New Guest Editor's Picks for 4/28

Hi folks, as posted to the Journals Message Board, the new Guest Editor's Picks have been posted to the Journals Main Page.

Our Guest Editor this week is Tommy over in England; he's choosing blogs whose authors he identifies with. Stop by his rather interestingly-titled blog (The Jabberwocky of Julius Jones) and check out his top blog picks:

* Undeniably Me
* Pretty Pink Patty’s Pictures
* La Dolce Vita
* I Have a Life, This Is It
* The Meaning Of Life ... But I Could Be Wrong
* View From a Farm House Window

Don't forget, if you want your own chance at being a Guest Editor, send me an e-mail at JournalsEditor@aol.com. Please don't forget to include a link to your blog.

Also as mentioned, Journals Project Manager Yoel has been trying to stick to his at-least-weekly-update schedule, so stop by his blog to see what's going on out in Mountain View.

Have a great weekend everyone. Thanks -- Joe

Tag: Guest Editor's Picks

Scalzi's Weekend Assignment: Paying for New Music

I've been pretty, um, easygoing when it comes to participating in blogger John's Weekend Assignments, but I was getting ready to promote this week's edition (which is about recent albums you've bought) and realized that I had a photo lying around from a few weeks back that fit the bill pretty well (even though this isn't a photo shoot):

These represent my second-most recent album purchases -- it's significantly more than three albums, so I will look at it taking the perspective of a single purchase, since it resulted from a single trip to the used CD store (total cost for all nine albums was $33, which I thought was pretty good).

The CDs are:
Depeche Mode, The Singles
Lisa Germano, Lullaby for Liquid Pig
The Shamen, En Tact
Robbie Williams, The Ego Has Landed
Pet Shop Boys, Actually
Dressy Bessy, Sound Go Round
Sigur Ros, Takk
Ivy, In the Clear
Throwing Muses, Limbo

I believe that artists deserve to be compensated for their work, so I'm conflicted when it comes to buying used CDs, since the artist doesn't see a dime (then again, neither does the record label), and purchases on the secondary market don't count towards album sales.

On the plus side, if it was a purchased CD and not a promotional CD, the artist did see money on the original sale.

My third most recent purchase was Beth Orton's new CD at her recent concert at the 9:30 Club in DC. I like buying CDs at concerts, even if they're more expensive, since you know that when you buy stuff off the merchandise table, the artist gets a much bigger chunk of the revenue than when you buy it in the store.

My most recent purchase of an actual, non-used CD was The Legend of Johnny Cash a few weeks ago -- it was one of those backcatalog loss-leaders at a large chain electronics store, so I only paid ten bucks for it.

So, three different types of purchases.

Regarding extra credit: I have bought music off of iTunes, but not a complete album yet.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: Weekend Assignment

Exposed: Underground Pretty, Pretty Princess Ring at AOL

So, I was able to track down some of those elusive kids running around the offices today.

Here's cow-orker Joanne (she of the Specialty Traveler and The Awwwww Factor blogs) -- apparently, she is running some sort of Pretty, Pretty Princess sweatshop. Or focus group. It could go either way:

I showed them a draft, and I was instructed (er, requested) to include a picture of the dolls:

From left to right, we have Erica, Annalise, Rapunzel, and Odette. I had to ask for help on the names.

Also, did you know that nowadays, they use velcro (sorry, hook-and-loop fasteners) on the outfits, instead of snaps? I did not.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: cow orker, pretty pretty princess, AOL

Children: They're Everywhere!

Okay, I admit it, I'm slow -- I was wondering why there were more kids than usual underfoot at the office today. (Spring Break? No, that already happened. Teacher planning day? Unknown. School canceled because of good weather? [link via fark] Unlikely.)

Seeing as how "Nachos w/Chili, Chicken Fingers & Hot Dogs" are featured menu items today, I figured it was some sort of event, and finally just now realized that today is Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day.

(I gather that the somewhat contorted title -- "Daughers and Sons" versus "Kids" -- is a desire to honor the "Take Our Daughters to Work Day" origins.)

This means I will need to control my frequent and seemingly random outbursts of swearing and desk-pounding.

No doubt this entry would be enhanced by pictures of some of the rugrats, though pictures of young kids (not to mention shy employees) are always a bit more problematic to a corporate blogger such as myself.

Thanks -- Joe 

Hey, Look: It's Omar

Hi folks -- so I was just on the Technorati main page, and I saw a familiar face in the Featured Blog section:

Yes, it's previous Guest Editor Omar of Detached and Indifferent Expressions (AOL Journals | Blogspot).

He's rotating through, so you might need to refresh a few times.

Apparently, the picks are auto-generated -- looking at today's bunch of featured bloggers, they've all just created their Technorati profiles today (since they all show as "Member since April 26, 2006.")

Anyway, congratulations to Omar. Thanks -- Joe

Tags: Omar, Technorati, Lord of Butter

Tuesday Update: Poll on Polls

Hi folks -- not a lot to report today -- been in a lot of meetings. However, Journals Project Manager Yoel has a poll about the Journals polls beta in his blog, so go check it out.

As noted, the polls beta test requires that you know the HTML for IFRAMEs -- an IFRAME is like a little window cut into a Web page that shows content from another Web page -- so we're not really pushing it right now. When we eventually roll it out for real, it shouldn't require any mucking about with the HTML -- it should be all plug-and-play. Or poll-and-play, as it were.

On the plus side, we were having some problems previously where you would go to a  Journal that had an embedded poll, and sometimes the poll window would replace the Journals window -- Yoel says that particular problem has been fixed.

Thanks. -- Joe

Tags: aol journals, polls

Hey Leadfoot: Drive Slower, Save Gas Money

In today's edition of Al's Morning Meeting, columnist Al highlights an Edmunds.com article entitled 'We Test the Tips', which puts a series of gas-saving tips to the test, which no doubt might be of interest as we head firmly into three-bucks-for-regular land.

(Incidentally, the article was originally published in November of 2005; the national average for gas at the end of November was about $2.10 per gallon, according to GasBuddy.com.  Ever thought you'd be pining for the days of two-dollar gas?)

Anyway, they didn't test any gizmos to stick in your engine or solutions to put in your tank -- just a couple of adjustments to your driving behavior. You can check out the article for details (oh, and so the AOL Autos guys don't come by and beat me with embossed, channel-branded promotional giveaway tire irons, here is the AOL Autos version of the same article).

In short, if you want to save gas:
* Don't drive like a maniac.
* Slow down.
* Use cruise control.
* Don't idle too much.

Unsatisfying, perhaps, but this is physics, not magic.

If you'd like to be a citizen journalist and show your own angle on the gas prices story, check out AOL News's Pictures at the Pump blog.

Thanks -- Joe

Home Improvement Therapy

I saw this article over the weekend in the Washington Post, about do-it-yourselfers who blog about their home improvement projects. (This was as I was studiously avoiding doing anything that remotely resembled a home improvement project.)

It's not exactly shocking news to us, but as with any kind of sequential project, blogs are tailor-made for chronicling redecorating, remodeling, repairs and any other home improvement project, big or small.

Part of that is strictly due to the mechanics of blogs: The new stuff goes on top; you can follow along in the archives; it's easy to post pictures to track progress (or setbacks, as the case may be); and it's easy to stay on top of updates with alerts and feeds.

The other advantage of blogging about your home-improvement projects is that sense of community-building that comes with blogs. Not only do you hear from people sharing their own home improvement triumphs and nightmares, but there are also those comments from the peanut gallery, of people who come by just to watch. 

