Making the Decision

The first, and probably toughest, part of this migration was to actually make the jump. This site, and every bit on it, is something I’ve carefully crafted over the years. Up to recently, I could proudly say that every piece of code on the site was something I had written myself. It was a point of pride and, while blog software was still new, it was also a way to experiment and go deep into the code. Over the years, though, software platforms have gotten more and more complex and my own code failed to keep up.

The second part of the decision in making the jump was also due to my focus on spending more time writing. However, this was balanced by my need to tinker with the code. As time went on, it became more and more difficult to figure out where I wanted to experiment.

Last but not least in that decision was the fact that everything I was building was my own but not something I could really share with anyone. Time and time again, people asked me how I implemented a particular feature on my blog and I had no way to deal with this than to pass the whole code, ugly commenting and all, to them.

Last month, the main drive on TNL.net crashed, something that appeared like a disaster at the time but was really a blessing in disguise. Having to rebuild the box, I decided that it was time for a massive upgrade. First, I would upgrade the operating system (TNL.net had been languishing on an old version of Redhat Linux 7.3 for so many years due to some bad system design decisions I made when I moved to Linux a few years ago). Having done so, I also decided to upgrade the web server (to Apache 2.0), the database (to MYSQL 5) and the programming language (to PHP 5). It was a major upgrade and, as is the case with every major upgrade, things started to break. I spent a considerable amount of time bringing things back up and reintroducing tweaks that had built up over several years. It was then that I realized that maybe a different approach was needed.

Who are the contenders?

Having decided that I would upgrade the blog to someone else’s software, I had to establish what factors I would consider when building the new site. From there, I built a quick list:

• The software I would take had to be something I could tweak: While I’m leaving my existing code base behind, I still want to have some level of control over what goes on under the covers.
• The software I would use had to be open source. My reasoning for this is that open source not only means free but it also means that I am not worried about control issues further down the road. So any changes that I make and then redistribute doesn’t fall under some kind of corporate legal entity and therefore (fingers crossed) I won’t have to worry about legal issues relating to my amendments.
• The software would have to be extensible through some type of plug-ins or module infrastructure.
• The software would have to be written in PHP and use MYSQL because those are technologies I’m familiar with and I didn’t feel like learning something new.
• The software would have to match the features I had running in my existing blog.

Having those requirements made the choice considerably easier, as it left only two major contenders: Drupal and WordPress. In the end, I decided on WordPress for purely visual reason: the admin interface just struck me as much more polished so I went with it. Drupal had a geekier feel to it but WordPress felt like a more finished product (and here, I may show some bias for interface).

Starting the migration

The first step in migrating things to move over was to figure out what I needed to migrate. One of things I wanted to ensure was that any upgrade would have little or no impact on the overall feel of the site. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time tweaking TNL.net so it did not necessarily feel like a blog and so that the user experience was always as optimized as possible, allowing people to get to any content within only a few clicks.

First Challenge: Look & Feel

This presented some challenges: the first challenges was in keeping the interface consistent. Most blog packages come with a set of skins or themes that are used by beginning users. I, however, set out on a path to change the whole look and feel to mirror exactly (pixel perfect) the previous look of the site. This sent me down the path of theme development for WordPress and I spent many hours learning about the internals of the system in order to make it do what I wanted it to.

The other look and feel challenge was in the URL structure of the site. For years, the URL structure on TNL.net has not changed however, I’ve always been bugged by some of the limitations I had created for myself. For example, entries could not have the same title because I had created a system that prevented me from being able to do so. It seemed clever at the time but turned out to be a major design flaw. As a result, the URLs for every entry sat at roughly the root of the site. I wanted to make sure that any Google juice or other types of linkage would not break so I had to write my own routine to redirect pages correctly. This ensured that the URL structure of old could still remain.

Second Challenge: Data structure

In the process of writing my own blog, I defined my own data structure. I wanted to ensure that it would be followed in WP but it took some tweaking to get everything to map correctly. However, thanks to the RSS importing feature, I was able to import most of the old entries without problems. This, once again, was to ensure that continuity would remain unbroken and that the site would still function as it always did.

However, a second challenge was in importing comments. I’m still trying to figure that one out as I’m working on importing all the comments back into the new system. They’re temporarily offline but they will come back.

