A plucky motorist who was pulled over by Strathclyde police, made his escape in a rather bold manner. While the police were distracted, he popped into their BMW car and made a run for it!The car was later found abandoned, but the motorist in question was no where to be found!
Only in Glasgow eh?
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The way to a mans heart is through their stomach they say. So it stands to reason that the natural route for vengeance should also be to the stomach.A scorned wife, Jill Martin, fed her husband a really special curry for his dinner one night. Her secret ingredient was dog excrement. Gave it a little extra nose I would imagine.
Rumor has it she suffered years of mental abuse and after a 21 year marriage could take no more.
No doubt this couple will eventually split and go their separate ways, and probably find other partners. Now imagine for a moment being in the mind set of Mrs Martains new beau - you definitely are going to be encouraging a lot more eating out!
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So Chris Evans has finally beating Jonathan Ross as radio personality of the year, including picking up the best entertainment show for his weekday show at the Sony Radio awards. Personally I like both of these shows, but since moving to the drive time slot, Chris Evans is no longer as edgy as he was when he had his Radio2 Saturday afternoon show (which in itself was no where near his level at the time of his breakfast show days).Bring back TFI Friday, and put a little fun back into the Friday evening slots!
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A toilet manufacturer in Japan has offered free servicing to a range of its toilets after it discovered some of them caught fire. These toilets are special toilets with a whole host of gadgets attached to them for the more discerning dumper!Just as Roy Chubby Brown once sang: "Can't I have a shit in peace?"
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Clever boffins in white suits have figured out a gene in our DNA that clearly signals that it will be harder for some than others to keep to a strict diet. The 'fat' gene is present in double doses in those that we would consider historically as big boned!So don't sweat it, celebrate your body style for whatever it is.
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The BBC in their FINITE wisdom is planning on shelving this weeks DrWho if the football match broadcast before hand goes into extra time. The problem would be that it would push Dr Who too late for the young ones.Dr Who has a WAY bigger audience than the football, so just who is getting shafted here?
Although I have it on good authority that Man United should be able to beat them in the alloted 90mins, so we may still get our weekly dose of the Dr.
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In a move prompted by the lobbying from a web site, AfterElton.com , Disney have bowed to public pink pressure and is permitting gay couples to take advantage of their wedding package, starting from $8000.Disney in all fairness has hosted a number of Gay Days at its parks before, but this move just rounds out the 21st century family values.
Good on Disney - even another sector to screw money out of! :)
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What is there to think about? Why not put finance aside for a moment, and join the happy team for what is going to be an excellent few months with some of the top names in the business. So what if it's a turkey afterwards, the thrill is the journey not the destination.
So come on Sean, pull your head out of your arse and get with the program!
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But what's your fate? Being snared by a fishing trawler. Talk about unfortunate dumb luck!
]]>What on earth does an 18 year old know about politics? Not the polictics that you read in the headlines, but how to handle people, handle complex issues, and how to even handle the press - the policitians best friend. Nothing of course. She hasn't lived long enough to figure out just how complex the world really is and how to handle what on the face it seems simple issues. I don't want an 18 year old representing me in anything, let alone my views at a national level.
So why are the Scottish Socialists doing this? Are they mad? Well, leaving the madness debate for another day, they are not stupid and if there is any party that knows politics then its them. They know they don't have a chance of winning this seat, so why not let a 18 year old girl run for it. There is only upside for them. They get some free publicity about the youngest ever candidate and at the same time demonstrate how inclusive their party is and they turn a seat that was going to lose anyway into some positive media spin. It's a stroke of genius on their part.
You have to feel sorry for poor Charlotte who is being used like this by a bunch of people who are obviously a lot smarter than she is.
]]>In true, over the top style, from the Americans, they naturally blame the so called "hacker" instead of looking at themselves for leaving the door open in the first place. If Gary hadn't found them, someone else would have. He admits he was looking, he admits he isn't a "hacker" in the Hollywood sense of the term. He was just a guy with a little computer knowledget that started trying some open ports and was completely surprised that they were open and letting him in.
For more information read the BBC News story. There is also a FreeGary blog on the go that has a lot of good background information on this. Read it at your peril, it wil insense you.
]]>Using a visual representation of the major airports, you simply click where you are flying from and where you are flying to. A flash based site that works very well, and I found it to be much quicker than arsing around with airport codes.
