Ever want to know what bloggers are saying about a web page but been too lazy to do anything more than watch slick animations? You clearly have a fever for which the only cure is Blogger Web Comments, our new extension for Firefox 1.5. Once it’s installed, you can see instant results from Blog Search showing you posts about the page you’re looking at. Plus, there’s a Blogger posting form built in, so you can immediately make a post on your own blog. Glen Murphy has a little story about making the extension in his announcement post on the Google Blog.

You’ll need the new Firefox 1.5 to use this, which makes the three to four minutes directly following your reading of this post the perfect time to try Firefox out, or upgrade if you’re still using Firefox 1.0. Download Firefox from http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/.

There are more nifty things you can install to make Firefox even more useful. There’s the Google Toolbar for Firefox (which includes a BlogThis! button for more Blogger posting possibilities) and the extensions described in the Wired News article, “The Firefox Hacks You Must Have.”

Just wanted to remind everybody that the annual MacWorld SF blogger lunch is coming up in a few weeks, so mark your calendars!

Upcoming.org: Macworld SF bloggers lunch and schmoozefest at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (Tuesday, January 10, 2006)

A group photo from last year:


(originally uploaded by pinwheel, more here)

Update: Shellen posted a bit about it too.

Last week the folks from Lovento wrote in, letting us know that their site now supports Blogger's API. You can see the functionality in action on their Venue pages.

Like Blogger-powered Diary of a London Call Girl, a few months ago a Brazilian blogger (nsfw) landed a book deal, and apparently it's selling quite well:

"In just over a month, it has sold some 30,000 copies and is already in its third edition -- a huge success in a country where only a fraction of the population reads books. It also ranks third on Brazil's bestseller list for nonfiction books, neck and neck with international hits like "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner."

[Via Y! Odd News]

Not quite, but according to the CBC, online journalists are now eligible for the Pulitzer Prize:

"Internet journalism received a leap in recognition Wednesday as the Pulitzer Prize Board widened its submission guidelines to include online material for all of its journalism categories."

"'The board believes it has taken a significant step in recognition of the widening role of online journalism at newspapers,' prize administrator Sig Gissler said in a statement. Online material will be considered beginning with the 2006 competition (which honours work done in 2005)."

You've still gotta write for a newspaper though:

"The eligibility guidelines 'will continue to be restricted to newspapers published daily, Sunday or at least once a week during the calendar year,' Gissler added, but will be widened to included the online editions of those newspapers."

Can you tell it’s a bit of a slow Friday at Blogger? Anyway, here’s Prashant and me being happy and excited in our new Blogger hoodies, which just showed up in a big box of warm fuzziness.

You can be just as rockin’ by getting Blogger gear at the Google Store. When people ask, you can say the B stands for “B’awesome.” It’s a great way to make new friends.

In actual Blogger news, the site’s up, spam’s down, and, as always, we’re working on great new features. So all is right in the b’awesomeosphere.

Darren Rowse, blogging at ProBlogger, posts 11 tips for increasing pageviews. This is mostly in the context of advertising on blogs (nothing wrong with that: How do I put AdSense on my blog?), but the tips are good even if you don’t sell ads on your blog. After all, if you can get readers to read more of your blog the first time they come, they’re more likely to find something they like and want to come back for more.

I think the best of Darren’s tips are those about linking your posts together: referring to posts you’ve made in the past, writing posts in series, or even just highlighting your best posts in a spot on the sidebar (or at the bottom). You may recall that last tip from Jacob Nielsen’s usability tips for weblogs, something I wrote about a few months back. (See! I’m doing it! Go go Blogger Buzz pageviews!)

Personally, I discourage tip #8, which says to include only summaries in your RSS feeds. I likes me my Google Reader, and get a bit annoyed by sites that only have the summaries instead of full posts. I think it’s better to include other ways to get your feed-reading readers to come to your site, perhaps with the aforementioned intra-blog links, or (ProBlogger tip #10) encouraging community in your comments.

Disclaimer: Pageview tips not effective during Blog*Spot outages.