For those folks, the article calls it "house porn" -- for me, it's always "research for future projects."

Anyway, if you've got your own home improvement project blog that you'd like to share, leave the address in the comments for me (and everybody else, including your fellow DIYers) to see.

Thanks -- Joe

Exclusive: Britney and K-Fed Tried to Destroy AOL Journals!

Hi folks -- as Journals product manager Susan reports in her blog, the outage that we experienced this morning (where we were seeing long load times and timeouts), has been cleared.

It looks like the problem was caused by massive amounts of traffic going to the Luxe Life: Vegas Journal (a celeb gossip blog done by CityGuide Las Vegas and Robin Leach. Yes, that Robin Leach.).

What was all the commotion? It was due to a Welcome Screen promo that linked to an exclusive about a fight between Britney Spears & Kevin Federline.

I kind of wish I was making this up, but it's true.

Now that the immediate crisis has passed (that is, unless you are Brit or K-Fed), the Ops folks will be investigating how they can scale up the hardware to handle these kind of traffic spikes, as well as increased traffic overall.

(I mean, what happens if someone breaks an exclusive story about, say, Brad and Angelina splitting up? One has to take these kinds of things into account. I mean, otherwise, one unplanned celebrity exclusive later and you've got a big smoking crater where the data center used to be.)

As always, in the event of Journals outages, check the Journals Message Boards for updates. (And when we're not having problems, it's a good place to show off your own Journal, as well as meet other Journalers.)

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: AOL Journals, status, gossip, britney spears, luxe life vegas

New Guest Editor's Picks for 4/21

Evening, folks -- as posted to the Journals Message Board and Journals Main Page: Our Guest Editor this week is Donna, a Texan mom who's featuring mostly medically-minded bloggers (and one waiter):

Stop by her blog, Sweeping the Cobwebs of My Mind, and check out her top six blog picks:

* My First Year as a Nurse
* Waiter Rant [Strong Language]
* THOUGHTS From the HEADoc
* Life as a Paramedic
* Hestia Homeschool for Young Wild Women
* Kevin, M.D.

Donna's got a few other folks she's planning on shouting out to, so check her blog for updates.

Don't forget, if you want your own chance at being a Guest Editor, send me an e-mail at JournalsEditor@aol.com. Please don't forget to include a link to your blog. 

Have a great weekend everyone. Thanks -- Joe

Tag: Guest Editor's Picks

Blog Mood Swings (and Introducing R6)

There was an interesting article today linked from Slashdot.org about mood swings in the big ole sphere o' blogs.

Some pointy-headed types in the Netherlands created a tool that analyzed the mood labels on LiveJournal posts over time; they started to find seasonal and other patterns, including:

* "Drunk" was used more on the weekends
* "Stressed" was used less in the summer and more towards the end of the year
* Valentines Day saw increases in both "flirty" and "lonely"

Nothing shocking, of course, but it just goes to show that blog behaviors reflect real-world influences.

Speaking of moods, Journals Project Manager Yoel writes in his blog that planning for Journals Release 6 (R6) has officially kicked off. Check out his blog for more details, but one of the things we're looking at getting done is the free-form moods field to supplement the existing moods drop-down, which you guys have been saying has had too few choices since, like, forever.

R6 will also get us mobile blogging (moblogging), a better AOL Pictures interface, and more stuff (including opening up the tagging beta to Internet Explorer users).

Plus, we're working on improved polls support -- right now, in beta, there is a polls test, but it's kind of ugly, since you need to fiddle around with the IFRAMES tags to get it to show up in your blog. With poll integration, you wouldn't have to worry about that -- it would be taken care of invisibly.

R6 is due in late May; Yoel, Susan, John, John, Holly and I will all be talking about it as we have more to talk about.

Anyway, since we were on the subject of moods, I asked a few of my AOL Editor cow-orkers to recreate a Journals mood for photo purposes:  

Here, we see sports guy Jamie Chillin'. 

Next, Gay & Lesbian editor Kenny is Mischievous. 

Staying sassy, we see NetGirl and Igglz fan Erin at her most Flirtatious. 

Lastly, because you see enough of me, here I am Embarrassed.

Feel free to act out your own moods and share.

The new Guest Editor's picks are pending.  Thanks -- Joe

Tags: cow orker, AOL Journals, moods, R6

Go Wild With Your Digital Camera

Hi folks -- there was an article a few weeks back in Webmonkey entitled More Effective Images -- it's an excerpt from author Dane Howard's book on digital photography, The Future of Memories, and it talks about how adapting your shooting style to the freedom given by digital cameras can make you a more effective photographer.

For starters, with digital cameras, you don't have to shoot with your eye pressed to the viewfinder -- you can aim using the display, or even not really aim at all, which means you can get all sorts of  interesting angles without having to contort yourself into awkward positions.

Plus, if you're not squinting through the viewfinder, you're taking in more of the scene, so you might catch things you wouldn't see otherwise.

More importantly, he makes the point, as have others, that the economics of digital photos has radically changed the way we take pictures -- once you get past the initial expense of your camera and computer, shooting digital photos is essentially free.

You don't have to worry about paying for film, and the only real expense is the time it takes for you to review and edit the photos you take. And since you don't have to worry about paying for film, you'll be free to take more pictures and play around.

Let's compare the costs of film vs. digital: Say a 24-exposure roll of 35mm film costs $5. For $30, that's 6 rolls, or 144 exposures, at 21 cents a shot (not even counting developing costs).

Now, you can look around online and get a 1 gigabyte memory card for under $30.  I have one for my camera, which is set at the second highest resolution, 1600x1200 pixels, which is more than I need (for example, a typical monitor resolution is 1024x728 pixels) -- even at that resolution, I can fit 1,500 photos on the card.

That's a heck of a lot of photos.

(... oh, and a pixel is just a little dot that makes up a picture -- put a grid of 1600x1200 different colored pixels together and you have a picture -- that's 1,920,000 pixels, or 1.9 megapixels.

It's best to shoot at the highest resolution you can -- especially if you want to print out the photos later on -- because you can always shrink down and cropthe photos using photo editing software, but you can't make a small digital photo bigger and still have it look good.)

What all that means is you can take as many pictures as you like, without having to worry about wasting film. (When I take photos, the limiting factor I face is battery life, never storage space.) If you don't like something, you can always delete it. And storage space on your computer is relatively cheap -- you can transfer everything from your memory card to your computer's hard drive if you ever start running low.

Now, does this mean you can go completely crazy and shoot everything you see? You can if you like, but I don't see a point of taking a picture if you're never going to do anything it, and freedom to take more photos doesn't mean you can just shoot everything and hope you accidentally get something interesting.

It does mean, though, that you're free to take more photos of stuff, from different angles and different exposures -- you have more room to experiment and try new things out.

Plus, it means that instead of trotting out your camera just for special events, you can use your camera to find interesting stuff or document your everyday existence.

For example, if I had a film camera, would I take a picture of my ugly bare feet sitting on my footrest? Probably not:

(I wore my deck shoes for the first time this spring, hence the bare feet.)

Lastly, remember that you can always adjust what you shoot "in post" (as in  post-production), using photoediting software like Photoshop, Paint.net, GIMP, etc.

Anyway, just food for thought. Thanks -- Joe.

Tag: digital photos, webmonkey, future of memories

Helpful How-To Videos From Japan

Hi folks -- well, can't let today go by without a blog entry (since after all, a day with a blog entry is like a day without sunshine, which I think we had a lot of today), so here's a link that's not even a tiny bit filler, since it's actually useful:

By way of a Metafilter post on Tuesday, here's a bunch of helpful How To videos from Japan (they're currently hosted on video-sharing site YouTube).

