Person of the Year

Hi folks -- okay, here's my last post for today (and most likely, 2005)... a little while back Time magazine was accepting "nominations" for their 2005 Person of the Year.

The way it worked was (it's closed now), someone could nominate a person's photo, which would then be shown on one of the big screens in Times Square for a minute or something.

They had a Webcam pointing at the sign, which would take pictures of the screen, which you could then see by going to their Person of the Year site [Flash]:

My sister submitted photos for me and the other members of my family -- part of our Christmas gift was printouts of the photos.

Now, if you're wondering what's going on that photo, well, you'll have to see the original -- it was taken a couple of years ago in a park, during a trip to China:

Have a great New Year's, and I'll see you in 2006.

Best. -- Joe

Waste Not, Want Not

Okay, so my previous entry would have been a better "last post of 2005", but since I didn't post any entries yesterday, I've got a couple of links that I wanted to blog before they become stale and/or completely irrelevant:

* The Knights Who Say "NEET"? (link via Obscurestore)
This was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Apparently, there is a growing media-created obsession and/or item of genuine concern in Japan concerning the growth of NEETs: Young people "Not in Education, Employment or Training" (a term imported from the UK in the 90s).

Because of the high cost of living, tradition and other cultural factors, young people in Japan weren't as driven as USians to leave the nest to begin with, but combined with changes in corporate hiring practices and fewer full-time jobs, people are worried about raising a whole segment of society that's content to sponge off Mom and Dad, with no job and no prospects.

In other words, they're slackers (in that whole 90s grunge, flannel-wearing, 'Reality Bites' way).

* 100 Things We Didn't Know This Time Last Year
From the BBC News weekly Magazine, here's a list of 100 facts and factoids of stuff that we learned (or should have) in the year that was 2005.

Although the BBC News' international coverage is second-to-none, this particular list is also interesting for its U.K.-centric take on things, so you'll see the best properties to buy in the U.K. edition of Monopoly (among other things).

* Firefox 2.0 Draft Plan:
This link is the wiki being used by the people building Firefox 2.0.

If that sentence didn't make any sense to you, a wiki is a kind of group Web page that anyone (well, nearly anyone -- keep reading), can contribute to by adding or editing content.  Wikipedia, which I use a lot, is an example of this -- it's like a big collaborative encyclopedia. Also, Firefox is a free, open-source browser that I also talk about a lot.

This link is interesting, not just because you can see some of what's going to be in the next version (Firefox 2.0 -- they're at 1.5 now), and see how product schedules and features are developed, but it's also notable because they've temporarily locked down the article while it's being dugg (featured on the collaborative links blog, Digg.com):

"This document is currently in draft. This document also static, while it is being dugg.
Please do not edit these pages without permission. Your feedback and comments are welcomed on the discussion page."

You might ask, "Well, doesn't that defeat the purpose of a wiki -- that anyone can contribute to it?" Yes and no -- in order to keep from being overrun by spam, porn, trolls and bad information, wikis depend on self-policing and a culture of shared interest and norms.

That is, the people who contribute to a wiki typically know the rules of the road and help enforce them, because they have an interest in making sure the information is good.

The people who drive by a wiki because they saw the link on a links blog may not have that interest -- they might mess with a wiki document just because they can. (People are funny that way.)

Thanks. -- Joe

My Blog Resolutions

Hi folks: This here entry is somewhat in response to blogger John's New Year's Resolution Weekend Assignment, though it's going to cover a few items I was going to address anyway.

I'm not going to bore you with my non-blogging resolutions (there's nothing out of the ordinary: I set the bar for my personal resolutions pretty low), but here are a few items that relate to what you're going to see here and in other Journals programming areas that I run (like the AOL Journals main page):

* Post More Frequently: Now that Journals Product Manager Susan has her own blog, she's available to take your reports of problems with AOL Journals and AIM Blogs, as well as your product-related feedback. This frees me up somewhat to do more content updates, which I intend to do. As I've said before, I blog at a more deliberative pace, though I will try to mix it up with short, quick posts, too.

* Look Inward and Outward: There are at least two things I'm trying to do with this Magic Smoke blog -- highlight things going on out in the big ole Sphere o' Blogs that are of interest to all of us as bloggers, and to talk about things going on in the AOL Journals space. I will continue to do both of these things, and hopefully do more of it.

* Develop New Blog Programming: There's a bunch more features that I have ideas for, both for specials and regularly scheduled programming. I also know that there are plenty of ideas for blog programming that you folks have, as well.

I'm going to get to more of them in 2006 -- some of them will rely on you all as my eyes and ears to highlight interesting stuff that's going on in both J-Land and the blogosphere-at-large, so even though I'm going to be doing more posting, I'm hoping that a lot of it is going to feature things that you're talking about.

It's an exciting time to be doing blog stuff right now (even if you don't buy into all the utopian blog hype, as I don't), so I'm glad I can be a part of it, and I'm going to try to do a better job of it in 2006.

Thanks. -- Joe

New Guest Editor's Picks for 12/30

Hi everybody. As posted to the Journals Message Board, our new Guest Editor's Picks are up on the Journals Main Page:

We close out 2005 with Guest Editor Amanda, a country girl who doles out advice and is very ... involved with her shoes. See her top blog picks.

* This Momma's Drama
* Courage
* Confessions Of An Angel Waitress
* Something New
* JustSillyme!
* The Hadonfield Myers Experience

Amanda's blog, Hey I'm Country, was featured by a recent Guest Editor, so the circle of life continues ....

(Look, there's another one of those ellipses.)

As I said, I have a few more entries I want to try to get done before the end of the year. So stay tuned. Thanks. -- Joe

Tag: Guest Editor's Picks

Styles Sheet

So, last week, we got word handed down from the keepers of the AOL Style Guidelines that the way we write ellipses is changing.

Previously, we did an ellipsis as three dots, followed by a space... like that.

Now, we're supposed to do it as three dots, followed and preceded by a space ... like that.

It now conforms with the AP Stylebook, but I think it's silly and annoying and I don't like it.

Now, I know there's nothing more interesting than arguing about grammar, punctuation and other points of style. And the thing about writing styles is that there are so many to choose from -- many of them contradictory.

For example, for some reason, the New York Times, the Gray Lady, the Paper of Record, the newspaper with a lot of nicknames, insists on making acronyms plural by using apostrophes.

For example, to the rest of the world (ignoring blatant apostrophe abuse, which I will talk about more in a second), you get cash from ATMs, then go buy CDs.

In the NYT world, you instead get cash from ATM's, and then go buy CD's.

I think that this, too, is pretty silly, since the abuse and misuse of apostrophes has now reached epic proportions and I know that Bob the Angry Flower agrees with me:

Anyway, the reason for all this writing styles talk is that I am writing the promo for the Guest Editor's picks, and used an ellipsis.

I wasn't planning on writing this entry. So I guess now I am further behind.

Thanks. -- Joe

Friday Update

Hi folks...well, it's Friday already, and I haven't gotten nearly as much done as I'd originally planned -- even going in with reduced expectations.

I believe this is an effect directly attributable to Hofstadter's Law:

"Everything takes longer than you think it will, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

I will get the new Guest Editor's picks up in a little bit, then will get a few more entries out before I take off.

Thanks. -- Joe

Go Broke Saving Money

While we're still basking in the afterglow of post-holiday purchases, I thought I might highlight a few blog bargain tips.

First off, found via Digg: apparently Amazon.com has a Price Drop Policy, where if the price of something drops within 30 days of purchase, you can get the difference back -- you just have to ask them for it.

The article is on bargaineering.com, which one example of the many bargains Web sites out there, dedicated to squeezing the most of out your pennies by highlighting deals, unadvertised specials, coupons and rebates -- both offline and online.

