Earthling

I wrote a while back about the apparent lack of new web applications and sites geared towards baseball fans. I wanted to list out some of my recent finds in sports-related sites:

• Faircatch.net - This is a conversation tracker for Pro Football, from the people that brought you Striketwo.net. I'm using the Custom Tracker RSS feeds in my Reader to keep track of blog conversations about the Oakland Raiders. Yeah, I know, Jeff George is old.
  
• Yardbarker.com - Yardbarker is a "digg-like" sports news site, where the users submit stories and decide on their popularity. There's a great rundown of how Digg works on Valleywag. I'm a big fan of the yardbarker icon.
  
• ArmchairGM - I mentioned them in my previous round-up. They have some changes and new features coming, including new partnerships with MetsBlog and the JetsBlog. From what I can tell, their goal is to use the expertise of team-specific blog communities to add features to the wiki, and in turn provide team blogs with a well-maintained, well-visited, supported wiki platform. They tell me they have more announcements on the way.
  
• AOL's Fanhouse - This is less a web app and more a new, pretty useful NFL-related group blog done by AOL. It has blog entries in the main column and stats and scores in the right column.
  
• Fanspot - Fanspot bills itself as a "sports social network." I haven't looked at it closely yet but in general, I think social networks centered around specific interests are too limiting to be worth the effort of joining. It takes a lot of effort and energy to invest yourself in something like this, and if you have more than one interest, you'd end up having to duplicate that effort in several different places. And make friends in one that wouldn't transfer to the other.
  
• Fanlete - This is another social network about sports, but it shows some promise with its special features. You can predict the outcome of games, and compare it to the actual outcomes, and compete against others in picking winners. I'd like to see these as features of a larger, more general social network site some day, instead of a separate site.
  

Posted by dave coustan at 3:42 PM |

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The Times-Picayune published an article today with some information about EarthLink's Wi-Fi project in New Orleans, and I also got some questions from Earthling reader Dave Ryan about the current status. I spoke to Clifton, the project's General Manager to get a run-down of the current status and plans.

One correction to my earlier entry -- I guess I incorrectly picked up an error that the Times-Picayune reported in July of a "September 1 launch date" for the Wi-Fi network. As is correctly reported today, that September date is wrong. We haven't had a specific launch date targeted, but we'll begin building in September and our current estimate is that we'll complete the initial 20 sq. mile rollout in late December. Here are Dave's other questions:

1. One of the wireless signals I keep getting in the French Quarter/CBD area is named "CityofNewOrleans." Is this the one provided by Earthlink?

   Earthling: No, this isn't ours. This is probably a City of New Orleans signal from their existing network.

2. I've read that Sept of this year is the goal that was set to "unwire" us. Are you able to meet that goal?

   Earthling: That was incorrectly reported in July as a goal (see above). We're estimating late December for the initial 20 square miles.

3. Will the 1Mbps speed be available to residents willing to pay for it? Or is that speed only for businesses?

   Earthling: There will be a consumer retail service at 1Mb in addition to the free tier of service at 300 kbps.

4. If the above services will indeed be available to residents, I want to get a headstart and be one of the first to sign up when all is said and done. Is there a way I can recieve an email notification?

   Earthling: At http://www.feather.net/neworleans, you can sign up to be notified when the service is available to you. There's also more information there about the initial coverage area: "a 20 square mile area encompassing most of the area from Carrollton through the French Quarter and South to the River, and Algiers on the West Bank." An initial coverage map will be published there as well.
   

As an aside, I have a short trip to New Orleans planned for mid-September, and I hope to pull together some sort of blogger meetup while I'm there. I'll provide more details when my schedule is nailed down.

Posted by dave coustan at 1:47 PM |

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Today, if you use EarthLink internet access, when you mis-type the URL of the web site you were trying to find, or if the site no longer exists, one of several things happens:

• (a) The site you wanted also owns the misspelling and redirects you. You typed "Goooogle.com" but you get to google.com anyway.

• (b) Someone unrelated to the site you wanted owns the misspelling and serves you their own page. Often it's a page filled with useless nonsense text and affiliate links, or it's a prankster.

• (c) The misspelled domain is not owned by anyone, or no longer exists. Your browser (often Internet Explorer) or an add-on toolbar you may have displays a suggestion for what you were looking for, or sends you to the site it thinks you wanted.

