Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

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.

rearranging the page layout

I'm experimenting with a new page layout for the blog, moving to the new Typepad format where there are two sidebars on the right.

   

How to create a 404 page for Typepad?

I am looking at how a few sites at work handle 404 errors - some good, some bad, some easily improved. Tried the same test on Typepad and discovered that Typepad's default 404 handling is awful. (see sample)

How do you get good 404 error handling in Typepad?

Some instances of "good" handling:

• The Perfect 404, Ian Lloyd in A List Apart from Jan 2004
• Twitter lolcats error messages
• Creating an Error 404 Page for Wordpress tutorial in the Wordpress Codex

and frustrations with "bad" handling:

• Moving blog engines is hard, about the lack of Typepad 404 support

More details as I have them!

Technorati Tags: webdev, 404, wordpress, typepad, howto

Splitting a single blog into multiple streams

There are a lot of reasons to keep a single blog together - you have a single web presence, everyone can find you in one place, and you can point everyone at one URL and they mostly can see who you are.

That said, there's a lot of reasons to pull your net presence apart into fragment, especially if you have interests that diverge. The network likes to see things that have focus, and if your category list is anything like the category list on this blog (with 1000 posts and easily 100 different clumps of articles that could be extended out into their own) it can be hard to be notable for anything except eclecticism. Pull things apart, and each of the sections get their own chance to grow.

When I pulled out Superpatron into its own stream I almost immediately doubled the number of people who could follow it, since it wasn't mixed in with recipes and Ann Arbor news and so on. I'm thinking about more low volume pieces of this blog to pull out into their own worlds, with the first one in mind being a2b3 since that weekly Thursday lunch group already has enough going on in the real world that it doesn't need to be mushed in here.

a2b3 recap for 2/8/07

Meeting recap, as short as possible. We had 16 people, new record.

UPDATE: I linked everyone's names that I could to some hint at current status in more detail.

Laura (mitten) is going to the symphony and redoing her web site for SXSW.
Spencer (swthomas) shepherded out a code release for JSTOR and is spending time on Flickr.
Don (dmblumenthal) is getting his infosec web site up and is publishing on Global Cyber Risk.
Brian (bkerr) is recovering from Recent Changes Camp and handed out a Local Names flier.
Matt is at JSTOR and has an itch to do a startup again. (First time at a2b3)
Bill (tozier) explains things to people and is doing an agile research and collaboration startup.
Tom (studytag) is doing business plan improvement and is working on SAT improvement skills.
Larry (polygon) handed out library district maps and is raising reelection money on President's Day.
Kathy (kathleenbrade) has a really bad cold and had mostly lost her voice.
Mark (marksmith) doesn't have a really bad cold yet, and was at CodeMash in Ohio.
Jose (jose) launched ATLAS and is getting caught up with sleep.
Lance (djlancer) is looking for transcoders in Darwin Ports.
Ed (emv, a2b3, vacuum, superpatron) is playing World of GoogleCraft and going to school for NAAPID.
Helene (hsgconsultingllc) is doing independent project management and grief counseling.
Joe (jcothrel)has a new X60 Thinkpad and is reorganizing his laptop for the nth time.
Matt (matth) is working on the Residential College's 40th anniversary and working at AADL.

Show and tell:

polygon: map of Washtenaw County library districts
bkerr: flyer from the Local Names project
bkerr: business cards from Print100, $0.03 ea from Hong Kong, nifty rounded corners
emv: moo card with Link Bus map
bkerr: badge from Recent Changes Camp

Wanted:

emv: LocalNames plugin or script for Ecto so I can link this at typing speed, and an a2b3 namespace.

Meeting notes and rituals:

Introductions around the table starts at 12:30 and should take about 1 min apiece. We were in at about 11:45, grabbed 5 tables, and I left at 1pm. Meeting writeup took 20 minutes.

Technorati Tags: a2b3, aadl, aata, agile, atlas, codemash, community_indicators, darwinports, eaccents, ecto, googlecraft, infosec, jstor, library, linkbus, localnames, naapid, pfired, pfizer, print100, rcc2007, studytag, superpatron, sxsw, thinkpad, transcoder, umsi, vacuum, wiki

a2b3 1/11/07 non-summary

I'm blogging this in part because of the Yahoo Groups / U of Michigan email snafu mentioned earlier.

The weekly a2b3 meeting happened today as it does every Thursday at Eastern Accents. You're invited.

In attendance: Lance Carlson, Mohan Kartha, Jose Nazario, Ron Suarez, Jim Schuler, Laura Fisher, Derek Mehraban, Dan Cooney, Jeff Stanislow, Hali Sund, Brian Kerr, and Don Blumenthal. (all links to LinkedIn profiles) and your host Edward Vielmetti.