Community is very important to these kinds of sites, not only because they rely on submitted tips, but also provide feedback on what works, ways to improve on deals, etc.

Some of these sites are blogs, but most are at least blog-like: The new stuff gets published on top; readers can comment on specific deals; and they typically also provide RSS feeds, which let you subscribe to content that you can then read in a newsreader program (it's a convenient way to read items from lots of different sources).

Anyway, as I said, there are lots of these kinds of bargain sites; a few that I check out from time to time are SlickDeals.net, BensBargains.net and Dealnews.com (which is where I stole this blog entry's title from -- their motto is "How to go broke saving money.")

A lot of these sites are techie focused, so you can usually find good deals on memory cards for your digital camera, USB flash keychain drives, peripherals (like USB hubs), refurbished computers, etc.

Some of the recent items I've bought after reading about them at sites like these include:

• A few 512 MB flash drives
• Season 1 of '24' on DVD for $15
• A 250 GB external hard drive
• The three 'Lord of the Rings' movie DVDs for $17 total
• My Canon SD200 camera (it's already obsolete, but I like it) and 1 GB memory card

I pretty much would have bought all of these anyway, but you know how it is: "It was such a great deal, how could I pass it up?!" Therein lies peril, so please exercise self-control when visiting these so-called bargain sites.

A bargain site of another kind is Woot.com, which features one deal per day, posted every day at midnight, central time. I haven't used it, but people seem to like it. They also have a blog, podcast, forums, etc.

(I'd been meaning to write about this one for some time, but I'd forgotten the name and I guess I hadn't been using the right search terms.)

One other thing I've found is that, given a choice, you should almost always buy your batteries online.  For example, lithium CR-123 batteries, that are used in cameras and high-end flashlights and electronics, can go upwards of 7 bucks a pop in a brick-and-mortar store. The same goes for the little button cell batteries, as well as the batteries that go in your car's remote, too.

It even applies to regular batteries -- depending on your tolerance for non-name brands, you can find your basic AA alkaline battery for less than 30 cents per, which is a lot less than in the grocery store.

One area where it may pay to stick with the brand-name, though, is rechargeable batteries, especially for cell phones, cameras, camcorders, etc -- you read every once in a while of someone getting burned (literally) because their aftermarket rechargeable battery overheated and/or exploded.

Thanks. -- Joe

Citizen Journals Takes Flight?

Here's another airplane in distress story from yesterday that you might have heard about: An Alaskan Airlines jet flying out of Seattle lost cabin pressure, did the whole oxygen-masks-dropping-from-ceiling thing (that I'm sure made people wish they had actually listened to the pre-flight safety briefing) and then returned to the airport safely.

There's a citizen journalism aspect to this, too: Jeremy Hermanns, a blogger and private pilot himself, blogged his account of the incident, complete with camera phone photos from his Treo 650. His pics were featured prominently in the regular media's coverage, as well.

Fellow passenger Damon Zwicker had his video camera rolling, too -- you can see excerpts of the video [QuickTime movie] he shot.

The video quality is pretty good, so I'm guessing it was probably from a full-fledged video camera of some sort, not a camera phone. Traditional media still has a challenge trying to figure out how to make amateur video (which I guess is the less-sexy predecessor of "citizen journalist") look presentable on TV -- what works in a Web-browser window may not necessarily look good on a TV screen.

If you watched any of Bravo's Viral Videos TV show, you'll know what I mean.

Thanks -- Joe

Tuesday Links

So this morning, I saw a News.com article updating us on the status of Steve Vaught, the self-proclaimed Fat Guy Walking.

He's a former 400-pounder who decided to walk from San Diego to New York, in an effort to lose weight and change his life.

Of course, he's chronicling it on his Web site (with blog) thefatmanwalking.com.

He's been walking for about eight months and has gone about 1,800 miles. In the process, he's dropped some weight, and has also picked up a few sponsors, some extra pounds in the form of donated electronic equipment and of course, a book deal.

In other book news, The New York Times [free registration, use BugMeNot] has an article about how Amazon is running a program to use author blogs and extended profiles to give authors more of a presence with their readers.

Their Amazon Connect program is one-way for now, but other author Web presences are not, and other publishing groups and books sellers are using blogs and the Web to increase the visibility of their authors:

"Most publishers have extensive author information on their Web sites, and a number of authors maintain their own sites, some quite elaborate."

Hrm, do we know anyone like that?

Thanks -- Joe

Back to Work (Pretty Much)

Hi folks...hope you all had a pleasant holiday, that being Christmas. If you are celebrating Hanukkah and/or Kwanzaa, I hope you are continuing to have a pleasant holiday.

It is D-E-D in the office today (as it will be, I suspect, for the remainder of the week). I hate taking off the week between Christmas and New Year's unless I am actually going somewhere, since it's the best time to be in the office, because there are fewer distractions.

Invariably, though, I always think I'm going to do more stuff than I actually get done. This week, it will be all about catching up on answering my mail, doing some blog posts I've been meaning to do for a while, as well as some other overhead/administrative work.

Thanks -- Joe

New Guest Editor's Picks for 12/23, Plus Happy Holiday Wishes

Hi everybody. As posted to the Journals Message Board, our new Guest Editor's Picks are up on the Journals Main Page:

Taking on the Guest Editor mantle this week is Kisha, a full-time diva who works in an ER and writes novels and poetry on the side. See her top blog picks featured in her Journal, So You Wanna Know Huh?

* Cubby's Rants and Raves
* The Life and Times of Flava
* Anything & Everything
* Mandy's Treasure Chest
* Dianna's Mindless Musings
* PINK is the new BLOG

Kisha's picks are all blogs that play a part in helping to keep her sane.  I guess when you're a mother of four, a full-time worker and a part-time writer, every little bit helps.

I'm going to head out on the road soon (today's technically a work holiday) -- connectivity is a little spotty on the family estate, with all the horses knocking down the transmission towers and the occassional wild peacock getting fried on the lines, so I might not update the blog again until Monday (well, Tuesday), so if I don't, have a very Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Happy Kwanzaa, and just an overall happy holidays.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: Guest Editor's Picks

Happy Holiday (and by holiday, I mean Festivus)

Hi everybody... today, as you know (or you should know) is December 23, which is the traditional date for the celebration of Festivus, the festival for the rest of us.

You can see how other people are integrating Festivus into their lives (via obscurestore); also check out TV Squad's Festivus coverage.

Now, go gather around your aluminum Festivus Pole, which I'm told you can get online for the completely-not-unreasonable-for-a-plain-aluminum-pole price of $30-40.

Thanks -- Joe

Scenes of Holiday Cheer at AOL

Hi folks...so, earlier today, I was at work, doing my thing, when all of a sudden I started hearing Christmas music (featuring a lot of brass) from somewhere.

I figured that someone was playing some holiday music, maybe from a CD or an e-card or something.

(Sound carries pretty far in cubicle-land.)

Then I heard applause. So I picked up my camera and took a look:

I know there's an in-house jazz band, but I didn't realize we had a holiday brass trio. They were pretty good, too.

Camera still in hand, I went over to the Christmas tree in the lobby and took a snap of that:

I set my camera on a conveniently-placed railing, turned off the flash, set it for long shutter, and used the 2-second self-timer to reduce camera shake from pressing the button. I think it came out pretty well.

As a reminder: If you want to add big photos to your own blog, you can check out my step-by-step tutorial.

Thanks. -- Joe

Release 3 (R3) Successfully Rolled Back From Production

Hi folks -- I just got done talking with Journals Product Manager Susan and I have some good news and some bad news about the R3 release, which went live this morning.

The good news is that the install was successful and everything was working post-launch: Buddy List Rostering, Blog About This Entry and the Notify AOL features all worked.