• (d) The misspelled domain is not owned by anyone, or no longer exists, and you get an error page with very little information on it that you've come to understand is the equivalent of "Try Again." In Safari, it looks like this:

  
  

Last week EarthLink started rolling out a new system for handling certain specific types of browser errors on our network. You'll only see it in the fourth case listed above. It serves you a page with suggestions for what site you might have been looking for, along with the ability to search using Yahoo. It also has an ad on it. We think that for the vast majority of users who end up in bucket "d", this is a better experience because it helps them to get where they are going quicker, and doesn't leave them with a dead end. In addition, EarthLink will generate revenue from the page.

Here's a screenshot how it would look with the new service if you tried to go to "www.lsusprts.net".

Read on for more on the service.

Continue reading "Handling Dead Domains"

Posted by dave coustan at 2:37 PM |

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There's now a myEarthLink widget to go along with our TV Listings application. So now, once you've spilled your guts to the application, you don't have to go back to the full application to see what's on tonight. The widget gives you your favorite shows, best bets for tonight, and top selling DVD picks from Amazon, all on the myEarthLink start page and at a glance.

It's not on your start page by default, so to add it find the "add a feature" box:

If you haven’t yet set up your zip code, favorite channels and cable provider, this would be a good time to do it. More on the TV Listings application itself here.

There are more enhancements on the way as well, including a changeable date on the widget, and streamlining the way you move back and forth between the myEarthLink widget and the full app. Special thanks to the TV Listings team for their ongoing hard work.

Posted by dave coustan at 2:10 PM |

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In a blog entry about Net Neutrality, I alluded to the concern that ISP's would specifically block competitors services in order to muscle their customers into using theirs. There's a conversation on Techmeme today about a press release from a European company that has developed a new technology for blocking Skype calls:

In experiments, the filter was able to detect and block a Skype call less than 30s after it started, making it a reasonably efficient Skype blocker. A regulator can drop the call by shutting down the pipe. The number of false positives was very low, though it is expected to rise in more complex environments like large corporate networks, especially under heavy network load. The solution appears to be fully scalable and doesn’t require much human intervention or monitoring.

I'm not an expert on these technologies, and I'm not sure how this differs from other peer-to-peer filtering products. Opinions vary widely on the potential impacts. It's interesting to me how within the Net Neutrality discussions, specific service blocking in the U.S. is generally vilified, but the coverage of today's story didn't get the Net Neutrality spin.

Andy Abramson points out that this technology could be used for good, to track down and stop nefarious behaviors as the happen. The21Talks.com author kind of yawns, as he's not sure this will last much longer than previous attempts to block Skype calls. In those two entries, the assumption seems to be that Skype-blocking technologies are needed to close up the potential security threats that goes with their use in various networks. Granted, neither is necessarily speaking in the context of an ISP, but I would think you could just as easily consider this new technology as fodder for the debate about blocking access to "unpreferred" service providers.

Posted by dave coustan at 4:05 PM |

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• Used FAQs - "A random round-up of frequently asked questions." It's a lot more entertaining than it sounds. "Are tigers’ teeth specially designed for flesh eating?" and "What does Husker Du mean?" are the kinds of things I might actually read if they popped up between "important" articles in my Reader.
  
• Long Awkward Pose - Found this one just this morning. At first it seems like found hilarity, but it turns out it's deliberate. It's a blog that collects video clips where the subjects are tricked into holding a pose for a long time, as if they were posing for a still camera. "It's simple, really. People look foolish when posing for a picture. So tell your loved ones you would like to take their photo... then secretly videotape them the whole time." Heh.
  
• Pinger, A Pretty Cool Vmail Service - What's funny to me about this is that it's an entire business set up around the idea that you want to call someone and leave a voicemail while completely avoiding the risk of actually having to talk to them. Sure, some phone systems do this as a feature, but maybe we don't want to make it so easy. What used to be the territory of the schemer or the socially awkward has apparently become so socially acceptable there's a market for it.
  
• Scott Wade's Dirty Car Art Gallery - Very respectable tableaus made on the dust and mud on front windshields of cars. [via Jeff]
  
• Milkshake Song Translated Into Elizabethan English - Heh. "Rap translated into something" is a premise that just doesn't get old. [via robon]
  
• Cross-stitched Nintendo DS Game Holders - Tiny things are generally appealing to me anyway, but combine that with some Nintendo love and the near-utility of holding a small game cartridge, and you have a project I might actually complete.
  