Third Challenge: RSS feeds

A substantial amount of TNL.net reader never visit the site: they get it via RSS. This presented a new challenge as I wanted to ensure that they would remain mostly undisturbed through this transition. In the process, though, I decided to move to a new model that would ensure they never have to worry about such URL changes. I redirected all the feeds to new URLs (http://feeds.tristanlouis.com/TNLnet for the excerpts feed and http://feeds.tristanlouis.com/TNLFull for the full entry feed) which are now powered by FeedBurner, allowing me to get a better understanding of who my readers are while helping migrate them from one platform to another. In a sense, FeedBurner is now serving as a migration tool while at the same time providing me with a new URL schema that I could take anywhere I want.

Conclusion: A pretty seamless transition

All and all, while it was some work to get most everything working, the transition has been pretty good so far. I’ve gained a fair number of new features and am still exploring how the system works. It seems to be much more feature rich than any code base I developed so that’s another great relief. On the downside, I feel a little sad to let go of a large chunk of code powering the site (the TNL.net blog was powered by a 90k PHP file which will soon be cleaned up). I’m still considering adapting the old code to deal with the front end of TNL.net but, all and all, it looks like WordPress will be my blogging tool of choice… until I decide to switch again.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title On the WordPress move. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Broadband penetration

Broadband penetration will continue to increase in the United States and Europe. Large scale deployments of city-wide broadband efforts in several large cities will start making internet access similar to phone or electric service, widespread and the type of thing few people think of. On the bleeding edge of the Internet access development world, some large scale networks, most probably coming from phone companies, will break the 10-Mbps barrier and close in on the 100-Mbps speed, making internet access on par with regular local network access.

The downside of this widespread deployment of high-speed internet access will be in the phone industry, where next generation (3G) rollouts of high speed wireless networks will prove costly and offer lackluster service considering its high price. This will force a drastic reduction in prices towards the end of the year or early 2007, in an attempt to recover some revenue from the large investments.

Implications of increased broadband penetration

The increase in broadband penetration will have several large implications, including the rollout of more voice over IP services, video services, and the infrastructure security.

Voice Over IP

Voice over IP will continue to see widespread deployment and large phone companies will start migrating their full networks to IP-based traffic. This will make VoIP the primary form of telephone communication for wired lines by the end of 2006, though few people will be aware of the change as it will largely happen behind the scenes, not touching people’s independent system.

Telephony services will increase as the VoIP phenomenon continues to increase. Expect early efforts in video telephony to start rolling out and becoming more mainstream towards the end of the year. Also expect to see the rise of wireless devices that can bridge the gap between computer and regular telephony, providing access to the network in a number of different ways.

Video

Video over IP will be very hot in 2006, with several major changes in the industry. First will be the announcement, by Apple, of its new mac-mini intel-powered platform designed specifically for the living room. Following on the success of the iPod, Apple will market the device less as a computer and more as a video consumption tool that will include stunning high definition resolution and will offer direct access to the iMedia store (formerly known as the iTunes music store) where one will be able to download movies and TV shows, as well as content created by amateurs.

Google, in partnership with AOL (and its sister companies within the Time-Warner world), will offer a pay-per-view system, mirroring some of the iMedia store offerings. The system will be available both in the AOL closed garden client (where it will use some level of acceleration to speed up delivery) and on the web through a new client package offered by Google and largely developed by the AOL client software team. The strength of the move will generate enough positive buzz for AOL that Time-Warner will be able to spin-off the unit and will be considering an IPO towards the beginning of 2007.

Seeing their advertising revenues eroding, TV stations will start offering more content online, also sponsored by advertising. New types of online video ad insertion and tracking system will be created by several companies, with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! offering aggregated model based on something similar to Google AdWords but offering not only targeting based on keywords but also based on certain demographic information.

New video aggregators will start appearing, offering a way to customize your own TV station. Some will be acquired by the major portals (unless the portals themselves have already developed that capability by the time this trend manifests itself). Meanwhile, Tivo will recast itself as one of those portals and will be acquired by Microsoft and merged with MSNTV (unless it is acquired by Sony, and merged with the PlayStation 3, or Panasonic, and kept as a standalone.)

Having lost in the bidding war for Tivo, Yahoo! will decide to acquire NetFlix and merge it with some of its video offerings, providing not only distribution of DVDs but also online streaming of content.