The bad news is that there was a problem with Buddy List Rostering that started breaking other products that use rostering (again, rostering is pretty much anything with a list that says certain people are allowed to do certain things, and other people aren't).

So, technically, Journals was okay, but the tech folks still had to roll back the R3 release in order to fix the problem -- see Susan's blog entry about the rollback.

They won't be able to try again until after the holidays, so sorry for the inconvenience.

Because of the nature of the problem, it could not have been detected in the beta or QA testing environments, so we only found out about it after it was installed to production.

Incidentally, the rollback, which happened a little after 3 PM ET and took about 10 minutes, was the reason you may have had some problems with your blog.  It should be better now.

So, here I was all set to say, "See? We can do a launch without any major problems!"; instead, now you're all like, "See? Told you so!"

Anyway, you can still play with the features in beta -- just add "beta." to the beginning of your blog's address (for example, http://beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke).

Thanks -- Joe

Release 3 (R3) Successfully Installed to Production

Hi folks -- quick update here: Product Manager Susan has informed me that the R3 release was installed this morning,
without a hitch (well, nearly -- it went pretty smoothly, anyway, or so
they tell me -- I didn't have the pleasure of being awake at 4AM this
morning).

If you didn't see it, check out Susan's pre-launch list, which details some of the specifics about the new features, including some details you'll want to know about Buddy List Rostering, which is one of the primary new features. The other main changes you'll see are:

* A Notify AOL link in the footer of every entry (instead of just on the main page of your blog)

* A Blog About This Entry
link, also in the footer of each entry, which makes it easier for you
to blog about other people's Journal entries (and vice versa.)

There was also some behind-the-scenes work, the impacts of which you won't see immediately (such as the Partner Ping, which improves the way we let blog search engines know about your new blog entries).


Now that R3 is up and live, the tech folks can work on the R4 release,
which should hopefully roll out in the early part of 2006.

If you're having any problems with Journals, either related to the new release or not, please let me or Susan know.

Thanks -- Joe
 

Blog Confessions

I'm starting to think that we're going to need a version of the Miranda warning solely for bloggers:

"Anything you blog can and will be used against you in a court of law (and every other darned place)."

As found on Fark: Blake Ranking, a Florida high schooler and blogger, plead guilty to DUI manslaughter because of what he wrote on his blog.

This
was after a car accident that killed his best friend and seriously
injured himself and another passenger. It seems Mr. Ranking, who was
drunk (underaged, of course) and sitting in the back seat, decided at
some point to grab the steering wheel (as also seen by witnesses),
which caused the fatal crash.

Three days later, he blogged about
it, and prosecutors found out. Combined with eyewitness testimony and
interviews, things didn't look so good for Mr. Ranking.

Mr.
Ranking later retracted the confession, deleted his entry, and made an
explanation, but the damage had been done... draw your own conclusions.

It also reminds me of an episode last month, when Hossein Derakhshan
(a.k.a. Hoder), an Iranian-born blogger (and Canadian citizen) who'd
been living in New York for a while, popped back over the border to
Canada for a visit.

On the way back into the States, one of the Customs and Border Protection officers googled him and read his blog, where he made a determination that Hoder wasn't allowed back into the country.

Whether
it's the police, the border patrol, your mom or your boss, whether it's
now or 10 years from now, there are probably people whom you don't want
reading your blog. So think before you post.

Oh, and the next
time I hear some distressed blogger say, "I can't believe they found my
[publically available] blog!", I swear I'm going to reach through the
screen and dope-slap them.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: Busted for Blogging

Marxist or Matrix?

Hi everybody...a couple of random articles for you right now, selected primarily because  Marxist and Matrix are very nearly anagrams of each other:

* Someone Call Karl Marx
This article comes from the Canuckian magazine Maclean's [by way of Fark], and its premise is that in the networked, digital age, everyone can be a publisher (also known as a content creator), so we're no longer reliant on big media companies with their expensive printing presses, television studios, etc.

I will let the elbow-patched academics
argue with whether that's truly a Marxist worldview, but the gist of
the article is that capitalists no longer own the means of production
-- the proletariat does.

(I'm pretty sure that Marx didn't have celebrity gossip Web sites, viral video and pet blogs in mind when he wrote the Communist Manifesto, though.)

This is not exactly a new idea (one recalls all the cyber-utopian stuff that came out around 1996 -- I'm looking at you, Nicholas Negroponte), though new developments have given it new legs.

Among those developments, of course, is the big ole Sphere o' Blogs, though I would also include:

* RSS & Content Syndication, which makes it easy for people to subscribe to other people's content.

* Lower barriers
to creating and distributing multimedia content, through cheaper and
more-accessible technologies like digital video and desktop video
editing, podcasting, etc.

* The idea of "remix culture,"
where consumers sample, reshape, and reform the media they consume,
then redistribute it, turning themselves into content producers in the
process.

Whatever the social-media flavor of the month is, it's the latest extension of the Internet as the ideal medium for many-to-many communications, so consider this the next chapter of the revolution. Power to the people, and all that.

* A Matrix Christmas
Speaking of remix culture, this link comes from the often-edgy, usually-hilarious, and frequently-profane Something Awful: It's a video reworking of The Matrix movies as a holiday special:

The
actual movie is a 30.2 MB .AVI file (which is largely a photo montage
with some video and animations); you can also see a lot of the
digitally-altered photos in the featured thread.

Lots of very geeky humor, though I do note a disproportionate number of references to A Christmas Story.

Thanks -- Joe

Old Reliables

Hi everybody...so, over the weekend, I was listening to the WNYC radio show On the Media.  They were doing an interview [audio link] with the editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary, talking about their 2005 Word of the Year which was... podcast.

Of course, they have a blog, where they talk about the full list of Word of the Year candidates and more.

Anyway,
since the year is wrapping up (so to speak), we're about to head into a
deluge of year-end lists, covering the "Best of", "Worst of" and
everything in between.

I'm not going to do a roundup of wrapups, but I did take the opportunity to go through some of my bookmarks and pick out some of the "old reliables" -- annual features that your hear about, um, every year:

* Banished Words List
The
full name of this list is the "List of Words Banished from the Queen’s
English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness."  The 2005 edition includes blog, though, so something must be out of whack, as we know that nothing about blogs can be overused or overhyped.

The list is announced in December, and submissions are accepted year-round.

* Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
Honoring
(or at least commemorating) the author of the infamous opening lines,
"It was a dark and stormy night" (which, in and of itself, isn't a bad
opening -- unfortunately, the opening sentence goes on... and on...),
this contest solicits for the worst possible opening sentence for a
novel. Actually, I guess it's the opening sentence for the worst
possible novel.



Fortunately, entrants don't have to write the rest of the novel.

Submissions are accepted year-round; the official deadline for current year entries is...sometime between April and June, and the fresh batch is announced in the summer.

* Beloit College Mindset List
This one comes out in August, just before the new crop of college freshpersons hits campus. It's a thoroughly depressing
list of all the things that were a big deal at the time, but that the
incoming frosh now take for granted as "always been that way" (e.g.
"Incoming freshman were born in 1987 and never known a world without
fire.")... if they have any idea at all what you're talking about
("2400 baud modem? Oh, yeah, I saw that in a museum!").

* Bad Sex in Fiction
Keep
the kids away from this one... but only because we don't want to scare
them into thinking that these literary selections are what it's all
about. The UK's Literary Review's annual list of bad sex writing comes out in December; Tom Wolfe won/lost this year's contest.

Oh,
you actually want to read the bad sex? Fortunately, the UK's Guardian
Newspaper has the winning passages, which I am deliberately going to
make hard to click so you don't click it "accidentally": *. [Link Content Warning:
while it's bad sex, it's still sex, so don't click the link if it will
offend you, either because it's sex or because it's poorly written.]