• The Effects Of Cannabis On A Web-based Lifestyle - I found this while searching for "WebLife." Not what I was looking for at all.
  

Posted by dave coustan at 11:17 AM |

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We recently sent out an email to our customers to tell them about the full launch of the Anonymous Email Address feature I wrote about in beta a few months ago. One of our customers has become so wary of scam emails he asked on Earthling "Is this the real deal?"

It is the real deal, and apparently not a moment too soon.

For the uninitiated, it's an add-on to your EarthLink e-mail account that gives you anonymized addresses that point to your real e-mail address, to protect your real address from spammers. There are two ways you can get it -- it's free for current EarthLink internet access customers (i.e. if you have a DSL, Cable, Wi-Fi, or Dial-up account). Or if you have a free e-mail account, you can get it and other features by upgrading to Premium Mail.

There's a flash demo of how it works here, and there's more information on the AEA product page.

If you're a current internet access or Premium Mail user, you can go to protectionpack.earthlink.net to turn on Anonymous E-mail Addresses for your account.

Posted by dave coustan at 12:29 PM |

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Robert Scoble points out today that individual Microsoft employees are often vocal in defending their company's reputation and products when it comes into question in online discussions (trying to wean myself off of the term "blogosphere" as much as possible). He notes that the same can not be said for most other tech companies including Apple and Google. Scoble goes on to ask:

So, why do we give Google and Apple such great reputations when they don’t engage with bloggers (and, actually, the “professional” journalists tell me that Apple and Google are harder to deal with too)? Is it better for a company to play aloof and stay above it all and not engage in the conversation? After all, why do Google and Apple have such great reputations, especially with bloggers? (Go to a blogger conference and you’ll see more Google and Apple products used by bloggers than are used in the mainstream world)."

So I wonder the same thing about us. Realistically, we don't have the same kind of reputation or reach of Google or Apple, but we have a decent one. We don't get the 24/7 press coverage that a Google or an Apple gets either, but when our number does get called, today you don't see swarms of EarthLinkers jumping up to join in the conversation. There's me, and often an individual on the team of the product in question will contribute as well.

EarthLink has fewer employees than each of the other three companies, so you'd expect there to be proportionally fewer voices. But I also think part of it probably stems from the fact that today we don't have an employee blog farm like Microsoft does. We have many employees who blog on their own, but we don't have a blogging platform we specifically give to our employees as part of their everyday tools. Having a large number of employees who blog as part of their job increases the likelihood that you'll get active participants in online conversations about the company elsewhere as well.

Sometimes, as a matter of course, we as a company choose to engage in a particular discussion. For example, when Steve Rubel and then Mike Arrington wrote about a couple of our yet-unlaunched products, we jumped in to the conversation. And through a few new product blogs (Reader and myFavorites), we're actively soliciting feedback on some of our new products. I spoke to our Vice President of Corporate Communications, Dan Greenfield, about these issues specifically this afternoon. He said we see ourselves as more like Microsoft than Apple or Google on this, and that we do feel the need to engage with the blogosphere and still working through the best way to achieve that.

There's been nothing since I've been here by way of a memo telling people *not* to engage, and in fact, we're just about ready to release a new, clearer policy explaining what the expectations are if employees do want to become more vocal in blogs and comment threads. What do you think? Is it better for us be more like Google and Apple, and generally stay out of the every day back-and-forth, or is it better for us to aim to be as vocal as Microsoft?

Posted by dave coustan at 2:31 PM |

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Does your sense of humor come across better in person, or in instant messaging? Which version of you is funnier?

Update: The site hosting the poll appears to be slow right now -- please bear with me. If the trouble continues, I'll temporarily turn off the poll.

Posted by dave coustan at 12:59 PM |

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A couple of weeks ago, Earthling reader John Blake asked for some more ideas about how teachers are using RSS and podcasting as part of their classroom practice. I'm fairly new to blogs about tech in the classroom, so I spent some time searching to see what I could dig up. It turns out I find this stuff pretty fascinating. I got a little far afield of the specific question of RSS in the classroom, but I found so many interesting links that I decided to broaden this round-up. Below you'll find a list of miscellaneous resources I found about tools, theory, and techniques for making best use of current web technologies in the classroom:

• First I have to include John's Junk EduBlog itself. It's a chronicle of his projects, approaches, and experiences as a teacher using RSS and podcasting. Reading about how these tools work in the real world for an end-user with a known, built-in audience and purpose can be a refreshing change from reading so much abstract analysis and opinion about the same tools.
  