On the strength of revenues from online ads, some small cable or local TV stations will start offering their complete programming slate online, for free, and adverting supported. This will rankle a few of the cable companies and syndicators who looked to those companies as another revenue stream. Meanwhile, on the same basis, most local TV news will be available online for free through an advertising supported model. During one major story, a local TV station’s feed will compete with the national networks in terms of reporting, as more viewers flood its website than watch the same story unfold on television.

The competition for those types of stories will continue to increase, as citizen journalism provides raw unscripted video of events. Videocasting, following on the success of podcasting, will start seeing some traction with a few podcasting and vidcasters signing deals with traditional media. Traditional media will look at it as an interesting set of development but one that ultimately won’t be trusted by the public because they do not have the right seal of approval; their prediction will turn out to be wrong.

Infrastructure

The rise of broadband and the increasing numbers of basic services running on the internet infrastructure will give rise to fear that the infrastructure is under-protected. From a technical policy viewpoint, electronic infrastructures will become a major national security matter with fears that the very openness of the internet could represent a large security risk. This will be seized upon by the network providers (phone companies, cable companies) and some security consultants as a way to push for policy that will allow those incumbent communications services to administer their networks with tighter control, with decision as to what they are willing to let run on the network and what they are not willing to. A subsequent battle will ensue as VoIP companies and media companies will complain about the network providers squeezing them out. No decision on any of this will be made in 2006 but the debate will continue through 2007 and beyond.

Growth and Scalability

2006 will be an explosive year in the Web 2.0 sphere. Explosive because it will see triple if not quadruple digit growth in number of users but also explosive because it will see several popular sites unable to deal with the capacity issues relating to that explosion.

On the RSS end, the explosion in growth will really start when Internet Explorer 7.0 becomes a priority upgrade on windows stations. The inclusion of some RSS feeds as defaults in the browser will prove to be too much for some sites which had not expected the onslaught of millions of new hits. Readership from RSS readers will increase as more users realize that they can get their favorite sites delivered to them instead of going out and checking to see if they are updated.

As more people discover RSS, more of them will start valuing blogs and many will start their own. However, the concept of becoming a professional blogger will decrease as many people who thought they could make money off their blog will find that the effort in doing so was higher than they had expected and will abandon their blog.

Meanwhile, other web 2.0 subjects will fail: Tagging services like del.icio.us will be see as too complicated by the general public (although they will continue to thrive in the more geeky world) but tagging of pictures (as in Flickr) will continue to grow. Most blog networks will fail to attain the amount of traffic required to play seriously in the advertising world and will be forced to either merge or shut down. Meanwhile, companies offering only a set of web services with the idea to generate revenue solely from advertising may find themselves in a bind as advertising revenue will fail to grow at the same pace as the new offerings.

Implications of Growth

The explosive growth in traffic see during 2006 has implications across a number of players in the blogging world and metadata space. It also has implications in terms of scalability, business, and trust.

Blogging, podcasting, vidcasting

As blogging takes better hold in the mainstream (your parents WILL be blogging), the number of subscribers per individual blog feed will drop into the low teens, with blogs being read by close family members and friends only. A few breakout blogs, specializing on particular narrow subjects will manage to increase their readership but the world will largely consolidate around less than 1,000 major blogs: of those, the vast majority will not be from any members of the Technorati 100 or any other such list. The vast majority of those mainstream blogs will be the ones created by mainstream media outlets, which will use their existing reach to heavily promote their own blog.

Radio stations will increasingly start offering podcasts and TV stations will offering vidcasts. Most, however, will do so through centralized hosting capabilities provided by their parent companies. Smaller podcasters and vidcasters will have a hard time to compete with those larger companies as they are forced to look into ways to support their own bandwidth costs and will sign contracts with hosting services promising a share of advertising revenue in exchange for doing the hosting: that share will largely go to the hosting service with many podcasters/vidcasters finding they are not really making more than a few 100 dollars a months from all their hard work.

Crash and Burn

One of the hosting services will crash in a major way, taking with it a few days worth of the hard work of thousands of people who were hosting on it. The provider will initially recover but suffer a subsequent crash that will seal its fate as a doomed company. The majority of its users will leave and join one of the larger hosting services provided by Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google.

Beyond the hosting world, scalability will also be a hot buzzword as more services, ranging from RSS hosting providers like FeedBurner to search engines like Technorati and Feedster to analytics providers like Google and MeasureMap will experience temporary failures and growth pains.

