? (July 6, 2003) Are you interested in the political implications of weblogs and social software? Then come to Can Weblogs Change Politics? - an event held in the House of Commons on July 14th. Here's an quick excerpt from the proposed topics of...

My obligation to you... (June 24, 2003) I feel a personal obligation to the people who read this site and to the world at large not to lie in my posts. I feel a personal obligation not to mischaracterise the truth and to correct any mistakes I...

Hacks: "On this day" links in Movable Type (June 24, 2003) Each day webloggers across the world post news, comments and little fragments of personal information onto their sites. And everything that they post will be forever associated with that specific day in history. But they're not the only sites to...

Hacks: Upgrading to Movable Type from Blogger (June 23, 2003) The instruction manual for Movable Type contains detailed instructions about transferring your weblog from Blogger and Blogger Pro, and these instructions work extremely well if you have not been maintaining your site for very long. But while it's rare for...

Hacks: Mailing Lists with Blogger Pro (June 22, 2003) One of the neat features that comes with Blogger Pro is the ability to have your weblog posts e-mailed off somewhere when you publish them. And this presents opportunities to extend your tiny empire right off the web and into...

Five by Five (Weblogging)... (June 21, 2003) Five links about the state of weblogging in depth: Watchblog.com A beautifully designed site which explores the 2004 US election across three weblogging panes, reflecting Democrat, Republican and Third-party contenders. It's an interesting idea and elegantly assembled. Bloggers Rate the...

Hacks: A Random Link Button (June 21, 2003) Some people read a weblog because they like the person who runs it. Maybe they think that person is a highly entertaining, witty and exciting individual. On the other hand, many weblogs are run by geeks (including this one). If...

Hacks: Styling your first post differently in Blogger... (June 21, 2003) Simple weblogging applications like Blogger can make it a breeze to update your site, but there's a cost attached - every post on your site has to look pretty much the same. Here's a hack that means you can style...

On Permalinks and Paradigms... (June 11, 2003) There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us - so seemingly obvious - that we forget that they actually had to be invented. Here's a case in point - the weblog post's permalink. I mean -...

Other people's RSS feeds... (June 6, 2003) A few things that drive me insane about some other people's RSS feeds which make the experience of reading their posts via a newsreader like NetNewsWire less simple, pleasant and consistent: Excerpt-only RSS-feeds... Now before I start, yes I know...

Stop bitching. Make it better... (June 3, 2003) The main problem I have with the weblog-related positions of professional writers like Bill Thompson and professional trolls like Andrew Orlowski is that we've had all these debates so many times before. Debate around A-list cliques has existed for years...

On parallels with academic citation networks... (May 28, 2003) As ever when I've written something long and vaguely serious, I can't think of anything to talk about for days afterwards. So to try and break me back into the writing habit, I'm going to talk a bit about the...

Discussion and Citation in the Blogosphere... (May 25, 2003) A few days ago a stunningly interesting article was published on Microdoc News called Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story which aimed to look at exactly how a story or discussion moved through weblog space. I've been thinking along similar lines...

How do we find information in the Blogosphere? (May 16, 2003) It has become almost a truism in critical examinations of the Blogosphere to talk about how - with the explosion in weblog numbers - it becomes difficult to find the best insights on any given subject. I first came into...

Andrew Orlowski is a weblogger... (May 3, 2003) So a few days ago William Gibson announced that he was giving up weblogging (at least for the moment) because he had a book to write. Wired talked to him about it: Gibson began his weblog this year in early...

How to do Trackbacks like plasticbag.org (April 13, 2003) This is for a very narrow niche audience, but if you are one of the two or three people who have expressed an interest in how plasticbag.org embeds Trackback links at the end of each entry then here's how you...

Oh Self-Correcting Blogosphere... (April 5, 2003) I'm going to be playing catch-up for a while here - picking up on things that I would have written about except I took a holiday (never again). First things first, let's have a gander at this article: Anti-war slogan...

What is Trackback? (part one) (March 31, 2003) As part of an (hopefully) ongoing series - here's the most very basic introduction as to what Trackback can do. This is not a study of how it is done - and it makes certain assumptions that I'll go into...

Observation on the Trackback "How To"... (March 25, 2003) I don't know what it is about Trackback that makes it utterly impossible for anyone to explain it well. Certainly the How Trackback Works (from cruftbox.com is a scruffy but noble attempt to make it comprehensible to people. But I...