• Edbloggernews - This is a digg-style user-submitted news site that specializes in education-related stories. It would be interesting to implement something like this at the classroom level, and it appears the technology behind it would let a teacher do just that. If anyone has done this, I'd love to see examples and hear about how it worked out. [via The Thinking Stick]
  
• EdTechTalk - This is a podcast that produces several episodes each week. According to their about page "EdTechTalk is a community of educators interested in discussing and learning about the uses of educational technology." Anyone can call in via Skype to participate in the discussions.
  
• NECC 2006 Podcasts - Judging by the blogs I read, NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) would have been one of *the* conferences to go to this year about technology in the classroom. They've published many of the sessions as podcasts, including subjects like "Choose Your Own Wiki Adventure: Using Wikis with K-12 Students" and "Electronic Constructivism: Compelling Ideas, Engaging Resources, A Dozen Ready-to-Use Techniques". You can get to all of them here.
  
• Weblogg-ed - This is Will Richardson's blog, who also created Edbloggernews above. I've seen references to his recent book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms throughout the "edublogosphere".
  
• Matthew Williams asks some good questions about how and why to use RSS in the classroom.
  
• ESL Handouts Feed - Here's a feed of free ESL handouts and lesson plans.
  
• Academhack writes about a project that brought blogging into the classroom for 60 university students in a writing class.
  
• Ebyblog writes about an article analyzing the use of Podcasting at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. Here's one of the interesting points: "One of the first findings was that most students seemed to prefer audio over video, which they attribute to being more portable. This is despite the students actually originally requesting video, which shows that it’s worthwhile doing more indepth studies like this."

As I come across more stuff I'll be collecting it in the myFavorites RSS in the classroom tag.

Posted by dave coustan at 3:43 PM |

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Here's another round-up of my bookmarks labeled "heh":

• Snakes Ahead, Planes Lag - Is it tacky to link to my own heh? Today is Snakes On A Plane day across America, and I did a little research this morning to try to find out which part is more of a draw. (There's plenty more movie pre-gaming to be had in the snakesonaplane tag in myFavorites.)
  
• Wii Will Rock Who? - WayIPlay.com does the math to show how many sites have used the same dumb pun to describe the Wii.
  
• Set Your Ringtone To A Sneeze - It makes sense when you think about it. If you want an unobtrusive ring that will still catch your attention, how about a sneeze? That way if you forget to turn it off it still won't embarass you.
  
• TSA - Where We Stand - A bulletin describing the TSA threat level for snakes.
  
• Monster Laptop Sleeve - Man do I want one of these. Maybe I can make one. [via robon]
  
• Lipstick Is Back - "According to the Transport Security Agency, the laws of physics have changed since last Thursday, rendering lipstick safely non-explosive again. Whew." [via merlinmann]
  
• Web 2.0 Or Star Wars Character? - I think this quiz has been around for a little while, but it's still good stuff. See if you can pick out the names of web 2.0 products amidst the Kit Fistos and Dookus of the Star Wars galaxies.
  
• 30% Of Americans Don't Remember In What Year 9/11 Attacks Took Place - Wow. [via jzawodn, who I assume is "the" jzawodn(y), and has over 600 hehs]
  
• Tiny Animals On Fingers - A Flickr set of photos depicting just what the title says. Creepy and neat. [via villicious]
  

Posted by dave coustan at 10:33 AM |

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I only got hip to it recently, but judging by the archives Dreamhost's blog has been around for at least a year. It's due for a best. Whether they're talking about a legendary company kickball game, revealing some of the spam complaint calls they get, or taking on the issue of large scale outage problems head-on and with aplomb, it's all good stuff. It's just one of many nice customer communication tools they've got.

They publish less frequently than many blogs (maybe once every week or two), but each entry is meatier, better produced, and funnier than what you'd probably get if they did it every day. It's just a good read, even if you're not a Dreamhost customer and aren't shopping for a web host. And if you are a customer of theirs (I've been hosting stuff with them since 1999), it's as much a source of information as it is entertainment.

You can use this button:

to add the Dreamhost Blog's feed to your Reader account.

