Blogger Discontinues FTP Support

These posts were originally produced in 2005, using Blogger, Google's on-line editing tool for creating blog pages. Most of the content posted here is still valid when it comes to the results people should, or shouldn't expect from adding a blog to their website.

However the majority of the buzz surrounding blogs has died away, to be replaced with buzz about other social media tools, such as facebook, and twitter. For people who want to use blogs vs tweets, Blogger still exists, and we still offer blogger template revisions.

Blogger's new templates offer some Wordpress like widgets, which allow you to put custom items in otherwise cookie cutter layouts, but further editing can produce a look that personalizes site look and feel.

Even if you aren't interested in revisions, you might want to look over the essarys about the issues surrounding blog creation and support. There is more to a public printing press than simply stuffing personal revelations into a text editor.

posted by jbell at 1:45 PM

Creating a Blog Community

A sense of community comes from shared purpose. What purpose will attract the general public to your site? The SofTECH meeting had 4 examples of attractors.

In the case of the Dean campaign, it was a political contest. Each side had a candidate, and the public interested in the contest joined the discussion of the issues. But it was not a general discussion, or a prolonged open-ended formulation of ideas. It was a focused debate that had a deadline. It would be interesting to know to what extent that focus remains, and what topics remain as drivers of community.

On Edmunds.com, the motivator comes from a group of people who use their choice of transportation as a social connection. It is not the public in general. Most people don't define themselves in terms of their car. So what turns an object like a car into a substitute for a persona? Whatever causes that transference drives the discussions.

It would seem like "community" among business owners would have a more task oriented set of reasons for discussions. Whether these are business regulations, local conditions or political processes, the outcomes of these group conclusions have financial implications.

In a non-profit atmosphere, where a large percentage of the labor comes from volunteers, the social aspects of the work are a large part in keeping people focused on the task at hand. Either they are treated to personal attention from key members of the non-profit staff, they participate in some group activity, or they have a personal interest in the non-profit's purpose.

To set up a site that forms community, it would probably be good to discover the connectors of that community, the people everyone knows. If they are interested in the idea of a community blog, and they write about their interests, they will draw other people.

Engaging existing social connector institutions would be another possibility. Perhaps churches members would congregate to post social events on a blog.

Sports Clubs might be another source of people with common interests. Bicycle clubs, sailing clubs, tennis clubs, swimming clubs, dancing clubs all have events. Perhaps the social leaders of those clubs would consider public planning of those events to interest other people, and encourage participation.

Pets, fashion, food, bargains, contests and public recognition are motivators. People group themselves around those topics because they have a personal interest in them. They use them to define themselves, and seek opportunities to pursue their chosen sense of self.

How those individual interests can be turned into a general sense of community is more difficult. Computer people and social people may not have many common interests.
Social bloggers may not have much in common with people in business. Unless the blog editor can identify the threads that draw people in, it may be difficult to form a blog with the express purpose of community.

Like an artist faced with a block of marble, it may be that the raw material of a community blog has a soul of it's own, and a potential blog community administrator should approach the act of creation as a discovery process, not as a way to accomplish any specific aim.

Your new Printing Press

Now that you realize a blog requires writing content, it's time to set up that first blog. The easiest way start is a combination of blogspot and Google's Blogger.com. Blogspot offers free hosting, and blogger.com offers the interface that sets up the pages.

First, you have to set up your blog disk space by registering with blogspot. Then hop on over to www.blogger.com to set up the blog template and post away.

It is nearly painless. The templates are pre-configured, and the post editor interface is no more complicated that a word processor. There is a straightforward set of "help" instructions, and you can choose whether you will be the only editor, or whether you are a group of friends will share the daunting day to day of creating interesting content.

If you prefer to put the blog on your own site, you can skip the blogspot registration. Instead, set up a restricted access folder on your site, and give it a separate ftp password. If you don't know how, ask your ISP. The separate password lets you keep your main site password private, and limits posts to the blog folder, not to your entire site.