The cost of upgrading the service infrastructure will be too much to bear for some companies, which will be forced to shutter their door, sell out, or merge with a similar service. Meanwhile, many web-based service companies will fail to generate enough advertising revenue to continue upgrading. A flurry of mergers and closures will happen over a few months, leading people to wonder if this is bubble bust 2.0.

The downside of all those fears about a bust will be in the increased number of negative stories about technology in the mainstream media. Stories will mention the hubris of web 2.0 founders and will showcase Google as a typical example of this hubris, highlighting its free lunches and other things that were thought cool in 205: As a result of all those negative stories (and others but more on that later), Google will loose several billions (possibly even tens of billions) of dollars from the high of its market capitalization, shedding anywhere from 10 to 25 percent off its high.

After the consolidation, there will only be one or two independent players in each of the following (notwithstanding the fact that there will also be offering from the bigger portal players): blog hosting , vlog hosting, podcast hosting (WordPress and Typepad will either be the two in these three sectors or will have merged), blog search, social networks (speaking os social networks, Yahoo! or Microsoft will buy LinkedIn (if it’s Microsoft, LinkedIn will quickly be integrated with Outlook and offer Plaxo-like features).

Meanwhile, a sector which will have been decimated will be tagging. Following slow adoption by the mainstream, largely due to the complexity of adding tags to pages, many tagging companies will fail. Tagging, as a concept, however, will remain and be adopted by most major search engines: as Metadata entry is simplified with the introduction of Windows Vista and Office 12 (both of which will be delivered by Microsoft to a relatively lukewarm market), and tagging becomes a browser feature, it stops being a differentiator.

Trust is hot topic

Fear of Google knowing a little too much about people will bring a slate of bad press for a company that was the darling of the mainstream media in 2005. The introduction of its Google finance service, hooking up into people’s bank accounts and payments systems will be seen as the company becoming too large a player, with fear of it becoming a monopoly. The backlash will first start in silicon Valley, with many tech luminaries starting to tear down the company. It will continue with publications that were once its biggest cheerleader becoming its biggest detractor. As a result, many of the companies that relied on Google for key services (advertising, analytics) will try to distance themselves from it and start looking for other providers (meanwhile, companies looking for funding will excise Google from their business plans, in order to avoid being associated with it by VCs). Yahoo! will pick up some of the adsense/adwords business, along with Microsoft, which will offer a similar service.

Meanwhile, in the analytics space, new companies will be formed and attract a lot of venture capital. Many of them will offer ways to opt-out of their tracking and some will offer added incentive to people willing to provide them with more information. New models in the space will emerge and at least one player will provide a revolutionary approach that will change the analytics landscape.

In the blogosphere too, trust will be a major subject as some of the top bloggers will grapple with issues surrounding defamation of character, libel, accuracy, and reliability after a top-name blogger is sued for something he/she said or linked to. Furthermore, some of the top bloggers will grapple with issues relating to invasion of privacy as they become more famous in the mainstream media.

On the Wikipedia end, anonymous editing will be abandoned after the revelation of a major hack altering minor facts over several months in an automated fashion has rendered a core version of the wikipedia unusable. The wikipedia trustee will revert wikipedia to an earlier date, erasing all changes performed during that period of times and destroying several significant entries on 2006 current events. The mainstream press will pile on about the inaccuracies of wikipedia, bringing back earlier scandals as proof that no information on the internet can be trusted unless it comes from a reliable source (incidentally presented as being a member of the media establishment).

Conclusion

In late 2006, a substantial portion of these predictions will be wrong and some may turn out to be dead on (although most of the ones mentioning companies by name will most probably be wrong).

Meanwhile, on a personal level, 2006 will be a year of big changes. However, I promise it will also be a year of continued writing on TNL.net, even if it is at the same substantial post every week or two rate that readers have gotten accustomed to. I hope you’ll join me for the ride.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2006 Predictions. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

You are hitting on the right points but there may be a need here for more details related to investigative journalism. In the past, reporters were given more of a chance to spend more time on a story. In today’s world of deadline every minute and producing volumes of copy to feed the paper, site, syndication engines, there is more of an emphasis on getting the story out, and getting it out before one’s competitors.