(Update: fixed a couple of typos and the URL for adding to Reader)

Posted by dave coustan at 11:35 AM |

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Google has partnered with Valpak to offer local coupons in addition to the usual ads alongside Google Maps. Google will now let any business that's listed in Google Maps create coupons to serve alongside their listing. I feel like I should spread the word around my favorite local businesses who may not even be in Google Maps yet. For those who assume it's too much effort to promote themselves online, the easy ability to offer coupons should sweeten the deal.

There's been some discussion yesterday and today about potential negative impacts on small businesses, who could be hurt by competitors squeezing out their coupons with adwords, and local newspapers, who historically have ruled hyperlocal promotion. From the Joe Average user side of things, it seems like a good thing to have and an obvious evolution from adwords. It's convenient, it's a type of advertising that users find very useful, and it's tied in nicely to what you're looking for.

I'm on board with all of that for sure, but I have to fight the future here at least a little bit. Forget all of the discussion about how the face of media and marketing is changing, and how useful hyperlocal coupons could be. I'm interested in something far more trivial. One day, if deals like this do away with paper Valpaks in my mailbox, I'll miss it. I'll miss thumbing through that fat blue envelope, finding the three or four sweet deals (free oil change...$5 haircut...$3 off a pizza), and tossing the rest. I get a real sense of accomplishment after sorting through a month's offers. It's one of those strange American consumer rituals I've become accustomed to. Am I alone in this, or is anyone else willing to admit that they like the paper Valpak experience?

I think the company encouraged this connection. An old roommate of mine pointed how the local TV ads for Valpak in the 80's went so far as to portray a family waiting breathlessly for the next envelope to arrive. They almost made it seem like Valpak was an actual person, or a character, or a superhero, as in "Did Valpak arrive yet? Has anyone seen Valpak?" How sad that family would be if Valpak never came home one day.

Posted by dave coustan at 11:20 AM |

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It's sort of like Pizza sending out for you.

Often in a blog entry when you see the terms "India" and "tech support" in the same sentence, you've come to expect some sort of bitter rant to follow. I've received my share of e-mails and read my share of blog entries about bad support experiences, ours included. Last night I had an unexpected, amusing, and positive experience with our customer service team overseas that made me think about how small the world has become.

It was unexpected because in this case, it was customer service contacting *me*, not the other way around. It was amusing because there I was at 10pm in front of the TV in my living room, chatting with a customer service representative in Hyderabad, India and helping to explain RSS and our Reader product to a customer in need of assistance. And it was positive because at the end of it, the customer service rep learned what he wanted to know, and the customer had his or her problem solved. It was neat to see a customer service person take on the customer's problem as his own, and charge at it like a rhino until he had resolved it. I'll explain in a minute how he decided to contact me.

Continue reading "..So Then India Called Me For Tech Support"

Posted by dave coustan at 2:36 PM |

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I just put a brief message up on the myEarthLink Reader blog explaining some issues we noticed this morning with some users. In case anyone's feed is affected, I wanted to put the link up here too.

Posted by dave coustan at 2:32 PM |

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Here's a list of links to recent stories of interest in the security, privacy, and protection world, with a couple more about legal protection issues thrown in for good measure:

• Google adds malware warnings - In cooperation with a group called Stop Badware, Google.com will now warn you if some of your search results point to sites identified as purveyors of malware. Eventually you'll get an individualized report about the questionable site along with the badware warning.
  
• AOL releases user search data by accident(that's my bad - it was for research purposes) - The big news in the search world last week was that AOL had published a database of 20 million search queries by their users between March and May of this year. I've linked to a snapshot of Techmeme, where you can find a multitude of perspectives on it. Also check out Rocketboom today, where the word "EarthLink" makes a cameo appearance as the demonstration search in AOL Stalker. It's a web tool you can use to see what (unidenfied) AOL users have searched for. (I checked and no one at AOL searched for "earthling" in that time period. Sigh.) [Thanks for the heads-up, Gregg]
  
• New CDT report on adware - Wayne Porter points to a new Center For Democracy And Technology report on how nuisance advertising gets from a marketer out to your desktop. It showcases some good investigative reporting and suggests in the conclusion that companies should adopt and enforce more agressive policies around acceptible advertising practice.
  