There is other software for creating blogs, but blogger.com's interface is an easy way to start. John Breslin (AKA Cloud) (Galway, Ireland, Co-founder of Ireland's largest bulletin board community) has some statistics for the blog engine software prevalent in his community. Blogger is first, followed by Wordpress.

Wordpress is a free blog software package that you set up on your own site. Where as blogger.com handles all the passwords, comments, archives updates, back pages and provides templates to simplify the process, when you go to install Wordpress or similar packages, you will be faced with the mechanics of setting up the php & msql that manage the visitor registrations.

But to start with, all you have to do is try it out for free. Be sure that you spell blogger carefully. Yahoo just happens to have a site registered with a similar name, spelled with one g. I wonder if they realize that it may confuse some people?

Who and What rises to the top?

Recent research suggests that people are not aware of the market forces that are shaping their browsing experience. People are aware of ads in the side bars that look like ads. Most of them understand that money speaks, and it is possible to "buy" the top position of the ads being shown. But there is a major difference in the way various search engines treat their advertising and searches.

• Yahoo's search (2004) results are heavily influenced by their indexes, which business joins via paid subscriptions. Historically, their directory contents were determined by a person to made decisions on the sites to include, Today they use an indexing crawler) Commercial submissions to Yahoo are paid on a yearly basis. Non-commercial URLs can submit their site if they "register" with Yahoo.


• Ovature(GoTo), AlltheWeb, AltaVista and Inktomi are now all owned by Yahoo. Commercial sites pay for listings.


• Google's search results are determined by an algorithm (formula) that looks at a site' external links, total volume of visitors, and the degree to which the site content meets the search criteria keywords. Site for inclusion is free and Google has hundred of categories to help you position your site to reach the proper audience.


• Infoseek garners links by crawling submitted sites with automated programs called "robots", that follow the links.


• Hotbot lets you search Yahoo, Google and Teoma all at once. Owned by Lycos, which didn't make searches a priority, HotBot was revised in 2002.


• Ask Jeeves, uses the Teoma search engine, once know for it's question based interface, Ask Jeeves has been working on smart search technology


• AOL search uses Google. Their internal version limits searches to sites within the AOL online service. Their basis for this is that they censor offensive material, but that remains open to question.


• MSN is developing a search engine


• LookSmart, has a human edited directory, commerical sites pay to list


• DMOZ - human edited directory. Free to list, but think of it as an encyclopedia rather than a commercial vehicle.

What does this have to do with the viewer? Could it be that paid indexes present their own indexes first? Whether this is good or bad depends on how you view the search engine's willingness to grant access for payment. Perhaps a human edited index is going to have more "relevant" listings, or perhaps its content will reflect business with deep pockets. If you are looking for the most informative choice of information, it would seem obvious that relevance should be the first criteria. Ranking that focuses on outside recommendations and popular consensus is likely to bring up information, not just sales pitches.

The treatment of ads also has some differences depending on search engine and site. Some ads are presented upfront. They are clearly labeled, and they are not mixed with the search result. Both Google and Yahoo look at whatever personal data you leave laying around. Google uses your search criteria to present AdSense, which brings up ads whose content is coordinated to the search keywords. Yahoo looks at your personal demographic, and presents you with search results that try to sell you to the highest bidder, whether or not you have indicated an interest in the topic.

While my personal vote is for relevancy to search criteria, the fact that the search results are determined by formula leaves it open to "Google Bombing".How Weblogs Influence a billion Google searches a week By posting the same link on multiple blogs, it is possible to distort the formula's "outside link" factor, and vault it into the upper pages of the search results. While multiple links could reflect actual popularity, it can also be a result of dirty tricks.

So the next time you look at search results, if you don't get the information you need, try another search engine. Google, Yahoo, Hot-Bot, Ask Jeeves, Go, Alta Vista, there are a lot of them, and they don't all return the same information. There are significant differences in the way they search. (This post is from 2005, and much has changed from then.)