Daring Fireball is a blog, but there are no comments.

Post Secret is a blog, but every entry is by someone different.

Stephen’s Web is a blog although it largely eschews the chronological structure thing.

There are conventions – reverse chronology, comments and authorship – but not so many rules.

So is there no difference between a blog and a website?

It’s the typical genre question. Does awkward example X belong in genre Y? Are Coldplay rock or pop? Indie, MOR or mainstream?

Obviously, it doesn’t really matter whether your somewhat-journally-website is a proper blog or not. All that matters is that is that it’s a good read and/or you enjoy doing it.

So maybe that’s what distinguishes the blog. That the people/person behind it cares about the content, not its context.

Blogs are dead, right? The cool kids are all doing micro-messaging and video instead? They’re missing out on a world of value, if that’s the case.

I’ve been swotting up on mobile as fast as I can — the industry, companies, technology, the apps scene, for obvious reasons. And one of my most valuable sources is Tomi Ahonen’s blog.

Over the last couple of days, a terrific debate has emerged between Tomi and Steve Largent, the president of America’s CTIA, its leading mobile association. Here’s the highlights so far:

• Tomi lambasts the US mobile industry, claiming despotic activity.
• Steve punches right back — Tomi’s facts are wrong, he claims.
• Tomi redoubles his efforts — with a swift right-hook to Largent’s stats and a belly-punch to his argumentation.
• How will Steve come back in the second round? Is the fight over for the plucky Yank? Only time will tell.

This is bloody fascinating. It’s also long-form, packed with facts and learning for people like me and basically a great testimony to the art of the blog. You cannot do this stuff in any other format.

It’s nearly two weeks old now, but Nick Carr wrote an article at the end of May which caused a lot of people to stop and think, or otherwise lash out with the sort of outrage at which the Web is best – the over-exaggerated kind.

He was writing about the use of hyperlinks in articles on the Web and their effect on reading and readers. The nub of what he was saying was:

People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.

The problem, as Carr sees it, is that hyperlinks – while being very useful and convenient in all sorts of ways – prevent people from reading properly. We start reading, hit a link and *boom* there’s a good chance that we’re suddenly on an entirely different page. I think we’re all aware this happens – it certainly does to me. We quickly developed an expression, ‘surfing’, to describe the speed of movement across the web from site to site. That feeling at the end of a session that you’ve read an awful lot of things, but aren’t quite sure you remember what any of them were.

I’m sympathetic to this argument. Hyperlinks have many purposes but might roughly be divided into traffic directions and footnotes. In blog writing discourse, of course, there’s a further layer of extra linking – the nods to one’s colleagues, the helpful pointers to the wikipedia article on the subject, the indications of where you’ve written about it before. These undoubtedly add to the level of distractability, but let’s stick with traffic signs and footnotes for now.

When you go to a lot of pages, you’re looking for the traffic directions – click here to get the thing you want. In blog articles, some of the hyperlinks are traffic signals – X’s article is well-worth reading in full. Some of them are footnotes – we saw a similar thing when *IBM did this* in the 90s. Like footnotes in a book, you might go and have a look immediately, if you’re especially interested in that particular matter; or you might ignore them because you’re engrossed in the material at hand.

So there’s an ambiguity to hyperlinks, I think. We’re used to them saying ‘click here’, but sometimes what they’re really saying is ‘you might want to click here later, or open it in a new tab’. This learned behaviour and ambiguity makes it tricky to concentrate on a piece of writing on the Web, to a greater extent than it is with printed materials.

Where I am less supportive of Carr’s argument is in the deduction that all this distraction is an unalloyed evil:

• Yes, we’re less likely to get to the end of a piece of writing, but that’s not such a bad thing. A lot of essays, papers and books have said everything they are going to say in their first quarter. The rest is further examples and filling – business books are especially guilty of this. Blog posts are often repetitive and unnecessary: spinning two minute’s thought into 500 words.
• There might be a really productive aspect to this, that the first words of what a writer says sets you spinning with your own, original, tangentially related thoughts. Following those new thoughts is easier now. Being smart is as much about this, surely, as it is with digesting the content of learned tomes?
• Arguably, the Web is teaching us a new way of thinking that is less about knowledge in depth and more about making connections. What you say now reminds me of something else and I follow that and the further connections that follow from that. You might say that I’m surfing over the shallows, but I might respond that I’ve covered a lot more ground. The generalist has as much to offer as the specialist, in many areas (though perhaps not brain surgery).