Now, I don't speak Japanese, so I am as much in the dark as to what they're saying as, um, anyone else who doesn't speak Japanese, but the videos are pretty clear, with abundant on-screen graphics and everything else that shows what they're doing. Topics covered include:

* Peeling a Cooked Potato in One Shot

* How to Revive a Fleece Jacket (Using a Pet Brush)

* A No-Mess Way to Scale Fish

Anyway, check out the category listing of videos here.

Now, I would be remiss (not to mention flogged) if I didn't mention that AOL has its own video project in the works. We're soliciting for member-created videos now, so if you've got a video you'd like to share, by all means, send it in. (You can also see some of the videos that folks have sent previously.)

Video is getting a lot more popular these days, with the prevalence of broadband. Plus, you don't need a camcorder -- my now-obsolete 3.2 megapixel digital camera does plenty fine taking video along with regular photos, not to mention all the angsty teens out there baring their souls into the Webcams mounted on their monitors, or folks taking cell phone video.

Relatively-speaking, the barriers to video are a little higher than with text or photos, and it's even more challenging to do good video. But as people get more comfortable working with the new medium,and as the tools get better for regular folks -- well, it's not going to go away.

I'll be talking more about video as I have more to talk about. Thanks -- Joe



Tags: youtube, video, aol video, How To

MySpace on My Mind

Hi folks -- this week's edition of satirical newspaper The Onion riffs on a story that was in the news last week about how popular social network/blog provider MySpace is taking steps to calm nervous parents (and legislators) who are worried about the shenanigans that kids are getting into on the site.

The Onion provides its usual, er, unique take on the subject, in the form of an easily digestible infographic:

Check it out.

In other MySpace news, Mike Davidson, one of the founders of social news site Newsvine, takes a look at what designers and other folks interested in CSS can do to hack MySpace layouts to make them less eye-bleedingly hideous ("Hack" is used in the traditional sense of the word, which means getting under the hood of something and tweaking it to do something the way you want it to work.)

There's a whole cottage industry around creating and selling customized MySpace layouts; some are great, some are okay, and some of them are really, really bad. 

Now, of course, that's just my opinion -- keep in mind that I'm a decade or two outside of the MySpace target demographic and ultimately, neither my nor anyone else's opinion matters when it comes to issues of taste -- only the opinion of the person whose blog it is matters.

Anyway, Mr. Davidson is trying to make it easier for people to muck around with CSS and their MySpace layouts to make elegant and useful layouts, so he's identified some of the "rules" that will help CSS folks write clean code that works.

(Incidentally, I found that link via Popurls.com, which is another one of those Web 2.0 sites; it cherry-picks the top articles of other social sharing and link sites -- in this case, the article came from social bookmark sharing site del.icio.us.)

For our part, in the coming weeks, we'll be talking about stuff that you'll be able to do to customize your own Journals layouts, without being a CSS guru.

There's also some other stuff that isn't really directly related to Journals that's pretty cool, but I can't talk about that right now.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: myspace, the onion

More on Tagging From the Journals Team

So, here's a follow-up to my earlier entry about the tag test beta; a bunch of you have tried it out, which is great. It would have been greater if we had been able to make it work for people using Microsoft Internet Explorer as their Web browser (this includes the browser that comes with the AOL software), which is most of you.

The good news is that the tech folks tell me that the problems that prevented the tag test from working in IE were mostly fixed, just not in time to get installed along with the R5 release. So, hopefully, we will be able to get it into beta an upcoming release so you can play with it.

Next, by way of explaining just what the heck tagging is, I'm going to steal one of the comments I posted in that entry, which applies a metaphor to help explain why tagging is useful:

Honestly, all this tagging stuff is just fancy talk that describes a way to label your blog posts so that they show up in blog searches with other blog posts (both yours and other peoples') that share the same label.

It's just labelling, though we can a lot more with it online than in the physical world.

For example, say every Deadhead in the US has a Grateful Dead bumper sticker on their car. You can't scoop up every car owner with a Grateful Dead bumper sticker and gather them together in a big field for a party -- but you can kind of do that with blog entries that are tagged.

All metaphors break down eventually, of course, so suffice it to say that tagging is just a way to get similiar blog entries together.

Looking around the rest of the team, here's what some of the other Journals folks have to say about the tag test:

* Tech Manager John also uses a bumper sticker metaphor, and also includes a snazzy animated gif demonstrating the tagging interface we're testing.

* UI Designer Holly has some questions about how intuitive you find the whole tagging thing in her entry. She also mentioned the polls test, which I still haven't talked about since it involves slightly more advanced HTML, though if you've played with it, let her know.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: Tagging, beta, AOL tags

Meet a Hardcore Journaler

Hi folks -- so, I was looking over the current batch of responses to Blogger John's latest Blog Photo Shoot, "Something Unexpected", when something caught my eye -- in her comment, Journaler Mosie1944 wrote "...because of its graphic nature, you may want to delete my comment here."

How can you not look at something like that? (This assumes that you are me.)

Naturally, I popped over to her Journal, My Country Life, to see the Photo Shoot entry in question.

It seems that Donna (that being her name), had a run-in with a cattle panel (Which is a type of wire fence. It's kind of a panel. For cattle. Why yes, I am a city boy.), which left her with a pretty nice gash in her leg.

Being a hardy sort and not wanting to go to the ER, she had it wrapped up and waited until the next morning to go to the doctor's office (not the hospital).

However, that's not the hardcore part.

No, the hardcore part is that while Donna was getting her stitches, she was taking pictures for her blog:

I don't care how much lidocaine they're giving you -- taking pictures of your wound as the doc is stitching you up is hardcore.

You can see Donna's full photo series in her blog entry -- as she notes, it's not for the squeamish, so if you get light-headed at the sight of blood, you probably don't want to click past picture #4. (The photo above is kind of bloody, though it's kind of abstract -- I didn't zoom and crop on the actual wound... though I could have -- it was a nice, big, detailed photo.)

So, Donna gets Journals Editor Joe's Hardcore Journaler of the um, Month Award.

In the event that someone else out there suffers an injury, I recommend that you go get medical attention and not worry about the "blogging about it" part.

(Incidentally, if you want to submit your own photo for this week's Photo Shoot, you still have a day and a half or so. Again, the theme is "Something Unexpected," not "Big, Bloody Injuries.")

On a photo note, I used the photo above (after getting permission and a photo release from Donna of course, but that's a special consideration since I'm a corporate blogger) because I thought it was dramatic without being overly graphic.

In addition, there's a bright spotlight effect that really focuses your attention on the action in the middle, with these disembodied hands coming out of the darkness.

Now, in Photoshop CS, which I am fortunate enough to use, there's an easy way to pull out details from underexposed areas -- it's the Shadow/Highlight settings adjustment; after using it, you can see a lot more of what's going on -- not that I necessarily think it makes it a better photo. It's definitely more documentary in nature, though:

I don't know if there's a similar functionality in other graphics programs (such as the free GIMP image editor) -- check out the entry and comments in this blog entry discussion
about the Shadow/Highlight adjustment.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: hardcore journaler, Monday Photo Shoot

Error Messages Leaving Comments? Clear Your Cookies

Okay, now this really is going to be my last entry of the evening.

A few folks have mentioned that they've been getting server error messages when they try to post comments in people's Journals.

