I'm not sure why Dana put my fac and name into this post - but hey, take it as it comes. A wise man once said: "it ain't what they say about you that counts, it how they spell your name." So thanks Dana!
This is especially apropos given the nature of this post. I watched and waited till one year ago to start officially blogging. I guess I got in - in a nick of time.
Clobbered By The Blogging Meme.
Clobbered By The Blogging Meme
Major ortals have caught on to The Blogging Meme and they are trying to support it, writes the San Francisco Chronicle.
One of Verne Kopytoff's sources, Matthew Haughey, nails the problem that all the portals, but especially AOL, now face. "I think that most old bloggers want myblog.com, not aol.blogs/username," he said.
In other words, the problem isn't getting it written, or getting it published. The problem for bloggers is getting it read.
As time goes by it becomes harder-and-harder for a new voice to break through. I have 25 years' experience as a business reporter, a fairly high Web profile (I can still beat syndicated radio host Clark Howard in a Googlefight) but Blogstreet still lists me in the second thousand and Technorati says only 52 of nearly 900,000 blogs it tracks has me on its blogroll.
When a blog falls in the virtual forest and nobody reads it, it makes no sound. No sound at all.
And we're not going to get an easy answer to that problem. The current system for ranking blogs or linking to them is very much geared toward those who have been around the longest. The longer your blogroll, the faster it grows. An exception is made for those who get a big publicity hit, like Salam Pax, but this is the proverbial exception that proves the rule.
RSS won't really help here. There is no way I know of in the current specification to "dump the garbage," and the more people blog the more garbage there is.
My guess is AOL and others may decide to break through by simply creating "master blogrolls," so that every blog on AOL is linked, via a master list, to every other blog. All this will do is destroy the idea of blogrolling as a means for ranking blogs (not that it's doing all that great now, as a quick glance at this list will show).
This is still an area where Google's help is very-much-needed, but they're still stuck in the middle of a food fight between Evan Williams and Dave Winer. And neither one really has proposed a solid idea for solving the problem, namely, how do I determine which of several hundred blog entries on, say, The Blogging Meme should I be offered, and in which order?
Whoever solves that problem (with this item on top of the stack, of course (that's a joke, folks)) wins.
Dana Blankenhorn
[
Corante: Moore's Lore]
I took a buttload of photos at the WorldCon in Toronto this year. Here are the 300 best pictures. Anything labelled ?? is someone whose name I've forgotten, which is really embarassing, but I have an unbelievably bad memory for names. If you have one of the missing names, please email me, along with the URL of the page that the photo can be found on. 