Regular readers may recall that in February I reported on a Pingdom study that basically said the opposite of this research – that the majority of social network users were much older. The age splits in that study were much narrower than Pew’s and can’t be directly compared, but nonetheless suggested a much more even age distribution in social media usage than this does. One clue as to the disparity comes in a later graph that covers what respondents had done in the last 24 hours.

Here, there’s much less of a contrast between the 18–29 year-old cohort and those aged 30–45. Maybe one thing you might reasonably say from this is that younger people are more inclined to try out new things. Whether they stick with them and use them on a regular basis is much harder to call.

BTW, where did the expression ‘silent’ come from for over-65s? I thought ‘boomer’ and ‘Gen X’ were bad enough, but ‘silent’… I would suggest the author has not met many 65-year-olds.

On a related note, in a research round-up from e-Marketer, using yet a third way of dividing age-groups, there’s the suggestion that blogging is a major force in younger people’s online activity. Apparently, 40% of the respondents who said they wrote blogs were aged 18–25.

Perhaps comfortingly, the main reason given for blogging – by all age groups – is for pleasure: ‘self-expression’ is the #1 answer, closely followed by ‘fun’. Respondents could choose multiple answers, but nonetheless less than a third thought they were going to make money out of their blogs. I’m pleased that most people have woken up from the blogging-for-benjamins delusion. There are two ways to make money from blogging: (1) get someone to pay you to write their blog for them and (2) get a proper job on the basis of your blog. Option 3 – where Google AdSense puts a roof over your head – is not available.

Since, as you’ll have noticed, I’ve already created my own blog, I’m not exactly the target audience for this book. Nonetheless, this puts me in a good position to tell you whether the information it contains is useful or not. (Short version: it is).

This is a book of two halves. The opening chapters describe what blogs are, how to set one up, choose a name and what sorts of things you might write about. That sounds a bit vague, but actually Tris goes into a lot of detail on how to choose between different platforms and the intricacies of which settings to use. The emphasis is on a self-hosted WordPress platform, which is not the simplest choice but it is one of the most versatile, while remaining intelligible to normal people. That may well be a show-stopper for confirmed Drupal addicts and so forth, but then, they aren’t the target reader either.

The second half of the book runs through the aforementioned six projects. These are a personal blog, a business blog, podcast blog, photoblog, videoblog and lifestream. In each case, he runs through a content strategy – including employee and comment policies in the case of business blogs – and the specifics of what settings, themes and plugins you should get hold of to make a good fist of what you’re doing. There’s also plenty of examples of good (and bad) practise. Despite the broad scope, there’s plenty of detail for each of these case studies. I learned a lot about the areas that I haven’t spent much time on, and picked up useful tips for those I have.

Tris’ writing style is light and airy and – well – bloggy. That makes for an easy read, even when he’s describing which particular set of plugins work well for podcasting and how you should set them up. If you’re a corporate suit, then you might find it too casual – but let’s face it: you won’t read this review and you probably shouldn’t set up a blog. The structure of the chapters is blog-like as well, with lots of sidebars and boxouts with asides going into detail on some particular point of interest. A well-constructed index and table of contents means that these don’t get lost when you try to find them again. Tris also ‘links out’ a lot from the book, introducing me to a number of blogs that I hadn’t  come across before that represent ‘best-of-class’ examples for a particular format.

When you buy the book, you get access to the complete e-book text online — which seems to have become the norm for technical books. I approve of this trend — it’s hard to follow the text in a book and type at the same time. Apparently, there was a companion blog to the book, but this now redirects to the appropriate section of Tris’ site – which remains a good source for blogging tips.

So a thumbs-up from me: it’s comprehensive and very readable and even very experienced bloggers will learn something useful or re-think some of their opinions.

Oh, and you can check out the opening chapter below to see if you like the style.

Sample Chapter from Create Your Own Blog (chapter 3)

picture credit: Mike Licht

And when I say ‘essential’, I obviously mean ‘used by me’ and ‘jolly handy’.

Comments and Spam

Akismet

Owned by the publishers of WordPress itself, you’ve already got this one if you have a WordPress blog. Akismet does a great job of detecting spam. Partly a crowd-sourced effort, since every spam comment rejected by users goes into the service’s database. Needs some backup, though, since you tend to get a lot of stuff to check on the ‘suspected spam’ list every day. Definitely keep it installed and active, though.

[addendum: I am trialling WP-SpamFree, as recommended. A previous version created a couple of false positives, so feeling cautious and checking the logs.]