[via Freshblog]

You may have noticed a bit of an unplanned outage for Blog*Spot blogs yesterday afternoon. We’re really sorry about this. There was an unlikely problem with some of the Blog*Spot machines that took our engineers and operations folks a few hours of work to track down. In something of a Catch-22, both Buzz and Blogger Status are hosted on Blog*Spot, so we weren’t able to get the word out that things weren’t working properly and that we were fixing them.

We didn’t lose any posts because of this, but if you posted to your blog during the outage, there’s a chance that you’ll need to republish to see the changes. (How do I republish my blog?)

The good news is that, were this to ever happen again, we’d be able to diagnose and fix it in minutes, not hours, now that we’re aware of the potential problem. Also, we’ll be improving our outage indicator so that we’ll be able to communicate about unexpected things like this much more directly in the future.

Again, we apologize. We wanted to read blogs yesterday afternoon, too, so we totally understand any frustration you may have had.

Because of the improvements we've made over the past several weeks, the amount of spam hosted on Blog*Spot has been significantly reduced. However, some of this improvement may not have been observed by third-party search services who rely on our Recently Updated list.

This week, we've pushed out improvements to this changes file such that we are filtering out suspected spammers. By relying on the updates in our Recently Updated list, other services that index our blogs can now take advantage of the spam classification on which we've been relying.

Based on a blogging-themed version of the Monopoly board from littleoslo, gaming site Kurnik just launched Blogpoly. From their post about the launch:

For a geek like me, there was no better theme for a Monopoly-like game that I planned to add (even Ghettopoly couldn't compare).

Before you give it a try, however, please be warned that the game is highly addictive. Seriously. The Polish flavour of Blogpoly launched a few days ago is now attracting crowds of more than 3,000 simultaneous players, nearly as much as the most popular game on Kurnik (a Polish card game of Thousand).

I’m happy with where Blogger is, especially since we’re sharing the color with some cool people. Though, while the yellows can be pretty good, when I play I favor the oranges if I can get them. Nothing like catching someone right out of jail with a big ol’ hotel.

[via Joystiq]

Previously, we tied the post-level setting for Backlinks to the Comments setting. Turns out that proved a little limiting for some folks. So we've just pushed additional options that will enable you to control your Backlinks settings separately.

These options can be found in the collapsable section we just added to the bottom of the post composition window. (Yay! I don't need to see the "change date" options all the time anymore.)

Marc Hedlund, blogging at O'Reilly Radar, makes a case for adding perhaps-inconsequential tidbits about yourself to your blog as a way to give your readers a better sense of who you are and therefore make you more memorable to them. He writes:

It turns out, then, for me at least, that reading about someone's cat and what they ate for breakfast and seeing their Flickr photos of the swirls in their coffee and all that adds up to a picture of a person in my mind; not a full likeness, but enough for an actual presence in memory; and with that picture, I associate the things they tell me with them, and remember what they say surprisingly well. Far better than my memory usually works, unattended.

That's the only excuse I need!

Hot Dog Spot "is the weblog of a crack team of 'dogophiles' who are hot on the trail of the best dog in Los Angeles!"

Godspeed, dogophiles. I wish someone would do this for San Francisco. My vote is for Rosamunde Sausage in lower Haight.

In addition to their Legal Guide, the EFF has published a Guide to Student Blogging; here's a snippet:

Do I Have More Protections for a Personal Blog?

Yes. In Emmett v. Kent School District, 92 F. Supp.2d 1088 (W.D. Wash. 2000), the court held that public school officials had violated a student's First Amendment rights by punishing the student for his personal website, the "Unofficial Kentlake High Home Page." The court held that "[a]lthough the intended audience was undoubtedly connected to Kentlake High School, the speech was entirely outside of the school's supervision or control." Likewise, in Flaherty v. Keystone Oaks School Dist., 247 F.Supp.2d 698 (W.D. Pa. 2003) a federal court found a public school's policy, which prohibited "inappropriate, harassing, offensive or abusive" behavior, was unconstitutional because "the policy could be (and is) read by school officials to cover speech that occurs off school premises and that is not related to any school activity in an arbitrary manner."

Every once in a great while (and much less now than in the past), we have to take Blogger down and poke at it for a bit. Blogger Status is the most comprehensive place for outage alerts, but who wants to have to check another blog? Now we have a new way to let you know of upcoming outages: the Blogger status indicator. It’ll show up on your Dashboard and on pages under the Posting tab and warn of any scheduled outages that might disrupt your posting.