In the process, investigation is dropped. As the deadline every minute frame of mind becomes more common, less time is spent on doing more research. If Watergate happened today, I fear that the story would end up getting buried and Woodward and Bernstein would be redeployed on other subjects. In a way, the Watergate scandal and the Trent Lott ouster parallel each others. A small, apparently insignificant event builds over the course of time and becomes a significant issue that eventually topples a powerful politician.

The only difference between the two is in who did the research. In the case of Watergate, the Washington Post editor gave its reporters enough leeway to investigate further. In the case of Trent Lott, a group of webloggers decided to do their own investigation and share the bits they had found. In a way, the Lott story could be a good example of collaborative journalism and could bring forth a rebirth of investigative journalism. Investigative journalism is time consuming, very costly (think of the output of an investigative reporter vs. a beat reporter) and can be risky from a legal standpoint (most investigative stories uncover things that people don’t want known).

On the other hand, collaborative journalism can spread the load. It allows for multiple people to build on research from previous people. I would not be surprised if, a few years from now, every serious newsroom has an internal blog with section broken out for bigger stories, allowing for multiple reporters to work jointly on stories.

Ultimately, blogging is about community, it’s about people sharing knowledge, and building on other people’s knowledge. This is why the Lott story happened. Someone posted a note about the original remark, a reader remember another fact related to the story and contributed it to the conversation. That triggered an answer by a third person, and so on and so forth. Because bloggers are passionate about what they are doing, they provide heavy background in the form of links to actual sources, making it more and more difficult for anyone to hide in plain sight.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title A response to Dan Gillmor. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

On a related matter, the blog world is now abuzz with a description of the Internet as an agreement. While the document provides an interesting set of concepts that are sound from a purely technical standpoint (yes, the underlying standards of the Internet are based on an agreement), it does not cover the variety of choices of what is on the Internet. If the goal is to say “hey, the Internet is just an agreement to tie networks together” then World of Ends succeeds. But the contention that this makes a difference does not really matter much in today’s world. What world of ends does NOT address is what is ”

on

the Internet” and therein lies the usefulness of a conversation.

So the problem arises from the fact that we keep coming up with new definitions of the Internet that end up referring or reiterating the initial one. However, we seem to do little to figure out the next step. Companies, government, and individuals co-exist on the Internet. Each of those can be considered an entity. Each of those entities makes statements. Each of those statements is either provable or not. And if it is not provable, each of those statements can be assessed as trusted or not (my basic assumption being that a provable statement can only be trusted if it is true). The question remains as to how we can parse those statements quickly (can machines do a better job than we do individually? can smart mobs do a better job than the individual?) and judge their trust-worthiness.

Chris is right: marketers are not necessarily bad. The question is how do we make the difference between the ones we can trust and the ones we can’t?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Blog, Internet, and Marketing. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

In the discussions surrounding my suggestion of how we can level the playing field, I’ve learned a couple of things:

First, whatever solution we come up with must be easy to implement. It is easy for those of us who are more technical to come up with XML rules and complex structure to represent the world. However, most people neither have interest nor experience in experimenting with such thing. Hence the first rule of any answer is that whatever solution is implemented, it needs to be simple.

Second, trust is a very large issue and some portions of it are being addressed. For example, FOAF allows you to establish trust between friends. But what about concepts (can I trust this person’s opinion on a movie review? can I trust their opinion on an Internet standard?), things (do they own the product? did they buy it or was it given to them for free? If it was given to them for free, who gave it?), people (I think that’s somewhat covered by FOAF but there’s more that needs to be built into it). This is a wide space and needs to be properly categorized for a model to work.

The next question is one of granularity. Should a trust statement apply to a whole site or to a particular entry on that site. As Scott points out “implementing this on a per post level would definitely increase the amount of work to blog content which isn’t good at all.” So what’s the option here? Is there a way to modify editing tools so they have a caveat emptor option?

Another question is how that information is displayed. Should there be a browser plug-in? an RSS reader plug-in? Should it be embedded in a feed or a page? How would the user know when the level of trust on an entry or a site is lower than expected? And, more importantly, how would one be able to check that a “trust statement” can in itself be trusted.

Lots of questions to which I do not have an answer yet but I think that they are worth pondering and I will post further on this soon. (but can you really trust that last statement? )

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Trust, truth and networks. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Declaration of bloggerdom

1. We are bloggers.
2. We are individuals.
3. We are not for sale
4. We are not a target market.
5. We link to sites because we find them interesting, not because we think we’ll get free goods or money out of our links.
6. If we have a relationship with a product/company/service/person we link to, we will disclose it in the same post.
7. We believe in contributing.
8. We believe in truth.
9. Our writing is our own. Our words are our own.
10. Like them or not, our opinions are our own, too.