* Plain English Awards
Another one from the UK, this one is from the Plain English Campaign, which highlights the most obfuscated, double-talked, non-utterances made by a public figure.

On
a side note, a previous winner was Donald Rumsfeld, though I thought it
was kind of unfair, as his winning statement actually made sense if you
think about it for a moment:

"Reports that say that
something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we
know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also
know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some
things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones
we don't know we don't know."

* Worst Movies of 2005
My last pick is pretty straightforward -- at first. It's a list of the worst flicks of 2005, courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes, though that's whyit's a bit more interesting than your typical critic's list.

Rotten
Tomatoes is kind of a movie-review aggregator/community site that takes
the reviews from "Approved Tomatometer Critics", who are all accredited critics, and then shakes out an overall rating. It's a good way to see opinions about a movie across a diverse range of critics.

If
you've got your own favorite regular yearly feature, feel free to share
with the rest of the class in the comments.  Thanks -- Joe

New Guest Editor's Picks for 12/16

Hi everybody. As posted to the Journals
Message Board, our new Guest Editor's
Picks are up on the Journals Main
Page:

Our
Guest Editor this week is Dave, a SWAT sniper team
leader & homicide detective.  Check out his
stories & see his top
blog picks.

*Aurora
Walking Vacation
*PIT (Psychologist
In Training)
*Fuzzy
Adam
*Scott's
Blog
*According
to Bill...
*I
Shaved My Legs for This?

Dave's

picks feature some of the, um, usual suspects, of AOL Journals, as
well

as his son Adam. Remember, here in the Guest Editor's Picks, nepotism

is not just allowed...it's
encouraged.

Also check out
Dave's stories from his day job -- some interesting
stuff.

On

a photo note, there is a butterfly on Dave's shoulder; unfortunately,
I

had to crop it out to fit the space. You can see another photo

featuring Dave and his butterfly in his All
About Me area.

Got a few more updates
pending, get to that in a bit.

Thanks. -- Joe



Tag: Guest Editor's Picks

How To: Add Photos (Step-by-Step)

Hi folks...we're getting more snow right now -- it
should only be a dusting, though it will probably turn to ice and make
driving tricky later on.

I thought I would take
this opportunity to tell you again how I put photos
in my blog.

Now,
first off, there's nothing wrong with just clicking the big blue button
that says "Add Pictures"

when you're creating or editing an entry. This lets you upload
pictures

to a new AOL Pictures album (which you can also add captions to), and

is quick and easy. Plus, it's great if you want to get that
slideshow effect. (I used it myself
just last week.) That's not what I did above,
though.

Sometimes, especially for single pictures, you don't want the extra

border, and you want to show the photos full-size. Here's what I do
for

that:

1. First, of course, you have to take
   the picture and
   
   download it to your computer (if you're using a photo you already have
   
   on your computer, you can probably skip ahead a few
   steps.)
   
   
2. Then, you'll want to
   edit your photo. I've been playing around with the
   free Paint.NET
   
   application for Windows, which is very slick and fast for your basic
   
   image manipulations: cropping and resizing, adjusting color, contrast,
   
   brightness, etc. (I mentioned Paint.NET and some other tools and tips
   
   in my earlier
   entry on digital photos.)
   
   Size-wise,
   
   for your typical three-column Journal (which is a left sidebar, a
   
   center column, and a right sidebar), a good photo width is about 450
   pixels wide.
   
   Also, don't forget to try to keep the file size down -- ideally, you
   
   want to save it at the lowest JPEG image quality that still preserves
   
   the look of the photo (that is, it doesn't introduce the weird
   jaggies called Compression
   artifacts).
   
   Oh, and one more thing --
   photos are typically better saved as JPEG files; drawings usually do
   better as GIF files.
   
   
3. Then,
   you'll want to upload the photo to your FTP/Hometown
   space, using the Web-based
   File Manager -- I did a full
   tutorial on using File Manager
   here.
   
   
4. After you've
   uploaded the photo, it should show up in your File Manager list:

   

5. Okay,
   
   
   now that you've uploaded the photo, you can work on your blog entry.
   
   When you're ready to include the photo, there are a couple of
   different
   
   ways to do it. I will outline the easy way, and the
   slightly harder way (that gives you more
   control):

   Easy Way: In the entry
   creation window, click the blue hyperlink that says: "Add Pictures From
   Hometown":

   

   Click
   
   
   the link, then choose the photo you want. If you use folders or
   
   subfolders to organize your pictures, you will have to dig down to the
   
   right subfolder until you find the photo you want (it will show you a
   preview of each photo):

   

   Once
   you have it, click the "Add Picture" button.
   
   This
   will stick the photo at the top of your entry, and depending on the
   size, will wrap the surrounding text around
   it. 
   

   Slightly Harder Way
   
   (that gives you more control): Refer back to Step 4 above: After you
   
   upload the photo to File Manager, right-click the file name and
   copy the photo's address (depending on your browser,
   it will be either "Copy Shortcut" or "Copy Link Location"):

   

   (Or,
   if you prefer, you can simply click the file name to view the picture;
   you can then copy the URL from the address
   bar.)
   
   Then, when you're creating your entry, click
   the little camera button that's in the formatting
   toolbar:

   

   This
   will pop up a box where you can put the address of the photo you want
   to use. You then paste the image URL
   
   you copied from File Manager into this box (to paste, either
   
   right-click the mouse and select "Paste", or using the keyboard
   
   shortcut of  Control-V):

   

   This
   
   
   will insert the photo, and it will show up in the editing window.
   (This
   
   method also works for images that are hosted elsewhere, like if you're
   
   using third-party image hosting. Be careful, though, if you're
   hotlinking to
   
   someone else's photo -- you might want to save it to your own space
   
   first.) 
   
   You can then continue editing the post, adding text
   above
   
   or below the photo:

   

   
    
   

That's it. If you know some basic HTML, you can
also control the layout a little better and do other neat things
like:

* Make images clickable
links

* Specify the alignment of the photo -- left,
right or center, using the following HTML:
 <p
align="center">Stuff you want to
center</p>

*

Add alt text, which is text that describes the photo and shows up

before the image loads -- this is important to visually-impaired

visitors who use screen readers.



I will dive deeper into some of these things in a future
entry.



FYI, one thing I find that makes blogging easier is the use
of tabbed browsing

(which is a lot like Tabbed IMs in the AOL software, only with browser

windows). It makes it a lot easier to switch between different
windows.

Firefox and AOL
Explorer both support tabbed browsing -- it makes things a
lot faster for me.

In fact, I have a special
group in my Firefox bookmarks composed of AOL Mail,
Magic Smoke, my Test Journal, and
my blogimages subfolder in File Manager -- with one
click, I can have them open in 4 tabs, and then flip between them using
the Control-Tab keys, which is very useful:

Hope
this helps. Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol journals, aol blogs, file manager

Local Flavor

Hi folks -- for my last entry today, a little local flavor:

* DC-focused group blog DCist has a nice little feature on the dissection of a SmarTrip Card, which is an electronic card that you can use to pay for your trips on the DC Metro system.

With a little acetone and judicious cutting,
they unearthed the guts of the card -- it's a Smart Card (that stores
information on a chip) with an RFID antenna. If you take it apart (at
your own risk), you can then repackage it to a handy keychain
form-factor. Quite handy if you really need to lighten your wallet.

* The Washington Post's ombudsman had a column Sunday outlining the differences (and similarities) between the Post's dead tree and online editions.

The Post's online edition is doing a lot of neat stuff that I've been meaning to write about -- they're experimenting with mashups (which is a very Web 2.0 thing, another thing I've been meaning to write about) -- it's basically means building things in an open way, so that other folks can create stuff around it -- similar to what Google Maps has done (you may be familiar with Frappr, which is kind of a roll-your-own mapping service.)