Back-Type Connect

Helps to join-up the dots when discussion of your post takes place on Twitter or FriendFeed, or even another person’s blog who cites your own post as an influence.

Subscribe to Comments

Lets readers who leave comments elect to receive emails if further messages are posted to the current comments thread. A bit of a no-brainer. Can’t imagine why it isn’t built into WP in the first place.

Housekeeping

Broken Link Checker

The web is ever-changing and the stuff you linked to yesterday may not be there tomorrow. Keeping dead links alive is poor service to readers and weakens your credibility with Google. This plugin flags up broken links to readers with the [del] attribute and creates a handy to-do list (*yay*) at the back-end for you to re-link or delete.

FD Feedburner Plugin

This redirects requests for your RSS Feed to the Feedburner version, allowing you to collect stats from readers who prefer the RSS edition of your work and adds the results to Google Analytics reports. This version, rather than the official one, seems (at the moment) to work better.

Front-End Editor

Obviously, the moment you notice that glaring spelling error comes exactly 1.4 moments after you press the ‘Publish’ button and are ready for a well-deserved cup of tea. Going back into the admin interface is a pain. This (frankly amazing) plug-in lets you simply double-click on the post from the front — like the name says — and make your changes right-there in an AJAX-ey mini-edit box.

Google XML Sitemaps

Allegedly entices Google, Bing and the rest to more accurately and frequently spider your site for new content. Looking at my logs, they’re round here all the time anyway, especially those buggers from Microsoft. I keep it activated as much as a rabbit’s paw than anything else.

Redirection

This blog has been going for nearly four years now, if you include earlier variants on Blogger etc. I realised recently that I had something like 20 categories, with most posts belonging to 2–5 of those. Slimming it down meant merging and deleting some categories. This plug-in stops visitors (and search engines) getting frustrated by redirecting them to the new address.

WordPress Mobile Pack

A suite of plug-ins and themes that mean mobile users get a mini version of your site that will look OK on their phone’s browser and load quickly. My mobile traffic has risen by 5% since installing it last month and now equates for over 10%. ‘Nuff said.

WP Super Cache

Makes WordPress a lot faster for your visitors by serving them up pre-prepared pages. Should you get a traffic spike (haha) then your server will not disconnect you as quickly. This is good.

On Page

Similar Posts

There are literally dozens of similar/related post plugins (i.e. the bit that says ‘you’ve read this, why not look at these?’ at the end of posts), but this one is doing great service. Its rivals seem to either find very poor matches or take up so much processing power that they either fail or result in really slow page loads.

Sociable

The ‘share this post on social media sites’ thingy that appears at the end of articles. This one has the benefits of (a) looking nice and (b) not loading images and scripts from another server – something that will slow your site down considerably.

[addendum: I have switched to Light Social. Not as pretty, but it does render valid CSS and is even quicker.]

WP-PageNavi

Makes the handy-dandy this page out of X / go forward / back navigorator at the bottom of most pages. Looks cute and is apparently good for letting Google sniff-out your content.

Sidebar Widgets

delicious-plus

There’s a dozen or so delicious sidebar widgets available. This one seems to be the most reliable. Delicious (like Twitter) only accepts a limited number of calls to the source per hour, so you want a widget (like this) that doesn’t go to the source on every page load, but rather caches it away for an hour or so.

flickrRSS

Can be tricky to set up – or it was for me — you need to set the cache folder up on your server to be read/write. I’m not a photographer, but the benefits are definitely worth the effort, nonetheless – the official widgets from flickr will baulk half the time and delay page loads for the rest. Also allows flexible styling through CSS, as not seen here.

Linkable Title Html and Php Widget

Bit of an unwieldy name, but really useful. Lets you create widgets from XHTML and Javascript that stay in style with the rest of your site, without CSS, rather than sticking out like a sore thumb. And also allows PHP queries within a widget – like the Featured Posts widget above-right (“show last ‘X’ entries with the tag ‘Y’”, in that case). Okay, a bit nerdy. But you will want it at some point, I promise.

Twitter Stream

Again, there are a billion variants. Most poll the Twitter API on load which leads to delays and frequent failures. This one caches for a little while and doesn’t look like cat-sick.

WP-EasyArchives

Nifty looking archives with collapsible bits. Who wouldn’t want that? OK. Maybe not strictly essential.

