Vacuum

Yahoo in talks to acquire Tumblr, users are not happy

Yahoo is in talks to acquire Tumblr, with a price tag north of a billion dollars. Who knew that simplifying the blogging interface could be so profitable? I wonder, though, how Yahoo is going to make money off of Tumblr page views without ruining the service. (cf Flickr) (cf MyBlogLog) (cf GeoCities) etc.  See what Tumblr users think of the acquisition.

You know that house your friends got that was the best hang out, watch tv, party you face off, great pot lucks, still clean and comfy to chill in place? Then the landlords were like ugh, yall gotta go, and then the best hang out place was gone?

Yeah, so where is everyone heading now that Yahoo bought this place?

There's nothing like a big messy purple smooch from Yahoo to make users fear for their accumulated friendships on a service that just wants to monetize page views with ads.

The import-export problem and fragile Internet services

Here's the scenario. You and your team work hard to use a new piece of collaboration software that offers some unique features that are suited either to the work at hand or that appeal to your sense of novelty. The tool works great and you get into it, using some of the more complex parts of the system to great advantage. Then the system's owners send out the dreaded self-congratulatory message saying that they have been acquired by a big company, or some beleagured product manager announces that their system is being sunsetted. You need to move.

Moving turns out to be hard. Once upon a time when the only thing you needed to move was electronic mail, there were only a handful of email file formats, and though they were incompletely specified you could readily move among them. Moving between news readers was just a matter of reusing your .newsrc file. Life was simpler then (cue sad violins).

The situation now is much more complicated. If you are extremely lucky, the system you have has an export file that is the same as its import file, and someone has built a faithful clone of your original service for you to migrate to. That was the case in my move from Delicious to Pinboard. If you're keeping a weblog, though, things can get really unhappy really fast, and a friend to recently migrated from Posterous to WordPress went through gyrations that I'm not sure that I would have tolerated.

The fundamental problem, I suppose, is that the more innovating the service the less likely that its data is structured so simply that you can drop it in to someting else. Brand new user interfaces, the ones that attract traffic because of the ever present need for novelty, also have novel data structures. Watch out when getting into something new that you may find it easier to start than to stop.

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I'll miss Google Reader, but it's no longer how people read this site

If my Google Analytics reporting is to be behaved, the peak of Google Reader usage for me was in mid 2008, and by early 2010 it had been reduced to background noise. I can understand based on this graph (and perhaps millions of other graphs like it) that it might be time to call it quits.

It looks like from other charts (that I won't show here) that Twitter picked up the slack, as did Facebook. 

Google's "sunset" announcement for Google Reader says that you can get your data out; I'm sure that at least one service will appear to let you load it in and carry on reading.

AOL buys Huffington Post; also, piffle

Paid Content, on the New Yorker's Auletta's take on AOL:

Auletta, who dismisses most of AOL’s content as “piffle,” says “quality is a problem for the entire AOL (NYSE: AOL) empire.” 

And some piffle from the Huffington Post, which has elevated the SEO of inane comments to a science:

Piffle.

What unthinking right wing piffle.

Piffle. Absolute piffle from the pifflinges­t of all British Rightwing, hate-monge­ring tabloids. 

Now, AOL with more piffle, buying the Huffington Post (NY Times); quoting AOL's Tim Armstrong:

“I think this is going to be a situation where 1 plus 1 equals 11.”

Techcrunch understands, though:

The fact is, it’s almost impossible to find a single ‘content’ company on the web that maintains a horseshit:quality ratio better than 10:1.

As for content, you might better find it on the blogs than in 'content' companies, preferably blogs written by people who are not getting paid to write; e.g. the weblog "Piffle", written by someone who is a bit ambiguous about who they are writing to and what they are writing for, but still manages to keep it up for 4 years and 350 posts before giving up. 

some details of setting up Movable Type: day 13

public notes from day 13 at AnnArbor.com.

I'm noting some MT setup details here, since I need a spot for it, and since I've been relatively spoiled by having the Typepad crew figure out how to make things just work.

1.  "Replace Word Characters".  A default setting when you paste in Word documents is to have them paste in with entity characters; this setting converts those to ASCII.  (Word, bleah, but it's the norm.)

2.  EntryIfExtended.  A template tag to use to conditionally include a "more..." button at the bottom of a page or entry, to link to the whole thing.  (Typepad doesn't do extended entries.)

3.  Creating comment feeds.  A forum post showing a couple of wrong ways and a right way to do it.

more to come, but that's tonight; spelunking through the docs to see what's possible.

blogger vs journalist, day 5

Trying to keep the chronology going - this is back to Monday of this week.

I had a nice and mostly non-confrontational interview with a journalist-with-a-capital-J about my new role at AnnArbor.com .  The discussion seemed to center on what kinds of standards (or lack of standards) people have when they self-identify as bloggers, and how that compares with the ideal of what a professional journalist is supposed to be.

I've been wrestling with this, in part because I've been blogging so long (since 1999) that there has been a big shift in what the popular press has characterized and categorized bloggers as.  When I started, the blogger was either the extremely widely read Internet explorer who kept a log of the many interesting things that came across their path, or it was the expert in some field (at times a very narrow field) who used a less formal sequential writing tool to capture details and query others in their niche interest about what was going on and relevant.

It's only much later that in some people's minds that blogger turned into the text equivalent of political talk radio show host as seen in text.  There it's been obvious that whatever standards of practice there are are much less interested in pursuit of Truth or of careful observation and much more about propoganda in one form or another.  Not that the press and the media and public relations hasn't done propoganda for many years - it's just that it's not the norm for old school blogging.

