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  Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Blogging Reviewed

Wall St. Journal tech writer Walter Mossberg has reviewed three blog software services, and reports that MSN Spaces seemed easiest to use for performing common actions. Yahoo 360 was almost as easy, but tried too hard to tie the user into other Yahoo! services. Blogger, he reported, wasn't as easy to use.

(via PR consultant B.L. Ochman, whose post isn't entirely accurate. Comments aren't participatory?)


Blog Tag: Links

7 Comments:

At 6/16/2005 12:30 AM, Blogger Melissa said...

Dave, is there some kind of blogging for dummies book? It's frustating that I keep seeing so many words that I don't know the meaning of. The dictionary is of no help. Where can I look up blogging terms?

 
At 6/16/2005 12:40 AM, Blogger dkgoodman said...

I don't know of any books like that, though there's gotta be one. A book would go quickly obsolete, though, the way blogging keeps changing.

A wonderful free resource that can address a wide variety of questions is Wikipedia. For example, Trackbacks.

Likewise, Answers.com. Example: Trackbacks.

Finally, the source I still turn to when all else fails, and often before anything else, is Google. If it's not in Google, it's probably not worth knowing. ;)

 
At 6/16/2005 12:42 AM, Blogger dkgoodman said...

heh. Just noticed that the Trackbacks entry in Answers.com is the Wikipedia definition. Wikipedia is one of the sources for Answers.com answers. Silly me. :)

 
At 6/16/2005 11:16 AM, Blogger Melissa said...

Thanks, Dave. I used Answers.com to look up permalink. In defining that word, another 9 words were used that I didn't know the meaning of. So, of course I looked up each of those words and even more unfamiliar words were used. This is going to be a long process, but eventually I'm going to memorize this stuff. I feel like I'm back in school. :)

 
At 6/16/2005 11:31 AM, Blogger dkgoodman said...

We all do that. AJAX? What's that? (New web page technology that geeks are buzzing about that normal people think is detergent.)

Feel free to ask about any term. If I don't know it, I'll find out, or someone else will answer your question, and we'll all learn the answer. Even the lurkers who read these pages but never post a comment.

In regards to permalinks, if you hover the mouse over the timestamp at the bottom of one of my posts (like Posted 6/16/2005 08:42:00 AM), you'll see a tooltip pop up describing that as a permanent link (permalink). Click the permalink, and you go to the web page for that post.

If a blogger linked to this post in my main blog page, dkgoodman.com/blog.html, it would confuse people because the post would eventually scroll off the bottom of the page. But if they used the permalink for this post, then it will always be a good link. A permalink is a link directly to a post; it should always be good.

 
At 6/18/2005 10:43 PM, Blogger Melissa said...

There is something else that I've been wondering about. Some bloggers have both Haloscan and Blogger for leaving comments. I'm never sure which one to use or why there is a choice.

Usually I choose Blogger because if people want to, they can read my profile. With Haloscan, I could be any Melissa. But, I noticed that when given a choice, you sometimes choose Haloscan. Why?

 
At 6/18/2005 11:40 PM, Blogger dkgoodman said...

As you've noticed yourself, Blogger comments occasionally have fits and stop working, and they don't support trackbacks, so some people have added Haloscan, seeking stability and trackbacks.

The problem is, comments are a big part of blogging, and sometimes a post's comments are more interesting than the post itself. Some people don't disable the Blogger comments because they don't want to lose the comments people already left before the migration to Haloscan.

I tend to leave comments in whichever link already has comments, often because I just finished reading those comments before adding my own. I don't really have a preference, since both Blogger and Haloscan know who I am, and I have a Gravatar profile photo (avatar) which shows up in Haloscan comments. Sometimes I just click a comments link at random, not really paying attention to which I clicked. Color me unpredictable. :)

 

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