I was wondering how LeMonde would finance their blog 'give-away.' Was it advertising? Nope, it's subscription.

"An online subscription to LeMonde costs €6 per month (almost US$8 or £4.13), and provides full access to the website and a number of other services, including the option to have your own blog. Half of the top 10 most popular blogs are now occupied by readers.

In France, more media properties have taken an interest in their audiences' wish to be visible online. Newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur, commercial TV channel M6, and radio channel Skyrock all have opened up their sites for weblogs from their readers, viewers, and listeners.

Skyrock launched its blogging service in January 2003 under the name Skyblogs and is the uncontested market leader: The site has more than 1 million blogs created by listeners, with an average of 35 entries per blog."

Another million I've never heard of, I wonder if Technorati has?

From: Radio: The Missing Manual I do as Dave Winer does : "I subscribe to over 250 RSS feeds. Here's how I read them. First, I use Radio UserLand as my aggregator. Second, I use Doug Kaye's news2mail Tool. This way I catch everything, I know that I'm not missing items simply because I haven't checked my aggregator in the last 24 hours." news2mail automatically sends email messages containing the most recent stories from the channels you've subscribed to. This way I have all my aggregated news feeds archived in my email client (Thunderbird).

Anything that kills off MSIE! Two page ad running in today's (16th Dec) edition. That was expensive—but necessary to raise the profile. Hopefully, they'll see it as a success and we'll see more in other papers, even over this side of the Atlantic.

One of my servers suffers from referer spam, sometimes it can seem like a denial of service attack, though I have a banned list and send back 403s.

Traffic has risen from last year, as it has every year, and I see that other eCommerce sites are also complaining, as they do every year, but the comment spam that Six Apart are seeing is near denial of service, as they do builds whether they block the spam or not (they're fixing this bug at the moment, but older installations are thusly dangerous for other sites on the same machine as the older MT installation—update people!) In a discussion on the issue I found one possible solution that will be just a part of the arms race, but demonstrate the problem: "...and the spammers will eventually figure out what an appropriate delay before each attempt is, but it should prevent massive server loads of 10000 comments within a minute, right?"

Now, Six Apart are working on a way of solving the problem not just for themselves, but for all in the weblogging world.

Jay Allen who created the MT BlackList and now works for Six Apart, writes: "...solving the comment spam problem once and for all and making it a non-issue, not just for us in the Movable Type/TypePad world, but also for all weblogs regardless of publishing tool. Our preference is towards solutions that scale to the entire weblog medium..."

I think I like the sound of this idea. But not sure if it's worth the candle. I'll think on it for a while.

Essentially, by adding a bit of javascript, when people print your webpage they have the links displayed as in the illustration below. You know the problem, when viewing a printed web page, one sees links but are unsure where it leads.

Some quotes from the article:

""Backfence sees the de-professionalization of news as a key to its success," says New York University's Jay Rosen on his PressThink site. "The pros gave away the 'news of your neighbors' franchise -- or never had it.""

"A housewife or hardware store owner can have something to contribute, that's important to them, that would be way under the radar of what we as journalists think is important,"

...thousands of people in places like McLean and Reston can become bloggers, or post responses to other bloggers' columns, or contribute photos and information about their particular subcultures. Backfence would have a five-person staff -- plus free classifieds, Yellow Pages-style listings and a local search function -- but the content would be provided by the users. The goal: Build it and they will post.

They are beginning to peddle the idea almost door-to-door, pitching Backfence to PTA groups and church organizations, and may sponsor a Little League team.

Potential investors have been wary, waiting to see if the Virginia experiment can generate revenue. The Bakersfield site's editor says it is nearly breaking even from ads that also run in a companion print edition. The site currently has a feature on local cheerleaders, a man who wrote 75 self-help books and a first-grader who won an essay contest, along with crime logs, home sales, church news and a holiday lights photo contest. Other companies, including Advance Publications, are planning town blogs, which could either be the Next Big Thing or a faddish bubble like pets.com.

Need to ping a load of other services, as you publish? Well, I do, and so do all the blogs I host. And here's another list.

Not enough time to evaluate all these services, I know a few, some I've not heard of at all.

Who links to me? This is a strange one. But I need to add a link so they can get my referer, I can't add it directly to a web interface. So no report till I publish today and click the link above.

Forgetting I could check this out in Technorati. Damn, as usual the over 2,000-results from Technorati are slow, ugly and in the end not useful... I've work to do, I'll publish and re-edit this item in a bit.

Later, not too impressed. I see my own links within the results, these shouldn't be there and are thusly giving inaccurate results.