We haven't gotten any official word of widespread problems on either the Journals or authentication sides, but I believe there was some flakiness earlier today -- I just talked to the Journals tech folks -- if you're having problems trying to post comments, try clearing your browser's cookies.

AOL users can do this by clearing their "footprint" (which clears your cookies and more).


Here are some instructions on how to do that: 
http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/entries/865


Just make sure you're also clearing your "cookies" when you do the
above.

If you clear your cookies and you still can't leave comments, please let me know and I will alert the tech folks to investigate further.

[Update: Also please leave me a comment or send me a mail if you aren't seeing your blue Journals owner buttons (add post, edit Journal, etc), when you should. Thanks.]

Thanks -- Joe

All About Your "All About Me"

Okay folks -- one last post for me tonight, I think -- as we mentioned, one of the things we got with the R5 release was an increase in the All About Me area from 1,000 to 25,000 characters, which I know you guys were excited about (to put it in perspective, 25,000 characters is the same limit as your individual Journal entries).

I haven't yet modified my own All About Me area to take advantage of the additional space, though I may add onto it and use it to link to my tutorial entries and other useful links that I want to keep visible on the main page. (They're currently in the right sidebar, but it would probably be easier to maintain in a single field, especially one I could copy, modify and paste in an HTML editor.)

In the meantime, I'm curious to see what you folks have done... if you've beefed up your All About Me area, please let me and everybody else know by telling us a little bit about what you did, and leaving a comment with a link back to your Journal so we can see.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: AOL Journals

More on the Public List Page & Error Messages

I forgot to mention something else cool when I wrote about the Public List page -- if you make a mistake and typo the title part of a Journal's address, instead of giving the previous very unhelpful, scary and misleading "AOL Journals is unavailable" blue screen error message, you will get the public list page, showing the Journals under that screen name.

For example, this is what you get when you try to go to this incorrect, typoed URL for my blog: http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsomek --

It's a lot more useful than the old error screen, which was not only a dead end, but it was misleading, because it said "please try again" -- if you had typed an incorrect address, no amount of trying again would have helped.

Also, now, if you mistype the screen name, you'll get a search box so you can try searching by screen name:

The Journals product folks are working on cleaning up our error message pages to make them more useful, but for now, there are still a few instances where you will see the old, unhelpful blue error pages. If this happens (and Journals isn't actually down), try going to that Journal's main page and look from there, or use one of the searches.

Also, unfortunately, the Public List page wasn't fully implemented for International Journalers, though we took out the old error page. This means if you typo a Journal title for a non-US Journal, you will get a funny looking error page; it's pretty much broken, though the net effect is the same as it was with the earlier error page.

International Journals are behind on a bunch of features and fixes, though they should get a bunch of these in the next release, which should happen next month.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: AOL Journals

Jamie Is Playing Favorites

So, Mister Irrelevant hisself, Jamie Mottram, has grabbed a big bit of blog fame -- if you go to the main page of blog search engine Technorati, and you hit refresh enough times, you will see a promo for Jamie Mottram's Favorite Blogs:

It's all part of an ongoing Technorati promotion around their Favorites functionality -- it's kind of like a beefed-up blogroll (sounds like a fast food); you create a list of your favorite blogs, and they will display the most recent entries from those blogs.

It's one easy way to keep tabs of what's going on in your favorite blogs, though it's primary purpose is to share your favorite blogs in a way that's a little more meaningful than a straight links list. I haven't created one yet, though I probably will, eventually.

The reason why Jamie is being featured is because Technorati has been highlighting the Favorites of a bunch of blog movers and shakers, so Jamie is swimming with some of the big fish in the big ole sphere o' blogs such as Wil Wheaton and Arianna Huffington:

(The photo being used in Jamie's Favorites promo was snapped by some of the Technorati folks during a visit to campus a few months ago.)

You'll note that I've been talking about Technorati a bunch lately (like all the tagging and blog search stuff). This isn't a payola thing -- they're pretty authoritative in the blog space, as seen by their April State of the Blogosphere report, which was just posted to their blog today. I will just paste their summary bullet points:

    * Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
    * The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
    * It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
    * On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
    * 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
    * Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

They have some interesting graphs, too, so check it out and see how many new neighbors you have in the blogosphere.

The "how many blogs in the blogosphere?" question used to be an issue of some contention by those who care about such things, since invariably, someone would say, "Well, you didn't count the X million blogs over here" and there would be big, barely comprehensible arguments about methodologies and spam blogs and inactive blogs, etc.

Thanks -- Joe

Sad News: Pamela's Passing

Hi folks -- sad news today -- as many of you have let me know, Journaler Pamela Hilger (His1Desire) passed away this weekend after a battle with cancer.

(Pam sent the above photo to my JournalsEditor predecessors in April of 2004.)

Pam's sister (who also has a Journal), posted the news in the comments thread of Pam's Journal. (Also see the Yahoo group set up for Pam.)

Blogger John has written an entry about Pam that includes some links to what some of you folks are doing to remember her; our current Guest Editor Andi has a link to a chat room, and Jimmy the Stupidsheet Guy has set up a page for donations.

For my own part, I can't say I knew Pam very well, though I did know her Journal enough that I suggested her as one of the people that might like to be interviewed back when AOL released the survey results on Why We Blog.

She was featured in the Washington Post in October (it's mirrored here in case the article isn't available). Pam talks about you all, and how much the people she met via her blog meant to her, including this:

"After I was diagnosed, the first people I turned to are my friends and journaling buddies," said Hilger, who reads about 50 other blogs. "They're never failing with support and encouragement."

If you're going to be posting about Pam, feel free to leave a comment with a link back to your blog here or with any of the other Journalers who are writing about her.

Alternately, you might want to tag your Pam entries so that everyone can find them without having to go to a specific blog -- here is the HTML for the tags that I'm using, though you're free to come up with your own:

<br><br>Tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/His1desire" rel="tag">His1desire</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/pamela+hilger" rel="tag">Pamela Hilger</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/remembering+pam" rel="tag">Remembering Pam</a>

(If you do use tags and you're going to paste the above HTML, make sure the pulldown menu in the formatting toolbar says "HTML", not "Text" -- if you prefer, you can just copy the tag links at the bottom of my post and paste them as clickable hyperlinks into your own entry).

Condolences, thoughts and prayers to Pam's family.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: His1desire, Pamela Hilger, Remembering Pam

Please Play With This: Tagging Beta

Hi folks -- with the R5 release, the tech folks put a new feature into beta for testing. It's a new front end for tagging your entries.

Now, before I go any further, I should say that it hasn't gone through the whole design and testing process yet -- the tech folks just kind of threw it together as a proof-of-concept to see if it would work. So the final product may look and act quite a bit differently. [Update, 12/19: Tagging is live now. It works as described here]

Also, this tag test doesn't work yet in Microsoft Internet Explorer (including the browser that is part of the AOL software) -- I've tried it using recent editions of Firefox and Netscape (which are both Mozilla-based browsers), and it works fine, but it this tag test won't yet work with Microsoft Internet Explorer.

[6/13 Update: The tag test now works with Microsoft Internet Explorer, so please read on and give it a shot.. Note that it does kill my next joke. Thanks -- Joe]

Did I mention that the tag test doesn't yet work with Microsoft Internet Explorer?

(The sound you just heard was the majority of readers clicking to close this browser window.)

Anyway, for the folks who are left, since you're the folks who will ultimately be using whatever tagging front end we come up with, we're asking that you play around a bit and tell us what you think.