Topics covered in no particular order of importance: Page Packer pocketmod layout program for Mac, automated social calendar aggregation, Calendar Swamp blog by Scott Mace, the Arbor Update calendar via upcoming.org , iPhone vs. Nintendo DS, the state of Wireless Washtenaw, how much an iPhone would fetch on eBay, iPhone as the second coming of the Newton. There was more, but I was taking notes on one page of a pocketmod so there wasn't that much room, and the table was long enough that there were two or three simultaneous digressions.

We concluded collectively that we wouldn't give up our Moleskines, Nintendo DS's, pedometers, Hipster PDAs, Blackberries, or simple but rugged candybar phones for an iPhone, but Mohan was certain that the Treo he loathes was going to give way to an iPhone. Ooh, shiny!

I talked about plans for a weekly Thursday call through my new employer, Ann Arbor internet search engine marketing firm Pure Visibility to talk about weblogs, tools to manage them and productive approaches for using them commercially - look for more details of that for a 1/18 launch. 2p Eastern, 11a Pacific. Email me if you're interested. Space is limited, order yours today, operators are standing by, but wait there's more etc.

Blog analytics, some tools and experiences with it

I'm closing in on 1000 entries in this blog, so it's time to do a little bit of retrospective analysis and look at some of the tools I'm using to keep track of which parts of the site are unusually active well after the original post hit.

The more general term for this would be blog analytics. Here's some capsule reviews of some tools and an approach.

One theory of blog analytics is to identify the things that you're writing about that don't own page one for the queries that are being searched for, but which still are clicked on regularly by people who go a couple of pages deep in the listings. If it's good enough to look at on page two, write about it again until it shows up on page one. Tools like 103bees and Hit Tail are specifically focused on this task, and they have views into your analysis reports that show which pages are on page two (or even deeper) on search results. You can do the same thing by hand if you have raw server logs by looking for "start=20" or "start=30" in the referrers - those will be indicative of click-throughs from pages deeper in the search listings.

A second useful approach to seeing where your blog fits in the greater world is to focus on the postings that are getting hits months after the original. If you are using a typical chronologically arranged publishing tool these are pretty easy to pick out since the filenames often include year and even months. Find a perennial favorite and revisit the topic from time to time either with new insights or just with an update to what else is new around the net since you last wrote. (Thanks to Brian Kerr for this idea.)

A third technique for testing effectiveness of a blog as a way to focus people's attention on something else is to look through the logs to see where people went to after they visited your site. The mybloglog tool has pretty good reports and tools for doing that, both for reporting in real time what the most visited links are as well as collecting over time where the hot exit points are. Close the feedback loop here again by writing about things that people are actually clicking on at the moment.

You can, of course, get so enveloped in feedback that you never actually write anything. Sometimes you want to get as far away from what you've said before and think about something new, and I don't know anything better to give ideas for that than LibraryThing's Unsuggester tool. It doesn't actually work on blog postings directly, but there's nothing better to help mix up your writing than to contemplate two opposite works (Polya's How to Solve It vs The Devil Wears Prada) and come up with a synthesis of the two.

Noguchi filing system on index cards from hawkexpress

Photo by hawkexpress, all rights reserved.

The Flickr photostream of hawkexpress has a wonderful example of the Noguchi filing system in practice. hawk takes meticulous and beautiful handwritten notes on index cards (3x5, quadrille, someone after my own heart), and has a well developed system for using that to be productive with.

The biggest single characteristic of the Noguchi system is that it's entirely chronological; new cards in this system go to the front of the file, and old ones go to the back.

See his blog, Pile of Indexcards, for more contemplation of these techniques; the blog is in English, though almost all of the card scans are of mostly Kanji cards.

Google blog hacked - alleged hole in Metaweblog API

Techcrunch reports "Strange things afoot at the Google blog", with an unauthorized post sneaking into their Blogger-hosted offiical news blog. This comment is recent.

# Mike McMan

October 8th, 2006 at 7:05 pm

The bug that was used to hack Google’s blog is not a Blogger specific bug, it is a bug in RSS and MetaWeblogAPI. All blogging platforms that support the two are vulnerable including Blogger (now fixed), Wordpress, and Typepad. Currently no details on how the bug works have been made public and there are no official patches for it.

This qualifies as unconfirmed rumor in my book, but if you run a blog platform it would make sense to XYZ, PDQ.

Technorati Tags: infosec, google, blogger, metaweblog, typepad, wordpress, movabletype, rumor, innuendo, techcrunch