I'm hopeful as I suppose I have to be that AnnArbor.com's experiment with giving voice to readers as contributors makes for something that adds to the whole operation.  I've talked to any number of people for whom when I describe what I'm looking for as "experts who can write but who are not professional writers", rather than "bloggers with free reign to spew unsourced and unedited opinion", that some of the concerns ease.  But I suspect it will take a whole year of refining what the Ann Arbor School of Blogging has as a style and attitude that sets it apart from the rest of the world that will make the difference.

Movable Type rich text editors and stripping weird tags

Another part of day 3 -

We're going through Movable Type training again today (thanks Natalie!)  And the question came up, because it's going to be part of the process, what are people going to do so that the workflow of someone pasting in what they write in some other text editor gets published in such a way that it doesn't include weird tags, weird HTML, or funky or smelly javascript.  Microsoft Word is one version of that process; there's lots more paths that get there.

I know that when I used to use Typepad, that the rich text editor I had was pretty good about stripping out tags and attributes that were weird.  Font tags disappeared, for instance, which made it possible to be sure that stuff didn't show up as Comic Sans unless I really wanted them to be in Comic Sans.

Here's what I've found out so far.

MT supports multiple kinds of rich text editor abstractions.  There's currently support for the YUI editor, for TinyMCE, and for FCK.    The relevant bit of configuration code is wrapped in
      <mt:setvarblock name="editor_content">

Here's the TinyMCE MT plugin source posted on Google Code.  The current release, supporting Japanese and English, is in active development and is at version 0.1.11 as of 29 hours ago.

Richard Benson wrote and supports the YUI MT plugin, which is at version 1.3.

Now, to the actual MT rich text editor:

A rant from François Nonnenmacher about the HTML generated by the MT rich text editor:

The Rich Text Editor produces tons of ugly fucking code behind the screen, especially when using Safari. So it's an old-school editor such Midas, only a slight improvement over WYSIFUC in the sense that it hides it from you (unless you select "none" in the Format menu or "HTML Mode" and scream in horror at the FUC it generates, like <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">...</span> instead of <em>...</em>!). For example, on Safari it generates a DIV per paragraph, while on Firefox it just spits out <br> tags or cosmetic <i> or <b> tags (not even <br />, or <strong> or <em> tags, mind you).

And generally that's my experience to date; weird tags, bad semantics, and unpredictable behavior.  What I don't know yet (and hope to figure out) is what the data path is through the system that would let things be cleaned up and filtered on the back end so that they are consistent, or fixed on the front end so that the generated code from the rich text editor is better.

The funny thing is, this used to work better: old versions of Typepad, and old versions of MT, both had a very conservative rich text editor that denatured the text quite a bit, removing a lot of tags and operating in "safe mode" much more so than "rich mode".

a puzzle...

Learning Movable Type on day two

day two of my new position at annarbor.com :

Full day of training on Movable Type.  We started with a mostly empty install (hosted on a temporary EC2 instance; nice setup) and the team added users, made comments, posted entries and worked through the admin screens.  I know that most people won't be working at this level most of the time, but it's also really good to give people some sense of what is possible with the tool and how the workflow and process starts to work.

I can only imagine what it would take to run a newspaper in the era before content management systems, the world of green screen terminals and baroque editorial process.

I'm also incredibly happy that I have been using Typepad, because the full MT system looks and feels familiar in many ways.

Some references for MT admin details:

• movabletype.com home page
• managing a community with Movable Type
• MT 4 documentation
• major league baseball blogs runs on MT
• talking points memo runs on MT

Brent Hill, Google / Feedburner speaking in Ann Arbor, Dec 4 2007

A talk tonight, 12/4:

Ann Arbor SPARK Hi-Tech Tuesday: Google's Brent Hill Offers Everything You Want to Know About Blogs & RSS

What: Google's Brent Hill presents "Everything You Want to Know About Blogs & RSS"

When & Where: Tuesday, December 4, 2007, 5-7 p.m. at Google, McKinley Towne Center, 5th Floor, 201 S. Division, Ann Arbor

Purpose: As content syndication on the web proliferates, audiences are becoming increasingly fragmented. How do marketers leverage RSS feeds to deliver targeted marketing messages? And how do publishers measure and monetize their audience?

Presenter: Brent Hill is a team manager in the Global Media Solutions division at Google. Previously vice president of Advertising Services at FeedBurner, the market-leading feed management provider that was acquired by Google in 2007, Brent has worked in a variety of interactive marketing, e-commerce, and consumer services businesses. He frequently speaks at industry events on the topic of advertising in syndicated content, and his insights have been published in Advertising Age, Adotas, and DMNews. Brent received a Bachelor of Science in Finance from Bradley University, and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Information: Registration is free.

More infos: Brent Hill bio, June 2007 interview reported by Online Media Daily, 2006 interview at Internet Marketing Voodoo.

Technorati Tags: feedburner, google, goog, blog, rss, feed

Maira Kalman - The Principles of Uncertainty - The illustrated woman (video) - TED talk

Maira Kalman has a new book out. She talked at the NYPL tonight - upcoming.org reminded me of that - and though I missed it I did find this TED talk.

Here's the book:

"The Principles of Uncertainty" (Maira Kalman)

Maira Kalman's wise, witty drawings have appeared on numberless New Yorker covers, in a dozen children's books, and throughout the pages of the Elements of Style. Her latest book, The Principles of Uncertainty, is the result of a year-long illustrated blog she kept for the New York Times.