Now, I've talked a little bit about tagging before -- it's a way for you to self-categorize your stuff, so if you have a blog entry about, say, SpongeBob Madonna (I just made that up), you can label (or "tag") your post with SpongeBob Madonna, so when people search for blog entries and content tagged with "SpongeBob Madonna", your blog posts should show up, along with everything else that's been tagged the same way.

This kind of creator-tagging is a way to help label and categorize stuff for search engines and such, that's a little different from a traditional category or taxonomy system.

For starters, anyone can do it (some tagging schemes, like what Flickr does, also give content creators the option to let readers tag stuff -- that's not what we're testing, though, we're just testing creator-tags).

Also, there isn't a rigid hierarchy you have to conform to. An example of a traditional hierarchy might be Celebrities > Entertainment > Music > Cartoon Parody > SpongeBob Madonna, etc. I mean, you can use all those tags if you want to be super-thorough, but you don't have to. It's all up to you.

Implementing the tag syntax is slightly unwieldy -- it looks like this (if you're pasting into your Journal, make sure that the pulldown menu in the formatting toolbar says "HTML,"  not "Text," because otherwise the machines won't interpret the HTML code, they will just display it and it won't work):

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/SpongeBob+Madonna" rel="tag">SpongeBob Madonna</a>

What all that does is two things:

1. It tells someone (in this case, the Technorati blog search engine) that this particular blog entry has been tagged "SpongeBob Madonna"

2. If you click on the link, you should get Technorati search results that will display everything tagged "SpongeBob Madonna"

Okay, enough about tagging theory. How does it work here?

First, to get to the Journals beta, just stick a "beta." in the front of your Journal's address. For example, my Journal's address is: http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/

So to get to the beta, I would go to: http://beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/

Please note that this is a beta, so it's all still being worked on. Also note that changes that you make in your beta Journal will show up in your production (live) Journal, so you probably want to create a test/play Journal and mess around with the beta version of that, not your real Journal.

Once you're in your beta Journal, click Add Entry. You'll see the standard entry creation window, though it has a few extras (I'm only going to talk about tagging right now, but you guys are pretty smart.)

What we're concerned with is a little entry field at the bottom of the window marked "Tags" -- when you're in "Text" mode (in the menu pulldown on the formatting toolbar), what you type in the Tags box will also show up in the body of your entry, at the bottom:

What you type in the Tags box will be made into a clickable tag (done up like what I mentioned above), and will show up in the body of your post as you type. It will be at the bottom though you can edit it or move it as needed ... with a caveat below).

If you switch to HTML view in the formatting toolbar, you'll be able to see all the HTML formatting done for you to make it a real tag. (Remember, when you're in HTML mode, you won't be able to type into the Tags box -- it will be greyed out):

* To separate tags, use commas. Words separated by spaces will be treated as phrases.

* What you type in the Tags box will show up in the body of the entry. The opposite, however, is not true. If you switch back and forth between the Tags box and the body, you'll see that the Tags box overrides and resets what's in the body entry (that's one of the sticky things that we're not sure is going to fly with users.)

Now, tagging is a type of labelling of content (what we call "metadata" - data that describes other data). In the User Interface and Information Design worlds, you shouldn't really mix metadata with content, which is kind of what we're doing here.

For this and other reasons, some of the UI folks think it would be better if we broke out the tag part from the entry part, though I won't try to articulate their thinking here, because I won't be able to do it justice.

Then again, it is relatively easy to do it this way. So that's one of the things we'd like to get your opinion on.

Naturally, this is just a first step, since tagging goes arm-in-arm with personal categories (so, for example, you could have a different category for all your knitting entries, your nature photo posts, your Weekend Assignment entries,your posts about Cow Orkers, etc.).

It's also easy for people to self-organize around shared tags. You could have a set of tags that you use for your book club or sports team or whatever, so you could easily find each others' posts, etc.

Anyway, let us know what you think -- I'm pretty sure Holly, Yoel, Susan and John (you know, all the Journals folks who have blogs that are listed in my sidebar) will be talking about this and other aspects of the Journals next phase developments in their blogs, too.

That's it for me right now -- have a great weekend, Easter and Passover.

Also, don't forget: Monday is Tax Day for most of us, so feel free to start panicking and running around in circles if you like.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: tagging test, AOL Journals

New Guest Editor's Picks for 4/14

Afternoon, all -- as posted to the Journals Message Board, meet this week's Guest Editor, Andi. She's a South Carolina artist who chose to highlight the Journals of strong women (or "Steel Magnolias," as she puts it); her top six blog picks are live now on the Journals Main Page:

* Saturday's Child
* The Dailies
* Ride Along With Me
* As I Am
* The Spine Line Too
* My Country Life

As is her perogative as Guest Editor, she's also highlighted a bunch of other favorite blogs in her entry, so take a look.

Don't forget, if you want your own chance at being a Guest Editor, send me an e-mail at JournalsEditor@aol.com. Please don't forget to include a link to your blog. 

Also, a lot of times, as I peruse the Guest Editors's comments, I see words to the effect of: "Hey! It's about time that [big dummy] Joe picked you as Guest Editor." This leads me to believe that you all are hiding other folks whom you think would make great Guest Editors.

Some of these folks may have already sent their names and blogs to me. Others may not have. If you know of someone whom you think would be a great Guest Editor, don't tell me -- ask them if they've written me to get added to the list, and if not, ask why not. I'm here to be told.

Got one more entry coming up.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: Guest Editor's Picks

Language Is Funny Thing, Yes?

Hi folks -- I'll get this week's Guest Editor's Picks up a little later today. I was also going to try to roll out the next edition of the Six-Pack Picks today, but let's just wait until next week, instead.

In the meantime, here are a few links relating to regional vocabulary and dialects in the U.S. It came up after an odd confluence of Web-surfing and lunch-eating (cheese steak with onion rings again; sorry, I didn't think it was picture-worthy.)

Now, Blogger John has touched on the whole Pop vs. Soda vs. Coke debate before; we move into food territory with a survey map of what people call "...a long sandwich that contains cold cuts, lettuce, and so on."

Out of 10,708 respondents to this (now-closed) survey, the results were:
a. sub (77.15%)
b. grinder (2.87%)
c. hoagie (6.98%)
d. hero (5.18%)
e. poor boy (1.77%)
f. bomber (0.01%)
g. Italian sandwich (0.46%)
h. baguette (0.25%)
i. sarney (0.03%)
j. I have no word for this (0.91%)
k. other (4.41%)

As per usual, the most interesting part of anything like this is reading the comments and posts by people who talk about how what they say is right and why people who call it something else are morons (like in this Fark thread, where I got the link.)

You can easily kill an afternoon going through the other survey map results -- they say it's a survey, but between you and me, it's actually a quiz -- the correct answers include:
* Water Fountain
* You stand in line
* Pill bug
* No, "might could" does not makes a bit of sense, please stop that immediately.

Then again, even those of you who speak your crazy moon languages can take comfort in the fact that at least you didn't answer "I have no word for this" for the sandwich question. How frustrating the lives of those folks must be.

Thanks -- Joe


Tag: crazy moon language

Meet the New Boss (Plus, a Look at Macs & PCs)

Hi folks -- here's the new laptop, up and running; you can see it sitting in its dock:

It's next to my old laptop, which they're letting me hang on to for a few days so I can make sure I have all the files I need off of it.

You can also see an inspection mirror next to my coffee mug -- it's like a dental mirror on a telescoping rod. It comes in handy for looking behind stuff, like when I'm trying to plug something in.

(Note that the photo is framed to show as little of the mess on my desk as possible.)