Designing for extreme readers... (March 23, 2003) So a mainstream news site is often comprised of many hundreds - thousands - of individual news stories. These stories are mostly designed to fit into a pretty clear taxonomy which reflects "what the news site is for". This taxonomy...

A microcampaign to turn on autodiscovery... (March 13, 2003) 1) Key Problems with Movable Type. If you're a Movable Type user then you probably share a few key experiences with me. To start off with, you've probably mis-spelt it Moveable Type more than a few times. You've probably chortled...

On Ethical Weblogging (Part One) (March 4, 2003) Update: Wednesday March 5 - The text of this post has been slightly edited and adjusted in an attempt to tighten up and clarify my argument. I believe that my position is essentially the same, but you are advised that...

Blogger & Pyra redux... (March 3, 2003) Keen-eyed new media news spotters will have seen the article this morning, Google takes the plunge (by Bobbie Johnson) about the search engine company buying Blogger. Bobbie got some comments off me, a couple of which made it into the...

The Ostrich of Journalism... (February 21, 2003) God what a stupid article. What a profoundly stupid article. I mean let's not even start with the condemnation of Google as the closest thing to an online Superpower, because while there may be some truth to it, at the...

Microcontent Voting... (February 12, 2003) Definition of Microcontent Voting: A recent trend in weblog circles, the "microcontent vote" has emerged from several historical contingencies. In particular, the increasing use of tools like Movable Type has encouraged the posting of longer, more involved pieces of writing...

Trackbacks and Simple Comments... (February 10, 2003) I posted a while back about the artificiality of treating Trackbacks as something distinct when we were developing the design of our weblog pages. I wrote at the time: " ...the only reason we're segregating [Trackback] from the body of...

Signing away your rights in perpetuity? (February 1, 2003) First things first, Creative Commons is a great idea that I thoroughly approve of and plan at some point to participate in. But I'm being a little more reserved about it than other people seem to be. And the reason?...

The weblog them. The weblog us. (January 31, 2003) Once more into the breach. We're riding back into familiar territory, only this time we're doing it with a different purpose - to provide a different perspective on One Pot Meal's piece on A-listers and the rest of us. First...

Building Trackback into plasticbag.org... (January 29, 2003) A few days ago I wrote a post on trackback and how incomprehensible it was. And then I got two or three more people to explain it to me and it turns out I understood it all along. The reason...

How has Blogger changed your life? (January 28, 2003) This post marks the end of a personal era. Over the last three and a bit years I have religiously written something into Blogger almost each and every day. From late 1999, when I'd been in London less than a...

Bon mots about Trackback... (January 27, 2003) A select few AIM bon mots about trackback from the last 24 hours or so that demonstrate that I have absolutely bugger-all idea what I'm doing on the internet and should probably go back to sheep-herding or something like that...

Resurrecting "You've Got Blog"... (January 19, 2003) I can't quite believe that we're doing the rounds of You've Got Blog again. But ever since diveintomark.org linked to it, I've been getting a new batch of referrals coming through to plasticbag.org - presumably from people who haven't read...

On the Pepys Diary Project and the clotting of the memestream... (December 27, 2002) The word/phrase 'lazyweb' (which I believe was coined by Matt Jones) refers to the way in which if you describe something you'd like to exist online then someone else somewhere else will build it for you. But what do you...

Why are there less overtly political left-wing or centrist weblogs? (November 24, 2002) Are there less left-wing or centrist political weblogs than right-wing weblogs? And if so... Why? It's a sentiment I've heard a lot in recent months, particularly in relation to the warblogging phenomenon. If it is true, I have some theories...

Weblogs and Journalism (Part One) (November 5, 2002) In which Tom publishes his responses to an e-mail survey about the relationship between weblog publishing and online journalism. Part one is about my personal experience of weblogging and my motivations for writing...

On the responsibility of linkage... (October 27, 2002) Ok. Right. This is where things start to get interesting. Firstly, a metaphor. Imagine if you will a solar system - let's make it a binary system with planets that fly around it. Watch the suns move around one another....

On the horror of warblogging... (October 24, 2002) This is a difficult post to write. It's difficult because I've avoided writing it for far too long. It's difficult because it forces me to face some things that I've tried to pretend weren't happening. And it's difficult because it...