WP-RecentComments

The recent comments sidebar widget that looks less-bad than the default. I’m of the opinion that letting visitors see that people do actually comment on your site encourages them to comment themselves. And that is – most often – a good thing in itself.

SEO Plugins

Nothing.

I’ve tried a few search-engine optimisation plug-ins and may do again, but my current thinking is that, unless you have adopted the worst WordPress theme ever and have no understanding about search and your content is terrible, you’ll be fine with what WP offers out-of-the-box.

[addendum: a couple of readers recommended All-in-One SEO. Digging around a little, I discovered the fast-developing young pretender Light SEO, which does the same thing but with less of an overhead. Bit hard to tell how it’s doing, of course, but it’s made an improvement to my title tags at the very least.]

Any recommendations?

There is a fever of anticipation over the imminent release of a tablet-style computer from Apple – let’s call it the iSlate [Thursday Update — actually, let’s call it the iPad — I stand by everything else in the post, though].

Nobody outside the company knows very much about how it works or its specifications, but the consensus of opinion is that it’s basically a big iPhone. Let’s imagine that’s the case, and I’ll write an apology on Thursday if this turns out to be very wrong.

It’s not just Apple that thinks that 2010 will be the year when Tablets finally come of age. Models from HP and Nokia were just two of the slew unveiled at CES a couple of weeks ago.

Now, I know that Apple UX design expertise means that their device will be poles apart from the Tablet PCs launched by these competitors or Microsoft hardware partners in the noughties, but it won’t be entirely different. The latter part of that is interesting to me, because I spent quite a lot of time with those devices, reviewing them for trade and consumer press titles. What I discovered is that they’re good at some things and less so at others.

Good for:

• Reading things – but not very long things – they still had LCD screens, so still created eye fatigue. Fine for a magazine article or a blog post, though.
• Filling in forms – the devices proved popular with people like service engineers, medical doctors and financial services salespeople.
• Drawing things – it’s easier to draw freehand using something like a pen, rather than something like a mouse or a touchpad.

Not so good for:

• Typing more than a few words – some had convertible designs whereby you could unfold a keyboard, but that made them bulkier.
• Surviving in your bag – the screen needs covering so needs a sturdy secondary case, which means it takes longer to get out and at work than a conventional laptop.

In a story today that looks not totally dissimilar from industrial espionage, a research firm called Flurry has apparently tracked the application usage coming out of Apple’s headquarters to reveal some suggestions of the use cases the company is anticipating:

The mix of apps is made up mostly of media and entertainment titles, as opposed to productivity or entertainment programs — underscoring that the tablet is aimed at consumers. [my emphasis]

“In particular, there was a strong trend toward news, books and other kinds of daily media consumption, including streaming music and radio,” stated the report. Coupled with recent reports that Apple is in talks with book and newspaper publishers, the apps suggest the tablet will compete with Amazon’s Kindle e-reading device.

Across the “tablet” apps Flurry identified, it also found a strong emphasis on social networking, photo sharing and other types of social interaction.

I hope you can see where this is going: iSlate and social media in a world where all right-thinking people are toting an iSlate. Web 2.0 is all about people creating online content: wikipedia, blogs, flickr, twitter, whatever. Slate computing devices are good for consuming content – I think it’s safe to say that a modern slate will also do video quite well. And anything that’s similar to a big iPhone will have some sort of GPS capability and the capacity for Location Based Services (LBS). They’re good for creating certain kinds of content – especially pictures, but not really for creating text content. I can imagine that up-to-140-characters will be fine, but your hand will get tired after that point.

So — in a slate-enabled future of social media expect…

More: microblogging, drawings, tagging, one-click sharing, LBS, pro media by the microchunk (iNews).

Fewer: blogs, wikipedians, lengthy comments.

This is bad in some ways, of course. Social media is already criticised for its superficiality. I cannot imagine that being able to write less will improve this image problem. On the other hand, blogging and wikipeding are already far too onerous for most people, so you could say this was simply being responsive to what people mainly want to do. Perhaps more worrying is the idea that there will be less authorship in this world and more spreading and curating. Perhaps fancifully, I like to think that the ability for anyone to self-publish is an empowering thing. I wouldn’t like to think that my ability to do so would be impeded by my choice of computer hardware.

One things I will be very interested in is the camera capabilities of the device. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine people taking a photo using a tablet, no matter who designed it, but am prepared to be corrected.

Picture: iPed Multitouch Slate by Myiube

The diagram was changed to add in users of Twitter and other ‘status-update’ applications, most notably Facebook. Author Josh Bernoff notes that this group has a different demographic make-up to others:

Conversationalists intrigue me. They’re 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.