Before we go into the world of RSS and what it can offer let's step back a moment. Since you are reading this article, we can assume then you are comfortable with using a browser to read pages on the Internet. You click on a link and are taken to that page. A fairly simple transaction.
Now, let us assume you always go to say the BBC News site. This is a site you visit often to get the latest news or sports scores. You may visit this site a few times a day to see if the information has been updated. If it has, then you can take some time to read the bits that interest you, ignoring the rest. But what if you didn't have to visit the site to see if something has changed. What if something could check for you and let you know when something has changed for you.
You could save yourself a huge amount of time and idle clicking around looking for fresh content. Imagine if there was a program that would monitor all the sites you usually visit, and then let you know when something new popped up. Even better, when something new did pop-up, it would direct you straight to that new page or story.
Sound good?
Well this is exactly the type of service that RSS feeds allows to exist.
In this world, the program that monitors for site changes is often referred to as an RSS reader. There are many different applications, for all the operating systems available. With the latest browsers (FireFox, IE7, Opera), an RSS reader is built in. But we'll come back to that in a minute.
So these RSS readers will monitor a site for changes and additions. But the question is how? How do they do that? Do they go to the site and read the page and then compare it to the last time? Well in a way, yes they do. But instead of looking at the pretty visual HTML page that you and I see, they don't need all the fancy graphics, colours or fonts. Instead they just need to see the raw data - the words. So to make this easier (and quicker) for computer programs to detect changes, they use a different standard, called the RSS format.
This RSS format contains all the data for the site, but in a format that is known as XML. This is the data that RSS readers like to consume so they can easily determine if a site has changed or added data.
So let us go back to the web browsers.
Browsers can now automatically detect whether or not a site has an RSS feed associated with it by looking at the top of the HTML page. If a site does, then they will display a small orange logo, that you can then click on and this effectively bookmarks the site. But it is a special bookmark. The browser will automatically keep an eye on the site for you and when a new item appears it will alert you to this, depending on the browser.
That is the secret behind RSS; it is a means by which users can remotely monitor your blog without the need to continually visit just on the off-chance you have added something.
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]]>But history has shown us that it didn't quite work like that. The big-boys got the bigger slice of readers leaving the smaller boys picking around left-overs hoping to get that infamous link-back from a large portal or site to drive some of their users over to your humble area of the world wide web.
Blogging is going through a similar realization. While one shouldn't be seduced by the promise of huge traffic numbers, you shouldn't cut off the opportunity all together. With a little work, little thought, you can indeed move through the ranks and start getting yourself a healthy readership. But be realistic.
A good entry over at Sabahan.com illustrates his own goal of moving from around 100 daily readers to 10,000 within a year. A fine goal and one that shouldn't be too hard to achieve if follows through on the tips he has laid out. But why 10,000? Why not 100,000? Or even a million? Or what about something a little more modest like 1,000 readers?
The harsh reality is that it comes down to a pure numbers game. There is only a finite amount of users on the Internet, and while that is increasing daily, there is an ever growing number of pages vying for their attention, growing at a much faster rate, thanks largely to the ease that blogging has brought.
Take a look at your own Internet experience. Sit back and think about how you move around the Internet. How many new sites have you stumbled upon today? How many of those new sites will you most likely visit tomorrow or maybe at a later date? How many of those new sites were lucky enough to be bookmarked by you? or even better, have their RSS feed added to your feed reader?
We are creatures of habit, and while we like to discover new things, the vast majority of our internet surfing time is spent visiting the same jumping-off sites on a daily basis. The only hope we really have of finding a new site is if it pops up in our news/feed reader and happens to catch our eye. Of course we can't discount the ill-fated validated link; the "oh you have to read this" email from a friend or colleague. Those can often be the key to the large influx of readers some desparately crave.
It is all about context - making sure you set your goals to a realistic value that reflects the type of readers you expect to attract. This goes back to our previous entry on Why people blog? But understanding your reader is the key to the whole success of blogging. Put yourself in their shoes, why would you want to come back to your blog on a daily or weekly basis?
Experts often cite daily or constant content is the key. But only if its of interest and of a perceived value. Drivel is still drivel no matter how often it is produced. Content is your product - after that, its just packaging. Deliver good solid content and you'll find you will start carving out the niche and the readers as your blog evolves.