It’s a start. But does it need more?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title A declaration of bloggerdom. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I don’t watch TV so television advertising doesn’t work on me. I listen primarily to public radio so, apart from placements in the form of contributions, I can’t be targeted there. I read a paper (the New York Times) every day and a bunch of technical magazines. What I get of pop culture is from flipping through magazines at the supermarket cash register, or reading about it online.

Online, I not only read the mainstream sites but also a number of blogs. I could have been blissfully unaware of the existence of raging cow, had it not been for the pointers to it from several blogs. Does the existence of the blog matter to me? Not really since it’s not a product I would buy. But what about a product I might buy? Would my perception be affected? THIS is the question that I have.

There is no doubt in my mind that marketers have a presence in the blogosphere and will continue to increase. As a result, the line between shills and individuals is going to grow increasingly hazy. If someone goes to a product launch (let’s say a new piece of hardware) and get a goodies bag and some free food and drinks, and then goes and blogs about the event, are they shilling? It’s not clear and that’s what I’m trying to solve with the full disclosure feed. I want to try to establish a way for people to be able to tell that there is a relationship between the writer and the product or site or whatever written about. How can we do that?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title astroblogs. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Here’s how it works:
First, there’s an XML definition to say this is an XML feed:

This is followed by the tag which says this is my full disclosure feed.

Generic information similar to an RSS feed includes the weblog title, weblog URL, the RSS URL (this is important because some people may only read a site through an RSS reader), the type of site (this can be either personal (for a personal site), corporate (for a site run by the corporation pushing the product), or marketing (for marketing agencies, advertising agencies, public relations companies, and other outside agencies promoting a product on behalf of a client), and a contact part (this can either be an email address or the URL of a web form to contact the person or company).

We then go into the section For every type of ad, we include a „ , and . Let me go into more details on this:

Type

: There are a number of ways in which a marketing placement can appear. It can be through the form of a banner, a button, a pop-up ad, a text-ad (similar to Google textads or metafilter’s), a links (within a blogroll, or navigation area, or an entry. If you want to make it clear, you might want to include all of them, or you can pick and choose which ones you will include.

Compensation

: This covers what kind of compensation you received. It can be none (if you just want to say we don’t run this type of ad), goodwill (if you think you’re going to get good karma out of it), cash (the hard stuff), product (if you got a free product out of it) or link (for example if you link to a friend and they link back to you).

Value

: This is a free form field where you can list what is the value of the goods, services, money you received. Some of it could be free traffic, for example.

Entry

: This one is in the off-chance that one day, you did decide to do a one-off deal on a particular entry or if you want to section off particular types of marketing to a particular section. It can be all (for all entries), none (for no entries at all) or a URL (which would be the permalink of the particular entry this applies to).

That’s about it. I just mocked it up in a few minutes so I expect a lot more fleshing out to happen. In that attempt, I invoke the LazyWeb to discuss further.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Marketer, Marketer, where have you been?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

If you take Dave Winer’s definition, you end with a definition that is much more limited than thinking of blogs as journalistic tools. Let’s examine the four basic tenet Winer presents as the basis for a blog:

• A weblog is personal: if that is truly the case, what does this mean for “community weblogs” like Slashdot and Metafilter ? Things they are not driven by a single person, can they truly be called weblogs? And what about the whole trend of companies setting up weblogs? Doesn’t that go against this concept?
• A weblog is on the Web: It’s pretty much a given (hence the weblog name). But so are web pages? What is the big difference between a Geocities personal page and a weblog? Is there any? Is it just the rate of updates?
• A weblog is published: Does that mean that any CMS tool is a weblog? Does it mean that only cheap or free ones are?
• a weblog is part of communities: Once again, the same could be said of any web page grouping.

It seems that there are few answers to be found here. Looking for more details, I ended up re-reading Meg’s “what we’re doing when we blog”. In it, Meg talks about the weblogs-are-links-plus-commentary definition. Is that it? Does that then make any page of links with a few commentaries a weblog? Does that mean that Dmoz a weblog? It has links and commentary on each link. Each of those is categorized in a group? I’m being facetious here as I don’t think it’s a blog but it does technically fit the description.

