As Dan Gillmor points out this step means Blogging Goes Big-Time. Google does appear to have an unerring nose for buying up companies and organizations doing cool stuff. It’s just a little worrying that one company might end up controlling large chunks of both web consumption (through search) and web creation (through blogger). Still, it’s hard to argue with something that will give self-publishing a big boost, and Google has mostly used its power responsibly. I have some concerns about their privacy policies though (see this and earlier posts of mine in the same category, and this – admittedly a little paranoid – overview).

One might ask “what bad things could realistically emerge from the Google/Blogger merger anyway?” Well, you may remember last month the Chinese authorities shut access to sites hosted by blogspot.com. I believe that has been resolved already but now Google owns Blogger and there is some evidence that Google is willing to “do business” with China’s censors. See this Wired interview…

I have recently written a review of the academic literature about search engines which had some further Google-related comment.

Other comments have been made by Ben and Mena Trott (who created the software this weblog runs on), Neil Macintosh @ The Guardian, Azeem Azhar and Cory @ BoingBoing.

[Later] There’s also coverage from Slashdot and the BBC.

Tripod, one of the leading purveyors of easy to create web pages, has launched a DIY blog service (currently only available to paying Tripod subscribers, however). AOL is clearly interested as well. Can Microsoft and Geocities be far behind?

Thanks to Dan Gillmor’s eJournal for the linkpolyphonic free nokia ringtone 3510 3530free ringtone 3560 t nokiasongs actual for ringtonesact ringtones fool aringtone free lonely akonin 3410 free nokia uk ringtoneair ringtone horn50 ringtone cent shop candy Map

It’s a long (3600 words!), alphabetical list with brief descriptions. I haven’t been through it all yet but I am sure there’ll be some useful stuff in there…

Thanks to Follow Me Here for the link.tid 15 xanax overdose mg adultambien and xanax180 tramadolviagra of affects.50 xanaxfedex xanax doctor 2mg4mg xanax6 and tramadol 7 dihydroxybergamottin Map

And weblogging is still too difficult, says Stef “Whitelabel.org/UpMyStreet” Magdalinski.

I love using MT but I can only do so because I have a tech-savvy friend to set up and host it.

Trackback is a hard concept to explain and implement (though I think it is rather useful once you start using it). But there seems to be a larger danger here. With everyone concentrating on enabling and improving on weblogging – the flavour du jour – I haven’t seen any work being done to enable more complex self-publishing like simple web forms for creating online newsletters.

To quote from a recent essay I wrote:

it is now possible to produce simple websites or photo albums without cost by filling in forms online, though sites created in this fashion may be less likely to show up on many search engines, they are limited in the number of visitors that providers will allow over a given period, and the primitive design templates used often make such sites visibly un-professional.

For more sophisticated users, weblogs (regularly updated websites) can also be produced and maintained free of charge… and message boards and chat rooms can also be easily set up for free on personal websites. Moreover both Microsoft and AOL have noted the growth in weblogs and intend to provide improved tools for people to express themselves online.

(What’s the name of that Microsoft “organize my life” R & D programme?) But I’m guessing all the action for MS and AOL is in helping people publish individually. What is needed is free – preferably open source – tools that let people make their own newsletters jointly with others or coordinate online to accomplish something (not just messageboards – though tailored ones could be part of it but shared document creation tools) – even create their own streaming audio radio stations without having to program anything.

I hope that is part of what Matt Jones and friends are working on at the BBC’s New Politics Initiative.

Later Is Textpattern part of the solution? It requires, the author says, “Little knowledge of internet technology to install and use it” but having to have “an account with a hosting provider who offers PHP and a MySQL database” to use it doesn’t sound like a good start.

It would be handy to see a sample site with some greeked text using its standard template to see what a Textism site would look like.

Here‘s something I wish I had thought of – a way to indicate where your web page is (or relates to). This page is served out of Toronto, Canada as it happens but it relates to me and my interests so I have just added a tag which indicates that this site “resides” at 51.00.06 N, 0.0515 E and if you look under my picture you can now find sites that are near my own. (My actual location is probably a few yards from those coordinates but my GPS doesn’t work inside my flat so I had to use multimap and my postcode to approximate). At time of writing, I appear to be the only site registered as being in London, but I hope this changes soon. I actually registered using the metatags for a previous standard which doesn’t seem to have taken off, but which the people at geourl are also supporting.