Another tip that is definitely worth bearing in mind, is to make sure your blog doesn't become a virtual cul-de-sac. Once people visit your blog, where do you take them to next? Links to other interesting stories around the Internet is a common thing to do and try to make your entries as rich as possible with links. So if you reference a story or comment on a product, then leave a link to the original source. This gives your entries not only greater depth, but serves you no harm when the search engines and aggregators come to rank your blogs popularity.
One of the best ways to get traffic to your blog, is to get involved in your community. Go out and find other related sites of interest and start contributing there, ensuring you leave a link back to your blog. Mailing lists and online forums are a great way to build up your credituals. A trick often used by the hard core bloggers is to participate on a list and instead of writing a full answer on the forum, write a quick overview and then tell them that if they want to read the full explanation then visit your blog.
There is no magic answer to building blog traffic, but by doing some of the small things, one can easily increase your readership. Just don't expect it overnight.
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]]>In its simplest form, you can think of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) as just a list of latest items. Formatted in a special way to make it easier for computers to interpret. For example, when you and I read a page of information we like to see formatting, fonts, layout, pictures and even colours in some instances. For a computer, they don't see any of this, they just want the words, the raw data. RSS enables this. Just keep telling yourself, it's not meant to be read by humans; only computers.
Right out of the box, your blog produces a variety of RSS feeds based on what you are writing, for other computers to easily consume and utilise. But what can you do with an RSS feed on your blog?
You want to think of your readers when you are thinking of consuming RSS feeds. You could take an RSS feed from say a news source, and display the latest headlines on your blog for your readers to see while they were visiting your blog.
For example, take a look at the open source news/toys blog over at http://compiledby.spikesource.com/. Look at how the home page contains more than just the entries composed by that author. It also contains the latest headlines from a variety of sources from around the Internet.
This way when the user visits the blog, then can also get a good round up of the things happening in other places. You have become your own mini-aggregator - bringing together related pieces of information in one place. This may even encourage the reader to come back to your blog as a jumping off point as they know it is a place to find good links.
The content the RSS feed will change content automatically depending on when the source updates their entries. This way your blog is always displaying something different for both you and your readers to enjoy.
Additionally, Blog-City blogs give you an overview landing page for all the feeds you are currently tracking. For example, here Alan Williamson's blog is tracking various Java related news sources and he can see them all here: http://alan.blog-city.com/newsfeed/.
One thing you may have noticed with these examples, is how the data from the RSS feed looks. Note how all the data is presented in the look'n'feel of the blog that is hosting it. This is the power of RSS; it is pure data, with no (or little) formatting imposed on it.
You are not limited to consuming RSS feeds from the major news sources; you can use any RSS feed, including your best friends blog feed. You can place their latest entries in your gutter, so your readers can see your friends entries, and maybe you can persuade them to place your feed in their gutter. Instead of swapping dead-lifeless links, swap RSS feeds instead. An example of this can be seen at the Blog-City support blog, that uses this blogs RSS feed in their gutter. So anytime this blog produces content, their blog is updated automatically to reflect the latest entries.
Be careful how you include RSS feeds into your blog. There are many Javascript snippets that you can easily cut'n'paste and drop into your blog. While this looks to do the same, all the links are blind to the search engines, and therefore you won't benefit from the likes of Google's page rank scheme. Blog-City does not utilise Javascript for this very reason.
You can get involved with RSS feeds more than just simply the production of them. Reading them gives you a window into the world that interests you, all without having to worrying about the logistics.
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The first thing you have to remember is that people aren't necessarily visiting your blog out of habit. They have to be attracted there from many different sources on the Internet. At this point, the only tool you have to attract them with is the blog title, and also increasingly a short summary paragraph. Both of these are free from any formatting, and therefore must rely on the content to attract attention.
The title is probably one of the most under-rated pieces of real-estate you have complete control over. The title finds itself everywhere, in search results, aggregator pages, email alerts, RSS feeds, side bars - everywhere! So making sure your title is strong enough to warrant further investigation is key.
The other literay weapon you have in your arsenal, is the blog summary. Some blog tools/providers don't provide for a separate summary and this is very poor, as you are relying on search engines etc to guess a summary by extracting the first few hundred characters of your entry. This can be horrendously misleading. Take control of this area and write your own.
