Conference: BlogHer 2005
Location: Santa Clara, CA – Techmart
Session: Advanced Tools
Date: July 30, 2005
Time: 11:15AM
Moderators: George Oates, Alexandra Samuel, Marnie Webb
Alexandra… does introductions… solicits favorite web sites and topics from the audience…
Marnie: I’ve had 18 gallons of coffee this morning. First, what blogging platform do you use? How many of you use RSS? Okay. We also have candy. The way that we talked about approaching this is how do I get started writing and how do I get other content (that I make someplace else, or someone else makes) into my blog. The two tools that are important are APIs and RSS. We won’t focus on what RSS is, but how to use it; RSS is what allows me to listen to others (another person, a persistent search, etc).
Marnie: Why are you here?
Audience: How to get RSS on my blog?
Audience: Using tags?
Audience: Reblog?
Audience: Using Radio Userland for several blogs, want to bring them all together?
Audience: Looking to combine blogs with wikis, following comments more effecively online?
Audiencce: Currently on TypePad domain, want to move to my own; want to do podcasting, moblogging and video blogging. How do I bring it all together?
Audience: Moblogging?
Audience: Avoiding porn spam?
Audience: Moving to a new URL?
Audience: Using a local desktop client?
Audience: Switching identities seamlessly?
[Minor chaos so far for this season. The TechMart, which I call the Low Tech Mart, is showing its true colors… WiFi not available to the panel, which makes it hard to show off advanced tools]
Alexandra: Del.icio.us is the worlds most unintuitive URL. If you’re not using Delcious now (or another social bookmarking site), you should start now. Instead of having your bookmarks stored on your own computer, you store them on a website where you can share them with other people. More importantly for our purposes… you can pull those links back into your blog.
[Alexandra creates a new account]
[Navigates to http://del.icio.us/tags/powerblogher
Alexandra: The joy of tagging is that you can have the same bookmark stored under multiple tags. This rocks because you can get an RSS feed for each tag. [Navigates to her site] All of the items on this page have been automatically added based on people who have tagged their post “powerblogher“. To aggregate an RSS feed into your page means that you need to play a bit with the code; you don’t need to learn how to code, just copy and paste the code into your page. We’ll show you more about this later. Reminder: before you dive into this, make sure you’ve backed up your blog, template, etc.
Audience: There are tools that will automate the creation of this.
Audience: You’re relying on the categorization and spelling of others, could be spam or porn
George: Right
Alexandra: You can aggregate in misspellings too. If you’re worried about others, just integrate the pages you’ve tagged. The big thing is using the work you’ve done in tagging/bookmarking as an input into your blog.
Alexandra: Three tools in your toolkit. One is bookmarking. Second is reading RSS feeds (including tags). And the third tool is allowing you to aggregate RSS feeds and republish them on your blog. You can track a lot of tags by using an RSS reader.
George: Delicious is one tool; there are 18+ social bookmarking tools
Audience (Rafer): The social bookmarking sites are putting synonym engines in place, correlating misspellings, etc. Probably not an issue in a year.
Audience: You mentioned 18 social bookmarking sites; so that means 100 in a year. Isn’t that a problem, because it’s not a shared space.
Audience: Get used to it. It’s been a long time since there was one place to see all new things.
Alexandra: Tagsonomy.com (site for discussing social bookmarking/tagging issues, limitations, etc)
Marnie: Flickr stole tagging from Delicious, but did it differently. On Flickr, everyone tags their own items (e.g., their own photos); with Delcious, everyone tags the same item (e.g., a public web page).
[More WiFi problems for panelists]
Marnie: On Flickr, you can make a “badge”, which associates a tag, image size and orientation; Flickr will feed you all incoming images that meet your criteria.
Audience: Is this HTML code?
Marnie: Yea, it’s a script
Audience: How do we actually get RSS in?
George: FeedDigest.com (used to be RSSDigest.com). There are also a plethora of plugins for WordPress et al.
Audience (Mena – SixApart): We’re launching a solution for TypePad next week to inline RSS (i.e., subscrbe to RSS Feeds from your Blog) that won’t require playing with script.
Audience: I want to take the first post from 10 different feeds to create one feed.
Audience: Reblog.org should let you do that.
Audience (blogger at Contentious.com): Contentious.com has a tutorial on What Are Feeds, And Why Should You Care — resource for non-technical.
Audience: RSStocracy.com has similar resources
Alexndra: Feedwordpress is another reblogging solution.
Audience (Canter and JD): Ourmedia.org will store all your audio, video, photos for free
Audience (Charlene Li): Can you just show the tag clouds and show how you use it
Marnie: We don’t actually call them tag clouds; just what is popular at a given time.
Alexandra: This isn’t the newest coolest thing; you can integrate a Flickr photo stream that allows people to email a photo and have it show up on your blog. Very powerful for getting non-techies to use technology in an easy way to integrate online and offline communities.
Audience(Kalyia): Single-sign on for digital identity is cool
Audience: Is there a site that compares all the blogging tools
George: We’ll put it on our site
Audience: Is there a way to go into a photo stream and remove offending results for the email-a-photo scenario?
Marnie: No, you need to only invite people you trust
Audience (Charlene): Other tools, MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360 allow you to moderate photos
Audience: Question for setting up the email account for the photo streaming; is that a feature of Flickr.
Marnie: You need to tell Flickr where your blog is. Then in “Your Account”, there’s a specific email address for your account
Audience: Is there a way to use FeedDigest that still works from an SEO perspective
Alexandra: [Long statement about reblogging and stealing people’s content]
Audience (Rafer):
Audience: Be aware that copyright law has not caught up with Feeds. Be sure you know what copyright others have on their Feeds. Items in the US are considered copyrighted from the moment they are created.
Audience: That’s right. And, lots of people using Creative Commons license have a ‘non-commercial’ clause.
Audience: Atom vs. RSS
Audience: Atom is API + Syndication Feed, RSS is only a syndication Feed
Audience: Request… on your advanced tools, when you do the comparison tools for blogging, can you also compare it to collaboration tools like Wiki’s
George: Sure
Audience (Charlene): It’s also message boards, etc; it’s about community voices
Audience (Niall): People might also want to use stat trackers (FeedBurner, SyndicateIQ, SiteMeter).
Audience: There’s something called Feedshake that allows you to select a bunch of feeds, specify a keyword, and it will automatically create a mash-up feed of all the selected feeds that match your keyword.
George: What I’m looking for is when I can use APIs as easily as I can now publish on the web thanks to blogs.
Audience (Charlene): You’re talking about widgets, right…
George: Yea, that’s what’s interesting about speculating what Yahoo is doing with Konfabulator
Audience (JD): If we have other cool tools, can we add them to your page?
Alexandra: Yes, via the Delicious powerblogher .
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