One example is the NewsCloud,
which presents Post headlines as a cloud of keywords (where the most
popular keywords are bigger). It's an interesting alternate way to
navigate the news (although honestly, I prefer the traditional format.)

Anyway, the Post has a blog where they talk about this kind of stuff: Post Remix.

One thing I missed, though, from the ombud's column, which was picked up in this Blog Herald entry, was that some of the Posts dead-tree reporters don't like how the online version of the stories features links to blogs (by using Technorati searches) that are talking about that story.

It was  just one item in the column, though, so I wouldn't go around with the pitchforks and torches just yet.

Talk to you later. -- Joe

10 Things That Make Me Happy

Okay, so I usually don't do these kind of entries (partially because I don't want to look like I'm playing favorites, but mostly because I am outrageously lazy) -- you know the kind I mean, where someone "tags" other bloggers to write about a certain topic.

In this case, it was blogger Jackie, who was tagged by blogger Steven (and so on and so forth), with the topic "10 Things That Make Me Happy."

So
I was all set to drop Jackie a quick note and say thanks for tagging
me, but I don't think I'll have the chance to participate, etc., when I
saw that the other 4 folks she tagged had already gotten their entries
in.

Like, 3 days ago.

Okay, so that don't look so good.

Anyway,
here are my 10 things (Since I'm late, I'm going to forego the "tagging
other people" part -- that, I will have to stand fast on):

1. The Impatient Cow Joke (not linking to it, because it really has to be spoken)
2. Turning a clever phrase
3. Dollar Bill Shirts/Darth Tater
4. Belgian White Ales
5. Deadline extensions
6. Doing 10 crossovers in a row on a jump rope without stumbling
   
   
7. Synchronized traffic lights
8. The snooze button
9. Control-Z (Undo)
10. Picking up a tricky split.

There you have it.

Thanks -- Joe

R3 Features: Clarifying My Clarification

Hi folks...just wanted to clarify things about two features in beta right now: Blog About This Entry and Buddy List Rostering, which will both be going live with the R3 release, hopefully next week:

* Blog About This Entry is even more useful
than I originally thought, but only if you're using Microsoft's
Internet Explorer (this includes the browser that you use with your AOL
software). I did not realize this because I was using the Firefox
browser when I tested Blog About This Entry.

So, say I'm looking at the beta version of Product Manager Susan's
entry about privacy settings and online presence (again, you can get to
the Journals beta simply by adding "beta." to the beginning of any
Journal's address),  http://beta.journals.aol.com/blogsinsider/intheknow/entries/804. I have something I want to say about her entry, so I want to do my own blog post talking about it and linking to it.

If
I just click the "Blog about this entry" link in the footer of her
entry, it will pop open a window for a new blog entry; the subject will
be prepopulated, and there will be a hyperlink to Susan's entry -- you
can change both of these, as well as add your own words, just like a
regular entry.  Then, choose which blog of yours you want to
publish to (via the pulldown menu at the bottom), and then you're all
set:

Pretty simple, but it gets better.

If
you're using Internet Explorer, you can "quote" from the Journal entry,
just like you can quote text when you're replying to an e-mail.

What you do is use your mouse to highlight the portion of the entry you want to quote --it can include both words and pictures:

Then,
with the part you want to quote still highlighted, scroll down to
entry's footer and click "Blog about this entry." This will pop up the
window to create a new blog entry, but it will also include the words
and/or pictures you highlighted.

You can then add your own commentary; click save, and it will publish to your blog.

A few notes on this:

* When you use "Blog About This Entry", you should make it clear to people
when you're quoting someone else's blog content. You can do this in a
variety of ways: quotation marks, a different font, dashed lines, etc.
-- anything that shows what part you're quoting, and what part is your
original stuff.

* When you "quote" photos, you're pointing to
the original photo, not a copy. This is known as "hotlinking", and is
sometimes frowned upon, especially if the photo's owner has bandwidth
restrictions. (If the owner finds out and doesn't like it, a typical
form of punishment is to replace the image with a new photo that has
the same name, so the new photo shows up on your page. The new photo
will usually carry a message from the photo owner that says something
like "Stop Hotlinking to This Image" and the new graphic could be
anything from humorous to obscene.)  So you should be sensitive and think before you include other people's photos.

* Buddy List Blog Rostering & Recent Buddies: Blogger Astaryth (Adventures of an Eclectic Mind | Blogspot version)
had a question about this upcoming feature, which will give you the
option of using the people on your Buddy List as the roster for people
who can read your private Journal.

Specifically, she wanted to
know if the people in your "Recent Buddies" group would be allowed to
see your Private Journal, since your Recent Buddies group is composed
of anyone who you send IMs to or read e-mails from.

The answer is no -- the Recent Buddies group is specifically excluded
from the people who can read your Buddy List; if you use Buddy List
Rostering, people will have to be elsewhere in your Buddy List in order
to read your Private Journal.

I could have sworn I saw this answer online somewhere, but I seem to have misplaced the link.

(By the way, if you want to turn off your Recent Buddies group in your Buddy List, just go to your IM Settings -- Keyword: Filtering and Viewing Settings
will jump you to the right tab -- and uncheck the box next to "Add
people I send IMs to or read e-mails from to my Recent Buddies Group."
I had to do this once, back before they upped the limit of people on
your Buddy List.)

Thanks -- Joe

Release 3 (R3) in Beta

Hi folks -- I just wanted to take the opportunity to expand on some of the items that Tech Manager John and Product Manager Susan have said in their blogs about upcoming R3 features.

These features are in beta testing right now, and should hopefully go live by next week.

Now, if you want to see the beta, it's real easy: Just put beta. in front of your blog address -- for example, my blog's address is http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/ -- the beta version is at http://beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/.

When
you do this, the primary difference you'll see is a new footer at the
bottom of all your entries (except without the seasonally relevant and
colorful red and green boxes):

The stuff in green -- "Notify AOL" and "Blog about this entry" -- are things that we'll be getting with R3 later this month.

The stuff in red
is stuff that is going to stay in beta until a later release (possibly
January, maybe later): Online presence and "Incoming Links."

* "Notify AOL"
is pretty straightforward -- it does the same thing as the "Notify AOL"
link at the top of your Journal, though it's now on each entry, so you
can flag specific entries.

It's also a new addition to AIM Blogs
-- previously, there wasn't a Notify button to report problematic
blogs; now there will be.

To those of you concerned that there will be a frenzy of entry-flagging, we've worked with the enforcement team to make sure they use a light touch before touching anyone's blog (and yes, this was a hard-learned lesson from a previous incident where we screwed up).

* "Blog about this entry" is also pretty straightforward. If you're reading someone else's AOL Journal, and you want to write an entry in your Journal about it (and of course, you do want to hyperlink to it because you're a polite blogger, as mentioned in my prior post, How to Get More Readers), just click the link, and it will pop open a window with the link and subject prepopulated, which you can then edit:

You'll also note that you get a pulldown menu that will let you choose the Journal you want to blog to -- or, you can create a new Journal by clicking "New Journal."

"Blog
This" is a fairly basic feature that you see on a lot of blog platforms
-- it's meant to make it easier to increase cross-communication among
bloggers.

It would be even more useful if there was a universal standard that worked across all blog platforms -- the idea has been tossed around the blogosphere, but I don't know where it stands.

(Note
that it doesn't quite work for everyone at the entry level right now,
though it does work from the main pages. This will be fixed before it
launches.)

* Buddy List Rostering is the last major feature we'll see in R3 (it's not on the new footer). This is pretty cool; when it goes live, you'll have a new choice when it comes to managing who can and can't read your Private Journal.