The blog summary is utilised by search engines to give a little bit of feedback to the user as to what the page they have just found in a search is all about. The summary is also used by aggregators as the majority of RSS output utilises only the summary. In addition, the summary is used throughout your own blog as people surf around your blog looking for interesting pieces. It is therefore crucial you take your time and provide a meaningful summary for your entry that will help promote and sell your blog piece.
The summary and title are both used by some of the search engines to rank you in their results. If your title, summary and entry all look related then this will increase your page ranking every so slightly. The rules on how search engines rank pages are always being fine tuned and there isn't one magic bullet in this respect, but you can help yourself, by make sure they all make sense, and you aren't deceiving your audience with false promises.
It generally only takes one good entry for a reader to make a decision on whether or not they wish to return to your blog, or even better, sign-up to your mailing list to be alerted of future publications.
Don't let the title and summary go to waste, they are your only hook to get the outside world into your blog.
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]]>This categorization or grouping can then help others find other related items if they want to explore further. For example, this entry here has been tagged with a number of tags that you can see at the bottom of this page. But what happens if you click on one? If you click on say, "blog help" you will be taken to a page that lists all the other blog entries that have also been tagged with this. This helps your readers to 'surf' in the traditional web sense around all your content finding relevant content.
So tagging within your own blog while powerful and useful, becomes an even greater tool when your tags are used by others outside of your blog. When you publish an entry, and the web pings go out, various search engines and aggregators come and read your content. Included in this content are the tags for each entry. Services such as Technorati provide a huge window into the blogging world by primarily offering tag based browsing. Blog-City offers a window into the most popular tagged entries through their community pages.
You can quickly see what the most popular tags are. In other words, what common subjects are people blogging about. By tagging your content, you are contributing to this larger picture, enabling people to easily find your entries by very nature of association.
Tagging can be a very useful tool to help both your current readers and to help attract new readers to your blog. Be careful to tag using relevant words and don't go too deep, or use too many. Take a look at the aggregators such as Technorati or Blog-City and see how others are tagging, and what type of words they are using.
Tagging is quick, easy and most of all, painless.
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]]>This is exactly what a web ping does. A web-ping is a small request that goes out from your blog to alert services that are interested in your data that your content has changed. This ping goes out to the search engines and the new breed of portals called aggregators. An aggregator is a place that brings together content from all different sources and arranges them into related categories depending on what their audience is looking for.
A web ping happens automatically for blogs at Blog-City without the author having to do a single thing. Services such as Technorati, Yahoo, Ping-o-matic etc all get notifications that your blog has changed, and they will then come and look at your blog to get the latest information.
The constant craving of new data from these services has meant a standardisation of the ping protocol. There now exists a large network, called Feedmesh, that takes your web ping and shares it amongst all the service hosts that want to know your data has changed. This includes all the large search engines as well as all the smaller specialised aggregators. This reduces the amount of web pings that have to be sent out. For example instead of 10 web pings being made on every blog update, only 1 web ping is generated and that web ping is then shared with everyone on the Feedmesh network. Even the big operators want to save bandwidth and resources!
But really what does it mean for you and your blog?
Basically it means a greater potential audience for your data. You are alerting the search engines that your blog has changed and needs re-craweled. You are alerting the aggregators that your blog has new data and they should come and read it and start using it, hopefully encouraging their users to click on it and come to your blog. It's about increasing your blog's visibility beyond that of just your own mailing list and regular readers.
All without you having to do a single thing; all you need to worry about is producing good quality blog posts.
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]]>For her own answer, Kimee cited personal reasons for blogging. She wasn't blogging for anyone in particular, but herself. Her blog was a record of events gone past, thoughts once mulled, it was full of bad spelling and bad grammar. Kimee even admits that if one were to read one of her posts at random, it would probably be boring. But what drives this woman to continue to update her blog daily? Because its part of her, she is documenting her own existence.
Others were quick to chime in with their thoughts. Barbara Payne, a professional writer, noted that her blog was also a personal one, "where I dream,
wax poetic, express my idealistic side, share insights, and thank people". What each of these blogs have in common is that they are not looking for a large readership, infact, they don't expect people to read their output - it's their blog and their words.