This indicator checks in with Blogger every minute to see if there’s an outage coming up. This means that, even if you’re working on a long post and haven’t refreshed the page in a while, you’ll get notification just the same.

As an added bonus, if the indicator can’t get in touch with Blogger, either because we’re down or because you’re not connected to the Internet, it’ll warn you that you probably won’t be able to post.


Despite all this, if by some trick of fate you lose a post — to a Blogger outage, to network trouble, or to a browser crash — you can usually recover it by using your browser’s back button or the recover post link on the posting page.

Carla Johnson for AP on rise of blogging by senior citizens:

Joe Jenett, a Detroit-area Web designer who has been tracking the age of bloggers for a personal project called the Ageless Project, said he has noticed more older bloggers in the past two years.

"Isn't that phenomenal? And their writing is vibrant," Jenett said. He noted that sites such as Blogger.com give step-by-step instructions and free hosting, making it simpler to self-publish on the Web.

As a consequence of adding the PuppetVision blog to Blogs of Note, I contributed to overwhelming the quota for their image hosting. Sorry ’bout that. I don’t know if it’s helpful or extortion to mention Blogger images as a way to post images without worrying about being BlogsOfNoteDotted. (Yeah, you heard me. I coined a phrase.)

So check out PuppetVision, but be nice to their servers and close your eyes. And now’s as good a time as any to give credit and admit that I crib my Blogs of Note nominations from Luxo, a blog about Pixar.

We've just introduced a frequently-asked for feature, comment moderation. By using this feature, you can approve or reject what would-be commenters are looking to post before it goes live on your blog.

This is useful in situations where you're looking for a bit more control over the conversation hosted on your blog. Additionally, comment moderation will prevent unwanted comment spam if previous deterrants like word verification and rel="nofollow" have proven insufficient.

You can choose to moderate your comments via either email or from blogger.com. To enable the feature go to the Settings | Comment tab of your blog. As always, more information on how to use this feature can be in the help.

A couple days ago, I picked up David Marusek's novel, Counting Heads, based on Cory Doctorow's ecstatic review over on BoingBoing.

Last night I finished it, after a week of franticly reading it in every spare second - unable to stop because on each page it seemed there was a new thumbnail of an idea or invention that would tease me along to the next chapter. Counting Heads has that remarkable quality of great science fiction - totally absorbing the reader in the intracies of complete world.

Just now I went to see what Blog Search would tell me about what others were saying about Counting Heads. And I realized that Dave Marusek has a Blog*Spot blog he started to talk about the release of his book.

Sweet!

(Interestingly, whenever authors start blogs people from both the publishing industry and bloggers themselves are, generally, excited. There's none of the "how do these two media relate to one another" angst that's been the central conversation around blogs and journalism for lo, these many years. Hmmm.)

It's November, and it's novel-writing time! If you haven't signed up already, you can do so at NaNoWriMo.org, or just dive in and start writing. In a few short weeks, you could have your very own shiny new novel. (Hint: Blog your writing as you go, to create a month-long serialized novel for all your friends. It's fun, and it's harder to quit if you have readers waiting for the next installment.) Good luck!

I remember the first time I read Tony Pierce's blog because I'd only been working on Blogger for a short time, and the fact that I hadn't heard of him was pretty bad from a first impressions standpoint.

But my fellow Pyrate (Sutter) tipped me off, and the first post I read was about how the newspaper in Hell is so bad. When I realized that for several weeks Tony had been writing his whole blog from Hell after having been escorted there by the spectre of Kurt Cobain, I was floored. From a "getting what this whole blogging thing can really be" perspective, it was a big moment for me.

Tony's got a new book out called Stiff which collects all of his infernal posts into a choice of awesome covers. I just finished re-reading them this weekend and I couldn't recommend it more highly.

As a good number of folks have noted, the cover story of next month's Forbes magazine features an article titled "Attack of the Blogs."

Seeing as how the article is already being picked apart by the web at large for saying things like "Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob," I thought I'd take the opportunity to say a couple nice things about the piece:

• The article points out that all kinds of blogs are being created each day and in amazing numbers. Of course, this point is made in the very last paragraph, but still. Forbes readers now know, for example, that hundreds of thousands of new blogs are created each day across the web and that this service gets more visitors "than each of the Web sites of the New York Times, USAToday and the Washington Post." Neat!