If you prefer, you can keep manually adding or removing readers, just like before. However, you'll also have a new choice: Just by checking a box,
you can make it so that the people on your Buddy List (and only the
people on your Buddy List) can read your Private Journal. Then, as you
update your Buddy List, your Private Journal roster will keep up
automatically.

For some of you, this will be really neat; for others, this is really horrifying.
But have no fear -- in a future release (we don't have a date yet),
you'll be able to pick a specific group from your Buddy List, so if you
want your "Friends" Buddy List group to be able to read your blog, but
not your "Enemies" group, you'll be able to do that.

To see it in action, go to your private beta Journal and click the blue Edit Journal button. Then, in the "Manage Your Journal Settings" section, click "Add readers":

(Oh, and ignore that other item with "BETA" next to it for now.)

Then, click the check box next to "Allow everyone on my Buddy List to read my Journal":

Remember,
you can still manage your roster the old way, so if you want to wait
until you can add a specific Buddy List group instead of your whole
Buddy List, that's cool.

Okay, so those are the features that
we'll see with R3. There's some other stuff, but it's infrastructure
stuff or otherwise not visible (like the Partner Ping we
mentioned, which will make it easier for blog search engines to find
your entries, which will then show up in search results and thus be
seen by more people who will comment on what a great blog you have and
how you're a great person overall).

 The next items will stay in beta until at least January, possibly later.

* Incoming Links is another one of those pretty straightforward things. It's a link to a blog search engine that's prepopulated with the URL for that specific entry, and it acts like a blog entry vanity search,
to show you what other blogs are pointing to your entry. So, if you
want to see who's pointing to your entry, you don't have to cut and
paste into a blog search engine -- all you'll have to do is click the
link.

* Last, but not least is Online Presence.

Now before I say anything else, I just want to borrow a page from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and say:

DON'T PANIC.

The presence widget basically takes the AIM Presence functionality and puts it on Journals, so people can see if you're online or not by a little icon next to your Screen Name.

This
will include when your Screen Name shows up in the footer of your
entries, and (more controversially) when you leave a comment, even on
someone else's Journal.

Now, again -- please don't panic. It's only on for the test, and I am nearly 100% sure the presence indicator will be turned off by default whenever it rolls out to production (which means you'll have to turn it on manually if you want it to work).

Also
keep in mind that it's the same basic functionality someone would see
if they clicked on your screen name now in a Journals comment you've
left (it pulls up your Member Directory Profile, which also shows your online status, subject to your Privacy Settings)
or if the they cut and paste your screen name into an IM window and
clicked the "Available?" button -- it will adhere to the same privacy settings you've set.



I understand that having the presence visible one level higher makes
many people uncomfortable, so we are taking this into account.

If you want to opt out of the test, which again is only on the beta site, Susan has posted easy instructions on how to do this.

That's it for right now.  We will keep you posted as we get more details about the R3 rollout date.

Thanks -- Joe

Accolades for Blogger John

Checking around the big ole Sphere o' Blogs, I see that Glenn Reynolds (of the influential blog Instapundit) has named blogger John's instant sci-fi classic, Old Man's War, his personal pick for book of the year. Kudos to John!

I know that John is far too modest to mention something like this (well, now that I think about it, he's not), and I'm sure he would never do something so crass as to suggest that it's the perfect stocking-stuffer for the sci-fi reader on your gift list... so I'll do it for him.

Thanks -- Joe

Hit and Run

Hi folks -- just wanted to check in. I'm trying to catch up on a bunch of things, including a whole bunch of e-mail I need to respond to.



In addition, I need to talk about the Journals beta, online presence and other stuff, which I will get to (eventually).



In the meantime, feel free to burn some time over at Little Fluffy Industries,
a site that aggregates different Web-based games. Among the field of
game aggregation sites, it's pretty good, except for an unfortunate
tendency of not posting new stuff for months at a time.



Thanks -- Joe

Consequences

* From the "Just Kidding!" File: The instigator of that whole JFK assassination fake-entry dustup on Wikipedia last week was tracked down and has copped to doing it.

He says he posted the bit about noted figure John Seigenthaler, Sr. being linked to the Kennedy assassination as a prank on a co-worker -- or make that "former co-worker", as Mr. Jokester has resigned due to the commotion.

* Truly Gifted (via Romensko's Obscure Store): Some Chicago-area middle schoolers in an Advanced Placement program were suspended for threatening teachers in blog posts.

Some santized tidbits are quoted in the article, though I also found a classmate's reaction quote interesting, as well:

"It's
none of their business. Why are they monitoring online student journals
in the first place?" demanded 16-year-old junior Fabiola Segovia. "You
would think teachers and staff have better things to do, like making
this school a better place. This school is crappy. I think they had no
right to read it, much less suspend those students."

I think young Fabiola has some rude awakenings in store.

Thanks -- Joe

The Year in Ideas

Hi everybody. I was reading the New York Times Sunday Magazine (online,
of course), which was their annual Year
in Ideas issue.

This

is great, because I get to link to a lot of interesting stuff without

having to do a lot of work (though I plan on talking about a few of

these things in greater depth).

Anyway, I've
highlighted some of the bloggier and community-type
stuff:

(One

note: The online version of the article would be a lot friendlier if

they linked to all of the stuff that they talked about. Also, since

it's the New York Times, free registration may be required. I guess

that was two notes.)

* Fleeting
Relationships looks at the value of fleeting
relationships (e.g. the people on the bus with you) and
anchored relationships (people you see only at
specific venues).

* Google
Map Mashups examines the neat things you can do with Google Maps' plug-in
architecture. Combined with Folksonomy
(which is like community content tagging) and Open
Source Reporting, it's very Web 2.0 (which
is something I will definitely be discussing
more).

* On the mostly-blog side,
we've got Splogs
(or spam blogs), Newspapers
Blogging as a primary source of info during Katrina, the rise
of Video
Podcasting, and the supposition that Conservative
Blogs are more effective than liberal blogs at advancing
their agendas.

* From the phone
world, we see a service geared to Preventing
Drunk Dialing, plus, a way from the MIT Media Lab for groups
of people to vote on whether you should be allowed to take
that cell phone call.

* Then, some that
are just interesting include: the difference
between British and American smiles, the reason why yawns
are contagious, the kind of morbid but thought-provoking idea
that you should hug
a suicide bomber (that is, because of the dynamics of a
suicide bomb explosion, one should sacrifice yourself to save others
around you), the cone
of babble, and lastly, the idea that the crawl at the bottom
of the TV news makes
you stupid.

As they say, food for thought.
Thanks -- Joe

How To: Get More Readers

Hi everyone,

So, as I blogged earlier, one of the more frequent questions I get is "How do I get more people to read my blog?"

Yes,
I know, we all blog for ourselves, not for other people. But then again
(to butcher a metaphor), if a tree blogs in a forest and no one is
there to read it, does it make a sound?

Blog Herald recently linked to Problogger.net's 11 Techniques to Increase Page Views on Your Blog.

The
11 tips are geared to professional bloggers (or folks with inclinations
that way), and a bunch of them are geared to specific features
available to advanced blogging platforms like (WordPress), but it's still an interesting read -- some takeaways for regular folks include Serializing Content, Making Things Interactive, and Highlighting Key Posts. Check it out.

Here are some of my own tips:

* Pick the Low-Hanging Fruit:
This is corporate-speak that means "Go for the easy wins first." Share
your blog's address with the people who already know you. They're the
people who are most likely to be interested in what's going on in your
life.

* Self-Promote Yourself (but only where appropriate):
Put your blog's address in your mail signature, profiles, IM away
message, message board posting signature -- anywhere that you tell
people about yourself.

* Participate in Other People's Blogs:
Blogging is all about participation. If you read someone else's blog,
leave a meaningful comment and include a link back to your blog -- if
people like your comment, they might follow the link back to your blog.
Just don't spam.