I'm giving more time to PubSub lately. Their vanity searches (where one searches the blogosphere for you name or, in my case client names) is invaluable. Now, they've added a way of defining how well linked to your blog is, by using some crazy maths. It's not a way of finding A-list bloggers but you could use it to define your site thusly.

I do like the top (and bottom) gainers, though with links only to domains and not actual pages, perhaps it loses some of its real use. For this, I like the old dayPop, which I've been subscribed to for years. DayPop helps you find the up and coming memes. Also, useful for upcoming memes, blogDex.

As they say in their explanatory page "LinkRanks are our way of measuring the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in weblogs."

"It doesn't jibe with what WebSideStory shows, and what neither of these count is corporate intranets where users aren't actually hitting the Web," Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows said of OneStat's statistics.

Remembering that many intranets (and I help with one in the UK governement, so I know) are not allowed to switch to anything. They have to stay with IE. Much, much, to their chagrin!

I'm very glad of this news. IE was wonderful when it came out, like, a milllion years ago. Don't forget why you should dump IE, if you're able.

Perhaps the Guardian's looking into blogs for their readers too, following on from Le Monde's?

Harry of UK political blog Harry's Place has answered my call for details of other newspapers hosting blogs:

The excellent little Italian centre-left newspaper Il Riformista, has been offering blogs to its readers and from its journalists for about two years now.
They also, believe it or not, print a blog supplement in the paper once a month with the best material they have found on the sites.

Weblog: Dann Sheridan's Weblog
Source: To UserLand’s Execs.
Link: http://www.xlogs.net/2004/12/09.html#a1588

Dan asked: "Why don’t you blog more about what’s going on at UserLand?" [via: PubSub: userland ]

I asked the same question, and put my POV as to why it was necessary in private emails I had with Scott Schuda early in 2004, but to no avail. Instead the two Scotts blog about their hobbies mainly.

Pity. The products are very nearly excellent IMHO, the company... Well, what company? I have a feeling that they're not developing their products for general customers anymore, that they're installing and developing customised versions for higher paying customers. This would certainly explain the snail's pace of updates to their products, the lack of customer support and perhaps why they don't (can't) blog.

As I said in my emails, there is a vacuum of information, and it's getting filled with rumour, gossip and drivel.

Story about a sales team who didn't want to blog with their customers on CEO Bloggers' Club. I guess the answer lies in their product and its future. In that they can't really say it's good out in public probably because there are better products from competitors. That they can't really say that it's got a future, because it hasn't, or one they know nothing about. There's always the idea that they also lie about these things—all sales people embellish the truth with some exaggerations. Face-to-face selling is like that.

They'll need to say all this in public, they'll need to say things are gonna change, with the help of customers, they need to be buzzed by this to encourage the same buzz in their customers' minds. This is the challenge most older companies have: a legacy of lies, crap products, and older world people.

More interestingly, they'll need to be ruthlessly honest.

I can see why these sales people are afraid to blog.

Dare Obasanjo, listens in with a vanity search, either with PubSub, Feedster or Technorati, as I do, as everyone should. I found his post in my Radio aggregator's emails in Thunderbird today, in my PubSub feed for "Steve Hooker." And left this comment at his site.

I don't use any instant messenger apps. Just ain't keen on them, though I have AOL IM and ICQ in case of emergencies. Will AOL be able to post to Spaces? Yahoo? Other IM/chat apps? I supposed I should have said "locked out."

Now that I don't use my Hotmail account because I needed to log in via Passport too many times and, frankly, I kept forgetting my details. I notice that to post a comment in Spaces I have to log in via Passport. Well, I guess that the comment spam problem is so pervasive that this is an unfortunate necessity these days. I know TypePad uses their own TypeKey for the same problem. I don't suppose there's a way for me as a rival blog hoster, to cut into Passport for comments? TypeKey's supposed to be open to other apps, though I haven't really looked into it.

I'm a Userland Manila developer. Comment spam is a problem, but I have my own cooked solution for it, sure it is an ongoing war. However, there is no 'Manila' authentication system. "You come, you see, you comment." Much like this (Dare's 25hoursaday) site. It's open.

To create a Manila site, all that is needed is a valid email address. I don't keep that address, only your site knows it, as it'll need to notify the owner when new stuff is posted.

Overall, I am worried about the potential you guys have for lock-in, indeed lock-out. Maybe I'll be proved wrong, but I see AOL's Journals and your Spaces becoming unblogs. I post my music, pix and everything else into my reverse chrono, and still manage to put some postings into a side bar. I also upload regular pages. It's all 'me and mine' stuff. I'll still call it blogging, though Manila and Radio is more like personal content management. I think you calling them Spaces will be your way of doing 'it' your way, away from the rest of the semi-open blogosphere.