So why indicate where your site is? Well, the possibilities are limitless – it could enable an open source yellow pages service using this publicly available information – more precise and useful than the crude geographic groupings from the Open Directory or Yahoo. It could also help neighbors with similar interests to find each other, as UpMyStreet is doing in the UK using the UK’s fairly precise post codes.

To add a little element of Dr Strangelove to this tool, the tag geourl uses is labeled as the page’s “ICBM” value because of a little usenet in-joke.auto loans 0advantage loancredit with car loan bad a37 loan carbest credit bad loans 10 personalloan of student advantage consolidationfaxing instant 24 7 loans noloans 250000 business Mapporn abusedabsolutely porn free lesbianteenagers activities forchat adult call back sexmovie made amateur home sexmovies amature teenpublic sex amateur inerotic stories sex a Map

Greg Costikyan, who has created some of my favourite board and role playing games like Paranoia and Pax Britannica has started a weblog in which he discusses and defends the notion that computer games can be an art form.

One of the organizations he consults for, Themis Group is in an interesting position – it advises people who run massively multi-player games on how to manage their virtual communities. No easy task!

Now if only Wagner James Au would do a weblog….

Thanks to boingboing for the link.

What Would Samuel Pepys Do [in the 21st century]? Keep a weblog, of course. Phil Gyford, who I know slightly, will be publishing Samuel Pepys’ diary online as a weblog a day at a time, complete with links to more in-depth historical information.

Pepys, probably the world’s best-known diarist, wrote about his life in 17th Century London – Phil provides more detail here.

If you prefer the text in an easy-to-carry-around form or want to “cheat” and read ahead, Project Gutenberg has the whole text for you to download thanks to Dr David Widger, who has also added a lot of other etexts to the public realm.

Later Phil has been interviewed by the BBC and a passing reader of the story pointed out that Pepys would not have kept a public weblog – his diary was in a very hard-to-decipher shorthand.

Frank Boosman makes an excellent point about the need to find a way to set levels of privacy on one’s weblog (because it would be better to do that than to have to create several different weblogs each with mostly the same posts but different levels of security.

livejournal has this feature.

One might also extend this idea to “quality rings” where different levels of depth of your thinking were available to different readers, or eventually “payment rings” (like the Salon Premium model) where people could read your blog at one level for free or pay to be able to see the deeper level (or pay per post read at that level?)

It has come to my attention thanks to the hit tracking software I use that for some reason the third most likely physical location (as far as it can be determined) of those most likely to visit my pages appears, oddly, to be Poland. Unsurprisingly this comes after “Major Domains (.com, .net, .gov, .mil, .edu)” and UK but significantly ahead of Canada which has more Internet users and (I had thought) has more people likely to be interested in my writing.

If you are Polish, how did you hear about blog.org? According to this, blog doesn’t mean anything in Polish – that was my first thought… Perhaps the dictionary is incomplete? Any other ideas? Looking back I seem to have had substantial numbers of Polish readers for months.

Of course, I am delighted to be read by anyone who finds this interesting…

I’m catching up with iWire, the iSociety’s ever-thought provoking and entertaining weblog and it pointed out a new Google game Steven Johnson invented – Googleshare. Take a concept you think you are associated with and see how many pages you find when you search. Then combine those search terms with your own name and find the (much smaller) number. Divide the second number by the first and that’s your Googleshare of that concept.

It’s a pretty rough and ready measure, but fun to do. For the record, my googleshare of “blog” is minuscule – 0.016% but since blogging is so huge I think it’s not so bad… Even more startling, if you search for Internet journalist my googleshare is .05% but my weblog is in third place!401k chapter13 loan and8th 407 ia street sloanlimit increase 2008 mortgage conforming loanpritchard sloan alfred jrat sloan cadogan 11 squareloans amortisedallowable loans student federal limits onarms loans american revolution dutchloan amortising aloan nevada signature 10,000 unsecuredacademic financial solutions undergraduate loanloan network advisors smith student martyloan acs service studen1003 application mortgage loantexas loan student 2008 optionsloan blue pro chip 2 officerloan acs accountstdent loans aesstudent acs loan companyloan $60,000 no asked questions