• A lot of folks have taken issue with a sidebar to the article that includes tips for how companies can Fight Back against the bloggers. But one of the tips is Start Your Own Blog. A fine idea, really. Lots of companies are already doing this as a way to have an authentic voice on the web and to better connect with their users. It'd be a shame if the thought only seemed appealing as a way of Getting Even ... but whatever it takes.


• The publication of the article serves as an opporunity to remind everyone of the excellent work done by the fine people at the EFF in putting together their Legal Guide for Bloggers.
  

And with that I must return to clubbing baby seals so that I might use their skins to publish my slanders.

We've pushed some additional changes this week to make it more difficult for spam to be created using our API and other tools (this includes Hello/Picasa, Flickr, w.bloggar, ecto and many others).

The downside to the API changes is that those users whose blogs have been improperly classified as spammy have been unable to post outside of the blogger.com interface. For these users, we've pushed a change so that posts will be set to draft if created through the API. This way no content will be lost and users can go to blogger.com to solve the CAPTCHA and post their content.

We've also introduced a way for users who have been improperly classified to let us know that their blog is in need of manual review. More information on that can be found in the Help.

Sounds like cooking blog Chocolate & Zucchini just scored a book deal:

"Life changes? Yes, indeed: today seems like the perfect day to announce that I have just signed a book deal with a NYC publisher, that I have quit my dayjob and that I now live the happy life of a full-time writer, working on the book and a miscellany of other projects. Excited, thrilled, gleeful and proud is how I feel -- but most delightful of all, free. There is no price tag on that."

I wonder if she read Biz's essay?

[via Baking Fairy]

Today we are posting a revised version of the word verification system we released yesterday. With this version we have resolved a number of the problems from the initial launch - the most important of which was the inability of some users to solve the CAPTCHAs presented.

There should also be fewer false positives. However, as I mentioned earlier, with any automatic classification of spam there will be some legitimate content that gets classified incorrectly.

It's important to know that if you are prompted to solve the CAPTCHA, it doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with your blog. Because of the number of variables our classifier uses, there's no easy way for us to pinpoint why your blog may have tripped the word verification (publicizing this information also serves to defeat the classifier).

The number of false positives will affect only a small percentage of the overall Blogger community. However, I know that for those of you asked to answer the word verification that this is a true inconvenience and for that I apologize.

We will be continually improving the classifier to reduce the number of false positives. We're also working on ways so that once a blog with word verification has been established as legitimate, the blogger will no longer need to solve the CAPTCHA.

It's important that we find ways to put reasonable barriers in place to further prevent the automated creation of spam content. This is not just to prevent the contamination of search indexes with spammy search results, but to ensure the quality of Blogger's service for everyone.

One of the ideas I mentioned yesterday was making it more difficult for would-be spammers to post. Earlier today we pushed out a change that will prompt some users to solve a CAPTCHA if our spam classifier identifies the blog as spammy.

We plan to quickly iterate on this approach a bit (as well as extend it to posts created via the API). So far, we have observed a slight decrease in the amount spam being created. There's clearly more to do.

Update: Some users are having trouble solving the new CAPTCHAs and are seeing CAPTCHAs when they shouldn't be. We'll be pushing out a fix for that shortly.

Update: This should now be resolved.

Spam is a tricky problem. Or as Matt Haughey says "spam bloggers sure are resourceful little bastards."

For a while now, the Blogger team has been contending with spam on Blog*Spot through mechanisms like Flag as Objectionable and comment/blog creation CAPTCHAs. The spam classifier that Pal described has also dramatically reduced the amount of spam that folks experience when browsing NextBlog.

However, spam is still being created and, as was widely noted, Blogger was especially targeted this weekend.

One group of folks who are particularly affected by blog spam are those who use blog search services and those who subscribe to feeds of results from those services. When spam goes up, it directly affects the quality of those results. I'm exceedingly sympathetic with these folks because, well, we run one of those services ourselves.

So given that the problems is hard, what more are we doing? One thing we can do is improve the quality of the Recently Updated information we publish.

