"blogging" in Weblog

I know I’ve not been posting here too regularly but I’ve not been completely out of the blogging loop… I’m using Donotremove as a place for my more general articles on things like the emerging web and online behaviour with more technical stuff going elsewhere. For a couple of weeks I’ve been posting news for the Carsons over at Vitamin, which has been quite fun. They’ve just kinda left me to my own devices and the kind of stuff I’ve been posting reminds me of the kind of thing I used to write when I first started blogging - short sweet posts with a couple of links and nothing more. I’m also posting every now and again over at the Content with Style blog. On top of these two I will have a couple of work blogs to contribute to as well so all in all, I’m keeping myself busy!

While I think about it, the Carsons are running another of their workshops towards the end of August. This time it’s Professional PHP Development from the chap who wrote DropSend for them and it’s safe to assume it’ll be good.

I’ve just been reading about Squidoo and its aim to provide a place for people to mark out their ground as experts and make money from what they write about. Mike Rundle and Michael Arrington were both quick to point out that just starting a blog would accomplish this and Wikipedia provides space for the rest.

Why is this interesting? Well, it’s interesting because it demonstrates the shift in how people perceive blogs. I still remember when people associated blogs with online diaries; these days they seem to have more in common with magazines. Not all of them, mind you, and I’m sure they are perceived differently across demographics but I think it’s an interesting shift: Blogging for credibility is now a given.

A perfect example of this is Pete Cashmore’s Mashable site. It’s a blog on Web 2.0… That’s it. It’s well written, updated regularly, on topic and, well, very good. What interested me was the two main navigation links at the top left - home and consulting. The blog says ‘credible’ and he says ‘hire me’.

As the devastating scale of the Boxing Day tsunami becomes clear I have been glued to my television. I was brought up in Asia and many of my family holidays were to the beautiful countries on the Indian Ocean. Since then I’ve been back that way travelling and it’s a part of the world I know and love. Fortunately for me I don’t know anyone who was in the area this Christmas but I have friends who returned from Sri Lanka only a few weeks ago and other friends who were bound for Koh Phi Phi in a few weeks time. Many haven’t been so lucky.

To their great credit the British public has managed to raise more money than their government initially pledged, some 32 million pounds at the latest count, and European countries seem to be queuing up to donate money to help with the Herculean relief efforts. The more the merrier though, and the easier it is to donate, the more money will be raised. Andy Budd has launched his own initiative, BlogAid, to encourage the blogging community to donate any earnings their sites may have for January to the cause. My site doesn’t earn any money and I’ve already made donations through the Disasters Emergency Committee but it is a fantastic idea and I’d like to humbly encourage anyone who runs Google Ads or any other advertising schemes on their sites to consider it.

Developing and working with CMSs is a subject close to my heart at the moment for a couple of reasons, neither of which I think I can talk about, and two articles have helped me along no end.

The first was Scrivs’ timely MT vs. WP vs. TxP: Entry Page Design, in which he critiqued the design and usability of the 3 most popular blogging tools. He reached the same conclusions as I had but he seems to have used a lot more reasoning…!

Next is a set of articles called Building a Web Application that document the development of a CMS by Jonathan at Snook.ca. This set of articles run through the full development cycle from initial design decisions, through requirements gathering and specification to debating release license options. There’s a lot there.

The launch of JPG Magazine has been announced by Heather Powazek Champ and Derek Powazek. As the site says: “JPG Magazine is for people who love imagemaking without attitude. It’s about the kind of photography you get when you love the moment more than the camera. It’s for photographers who, like us, have found themselves online, sharing their work, and would like to see that work in print.”

The first issue is on the theme or ORIGIN. It’s logical but pretty tough… Submissions launch on the 4th October with the first magazien due on November. I look forward to it!