Levi Wallach on the other hand is all about his audience as he writes his Gadget and Technology focused blog. He wants to write the sort of piece he himself would find interesting about a given topic. As he puts it himself, "it would be nice to not have lots of others have to go through as much work as I did and so I try to make it easier for others to grasp". An audience driven blog like this is more likely to find a bigger audience as his posts become more valuable for people looking for specific information. Levi's entries most likely will feature higher on Google for example than say Barbara's or Kimee's personal entries, since people will be more inclined to bookmark or pass his blog url's around.
Blogging to educate is another common reason for people taking to their browsers, and the wide range of material that people wish to educate about is wide and far reaching. Take for example, Geraden, who describes himself as a "man who regularly wears tights (and pantyhose) and I want to spread the message that it is ok for men to do this". His blog has become an online support centre for people curious or needing advice. Geraden has built up a small community around him, with over 200 comments in the last 10months alone.
Blogging is billed as self-publishing, giving voice to those that may have otherwise gone unheard. Leastbest took up blogging to write stories that he didn't have the confidence to get published, and having received positive comments, the whole experience has gone much better than his expectations. Trudy Schuett, another professional writer, started her blog as a replacement for an email newsletter she use to pen, but the logistics of promoting that became too hard that she turned to blogs. She writes for her audience and for her, the blog is the perfect publishing tool for her that gives her full editorial control.
Finally, the seasoned geek blogger, Mark Derricutt, who started a journal back in the old days when the term blogging wasn't even coined, it was just an HTML page that he manually updated with various notes. He knows he has an audience, but that doesn't effect what he writes, it's his blog and if he wants to update on various programming subjects then he will, often putting out strong how-to or help related posts that undoubtedly will ease the pain of others.
This just a small sample of some of the reasons people blog. The reasons are varied but the one thing that does come through them all, is the sense of control. The blogger is in charge and no one tells them what they can or can't write about. They may be writing for an audience but that by in large is a by-product of the ultimate control of having the ability to express one self. To start a blog in the first place, you must first have the desire to write and put a little of yourself out there.
Who knows you may attract an audience, you may not, but whatever reason you blog under, always enjoy it, and don't get caught up in your own self hype.
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]]>Thompson was invited to a closed-forum discussion that took place under the "Chatham House Rule", which reads:
"WHEN A MEETING, OR PART THEREOF, IS HELD UNDER THE CHATHAM HOUSE RULE, PARTICIPANTS ARE FREE TO USE THE INFORMATION RECEIVED, BUT NEITHER THE IDENTITY NOR THE AFFILIATION OF THE SPEAKER(S), NOR THAT OF ANY OTHER PARTICIPANT, MAY BE REVEALED"
Ironically Thompson was there representating the views of the blogging world and how it has transformed the world of publishing. While the meeting progressed, Thompson happily typed up his notes into his blog and thus null'n'voiding the very rules he was duty bound to uphold. Realizing his mistake, he owned up, and noted there was nothing more he could do because it was already published, the blogging engine took over, indexing and sharing his words throughout the world.
Thompson however was being a little naughty here, not owning up to the logistics of the Internet and believing that one can't control the flow of information. It takes a finite amount of time from when you publish your blog, to the time when people start reading it, and the various search engines and aggregators start indexing your content.
Thompson could have easily unpublished the item on his blog and minimised the exposure. The respected search engines, would quickly drop the entry from their indexes once they seen the "410 Permanently Removed" HTTP response from his blogging software. Aggregators also respect this basic HTTP error code that has existed since the world wide web first burst onto the scene.
The entry could have easily been removed from the majority of people seeing the words contained within. But Thompson used this an excuse to simply continue and let the entry exist; "publish and be damned". Respected journalists such as Thompson, while positioning himself as a blogging expert, can do the blogging world more harm than good by playing on peoples fears and myths about the Internet.
In an interesting twist of fate, at the time of writing this entry, Thompson's blog site was actually unavailable for public viewing, illustrating perfectly how easily it is to restrict access to your words.
Your blog is a valuable publishing tool, but remember it is a publishing tool, one can make corrections, additions, and removals at your will. You are your own editor, you have ultimate say on what goes on your blog site and assuming you have chosen your blog software properly, Pandora's box can indeed be closed again.
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