Recently Updated lists like the one Blogger publishes are used by search services to determine what to crawl and index. A big goal in deploying the filtered NextBlog and Flag as Objectionable was to improve our spam classifiers. As we improve these algorithms, we plan to pass the filtered information along automatically. Just as a first step, we're publishing a list of deleted subdomains that were created this weekend during the spamalanche.

Greg from Blogdigger (one of the folks who consumes blog data) points out that "ultimately the responsibility for providing a quality service rests on the shoulders of the individual services themselves, not Google and/or Blogger." However, we think by sharing what we've learned about spam on Blogger we can hopefully improve the situation for everyone.

We can also make it more difficult for suspected spammers to create content. This includes placing challenges in front of would-be spammers to deter automation.

Of course, false positives are an unavoidable risk with automatic classifiers. And it's important to remember that the majority of content being posted on Blog*Spot is not spam (we know this from the ongoing manual reviews used to train the spam classifier).

Some have suggested that we go a step farther and place CAPTCHA challenges in front of all users before posting. I don't believe this is an acceptable solution.

First off, CAPTCHAs represent a burden for all users (the majority of whom are legit), an impossible barrier for some, and are incompatible with API access to Blogger.

But, most importantly, wrong-doers are already breaking CAPTCHAs on a daily basis. And not through clever algorithmic means but via the old-fashioned human-powered way. We've actually been able to observe when human-powered CAPTCHA solvers come on-line by analyzing our logs. You can even use the timestamps to determine from whence this CAPTCHA-solving originates.

One thing we've learned from Blog Search, is that even if spam were completely solved on Blog*Spot, there would still be a problem. As others have concluded, we've realized that this is going to be an on-going challenge for Blogger, Google and all of us who are interested in making it easier for people to create and share content online.

Jacob Nielsen has a new Alertbox column: Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes. He has some good tips and points worth considering, though issue #4 does conflict with my love of Suck-style linking.

(Also, I take offense to #10. My Geocities website, at TimesSquare #2334, was awesome. It kicked ass. It even got mentioned in an issue of The Duelist. Hell, yeah! The one with Xena on the cover. I bet Jakob Nielsen’s deck sucks, anyway. It probably uses four colors and has no land. Of course, my site isn’t there any more, so I guess Nielsen gets the last laugh. Meh. Don’t worry, though; We don’t get rid of Blogspot blogs, even if you do leave them languishing for years.)

If you want to play along on Blogger, here are some help articles to get you started: Profiles (#1, #2); Create a title for your post (#3); Do more with links (#4); Edit your link list (#5); Vote for feature requests (#6); Create a new blog (#8); What to do if your mom discovers your blog (#9, sorta); Using Blogger to FTP (#10, also known as Robb’s Law).

Our friends at Photolightning just released their latest version, which incorporates some nifty Blogger functionality — it can post photos to blogs, which can then be purchased at ClubPhoto. Here's an example blog with some Photolightning posts.

Indeed, blogging demonstrates the persistence of a key truth in the history of reading … that readers, in a culture of abundant reading material, regularly seek out other readers, either by becoming writers themselves or by sharing their records of reading with others.

There have been a ton of comparisons made between bloggers and pamphleteers like Thomas Paine, but an article from Common-Place.org argues that the better historical anology is to “journalizing,” a practice of journal writing and sharing that developed after the proliferation of newspapers in antebellum America.

Surrounded by ephemeral print, many began to make references in their journals to what they had been reading—the rough equivalent of what bloggers do by linking to a Web page. During the Revolution, for instance, Christopher Marshall, a Philadelphian radical and friend of Thomas Paine, peppered his journal with references to the papers, often with brief comments on the news.

In other words, we don’t all have the audience of a Thomas Paine or George Orwell, but we may still use our blogs to, like Christopher Marshall or reformer Henry Clarke Wright, “mix quotidian reflections about life together with records of [our] reading.”

[via PB]

Interested in finding out who's linking to your posts? We've just introduced a new feature called Backlinks that makes it easy to find out.

By turning on Backlinks, we include a "Links to this post" section on your post pages. This section is populated by links to that post that have been made from other blogs across the web. For example, check out this post from Blogger Buzz a couple days ago.

