How to Blog: 1. Blog Basics
I receive fairly frequently questions about blogging from friends and through my site. When I was new to blogging I realized that it wasn’t easy to locate basic instructions on blogs and blogging. Most of the articles I found assumed some level of knowledge I didn’t have at the time. For this reason, I’ve decided to write "How to Blog," a series on blog basics. My objective is to give people new to blogging easy instructions and basic information on how to start their own blog.
If you want to contribute to this series, send in your questions, links to good blogging resources, or suggestions for future installments of "How to Blog."
What is a blog?
A blog is a website powered by weblog software that let people easily publish online content. The weblog software neatly organizes content in a database, creates permanent addresses for each chunk published (a blog entry or post), and dynamically publishes the updated site. Read more »
What’s your manager’s expiration date?
I took this picture at my local Wegmans. It was by a door labelled "Employees Only."
The State of the Blogosphere, April 2006
I wish this graph represented the performance of my investments.
Instead, it shows the number of blogs tracked by Technorati in the last 3 years as reported by Technorati founder, David Sifry, in his latests State of the Blogosphere (via Boingboing). The blogosphere according to Technorati (which is just part of the blog universe) is 60 times larger than in March 2003, with 34.5 million blogs.
This evaluation may be a little overinflated, though. Only 55% of the new blogs survive after 3 months, 11% post at least weekly (3.9 million), and spam blogs (and related techniques: sblogs, spings, and sporms, ah ah…) is on the rise.
Tags: Technorati, blogging, blogs, statistics
Best of Web 2.0: Remember the Milk
What’s a girl got to do when she has too many things to accomplish and too little time? Creating a to do list, of course! But not any simple, paper-based to do list. We are too geeky and our world is too complicated for old fashion to do lists (you know the drill: the lists multiply, they are never there when we need them, and life changes too fast for a static paper document).
Luckily for us, the Web 2.0 new wave has brought us many tools to create fancier and ubiquitous to do lists, from 37 Signals’ Tada List and Backpack, to Mark Hurst’s Gootodo. None of them however is so elegant, well designed, and grown-up as Remember the Milk (aka RTM). Read more »
The social life of humans and machines: How to design for the social interaction
Solitary designers, lonely geniuses, and isolated creative teams: it’s time for you to think about social interaction for your user interfaces. No, I am not talking about social software, user-created content, or Web 2.0. I am talking about any old-fashion user interface: because for us human beings any interaction is a social interaction–even when we are interacting with "a stupid machine."
We all know this: we tend to treat objects that display intelligent behavior as humans. We curse at our computers and at frustrating websites, we trust or distrust them, we talk to them, we find them cute or insufferable; we get angry, happy, frustrated, outraged, even if there is no living creature on the other side. (Well, there is always a living creature on the other side: somebody has designed and built the application. And human qualities bleed into inanimate objects very easily.)
Interfaces can persuade, make us uncomfortable, happy, or unhappy. The personality of an interface emerges by the interactions with humans: the style of the content, the choice of words, the behavior, how well it responds to our expectations and needs, and the appearance blend together to trigger our all too human feelings. Interactions between humans and machines are conversations (or arguments) in which information is exchanged, connections are made, needs are satisfied or frustrated, and relationships are built. When we design applications we need to think of them as social entities. Read more »
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