Clay Shirky on being paid for weblogging... (October 3, 2002) Clay Shirky on Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing: "This destruction of value is what makes weblogs so important. We want a world where global publishing is effortless. We want a world where you don't have to ask for...

If this truly is the future of Google news, then the project I've been trying to persuade people to undertake for the last six - eight months is dead. (September 22, 2002) According to Google Blog there's potentially a new front-page emerging for Google News. The current page can be viewed at news.google.com, and its apparent replacement is here. To be honest, this news doesn't fill me with the love and happiness...

Unable to comment on our own revolution? (September 8, 2002) In which - taking as an example a recent article from Internet Magazine - I make a claim that despite their protestations to the contrary, most mainstream media outlets still don't credit webloggers with the intelligence, integrity or ability to even comment on their own revolution...

The "Not the Best Weblog" Project (September 4, 2002) On one side it gives you a chance to say publically and to the most number of people: 'Best British Blog - not for me'. But more positively it also means that everyone gets to meet other people who feel the same way as them. And it might introduce new people to your weblog...

Everyone will be famous for 15Mb... (August 26, 2002) The glorious Andy Pressman of beautifully designed Oh Messy Life! infamy has posted a picture of a singular poster. The poster reads, "Then it hit me, I'm not going to be famous, I won't get to be a rock star,...

Why you don't really need to buy "We've Got Blog" since you can get it all online for nothing! (August 14, 2002) Ok, before I start this one, you're going to want to bookmark this entry if you're even vaguely interested in weblogs, and it'll be much easier to both bookmark and read if you click through to the archived entry which...

Mainstream Publishers & Weblogs (August 6, 2002) Mainstream publishers seem increasingly to be letting their readers start weblogs on their sites - but is this really the best way for them to connect with the personal publishing revolution?

Proposal for a new relationship between weblog and mainstream publishers (August 6, 2002) The Situation:Imagine, if you will, that a prominent web magazine had decided to start hosting Weblogs. Imagine if shortly afterwards another prominent online publisher said they were doing the same. And then imagine if rumours abounded that they weren't going...

The Guardian's Best British Blog Award (August 4, 2002) I've been quite outspoken about the Guardian's Best British Blog award - and for this reason I was asked to participate in an online debate with Simon Walden, representing the Guardian.

A public response to Neil McIntosh... (July 18, 2002) I don't hold Neil McIntosh fully accountable for the concept I'm only prepared to refer to as 'a bloody stupid idea' (and I advise you to do the same). Neil suggested on a publically available mailing-list that when I suggested...

XCOM2002 and TAKING IT OUTSIDE (June 9, 2002) An attempt to write a huge piece on my experiences of XCOM and TAKING IT OUTSIDE, at which I sat on three panels and left very very tired.

Introducing Metalinker... (May 24, 2002) Another Thinkblank conception (this time co-created by Cal and I) was thought of yesterday and launches in a very beta version today. It's called Metalinker (because now it's retro cool to use the prefix meta) and if you're reading this...

Using Blogdex to predict the Bloggies... (January 29, 2002) The most interesting contribution to the debate on the Bloggies so far has to be on Metafirda. She has produced a list of all the categories and ranked each of the nominees by their position on Blogdex. If the Bloggies...

How to get more traffic to your weblog... (January 16, 2002) I got an e-mail a couple of days ago from a guy who wanted to know how to increase traffic to his weblog - god only knows why he chose to ask me, but there you go. I'm not entirely...

There's nowhere to go but down... (December 14, 2001) The depressing thing about the Blogdex All-Time List is that there's nowhere to go but down. In the few months that it has been up and running, I have gradually watched myself slump further and further down the list... Not...

Is there a decline in the potential of the form? (December 14, 2001) Addendum to post about weblogs obsessing on the trivia of people's lives. I should clarify that I wasn't so much talking about the tendency to write about the trivia of one's life, but about the public perception of the weblogging...

On changes in the weblog culture... (December 13, 2001) I found this one via Blogdex, which is always a shameful confession for me: Geoff Nunberg talks about the weblogging phenomenon (Real Audio). In this little radio segment, he compares weblogging, with all it's diarist minutiae to Diary of a...

Proglomena to a method of ranked privacy... (August 29, 2001) Proglomena to a method of ranked privacy on Greymatter weblogs: Define several user accounts for use on your greymatter weblog. Name each one according to a number or name representing a level of privacy that each post might have: eg....