• Is publishing screenshots fair use? - This question has come up countless times in my work on the web, and I'm never totally confident I'm giving a satisfactory answer when someone asks. This lifehacker story puts the question to resident law geek Stewart Rutledge.
  
• Guide to permissions for photography - Another good privacy and protection article via Lifehacker, this one covering when you most likely do and don't need permission to take photographs of people overseas.

Posted by dave coustan at 1:48 PM |

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EarthLink multi-year veteran and VP of Non-Access Products Tom Andrus (featured here) is taking a year off to go on a worldwide journey with his family. He'll be deeply missed around the office, but we'll be keeping up with him on his travel blog, Sixintheworld.com. And we look forward to lots of great stories when he comes back. I asked Tom to share his thoughts via Earthling as he prepares for the start of the trip:

From 5.5 Million Customers to 5: My Year as “Just” Dad

For the last 7 1/2 years I have spent a lot of time listening to EarthLink customers. I have had the opportunity to sit in on focus groups, handle the occasional escalation tech support call, and hold dozens of in-plane conversations with our customers. Through these interactions, I know who our customers are and what they expect from us. As a product person, I love turning customer needs into products. At EarthLink I have had the opportunity to work on almost all of our products and services at one time or another. From our first portable email device to WebLife, from our dial-up product to our newsreader, I helped roll out some wonderful and some not-so-wonderful products for our customers. It would be nice if all our products could be fabulous and delight our customers, but if we only shipped products with a 100% chance of success, we would never take risks and probably never do anything great. If we want to ship great products, we must take the risk that some might not be a perfect match for the customer’s needs. Fortunately I have found that with those risks come some of our best products.

Tom and Anne in Australia

I think I have done a decent job in my role at EarthLink managing risks and helping us reap rewards when we deliver the right product at the right time for our customers. But in my private life I am more risk averse. My family and I have followed a normal path through corporate and suburban America. We have no complaints. We are extremely blessed and are grateful for what we have done and seen. However, this year a few health issues have stirred in us a desire to take a little more risk. Next Tuesday, I will be taking a one year leave of absence from EarthLink to take my family on a round the world adventure. We expect to meet great people, do a little service, and experience life in a new way almost every day. Looking out for the family’s needs isn’t much different than looking out for the customer’s. I will replace the focus groups with family meetings, the tech support calls with parental arbitration, and the in-flight-discussions with long car trips. I will expect to have my finger on the pulse of the needs of the family. Right now those needs are for us to spend lot more time together, to have more shared experiences, and to step out of the hurried and material world we are so comfortable inhabiting. If you are interested, you can follow our adventure at the family blog, www.sixintheworld.com. Please make comments or suggestions; we are looking for input.

During my leave, the EarthLink customer will never be too far from my mind. In addition to being dad, I will be doing a little research of my own to look at how broadband is changing the world, one country at a time. I hope to meet people as we travel who work at companies that provide broadband, wireless, or Internet services. I am interested in how they look at their customers and how they choose what products and services to provide them. I am sure that even when I am sitting in a little café in the middle of Cambodia trying to get my wifi to work, I will still have in the back of my head the EarthLink customer who is sitting on a park bench in Philadelphia with her wifi and be thinking, “What new services could we extend to her to make her Internet experience even better?”

-Tom Andrus

Posted by dave coustan at 7:38 AM |

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When I saw the Applemaggots tag in myFavorites last night, I guess I assumed it was some enthusiastic Apple computer hater. But it turns out that Paul L, whoever and wherever he is, has collected some extensive information about maggots that hang around apples. I love that. It's almost better than a 'heh'. A heh that could come in handy some day.

Bless you, Paul L, for inadvertently bringing me something I may have never seen otherwise. If you read this, I'd love to hear how these ended up in your myFavorites. Are you an entomologist? Homeowner with a problem? Botanist? Hobbyist?

I also heard from Travis and the dev team today that they installed a new version of myFavorites yesterday. Check the myFavorites blog for the overview.

Posted by dave coustan at 2:23 PM |

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Ingo Haupt, a student at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, is doing a study on the value and effectiveness of business blogs. He e-mailed me to ask if we would help him out by filling out his survey, and when I say we I mean you. I've read through the survey and it's a little long, but it asks some very good questions and I think I'll get as much out of it as he will. So if you have the time and the inclination, please consider filling this out:

The survey.