Also, as the author of the blog, you have the ability to hide any links to your posts that you might not want to display. You can turn on Backlinks by going to the Settings | Comments tab for your blog. More information can be found in the help article.

The web is always been poised to grow. (Duh.) And as a second order effect the amount of information available through feeds seems likely to overwhelm the casual onlooker despite its being potentially useful for them. A (currently) smallish cross-vendor community has been adept at making tools for managing this incredible volume of data available for everyone for years and at Google we're interested in helping out with the resources available to us.

More later. There's a little bit of digital soup being thrown at the newborn. So many people... so many people at the same time... So we (Google) have launched a service called Reader as an experiment on Google Labs. Reader has been the fascination of a group of developers who were interested in building feed readers and I'm just happy to have been involved so please bear with the occasional confessional-letter cadence since "I never thought these letters were real until...'" can sound silly to anyone who isn't actually the surprised person in question.

Screenshots of Google Reader. You probably know the drill, click to enlarge.

The main window:





Your starred items:



A podcast showing the audio player:




With the drawer open and editing a feed:




With the drawer open, browsing subscriptions and labels.




The gist? It's clear that there's value in keeping up with web content by subscribing to feeds. But the promise of this technology seems greater than, say, the attention paid to its admittedly excellent ability to manage news updates and it's been clear that developers who have been working with RSS, Atom, and microformats have understood that syndication can perhaps be compared favorably, and superficially, to bricks-and-mortar efforts like bridge, dam or canal
building. (For additional metaphoric conflation I'd been considering mentioning the Yangtse River's Three Gorges Dam project to highlight engineering designs for managing floods. Aren't you glad I didn't?)

The web is always been poised to grow. (Duh.) And as a second order effect the amount of information available through feeds seems likely to overwhelm the casual onlooker despite its being potentially useful for them. A (currently) smallish cross-vendor community has been adept at making tools for managing this incredible volume of data available for everyone for years and at Google we're interested in helping out with the resources available to us.

More later. There's a little bit of digital soup being thrown at the newborn. So many people... so many people at the same time...

It's October now, and all you closet novelists out there know what that means: It means it's almost November. And November means National Novel Writing Month. Signups are now open over at NaNoWriMo.org, so go toss your writer's block out the window and put your name down to become an author.

For those of you unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, the basic idea is 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days. It's not a competition -- anyone who participates can be a winner, and the reward is your very own novel. Nearly 6,000 people last year cleared the 50,000 word mark. Whether you're an experienced writer or a complete beginner, it's a creative trip like no other.

(From last year: Blog Your Novel I, Blog Your Novel II, NaNoBlogMo.)

A few of us got to have lunch with Neil Gaiman today — he's on tour and stopped by to give a short talk about (and reading from!) his new book, Anansi Boys. Apparently it'll soon be taking the top spot on the NYTimes Bestseller list, and Neil attributes this largely to his Blogger blog. In his talk he mentioned how his blog helps him overcome increasingly-small marketing budgets for his books, and connect directly with his readers and fans.

*

CNBC's Morning Call has now started The Morning Blog. It's brand-new still (just announced this morning) but here's what they say it's going to be like:

What you'll get when you log on to TheMorningBlog are the insights about the business news of the day, and more importantly, how we put our show together. [...] You'll find out about our decision-making process: why and how we choose and book guests and segments, what happens when news breaks and how we make sure you get all the market information that's important at that very moment.

If you don't yet have a song stuck in your head, be sure to check out Rocketboom today for the remedy.

On Saturday, the Blogger team squared off against our good friends from Flickr in the sport of kings ... kickball. (Well, it's the sport kings played when they were in grade school).

We're happy to report that the Blogger side emerged victorious with a score of 24 to 17.

Pictured here: Chris Wetherell records the final out while Eric Case gloats over our fallen foes (Cal being one of them)

Photo credit:Jason Sutter.

Jason Goldman demoing Blogger during the blogging tool dance-off.

Reporters Without Borders just released a "Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents:"

"Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation. It also explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicise it (getting it picked up efficiently by search-engines) and to establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles."

[Via BoingBoing]

We've just made it a lot easier for Blogger users to make money using their blogs.

Our new integration with AdSense lets you signup from within Blogger. And we've added a tool for inserting the ads in your blog (so you don't have to mess around with the HTML).