In which Wil Wheaton starts a weblog... (August 25, 2001) Ignore the griping, embrace the wonder and launch yourself straight over to Wil Wheaton's Weblog. Will used to star as Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation. My favourite line from the Metafilter posts: "I am 17 years of...

Keith Waterhouse on weblogs? (August 9, 2001) Writing a good weblog can be, at times, much like writing a column for a newspaper. I've got an old article on writing a column which I'd like to put up in a public place. It's by Keith Waterhouse -...

A new definition of 'weblog'... (April 27, 2001) A place where people who aren't heard in everyday life can not be heard online....

On Fictional Weblogging... (February 14, 2001) Ok - it's occurred to all of us at one time or another - weblogging is based upon the presumption of authenticity - people actually writing about their own lives. But this presumed authenticity is almost certainly to a greater...

Why weblogs are wonderful... (February 14, 2001) By writing about the Minor Musings piece on the reasons for 'weblogging', I suppose I'm really rather missing the point, but nonetheless it's worth talking about. I think it's important that we have these conversations (at least with ourselves) every...

Invasion of the Blog, starring Meg & Ev... (December 29, 2000) Coming to a cinema near you courtesy of the New York Times (if you can bear to go through the whole registering palaver): "Invasion of the Blog" starring Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. The crowds go wild. [Addendum: Metafilter discusses...

On "Deconstructing You've Got Blog" (November 12, 2000) What a steaming pile of crap. Right it's time we set a few matters straight around here. It's time we got the weblogging house in order. The matter under discussion today is: Deconstructing "You've Got Blog". The form of the...

The future is masturbatory... (August 25, 2000) Sometimes I think it's important to just feel good about yourself. So that's what I'm going to do. I read a post at Metafilter praising blogger and then I read a snarky comment about weblogs in general. Such comments are...

On British Blogs... (August 25, 2000) I started weblogging pretty soon after blogger launched. I think it had been going about a month and a half. And when I started, I don't think there were many of us doing this, and certainly not that many in...

On the personal life of the weblogger... (July 29, 2000) Weblogs (at least those with online diary content) are strange things. They force you to make decisions about which parts of your life are open to everyone and which parts of your life should remain discreetly behind closed doors. Even...

Dreamweaver and Blogger don't bore people. People bore people... (July 15, 2000) I love A List Apart. I really do. But is anyone bored of the anti-weblog riff? It's a banal conversation at the best of times. It's good that they are easy to build (html isn't exactly the trickiest language itself...

On Adding Functionality to Blogger... (June 23, 2000) On 23/6/00 3:16 pm, Matthew Kingston at hit_or_miss_org@hotmail.com wrote: Tom- You use Blogger for your weblog, right? I'm wondering if you've seen my "Blogger Comments Manifesto" (http://hit-or-miss.org/blogger_comments/) and have any thoughts about Blogger and comment systems. Matt of hit-or-miss.org On...

Webloggers in PC Format... (June 15, 2000) Wise up, UK webloggers, and get yourself a copy of PCFormat. Picture the scene - I'm sitting at my desk, pretending to do work and sending my boss cartoons involving kiwi birds being chopped up into little bits and stuck...

The evolving role of weblogs... (June 12, 2000) I am going to respond to Jason Kottke's comments about weblogs in full shortly. In the meantime here are a few thoughts on the matter: Jason Kottke has inspired me to work on the web more than anyone except perhaps...

Blogger could do with a global search-and-replace... (May 13, 2000) It occurs to me that the awesome blogger could do with a search and replace facility. I mean, I know it could be a right pain in the arse, but what happens when someone moves their blog to a new...

Death of the Weblog? (May 5, 2000) Did everyone in the weblogging world get sent this link: Death to the Weblog? It's a really weird site, which I can't quite get a handle on. It seems to be about 2/3 spoof and 1/3 serious, or maybe the...

Six months of weblogging... (April 23, 2000) The 1st of May (next Sunday) will be my six month anniversary of weblogging, and I find myself confronting the same questions and situations now as I did when I began. My first entry came together at the beginning of...

On writing about one's partners... (April 18, 2000) So I am sitting in my new office, everyone else has gone home and I have a few things to get done before I can go drinking with Nick and friends. I've got the Sex Pistols playing on the G4...

Ruminations on Weblogs... (November 15, 1999) You can't talk about your life because people you know read them. I have on occasion (yesterday for one) suggested to a few friends that they should look at the site because there was this really satisfying link on it...