All information will be kept confidential, but if you include your e-mail address Ingo will be raffling off some $25 Amazon.com gift certificates to the participants.

Posted by dave coustan at 10:21 AM |

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At close range, this pole will look a little bit different tomorrow.

Hints: it's in Philadelphia, it appears to be on 17th Street, and some people from EarthLink will be there. And no, we're not stapling a flyer to it.

Update: Switched out the pole photo. The one you see now is the right one. Still on 17th, still not stapling a flyer to it. And probably not giving it a mustache either, but good guess.

Re-update: The expected pole-changing event will not be taking place tomorrow. Unless someone draws a mustache on it overnight, it's probably going to look the same as it does today.

Posted by dave coustan at 12:14 PM |

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There was something really inspiring about the "Is Your Blog A Canvas Or A Gallery" Session at BlogHer. I've read similar reports from other audience members. It was refreshing to talk about personal publishing not as a marketing tool, a way to make money, a literal communications vehicle, or as a way to change the world in some grand gesture, but as a form of lowercase-a art. Or almost ritual. Something you just do. As both a maker and a reader of them, these kinds of projects have always been some of my favorite things online.

None of the people leading the discussion seemed to have an ulterior motive (except for Elizabeth, whose motive other than blogging is to learn to draw in public). Even when we did discuss the idea of making money from our projects or creating products for people to buy, it was still in the context of some sort of personal fulfillment and connecting with an audience. And I think we in the room felt like fellow, like-minded practitioners rather than a novice audience sitting before an expert panel.

I was going to publish all of my notes on the session, but then I found a transcription of the whole thing online. So I think I'll just provide some of the key points from my notes.

Presenters: Eden Kennedy of Yogabeans and Fussy. Elizabeth Perry of Woolgathering. Ms. Jen of Black Phoebe.

Continue reading "Bloggers On art"

Posted by dave coustan at 4:36 PM |

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I fear I'm nearing the outer freshness date limit of my Blogher notes and observations, and they are currently stopping up my ability to move ahead and talk about other stuff. So today I'm going to finish up those thoughts. Apologies if I've been leaning on the subject of blogs and blogging too heavily lately -- it's been on my mind ever since I got back from the conference.

I like what Susan Kitchens did with creating a separate del.icio.us tag to list out all of the people she met and their sites. I'm going to do that too -- mine will be here and I'll be filling it up as fast as I can. There are lots of blogs worth checking out in there and if you want to discover some new writers, photographers, crafters, thinkers, etc., I urge you to flip through it.

There's also a good and comprehensive conference wiki that collects transcripts, writings, photos, and discussions about and from BlogHer06.

Posted by dave coustan at 11:43 AM |

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David Sifry published another State of The Blogosphere report today, and the number of new blogs continues to grow at an astounding rate. Technorati now tracks over 50 million of them. Sifry makes the point that this growth (as true blogger growth) has to slow soon -- what fraction of the six billion plus people in the world are potential bloggers?

Another trend in the report suggests that bloggers spend a fair bit of work time publishing. "I'm not entirely sure what to make of these numbers, but it would appear that English-speaking people are more likely to blog during work hours and early evening in the USA, while they are more reluctant to blog during work time in Japan."

If it's true it's not a big surprise, and Sifry points to it as a potential avenue for further research and not an actual data point. But I do want to draw any worktime bloggers' attention to this stealth browsing tool featured on Lifehacker.com a few days ago, that turns anything you're viewing into a convincing Microsoft Word Doc. Boss Key technology has come along way since the fake ad insertion order Leisure Suit Larry once displayed.

As usual, the whole Blogosphere report is a good read if you're interested in looking at big numbers around blogging trends.

Posted by dave coustan at 3:57 PM |

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Click through to Flickr for Ken B.'s annotations.

Posted by dave coustan at 5:10 PM |

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Earthling reader and edublogger John Blake sent me a really interesting write-up of the ways he has incorporated personal publishing and RSS into his classroom practice. He's also interested in hearing about how other teachers have used it in their curricula, so I wanted to publish what he sent me and throw it open to any other teachers who'd like to share their ideas. In the meantime I'll do some research as well and help develop a list of resources. Please add any suggestions, anecdotes, and stories to the comments of this blog entry.