He also explains that people don’t just belong in one category. That’s why the percentages don’t add up to 100 — people take on a variety of roles at different times — the rungs are behaviours rather than groups. I’d argue that all of us are Spectators at least some of the time — people who continually contribute tend to be a bit annnoying, to say the least.

It’s clearly appropriate that Tweeters be included, and understandable that they weren’t perceived as a meaningful description two-and-a-half years ago when the chart was first published. But why are they placed higher than Joiners, Collectors and Critics? It surely doesn’t take any more commitment or engagement to publish an update than it does to join the site in the first place?

I guess the problem is that Twitterers are a broad church. Some people are using it as a microblog or lifestream; some use it to share or republish cool links; some just offer a daily ‘I’m doing this today’; some have conversations.

This was a problem with the ladder analogy in the first place: it’s a little too coarse. Owning a blog doesn’t necessarily mean you’re more ‘engaged’ or ‘participatory’ than someone who doesn’t.

picture credit: Anne Oedolfhirsch

It also lets you test your site using ready.mobi – this is available to anyone, with or without the plug-in. You may find it instructive to give a go on your own site(s). Apparently, I still have some work to do to make twopointouch standards-compliant.

Part of the suite measures the number of hits from mobile browsers. I found the results rather shocking:

7% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.
You’ve had 93 desktop hits and 7 mobile hits in the last 11.8 minutes.

Really? In that case, I have two things to say:

1. I’m really sorry it took me so long to install a mobile alternative to the full fat site. Why didn’t you say something?
2. I hope it looks OK. Let me know in the comments or on twitter if you have any issues or ideas. Can’t do anything about the quality of the writing, I’m afraid.

I also had a go with Mippin, which does a similar service. Upside: no configuration required. Downside: no configuration allowed.

The latest storm in a teacup to upset the blogosphere is the spectre of ‘fast-food content’. Raised as a threat by McArrington himself, the worry is that fast and loose content quickly generated to match popular keywords will swamp quality content in search rankings.

…what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

This ‘fast-food’ content is actually regurgitated. It’s the copies of original material being re-written hundreds of times again within a matter of hours of its original publication. This may already seem familiar to users of Techmeme. Apparently. if you create lots of content quickly enough about the topic du jour, you can generate lots of traffic. Whether it’s new, well-written or popular won’t really matter, Arrington claims. It only has to be ‘popular enough’ to tip the scales of Google recognition and AdSense style advertising revenues.

E-consultancy today attempted to pour oil on the waters, claiming:

There is a market for content of all types, just as there’s a market for restaurants of all types. You might scarf down an occasional Big Mac at McDonald’s, but that doesn’t mean you’ll never make reservations at the most expensive restaurant in town. And so it goes with content. If you’re looking for information on how to change the oil in your car, you could probably do far worse than the eHow article on the matter.

I think I may be a bit thick, but I don’t really understand the problem:

• There has always been a wealth of cheap/free content on the Web. That’s part of what makes it good.
• Some of that is good quality e.g. much of Wikipedia and some of it is….mmm not so much e.g. Linkfarm material, Answers.com.
• Google – the search engine used by almost everyone – has worked out how to circumvent much of the bad material by depending on the volume of inbound links, whose weighting is in turn determined by the credibility of those link-makers, among other criteria.
• Google also regularly updates the ways in which it finds people trying to cheat their way to the top of search rankings by, for example, rewriting content from other sites and then inter-linking.

More importantly, I think we’ve already established at this point that lots of search engine traffic is not a very effective way to try to make money for a news publisher. The UK newspapers’ relentless war to become the sites with the largest number of monthly uniques over the last 5–10 years has left them all almost penniless. Randoms don’t click on the ads, you see.

What they really want is useful content and useful readers:

Relevant and responsive readerships for advertisers = revenue.

Brands readers trust for quality and such = revenue.

Readers who want value-adds = revenue.

Useful and valuable branded content for relevant readerships = revenue.

A bunch of randoms who found you on Google = MASSIVE SERVER FEES AND NO RETURN (see FAST FOOD).

Arrington shouldn’t fear the fast-food merchants, he should fear the mainstream media catching up on his turf. They may often be a little hapless, not terribly online savvy, but there are an awful lot of them and they’ve still got lots of money to invest in digital publishing to find models that work. And they will keep coming, wave after wave.