I pride myself on the openness of my system, that users can export and download their entire site and move to another hoster. That they can connect via the blogger API, metaWeblogger API, Manila API. That they can post anything legal. That, THEY own their text and images, it's their site—I just host it. I try not to lock-in.

Your (Dare's) post about APIs had me thinking that you'll be integrating Word, Outlook and possibly MSIE into Spaces. A good blog editing tool is missing right now. Will MS fix that? Will it be open?

Dare seems to be saying that Spaces will be better than blogs, "...It's supposed to be a person's personal space online which was the original vision of personal publishing on the Web which spawned the personal homepage revolution a couple of years ago. Weblogs are the next iteration of that vision and we expect MSN Spaces to be the refinement of that iteration."

I worry that MS has already locked out iTunes, AOL Messenger, ICQ, maybe later, even Firefox, Nokia, Google (and me) out. Well, it's just business.

[Update: 07/12/04; 10:59:15] Dare replied, "As for blog editing tools, there are currently no plans I am aware of for us to produce something like this in the near future. Of course, if we get lots of feedback from customers requesting such tools then we'll reconsider."

It'll be coming. Users want it. Everybody complains about the WYSIWYG editing or raw HTML editing that's so primitive in browsers, even with today's widgets. Most of my longer posts are done with Radio, where I have much more flexibility, as I write, and even here, it just ain't as good as Word—no images to wrap around, not much WYSIWYG.

Blogger for Hire - Start or Improve Your Blog No Reserve! - Hire a Succesful Blogger for your Company

 

Winning bid:

US $3,350.00

Finally, and as usual the price shot up in the last few minutes to £1,723.07. Lucky buyer, getting such a good product for 3 months at that price! Lucky, lucky buyer.

"I think something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model," Google Chief Financial Officer George Reyes said Wednesday.

Apparently, competitors clicking on your Google Adsence ads to get you to pay more, fruitlessly. Very worrying. So, you may have a high click through rate, but are any buying?

I'm just watching the blogger for sale on eBay. With just over an hour to go it's already up to $2,000 for 3 months. Initially I thought it was per month, now I see it's for 3 months.

This is incredibly cheap. What? About 12 days over the 3 months = £86 a day!

Certainly, they are blogs, at least for Joe Sixpack, but why did they call them 'Spaces'? My guess is that they're going to take them deeper into Microsoft land, and the term 'blog' won't fit later. Already they're locked into MS's instant message app, Messager and their authentication system Passport.

Already they're hyping the sharing of song lists (only through MS's Media Player and of course the purchase of music) and distribution of digicam pix between friends, which is more a by product of blogging IMHO. They're also promoting the idea of community between other 'spacers' in that there will be plenty of ways of discovering and linking to other 'spacers.' Blogging is all about the openness of the blogosphere. And we all know what MS thinks of open source.

Dare Obasanjo (the lead developer) says nice things, while Scoble says not so nice things. And the BBC reviews the service, impartially. While someone else compares and contrasts to TypePad.

My main gripe, and it is a worry, is that Microsoft may not play nice with the rest of the blogosphere. Or worse, they play nice for a bit the... If they get a huge, huge number of users quickly, as is likely with their massive worldwide roll out, it'll be too difficult for them to not close the trunk, cutting themselves off from the rest of the world, and chopping many fingers in the process.

Consider for example, will they support the metaWeblog API? One the the lead developers asks this question and says the metaWeblog API is limited. Sure it is, but it does all that's needed currently; that is, posting a blog entry from another client. He moans that other functionality like their song lists isn't within the metaWeblog API. Dare Obasanjo should look at Manila's API; the most extended and complete API in today's weblogging world.

Were they to extend the metaWeblog API to suit their needs in an open and accessible way, and say, Nokia's LifeBlog plugged into it (though LiferBlog is based on TypePad's own version of the Atom API), would it be too tempting to screw that for Nokia, while MS develops their own API or proprietise the metaWeblog API onto their own mobile phone platform?

Think of the fun MS could have with making it drop dead easy to post images, upload song lists from your (MS) phone and only your MS phone. They could really lock Symbian out of the trunk, and Blogger (Google) and Yahoo (who'll, sure to be, soon releasing their own blog tool, like every other portal) and every other blogging platform. This is perhaps why 'blogs' would be to limiting a term for them.

I don't think 400lb gorillas are capable of playing nice.