Here's what John had to say:

How about a list of how RSS can be used for teachers to communicate with parents and the community? I am no expert on this, but there are commercial web pages (CMS)/hosting companies that target educational markets. I like using myReader because it is easy on my old teacher eyes. In your post, "I think one of the best kept secrets of RSS in the general web user population is that it's not just for news; it's useful way to get content of all kinds (photos, information, alerts, updates, shopping info)..." This is true and I would venture a guess that less than 1% of parents in our district even know what an news reader/aggregator is. I try to teach my students to use them and hope they see the benefits and uses of using them.

Here is my list of how I have used RSS in my classroom and attempted to use it with parents and community:

1. Student Projects: In science class, my students have used Bubbleshare.com and its RSS syndication to share their individual digital storytelling projects with their classmates and parents (those that even have email addresses). Students use Bloglines to aggregate their class projects. The only problem - the number of steps this required - to go from creating the story to looking at their classmates projects and peer evaluating them takes time. However, if the end project helps them remember the bones in the body, then it is almost worth it!

2. Classroom Podcasting: We created a blog and a series of podcasts. Students used iTunes to subscribe to the class podcasts, and share them with their family.

Posted by dave coustan at 12:41 PM |

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I was eating lunch during a break at the BlogHer conference this past weekend, and who did I spy over my right shoulder but the father of RSS/OPML, Dave Winer. Dave gave Reader a thoughtful review a couple of weeks ago, and I took the opportunity to thank him in person, and ask for more feedback.

Photo courtesy betsythedevine, some rights reserved.

It was a quick chat. He reiterated his appreciation for our approach, and said he'd like to see it make better use of vertical whitespace. One specific suggestion was to group individual items together that come from one source. He also urged us to take a close look at his Aggregator, and see if any more of the features or approaches he's used make sense to incorporate in ours. I like Dave's approach, but I also like how the use of whitespace in myEarthLink Reader is easy on the eyes and lets the content breathe. It may not be as efficient as it could be, but it's pretty comfortable for my reading habits. It'll be interesting to see how the user experience evolves over time to adapt to this and other feedback we get.

I also asked Dave about his parents' experiences with RSS and he said they don't use it -- or his mom doesn't, anyway. In explaining how I've managed to get my mom to use Reader, I pointed out one of my pitches to her: that you can use this URL to track FedEx packages via RSS. I don't think Dave knew about that one; either that or he was just being polite.

I think one of the best kept secrets of RSS in the general web user population is that it's not just for news; it's useful way to get content of all kinds (photos, information, alerts, updates, shopping info), not just text-based articles. I got the FedEx idea from this great list of various things you can do with a feed and a reader.

As I chatted with Dave at BlogHer, several bloggers came up to him to thank him for the pioneering work he's done that's enabled much of what we can do today with blogs, conversation, and syndication. Thanks, Dave!

Posted by dave coustan at 11:06 AM |

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I got word over the weekend from SixApart that they'd fixed the problem with EarthLink addresses and TypePad. EarthLink e-mail addresses should now work fine for receiving TypePad system e-mail messages. Thanks to the TypePad operations people and the EarthLink e-mail administrators for getting that resolved.

Posted by dave coustan at 12:45 PM |

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Catching up on some housework. A couple of quick updates rolled out recently to the myEarthLink Radio service on my.earthlink.net:

• 20-minute anonymous listening - If you'd like to try out myEarthLink Radio before registering as a free user of the service (and you're logged in as a myEarthLink user), you can now skip the registration and go right in to listening. Just go to the music channel, type in an artist or song name, and hit "listen".

• Pandora user login bridged - If you already have a Pandora login from before we brought it to my.EarthLink, you can now use it to log in to myEarthLink Radio.

For more on what Pandora is and what the myEarthLink Radio music discovery system is all about, read my previous write-up.

Update: Lifehacker.com just published a nice list of keyboard shortcuts for the Pandora power-user.

Posted by dave coustan at 11:20 AM |

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I guess this is why the "take notes now, blog them later" strategy is risky. I'm occupied all day with an internal presentation, and not only do I have more BlogHer stuff to write about, but we also just announced we're developing another Muni Wi-Fi city.

Looks like we'll soon get a chance to dine on our own (steaks? dog food?) in large quantities, as the next city we're going to unwire is Pasadena, CA, home to over 400 EarthLinkers.

Josh, teaching kids to blog way back before Pasadena Wi-Fi

Here's a link to the press release. More soon.

Posted by dave coustan at 11:49 AM |

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