The IT guys also had to replace the hub I inherited that sits under my desk -- it was apparently toasted after 10 years of existence, which is 5 years past its expected service life.

Speaking of IT, here's a somewhat amusing post that was on the Digg.com main page today: "Stupid user tricks: Eleven IT horror stories."

When it comes to computer stuff, we are all at some point or another "stupid users." (Though I hope none of us would try to dry out a Coke-drenched laptop with a heat gun -- you know, what they use to strip paint with. Result? Melted laptop.)

Like I said, I have a few more days ahead of me, transferring files, reinstalling programs, and tweaking settings to get things just the way I like (that is, because it's the way I'm used to doing things).

Anyway, this reminds me of a blog post I never finished from back in January, which is sort of related, so I will dust it off:  It starts with a TUAW blog entry, "Common Mistakes Made by New Mac Users", and was followed by "Top 30 Mistakes Made by New Mac Users."

The stories from commenters are the more interesting part; many are of the "oh, look what the dumb user did here"-type; some are the usual PC vs. Mac vs. Linux flamewar material.

More eye-opening are the behaviors that are "dumb", not because of any inherent stupidity on the user's part, but just because they are a result of inertia -- people get so used to doing stuff in a certain way, that even when they make a change and they no longer have to do something, they keep trying to do it (for example, if you switch from PC to Mac, you don't have to defragment your hard drive any more -- the Mac OS X file system takes care of this as you go along. This does not stop people from trying, driving them crazy in the process.)

A more tangible analogy: Say you're a life-long motorcycle rider, and that after you switch to driving a car, you keep trying to put the kickstand down when you park. Kind of like that. It's not really "dumbness" -- it's more of a lack of adaptability.

Of course, if enough people are making the same mistake, it's quite possible that the designers did something wrong (that is, have a design flaw), not the users.

Now, I'm pretty much cross-platform when it comes to Mac vs. PC, but here's an example where I still get tripped up: When I'm using the Firefox Web browser, I usually hit Control-H when I want to bring up the browser's History of previously visited links.

On the Mac, Command-H (Command is pretty much the functional equivalent of Control on the Mac), means "hide the current application window." The keyboard combo I should be using on the Mac is Shift-Command-H.

I usually manage to do this several times a day -- it irritates me.

Anyway, just an excuse to dust off an unused post. Also, here's a photo of the Mac that sits under my desk:

Thanks -- Joe

Here's Where We Are

Morning, folks --

Journals Technical Project [not Product] Manager Yoel reports that the AOL Canada Journals problem was fixed last night.  Apologies to our northern neighbors (sorry, neighbours) for the inconvenience.

Yoel also notes that the Journals team also snuck in an added bonus feature with R5 -- if you subscribe to a Journal by using a feedreader program or Web site (such as the My AOL beta), you can subscribe to the comments feed for an entry. This means that you'll be able to view the comments for a particular entry, along with the entry content itself.

If you don't know what any of that means, don't worry, I will talk more about feeds and such later.  The comment feed implementation isn't the user-friendliest thing out there right now, and the Journals team will work on making it easier to find and use, so consider it an undocumented feature for right now.

In the meantime, Yoel has pledged to keep posting in his blog (the daily grind) at least once a week to talk about Journals stuff and other things, so please be sure to keep him honest.

In other news, my number came up and the Internal Computing folks replaced my laptop with a new machine last night, so I got that going for me. ( I was pretty happy with my old machine, but it was starting to get a little beat up. I guess it was just its time.)

On the other hand, that means I will be spending most of the morning (and probably the day) transferring files, reinstalling programs, adjusting settings, and doing a bunch of other stuff to get things just so.

It also means that my desk is a complete disaster. More than usual. I would post a photo, except I have to reinstall the camera software and Photoshop first.

Thanks -- Joe

Update on AOL Canada Journals

Hi folks -- just an update -- AOL Canada Journals are still down. It is not a prelude to invasion. It looks like something broke during the transition to R5. 

The tech folks are continuing to investigate; the problem can currently be duplicated in one of the three different levels of test environments, though the other two are okay -- it's kind of odd.

The problem doesn't appear to be affecting any of the other International journals. As always, please let me or Product Manager Susan know if you are having a Journals problem. Sorry for the trouble.

Thanks -- Joe

Journals Release R5 Is Live!

Morning, folks -- Journals Product Manager Susan reports that Journals Release R5 was successfully installed to production early this morning.

I've gotten a report of a problem with AOL Canada Journals, which I have passed along to the tech team, but other than that, we seem to be okay.

Please let us know if you're having any Journals problems.

As I  mentioned yesterday, the primary differences you will see in R5 are:

* The All About Me size limit has been raised from 1,000 characters to 25,000 characters, which gives you a whole lot more room to talk about yourself.

* There's a new Journals Public List Page, which will show you all of your Journals, plus the publicly-available Journals of any screen name that you specify.

The rest of the work was done on the back end, so you probably won't see any difference.

Now that R5 is out the door, planning and development will proceed with the next release (R6), which we'll be discussing as things progress. Thanks -- Joe

Coming Soon: Journals Public List Page and More

Hi folks -- so, Journals
Product Manager Susan says that this morning's install (which
I
mentioned yesterday) went pretty smoothly, so we're all clear
for tomorrow morning's install of the Journals R5
Release.

Here's
Susan's entry on what's coming in R5.

In
short, there's a lot of back-end and
infrastructure work to fix bugs
that you might not have noticed but that still caused problems, as well
as work that supports upcoming cool stuff like
mobile blogging (moblogging), video
and more (things that we've been talking about for a while,
but we're getting close, honest).

Also, something
you've been asking for for a while -- the "All About Me"
character limit is going from 1,000
characters to 25,000 characters, so you'll
have a lot more room to play around with.

(I'm sorry
it took so long, but it wasn't just a matter of changing a number from
"1" to "25" -- the tech folks had to go in and do whatever
database voodoo it is that they do. They'd actually
been running into some problems, but I think they've got it ready for install.)

The other major change you'll see is the
Journals Public List Page -- as the name suggests,
it's a page that will list all of your publically available Journals
for a particular screen name. Here's how it's going to
work:

Now, the way AOL Journals addresses (URLs) are
set up, they go like this: http://journals.aol.com/SCREEN_NAME/JOURNAL_TITLE (so my Journal's URL is
http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/).

Before,
if you went to http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/, you would get
the usual blue "Not Found" error page.

With
yesterday's install, they started doing some work to prepare for the
Public List page. Right now, if you go to
http://journals.aol.com/SCREEN_NAME/ (where you replace SCREEN_NAME
with the screen name you're currently logged in with), you will see a
page that looks kind of like this (only it will show your own
Journals):

This
is NOT the Public List Page!

This page is
kind of a glitch page; it was live but never really
used -- you could previously only get to it by accident; usually by
typing any non-supported character in a Journal URL (for example, try:
http://journals.aol.com/johnmscalzi/byt^heway).

It's
kind of ugly, and it has some information that isn't
really useful to people (do you really need to
know your locale is "en-US"?).

What
is going live with R5 is the Journals
Public List Page, which you can see in beta right now. I will
use myself as an example: beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/
--

That's the owner's
view of the Public list page. It shows me all the Journals I
have, both public and private, that I have under my JournalsEditor
screen name. In some ways, it's like the widget (remember Myrtle?)
on the Journals main
page.

In addition, if
someone else goes to http://beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/
(and eventually, journals.aol.com/journalseditor after R5 goes live),
they will see all of my public Journals (I only have the one there,
Magic Smoke) and only the private Journals that
they're allowed to read (because they're on the
roster.)

