Changing Way

Duncan Riley is one of the most prominent tech bloggers. He’s just left TechCrunch to start Inquisitr, a blog that will focus, not only on tech, but also on pop culture and oddness.

Inquisitr, like TechCrunch, runs on WordPress. I can’t say I like the look of the site, but I’m not sure that Duncan does either yet. “The site itself is still a slight work in progress… and I’m still not 100% on the front page magazine layout.” I am 100% sure that the front page should not have its lead story on a black background.

On behalf of the association of WordPress blogs covering web tech and enough other stuff to lack focus, I welcome Duncan and Inquisitr. I’ll leave others to roll out the welcome map for other relevant assocations: bloggers who couldn’t afford the last vowel?

Acquia was started up by Dries Buytaert, the lead developer of the Drupal CMS, in late 2007. At the time I remarked on the similarities between Acquia and Automattic.

Now that Dries has announced Mollom, there’s a new and significant similarity. Mollom, like Automattic’s Akismet, is a spam-fighting web service. Duncan at TechCrunch reports that Akismet is the current market leader.

Here are a couple of ways in which Mollom is following the leader. In each case, the server code is closed-source, even though it comes from a firm notable for its foundations in open source. In each case, the spam-fighting service can be invoked by any client using the API: Mollom isn’t just for Drupal, any more than Akismet is just for WordPress. One of the main differences is that Mollom uses captcha, albeit only when it’s unsure whether it’s just bitten on spam or ham.

Meanwhile, Six Apart has made an acquisition that expands its range beyond blogging, albeit into a closely related domain. Mike Arrington posted a guest the acquired firm contest on Friday. It now has almost 400 comments: that guy really knows how to get his audience going.

It turns out that Six Apart acquired Apperceptive. Here’s how Rafat Ali described the deal.

SixApart, the blogging software firm with products like MovableType, Typepad and Vox, is now moving up the value chain into offering advertising and consulting services, and has bought New York City-based social media creative agency, Apperceptive. The financial details were not disclosed.

In case you, like me, were wondering what “social media creative agency” means, it seems to be how they say “ad network” on the mean streets of New York.

On April 20, 2003, Richard MacManus posted about Read/Write Web. As he kept on doing so, ReadWriteWeb became one of the best ongoing accounts on what’s going on with Web 2.0.

Happy birthday to RWW and congratulations to Richard and the other people involved with its success. I enjoyed today’s celebratory post. I will disagree with one of the things that Richard says in it, though. I don’t think that RWW “has retained the same essential character and ‘voice’ that it had.” It can’t, since most of RWW is now written by people other than Richard.

RWW is no longer the blog written by Richard. It is the publication run by Richard. It’s still excellent, but in a rather different way.

Anyway, congratulations to Richard on his healthy 5 year old kid.

I'm posting this from Facebook using BlogIt, an application written by Six Apart. You might know Six Apart from such blogging tools as Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox. BlogIt allows you to post, from Facebook, to a blog at any one of those three - or at Blogger, or at WordPress (self-hosted or .com), and so on.

BlogIt allows you to send the same post to a combination of such places, as well as to your Facebook mini-feed. This post is just going to Changing Way and to my mini-feed. That would be a good thing if I had friends for whom Facebook is the web (just as AOL was the pseudo-web of their parents), and I wanted to make sure that they saw my blog posts. I already do that, and do it rather better, using the WordPress.com FB app, but of course that's WordPress.com-specific.

Even so, I don't see why or how BlogIt could be the start of something big. And now I have to go to WordPress.com to fix this post, since BlogIt doesn't let me categorize or tag it, and I'd rather use the post editor there to put in links than have to type in the html here.

The folks at PhotoJojo coined the phrase long portrait, Mashable Stan hailed the long portrait as a use for Flickr video, and Heather Rasley commented about the long self-portrait.

That got me thinking about an About video, in lieu of, or as part of, a blog’s About page. So I made such a video. There’s about a minute of About video.

The New York Times recently published a particularly silly article. Which one? I won’t dignify it with a link, but I will tell you that its title was “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.”

Universal Adam provided an excellent response. Score one for Boston over New York, and one for blogs over mainstream media.

LiveJournal’s decision to stop offering new users a free of charge and free of ads option was one of the things that prompted the recent content strike. I expressed surprise that the strike went unremarked by some of the very blogs that had been impressed by the composition of LJ’s advisory board.

I shared my surprise with Marshall Kirkpatrick of RWW. He got right on to the story and found that LJ management had run the change past a couple of its advisory board members and been told that it was “the worst idea ever.”

I was going to question the purpose of an advisory board whose members are either consulted then ignored, or not consulted, over a decision like this. My first and most cynical thought was that the advisory board was an empty PR move. However, danah boyd describes herself as upset but optimistic about her role on the board, so I shouldn’t rush to cynical judgment.

I saw Lucius’ post on the LiveJournal strike just before the 24-hour content strike started.

For 24 hours, we will not post or comment to LJ. Not in our own journals, not in communities. Not publicly, privately, or under friends-lock.

Why? Because the new owners of LJ said they were going to listen to a user driven advisory board before making any changes, and didn’t. They instead tried to take away all GLBT related interest groups, and were about to take away all free, ad free accounts as well and make LJ paid.

I expected to see the story show up on the web-focused blogs to which I subscribe. These blogs had been impressed with the makeup of LJ’s advisory board. For example, Marshall at RWW described the board as “filled with awesomeness.”

The new Board is made up of an all-star cast. Copyright and corruption fighter Larry Lessig, tech pioneer Esther Dyson and brilliant social network analyst danah boyd make up the group, along with Brad Fitzpatrick, whose work has been key in the development of LiveJournal itself, OpenID, social graph theory and the Google-led OpenSocial. That’s hot.

Right now, RWW seems like the blog that didn’t bite on the strike. I hope to see coverage on the strike story soon from RWW - and from TechCrunch, Mashable, etc.

A Business Week cover story in May 2005 argued that “blogs will change your business.” This week, authors Stephen Baker and Heather Green took the interesting step of annotating the article with updates.

For example, the 2005 article remarked that: “Six Apart, a four-year-old San Francisco company, leads in blog software.” A 2008 annotation adds that: “We also should have mentioned WordPress, a highly influential open-source blog platform.”

The article has a new title: Social Media Will Change Your Business. The last three years have seen the rise of Facebook, Twitter, etc.

It’s interesting to see Business Week using the web to update a much-downloaded and frequently-linked article from a few years ago. Good for BW, and for Stephen and Heather, for having the nerve to admit the ways in which the original article has dated. To say that it’s dated isn’t to look down on it. In 2005, I didn’t see Twitter coming (although I would have mentioned WordPress).

Boing Boing has long been one of my favorite blogs. But I’ve just dropped my subscription to its feed. There are just too many posts, and many of the ones I find most interesting are picked up by one of my other subscriptions or appear on Reddit.