* Update Frequently (or at least consistently):
The more you update, the more there is for people to come to. And, no,
you can't cheat by posting filler -- what you post should be
interesting or useful... this creates value in the mind of the visitor.

* Be Self-Referential:
If you talk about something you posted about previously, throw in a
hyperlink to it. This exposes readers to stuff that deeper in your
archives that they might otherwise have missed.

* Give and Receive:
Don't be afraid to link out from your entries. A lot of Web sites are
reluctant to link out to other Web sites, because they're afraid that
if they send people away, they won't come back. This is wrong, on so
many levels.

For starters, if you mention something in your
blog but don't link out to it, it's considered rude (or at the very
least, it's seen as very lazy.)

Plus, one of the best ways to
get repeat visitors is to be useful, or otherwise valuable. Talking
about something you saw on the Web, but then not letting people take a
look for themselves so they can form their own opinion and find other
viewpoints, is not particularly useful.

* Don't Be Difficult:
Don't make it hard for people to read your blog. Be careful with
eye-bleeding font colors, background images and colors, and try to use
proper spelling and grammar -- I know a lot of you type in IM-speak,
but this can turn off people, just like typing iN l33t sP34K, oR tHaT
rAnDOm CaPiTAliZaTiON tHiNg wHicH I cAn'T dO vErY weLl.

At the very least, use paragraph breaks to break up big blocks of text. Big blocks of text are hard to read -- put things in easy-to-digest chunks.

* Don't Shut Out Other Browsers: This is a little more technical and I will have to a separate entry later just about this. I know a lot of you are using style tags to insert background images
in your entries, which is fine. However, please be aware that when you
do this, danger lurks: Just because it looks good in your browser
(which is probably Microsoft Internet Explorer [MSIE] -- the AOL client
browser is a  version of the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser)
doesn't mean it's going to display properly in other, non-MSIE
browsers.

MSIE is still the dominant browser out there, but Firefox is getting more popular. And when style tags go bad, they can go bad badly, to the point of illegibility.

Testing
for browser compatibility can be a pain (especially when dealing with
multiple platforms -- Mac/PC/Linux), but sometimes all you have to do
is ask a friend to take a look at your blog.

Ultimately, you
might just decide to worry about viewers using MSIE browsers, and
that's fine -- just know that browser compatibility issues lurk out there.

Finally, when it comes down to it, here's a good rule of thumb:
Think about the blogs that you like to read and that you revisit on a
regular basis -- then think about what it is about those blogs that
keeps you coming back.

If you have other tips for drawing in visitors, feel free to share in the comments.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: how to get more readers, blogging tips

New Guest Editor's Picks for 12/9

Hi everybody. As posted to the Journals Message Board, our new Guest Editor's Picks are up on the Journals Main Page:

Our Guest Editor this week is Robin, who also runs a questionable weekly topic called The 5'er. Check out her top six blog picks.

* All the Makings of Insanity
* FromTopToBottom
* My Country Life
* My Journey
* Linda's Thotful Spot
* From Here to There

Appearances to the contrary, Robin did not earn the coveted Guest Editor spot just because she'd posted a rant about the whole Guest Editor thing. Honest.

Got an entry or two pending. [Update: Make that tomorrow -- I'm beat.] Thanks. -- Joe

Tag: Guest Editor's Picks

Live and Direct

Hey folks,

Here's an unintended consequence of the snow -- today is our Time Warner Global Broadcast, which is pretty much a big team rah-rah meeting with video simulcasts in offices all over the world.

Because
of the snow, a lot of folks didn't come into the office today, so they
needed some warm (or even slightly cool) bodies to fill the seats for
the Dulles studio audience.

So, I went. I brought my laptop and my camera.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but it was pretty heavily stage-managed -- they even handed out noisemakers.

Okay, so they may not be the most interesting photos. But let's see you try to get Anderson Cooper to moderate your team meeting.

Thanks -- Joe

Snow Day

Hi folks -- we seem to have survived, yet again. Around here, we only
got about 2 inches of wet, slushy snow (you know, the kind that's
really fun to shovel):

Yes, I know you can still see grass, but at least there are tiny little piles where they had to shovel the walks.



Around here, 2 inches is more than enough to get the schools
closed, which means you can usually see a lot of kids around the
cubicles, though it's pretty quiet here today.

The northeast is supposed to get hit a lot harder today, so be careful out there.

Oh, and remember kids -- you have to make at least a token attempt
to clean the snow and ice off your car before you jump on the highway.
It's not my fault you're five foot nothing in your Ugg boots, yet
bought a 10-foot high Canyonero SUV with a roof rack.

Thanks -- Joe

Watch What You Say! (Again)

Hi folks -- seeing as how we've gone several whole weeks without
a story about how putting the wrong kind of information on your blog
can get you in trouble, here are two news stories to remind us:

* The Wall Street Journal has an article reminding us that it can be iffy putting 'Too Much Information' on Facebook (the outrageously popular college-oriented community site).



"Too much info" can include photos of recreational drug use, underaged drinking and detailed schedules of your precise location (the better to stalk you with). The article is specific to Facebook, but it also serves as a general reminder to the rest of us.

* I found this next story on Blog Herald (which is running really slow right now); it's a different angle on the perils of college blogging and comes from the Marquette University School of Dentistry, as detailed in this news article from the Marquette Tribune.


It tells of a second-year dental student who was suspended for blogging -- not for drink, drugs or sex, but for slagging
professors and fellow students in his personal blog (which is gone,
though you can get another perspective on these and other issues from
the blog of MU PoliSci prof. John McAdams.)

Again,
since Marquette is private, the school can do this -- the grounds are
violation of the code of conduct for harassment. Whether they should do
it, of course, is a completely 'nother matter.

Thanks -- Joe 

Didn't We Just Do This?

Hi all,


The overnight weather forecast for the DC Metro area is 3-6 inches of snow and wintry
mix (which is nothing at all like party mix).  It's not going to get
here for a few more hours -- guess the storm has to finish hiding blogger John's lawn, first.

Monday's
snow was supposed to be 2-4 inches, though we barely even covered the
grass. I am interested in seeing what happens tomorrow.

Oh, and winter doesn't even being for 2 more weeks. Fun.


Talk to you. -- Joe

Guest Editorships and Open Systems

Hi everybody,

(Warning, this is going to be a long
entry.)

I happened to stumble upon a Journal entry
by Robin (of These
Are the Days of Our Lives...), which kind of took
me to task about the direction I've taken the whole Guest
Editor thing.

Actually, she
flamed me pretty good,

but I don't mind [Update: Okay,
I see that it's tongue-in-cheek, except with more naughty words than
one would expect for that sort of thing.] I would, however, like a
chance to talk about some
of
the questions she (and some of the commenters in her entry, as well as
others) have raised.

(By the way, if anyone has a
rant or complaint about me, my blog, or Journals in general,
feel free to send it to me as well as post it to
your blog -- it's the only way that will guarantee that I will see it,
and I won't get mad. Honest.)

Okay, so about the
Guest Editor

thing. As you recall, it's the primary way we're featuring blogs: I
ask

someone to be Guest Editor and pick their favorite blogs and do a blog

entry about them, and then I point to the Guest Editor's blog
entry.

I do this because I am 1.)
incredibly lazy and 2.) relying on the
collective wisdom of Journalers and bloggers to find
stuff, on the theory that many eyes are better than two (or four, in my
case.)

Now, there are several complaints and
concerns about this, which I hope I am characterizing
correctly:



* It's been months since I asked; why haven't I been
picked yet?
The answer, unfortunately, is
simple math: Guest

Editors' (or Editors') picks are once a week, and we've only been
doing

them since June, so we've only had 23 Guest Editors so far. There are

close to 100 more people on the
ever-growing list of

people who've expressed interested in being a Guest Editor -- even if

you subtract the people who don't want to have anything to do with me

or AOL any more after the ads debacle, that's still a lot of people,

and we're only able to feature one a week.