For example, if any of you folks go to
http://beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/,
you should only see this:

So, you're not going to be able to
see my test blogs, which are private.

The Public
List Page is just a neat little extra that will help you see people's
publicly available Journals. It was done to support other work, but I
think it will be pretty useful by itself.

Thanks
--Joe

Journals R5 Release Is Coming (Scheduled Outage, 4-6AM ET, 4/11)

So, the Journals R5 Release is coming (as you might be aware, the Journals development team has been working under agile development methods, which I've written about before -- it basically means putting out smaller releases every 4-8 weeks).

I will let Journals Product Manager Susan do the heavy lifting on telling us what specifically is coming with R5; it's scheduled for an early-morning install on Wednesday, 4/12; in the meantime, the Journals tech folks will be doing some work tonight in preparation for the install, so there will be a scheduled outage from 4-6 AM ET, Tuesday, April 11. Journals will be unavailable during most of this time.

Assuming all goes well tonight, the full install of R5 will happen in the early morning of Wednesday, April 12 -- it will be a shorter outage.

Thanks -- Joe

Don't Be Stupid

Hi folks -- as part of my continuing series of how not to do stupid things on your blog, here's an item that was on Obscurestore.com on Friday; it seems that a few misguided youths videotaped themselves firebombing an abandoned Air Force hangar; naturally, following the dictum "Sharing Is Caring," they posted the video to a MySpace profile (you can see where this is going, right?), leading to the article headlined: "MySpace video of hangar bombing leads to teen arrests."

If these criminal masterminds aren't enough, the article rounds up a few other recent incidents involving MySpace, blogs, or other social networking tools, including a look at the other side of the law, where six Lexington, Kentucky police officers were suspended for questionable content that they posted online.

In another item, from a listserv here at work, there was an article from over the weekend in the L.A. Times, about one journalist-mom's experiences wranglings over her 13-year-old daughter's MySpace profile. According to MySpace's terms of service, you have to be 14 to set up a profile, so there's a lot of negotiating, not to mention "You're ruining my life!" thrown around as boundaries are pushed and privileges revoked.

It's interesting in a train-wrecky kind of way, though the writer seems fairly adept and nothing really bad happens; plus, she's pretty aware of the fact that her daughter can always do an end-run around her if she wants to.

Thanks -- Joe

Screen Shots 101

Hi folks -- hope you all had a pleasant weekend.

I got a question over the weekend from reader Josh who asked me how I make those screen shots (that is, pictures of what's currently on the screen, also called screen grabs or screen captures) that I usually illustrate my "how to" entries with; this comes up from time to time, so I thought I'd list out the steps.

Now, I'm primarily using a PC running Windows XP, so when I want to take a screen shot, this is what I usually do:

1. Hit the "Prt Scr" button (or Print Screen) button on my keyboard. (It's on the top row of function keys, next to your F12 button):

This takes a picture of what's currently on my screen and copies it to my computer's clipboard (it's where information is stored when you cut or copy something to paste it somewhere else).

Please disregard the fuzz by the End key. It has since been removed.

2. I switch to the graphics editor program I'm using (usually Photoshop), open a new document, then paste what's stored in my clipboard using the Control-V key combination (Control-V is pretty much the universal keyboard shortcut for "Paste.")

3. Then, I will edit the screenshot as needed; this usually involves cropping and resizing the photo, since by definition, a screenshot is a picture of your screen, so it's going to be pretty big; then I do whatever else I need to, including adding notes, circling things by drawing borders (in Photoshop, a border is called a "stroke" -- it's under the Edit menu), etc.

4. When I'm all done, I upload it to my FTP storage space using the Web-based File Manager, then put it in my Journal (here's how to do all this).

If you take a lot of screenshots, there are a number of freeware and shareware utilities that can make things easier; just do a search on any shareware site.

Also, if you're using Mac OS X, it comes with a utility program called Grab that you can use to take screen shots.

When it comes to editing photos, if you don't have Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, you can try Microsoft Paint (which comes with every Windows PC), or one ofthe free editing programs I've mentioned before.

In a bit of trivia, I used to highlight things in my screen shots by drawing red boxes around them; when I saw Product Manager Susan doing her screen shots, though, I saw that she used red ovals, which makes more sense -- you don't usually see ovals used in interfaces, so when you circle something, it stands out more.

Hope this helps. Thanks -- Joe

Tag: Screen Shot, How To

TV & Blogs: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together?

So, my last post of
the day (please, please make it my last post of the day), is inspired
by (which is to say, directly rips off) a
USA Today article from
Tuesday:

TV
goes to blogs: Shows add extra information as treat for
fans.

(The photo of the 'Grey's Anatomy' cast is the same photo as in the article,
but I didn't steal it -- I got it from our photo guys, who got it from
the ABC publicity folks.)

This is going to be a long
post, with a lot of links, but it's about our friend
TV, so that's okay.

Now, as with any
decent craze, TV shows and movies are always trying to cash in.
(Remember the internet-themed movies like 'Hackers' and
'The
Net'?). Blogs are no exception, though they're not just being
used as plot devices -- they're meant to try to get people
more invested in a show, and bring them closer and
get them more involved.

When it comes to TV
blogging, there are your three basic types of
blogs:

* Blogs by outside
commentators: Fans, critics, haters, anyone who wants to get
on a soapbox and grind their axe or sing a show's praises to the world.


* Blogs by show insiders: Blogs
done by people involved with the show, whether it's on-air talent or
behind-the-scenes folks.

* Blogs by show
characters: Blogs written from the viewpoint and voice of
characters featured in the show, which may reference events on the
show. (This is an extension of TV & movie Web sites that teased
or expanded on elements used on screen, to try to build interest and
provide additional information or
backstory.)

Commentator blogs
(say, our own TV
Squad, or blog/forum Television Without
Pity) are pretty straightforward; blogs are just a new venue
for the kind of online community that had been going on in Web pages
and message boards, though the blog format makes it real easy for the
entire community to realtime blog during the show (as in the '24'
show category of Dave Barry's blog).

Blogs
by show insiders can be either really
interesting or really
self-indulgent (or sometimes both) -- it can be kind
of like getting a directory's commentary without having to wait for the
DVD.

One of the first shows to really take advantage
of the blog format (and I'm sure someone will tell me I'm wrong) was
'Battlestar
Galactica' -- creator Ron Moore was in his blog early and
often, and his forthrightness and candor probably helped him
win over a lot of original series purists who were angry at him for,
say, turning Starbuck into a female character.

Mr.
Moore's blog was followed by producer David
Eick's video blog, which is to say it's video and not really
a blog, but it's a quibble, really.

The Sci-Fi network's blogs are
great examples of show insider blogs; for example, their 'Stargate' blog is
done by Alex Levine, a script coordinator, who is blogging because
everyone else is "too darn busy" putting out two TV series. And they're
very upfront about that. (Is it actually written by
a group of interns? Who knows, but it seems very
authentic.)

(Now, their other blog right now is for
'Tripping the
Rift', which I guess I'm supposed to watch because it's got sci-fi, pottymouths and big CGI boobs, though I don't -- it's done in the voices of the
characters. Or was done, I should say, it seems to have stopped
updating back in October. More on character blogs in a
bit.)

The other behind-the-scenes blogs mentioned in
the USA Today article are for 'NCIS'
(by actress Pauley Perrette), the 'CSI: Miami'
Writer's Blog, 'The
Unit' (by producer and Delta Force founding member Eric L.
Haney), Grey
Matter (the 'Grey's Anatomy' writers' blog), and Out on a Limb, by
'Sons and Daughters' creator Fred Goss.