Meg does provide a good framework for what weblogs are. Based on her extended definition, a weblog includes short posts and links, an email address (does that mean I don’t have a blog since I offer a web form instead of an email address?), and is united by common tools that “spit out our varied content in the same format — archives, permalinks, time stamps, and date headers”. So is that format the basic point of blogs? And is the assertion that “Weblogs simply provide the framework, as haiku imposes order on words” the core of the weblog revolution?

If so, what is the big deal? There are many formats out there and it seems that a particular writing format does not a revolution make. And if it is just a new writing style, it cannot possibly be journalism (since journalism is a task and not a format) but can be applied to journalism.

Somehow, though, I think that I am missing something here. Otherwise, why would there be so much fascination about blogs? There is a bigger story and I cannot put my finger on it. If you can, please contact me!

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title What are weblogs?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

It’s an interesting question and one for which I have my own personal answer: right now, for the most parts, it isn’t. But is there a kernel of truth to the possibility that it is? Some say it will never be. If that’s truly the case, why is it that the media is painting it as such? Is it because they do NOT understand the weblog phenomenon? Is it because they have been misinformed by people in the blogging community who believe that it is? And if it’s not, what is it? Has the “professional press” been swindled into buying a non-story?

Something tells me that this is not quite the case. I do believe that somewhere, between where blogs are right now and where they could go, lies a grain of truth to the blog’s potential for being a new journalistic form.

Let’s dissect the job of a journalist.

First, the journalist hears about an event/fact/technology/policy/etc… He analyzes the value of the information. If it’s something that needs to be covered immediately, he starts researching. If not, he stores that information somewhere (either in a document or in his mind) for potential later use.

For research purpose, he contacts his sources (the value of sources evolves over time. Initially, a young journalist relies on public relations people. As time goes on, he develops contacts within his beat and gets past the PR people by going straight to people who have provided him with good information on the subject in the past). His sources provide him with more details and/or analysis, based on their own knowledge, which the reporter plans to use in his story. Some of those appear as quotes; others are “off the record” and are to be used as background information only.

Based on his own knowledge of the field, the journalist starts crafting the story, using what is called a reverse pyramid structure: most important information at the top, least important at the bottom. Depending on the medium, the journalist could be limited in how much information he can include in a story (in television or radio, this is limited to the number of seconds or minutes given to a story; in a paper, it is limited to column inches (or words). Interestingly, because the economies of freelance journalism are still based on a per word rate, the word limit has also migrated to the web).

Once the story is done, he gives it to his editor, who may or may not ask for more clarification or investigation of a particular part. The same loop happens again until the editor thinks the story is good and it is then published/broadcast/distributed.

That’s more or less the way journalism work today. If you apply the same model to blogging, links in a story are the sources. The problem I’m trying to highlight here is that, in journalism, a reporter usually has sources that his competitors do not (because of an “established relationship” with that source). What I’d like to see is more of an emergence of a distributed model. All bloggers cover the same story, but why do they have to go to the same sources?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Thoughts on blogging and journalism part II. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The main thing that bothers me about this is that, as a result, few bloggers take the time to take in information from different sources. Reading a single story about a subject is good if you want to get some quick facts but, in order to really act in a journalistic fashion, you need to develop a fuller picture.

For example, if News.com publishes a story about a new technology/company/whatever, then most bloggers will link to that story and add their comment on it. Meanwhile, the San Jose Mercury News could publish a story on the same subject but, having talked to other people, provide tidbits that could be associated to info received from the initial News.com story. In another corner, a blogger who’s involved with the technology/company/etc… could add his/her thoughts on the subject adding more data. A competitor would do the same and so on and so forth. However, in the blog world, the emphasis is on link, add your opinion, move on. Few bloggers seem to be revisiting stories and adding more analysis as the story develops. This is a shame and if it remains as it currently is, weblogging will never replace journalism fully.

Since the 80s, professional journalists have been moving further and further away from analysis, focusing instead on delivering facts quickly. I believe that niche (the investigative journalism one) is the one where blogging could add a lot of value (and if blogging is to displace journalism, it needs to add value). Can we do better, I don’t know the answer to that but I suspect that collectively, the blogging community needs to examine its role and figure out whether it wants to go beyond the opinion page (where it would be sitting right now if it were a newspaper).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Thoughts on blogging and journalism. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.