How can
we remedy

this -- can we have multiple Guest Editors each week? Possibly -- I

will look into it; however, please know that coordinating all this is

not easy. It's just me doing all this.

As I've
mentioned several times before, we're working on additional ways to
feature bloggers -- the Face Wall on the Journals Main Page is one
of the newer ones, and I'm hoping that the partner
ping stuff that went up with the R2 release will help us
build ways to automate displays of newly created or
updated blogs...but, I also understand that being a Guest Editor or
Editor's Pick carries a status or cachet that other
features do not.

* If there are so few
Guest Editor slots available, why did you waste two around Thanksgiving
with your own picks?
I

apologize for this one -- due to both the timing of the ad banner

fiasco (which kept us pretty busy, as you can imagine) and the

logistics of the short holiday week, I couldn't guarantee that I could

coordinate everything with Guest Editor candidates on time, so I

decided to put up what essentially amounted to filler (though I hope
it

was decent filler).

Despite what I said earlier
about the Guest

Editor being created out of sheer laziness, there is still a lot of

work involved, from outreach, asset gathering and management, art

creation, authoring, and publishing to Journals main, this blog, the

boards and the Alert (which I also failed to send out last week, sorry
Brandi).


* You've missed out on so many good AOL
Journals! Why are you wasting time letting people feature non-AOL
blogs?
Okay,

this is a pretty controversial one and I know a lot of you will

continue to disagree with me on this, but please hear me
out.

First off, I tell Guest Editors that they have
the editorial freedom

to pick whatever they want (well, okay, within the bounds of decency
--

I'm not an anarchist). Telling them to limit their picks to AOL

Journals would like me being forced only to talk about how you

shouldn't use a 3rd-party
FTP client

because the AOL in-client FTP tool is so great (which it isn't -- it's

older than dirt and a pain to use) or that you shouldn't use the great
Firefox
browser because it's not AOL's. It's not honest, and it's not
right.





Similarly, if I tell a political blogger Guest Editor that they can't
feature PowerLine or Daily Kos,

just because they're not AOL blogs, even though that may be that

person's favorite, bestest blog ever, doesn't seem right. (And yes, I

know that neither PowerLine nor Daily Kos need the extra traffic since

they're pretty dominant already -- this isn't about pimping blogs for

pageviews, though.)

As you hear time and time again,
blogging is about relationships -- if your
relationships include non-AOL blogs, why shouldn't you be able to
highlight those blogs?

From a practical perspective,
there's a very big blog world

out there, and AOL needs to be a part of it. The more we participate
in

the blogosphere, through meaningful interaction (and remember,
blogging

is all about relationships and interaction) the more the blogosphere

will pay attention to us. (And not just because AOL gets a writeup on
the ad thing in BlogSpotting
or because we do a blog
survey that gets picked up in the blog
press.)

Keeping the raw numbers in mind, there are a
lot -- millions -- more non-AOL blogs than there are
AOL blogs -- that's a lot of new potential visitors
and commenters to your Journal out
there.

Now,

please don't take this as a slam on the AOL Journals community. Part
of

the reason why the Web and the Blogosphere works is that it is
open. The blogosphere would be a completely
different place if Xanga
people couldn't interact with Blogger people who couldn't
link to LiveJournal
people...you're going to hear more about "Web 2.0"
in the coming days, but it's about this -- closed systems stagnate --
open systems thrive.

The AOL Journals
ecosystem to date has been pretty closed.
I know it's comfortable, but it can also be
cramped -- I've had to work really
closely with the Guest Editors to make sure that we see new
Journalers featured, instead of the same names over and over
again, which is a very real risk (and another type of
complaint I'd gotten early on).

A final point I'd
like to make about this goes back to the first
Guest Editor's picks, where all of the
picks were non-AOL blogs. Perhaps that was the wrong foot to setoff
on, but I'd asked for Dan's
picks and I had to keep my word, and it's not his fault that
his primary blog reads were off AOL.

However, I saw
the following sentiment a bunch of times: "You SUCK
for featuring non-AOL blogs, but ohmygosh PostSecret is
soooo cool."

Now, largely
because of the Journals
exodus,

I'd opened up the possibility to have non-AOL bloggers make Guest

Editor picks -- I don't want to close off any possibilities, though as

I said before, we've got a long list of people who want to be Guest

Editors, so I don't see it happening anytime
soon.

Whew, that

was a pretty long one. I had originally planned to talk about a blog

entry floating around today on how to get more
visitors, but that will

have to wait until tomorrow.

In any case, if you
have any ideas

as to how we can better feature AOL Journalers, both
here and via other

methods, please let me know in comments or
mail.

Keep in mind,

it doesn't have to just come through me. For example, maybe we do some

kind of Journals passaround, where everyone does an
entry that links to

5 of their favorite blogs (AOL and non-AOL), and we find some way to

spread these around (kind of a combination of a blog carnival and the

Halloween trick-or-treating that you guys just
did.)

Just thinking out loud, let me know your own
ideas.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: Guest Editor's Picks

Porn Comment Spammer Is Back

Hi folks -- a few folks have written me to let me know that our
porn comment spammer is back.


This one is the same one we've seen before, except he/she is being
extra annoying, as he/she is throwing in a lot of
additional whitespace around the text, which
is:

Looking for HOT Guys and Sexy BI Females in my
AREA!
I am a 20/F/Pics. View my ADULT Pics profile below!

[URL Removed]

I haven't
included the screen name because the spammer can create a new one
pretty easily.



Why does the spammer do this? It's probably because he/she thinks that

doing this will help increase the search engine ranking of their silly

affiliate porn site, not knowing or caring that
comments in AOL Journals use
the NOFOLLOW tag, which means that your major search
engines (like Google) that rely on links to determine relevance
will skip those links and therefore won't
help your search engine ranking, you big spamming
dummy.

The

tech team is looking at different rostering methods and other measures

against comment spam. (I will talk more about that in a
minute.)



In the meantime, Journalers can use the "Block This Screen Name"
button

to block the screen name and delete all comments by that screen name.


By the way, if you accidentally
block someone from commenting, here's how you manage
your block list:

* When signed in to your
Journal, click the blue "Edit Journal" button.

* In
the section marked "Manage Your Journal Settings", click "Manage
Permissions."

*

This will show you a list of screen names which are blocked from

commenting to your Journal.  You can add screen names, and
also

unblock them.

Now, getting back to the problem of
comment spam:

It's a problem all over the blogosphere, not just AOL Journals. In

fact, to date, we've been pretty "lucky" that we've only had a few of

these clowns.

Different blog providers use different
methods to try to block comment spam -- for example, Blogger and others use
image verification (also known as a CAPTCHA)

-- it's a basically squiggly letters and numbers that machines can't

read, but people can, to try to block automated spamming
robots.

Image

verification works, but it's not a silver bullet -- there are ways

around it, including offshoring low-wage humans to defeat it.






Also, it can be pretty hostile to
visually-impaired humans

(especially with the squiggly lines -- if you've ever asked yourself,

"is that a 6 or a G?" while looking at one of these, you know what I

mean.)

Like I said, all sorts of different folks are
working on

ways to beat spam commenters (though if that isn't bad enough, there
is

also a problem with spam blogs, or splogs, which are
blogs

created specifically as link farms, to try to do the same thing as
spam

comments. This has also been a problem for Blogger/BlogSpot, which is

kind of ironic, since the spammers are trying to raise their Google

pagerank, and Google owns Blogger/BlogSpot); I've seen some instances

of it on AOL Journals/AIM Blogs, but not too many as
yet.

Thanks -- Joe