Of this
bunch, only the last two take comments, which leads
to that philosophical question, is a blog without comments really a
blog? Personally, as I've said before, I think a blog that doesn't take
comments is kind of bloggy, but isn't really a
blog.

The last of my arbitrary categories is the
show character's blog. Of the ones listed in the
article, I've seen the Nigelblog of 'Crossing
Jordan' used on the air. Of the rest, whose shows I watch even less
of:

* The 'Medium' Dream
Journal isn't really a blog (even as these things
go).

* Neither is the 'Boston
Legal' site

* Of 'The Office' blogs, one
is a MySpace of
receptionist Pam, the other is Dwight Schrute's
blog.

* 'How I Met Your Mother' has Barney's
Blog (the Neil Patrick Harris character,
apparently)

* 'Grey's Anatomy' (I did see that one
with the bomb in the guy's chest) also has Emerald City Bar and
The Nurse's
Station, two blogs that supplement the stories presented
on-air, using locations and characters used on the
show.

One thing that I saw about the ABC show blogs,
is that poking around with the URL led me to http://blogs.abc.com, which
redirects to http://www.drrobinscorpio.com,
which is Robin's Daily Dose, from 'General Hospital' (not 'All My Children', duh -- or did she also have a role on AMC? -- either way, I note that the
soap got no love in the article).

Now, I don't want
to offend any of you soap fans, but one thing I found pretty
darn creepy about this last one was that the comments, presumably
left by real people, are written as if the characters are
real. (I had to check IMDB to make sure "Dr.
Scorpio", as improbable a name as it is for a
non-supervillian, wasn't some kind of technical
adviser.)

Shared fictions, roleplaying and created realities are
all well and good, but I mean, yikes.


Of the three types of TV blogs, I
probably like the behind-the-scenes blogs best,
since commentary is everywhere and the fictional character blogs aren't
really compelling unless you're a fan of the show. Maybe I just want to
be in show business. There's no business like it, after
all.

Have a great weekend, everyone. Thanks --
Joe

Tag: television

You Probably Don't Want to Read This Entry About Copyright

So, as I mentioned in yesterday's entry about plagiarism
and attribution, I wanted to talk a little about some
copyright issues. But do I
really?

After all, I Am Not A
Lawyer (IANAL -- it's an
acronym in common use); I am also not a copyright expert or authority
on intellectual property law.

Besides, all of these
are heady and mind-numbing (albeit important)
topics, especially for a Friday early-evening.

So
you probably should just ignore what I'm
saying.

Additionally, I don't have anything
substantive to add about:

* RSS
aggregation of individuals's content by commercial
entities

* The Creative Commons
license

* The question: "Are all mug shots in
the Public Domain?"

* The Public
Domain

* Public Domain
Images

* Or even, the broader issue of
plagiarism

Instead,
I wanted to dust off a couple of links about a Scary Copyright
Question from back in December (as seen in BoingBoing):

What
If Copyright Law Were Strongly Enforced in the
Blogosphere?

I'm not going to
restate the whole article, but I will boil it down to
this:

* "Fair Use" is probably not
as permissive as you might think -- small quotes or excerpts
are probably okay, but if you start copy-and-pasting large portions of
news articles or other blogs, etc, you are most likely, technically,
violating copyright (even if it's a noncommercial
use)

* People online have been able to "get away
with it" so far, just because in most cases, copyright holders have
bigger fish to fry than your average individual
blogger.

* What if copyright
holders started going after all those small fry bloggers, just like the
RIAA is going after individual music
downloaders?

The article also links to a Wall Street
Journal article from October about stock
photo companies (like Getty and Corbis) and how they're
trying to go after folks who use their photos without
permission.

Talking about Copyright and Fair
Use issues is a big, headache-inducing,
legalistic mess, though it may be more palatable in comic book
form (as recently linked on fark.com).

Anyway,
I'm not trying to chill anyone's blogging. It looks
to me like the genie is out of the bottle, and copyright will have to
start adapting to the big ole sphere o' blogs (see the Creative Commons
license), rather than the reverse, but then again, I am not an expert
in, well, much of anything. 

My lack of
expertise shows as I finish pounding out a large
chunk of not-too-light reading on copyright and fair use issues, that
doesn't answer any questions and could conceivably cause me more
heartache than any possible benefit, on a Friday evening. (What was I
thinking?)

Thanks. -- Joe

New Guest Editor's Picks for 4/7

Hi folks -- our Guest Editor this week is Jackie, another freshly minted adult who uses her blog as an outlet. As posted to the Journals Message Board, Jackie's Guest Editor's Picks are up on the Journals Main Page:

Stop by and see her "extraordinary" top six blog picks. (Note: Some of Jackie's blog picks contain profanity):

* The Thursday Night Jam Sessions
* Someday I'll Get There
* My Life
* The United States of Beth
* Make This Girl Smile
* Where The Heart Is

On an editorial note, "freshly minted adult" is code for "just turned 18", except hopefully not as creepy-sounding.

Why does 18 matter? Well, in order to be Guest Editor, you pretty much have to be 18 (since we feature your photo); if you're under 18, it's still doable, although it's a lot more complicated, since it involves parental consent forms and such, and as we all know, I am outrageously lazy.

Anyway, if you want your own chance at being a Guest Editor, send me an e-mail at JournalsEditor@aol.com. Please don't forget to include a link to your blog.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: Guest Editor's Picks

Change Your Journal's Time Stamp

This is sort of a follow-up on my entry about changing your Journal's style -- a little while back, Suzy from Adventures of Suzy Colorado sent me a question: A fellow Journaler lives on the West Coast, but was getting an Eastern Time Zone timestamp on her Journal entries -- how could she fix this?

I'm not sure how the setting might have gotten messed up, but I checked with the tech folks, and this is how you change your timestamp:

1. On your Journal's main page, click on the blue "Edit Journal" button
2. Click the link to "Change the style of your entries and manage comments"
3. Find the dropdown menu for "Display times in:"
   
   
4. Change the time zone to "US/Pacific" (or whatever's right for you)
5. Click the "Save" button to save your changes.

That's all there is to it.

Looking at the list, we've got the 4 major time zones for the lower 48, plus Alaska, Aleutian Islands, Hawaii, and Samoa.

Arizona, Michigan and Indiana also get separate listings: Arizona, for its stubborn refusal to go to Daylight Savings Time; not sure why Michigan has its own listing, since everything except the Western Upper Peninsula (which is Central time) is Eastern Time, and both follow Daylight Savings; Indiana just went over to Daylight Savings Time, including the four counties in Central time zone, so that listing would seem to be redundant, as well:

If anyone's blog timestamp isn't showing the correct time because our time zone info is messed up, let me know.

Now, if necessary, I'm sure the tech folks could clean up the time zone listing, though of course, it would have to be done at the expense of other work. What could we drop from an upcoming release in order to make any time zone fixes? How about custom skins/styles? Surely it would be worth losing custom skins/styles so that... okay, okay, stop, I was kidding.

As I've noted before, it never hurts to look at settings or preferences, to see if there's stuff that you can tweak to get it just right for the way you work.

Finally, here's a peek into my creative process -- originally, I was going to make this a big entry describing everything you could change on this particular screen; here's the graphic I did:

As you can see, it is very... oval. I decided to talk about it in smaller chunks, wisely I think.

Thanks -- Joe