There's even built-in options that will analyze the colors on your blog and choose a recommended color scheme. Check out the mad science, why don'cha.

Sorry for the late notice, but there'll be a brief outage (~15 mins) at 4pm PST today, for a server memory upgrade. Details are on Status.

Update: This is complete.

If you’re looking for ideas for meddling with your blog’s template, take a look at how Derek Powazek focused on the bottom of the page when he redesigned his blog. Try it as the new home for your profile or your previous posts, and see if you can give your visitors somewhere nice to go after they’ve finished reading one of your entries. Also, read Derek’s follow up emphasizing how content at the end of a page rewards your committed readers — exactly the people you should be sucking up to! (I’ve admired Derek for a while for the storytelling and the book, but I recently learned that he designed our original logo, too.)

A bunch of us Bloggerfolk will be at Webzine 2005 this weekend in San Francisco. If you're in town, please come by and check us/it out.

Judging by their commercial it should be an unmitigated hoot.

w00t! The Billboard Liberation Front is now blogging.

[via BB]

This sounds like a fantastic program:

"New Voices is a pioneering program to seed innovative community news ventures in the United States. Through 2006, New Voices will help fund the start-up of 10 micro-local news projects with $12,000 grants; support them with an educational Web site, and help foster their sustainability through $5,000 second-year matching grants. New Voices is administered by J-Lab at the University of Maryland and supported by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation."

(we aren't affiliated with these folks in any way, just helping spread the word)

Here's one for the audiobook and podcast fans out there. LibriVox is a project that "harnesses the power of the many to record audio versions of books in the public domain, and 'free' them in podcast form." Volunteers can claim chapters, record them, and send them in to be added to the site's podcast, where anyone can listen to them for free. Right now they're working on Boyhood, by Leo Tolstoy and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Check out their blog to see what other books they've made available. According to TeleRead, "this is the birth of an audio book publisher, and everybody gets to witness it."

Both of the Blog Search issues mentioned the other day have been resolved.

(Also did you know we had advanced operators? It's true.)

Have you ever played the Exquisite Corpse game? Well, take a look at Unblokt, a collaborative writing experiment. They're taking the same basic idea, but aiming for an entire novel, written by anyone on the internet who wants to participate. Given two adjacent sentences, you get to create a new sentence to go in between them, so the whole project expands outward as you go along. Crazy, but fun (not to mention addictive). There are over 60 pages up already (and you can even read them if you want a peek). This might be a good warmup for NaNoWriMo, for those of you who are already starting to think ahead to November.

I just noticed that the main news column on Alexa is powered by Blogger!

Looks like the Alexa team is digging Blog Search:

"I don't know about you, but I have been waiting for this feature for about a year now and am glad that it is finally here. Why do we need a blog search? Simple. Blogs are a quick way to get a feel for what people are thinking on any topic. Just type in your term and whammo! You get blog entry after blog entry from people like you and me spouting their opinions. Try it for yourself. Search for "ipod nano", the newest iPod, and see what people are saying. You'll get 17,840 blog entries of people talking about it."

The great thing about launching Blog Search is that it's very easy to find out what people are saying about the product. And the feedback has been great. Plus, it means that we find out about potential issues right away.

Here are a couple questions we've seen:

• "After clicking on a result in Blog Search, I'm being passed through a redirect. Why?"

Sadly, this wasn't part of an overly clever click-harvesting scheme. We had the redirects in place during testing to prevent referrer-leaking and simply didn't remove them prior to launch. But they should be gone in the next 24 hours ... which will have the advantage of improving click-through time.


• "I included a robots.txt or <meta> tag to prevent the indexing of my blog. Why does it appear in Blog Search?"

As covered in the FAQ, Blog Search was designed to respect robots.txt and NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW meta tags. Unfortunately, we discovered a bug which caused some of these blogs to be indexed despite the presence of the meta tags.

We are already in progress on removing from the index those blogs that were affected and apologize for the unintended exposure.

How often do you update your blog? Weekly? Hourly? Secondly? Hundreds of new blog posts go through Blogger every minute of every day. That’s a lot of updating! We definitely have something to learn from you, because we seem to update our homepage 16-monthedly. (Which is a shame; it tends to be a good time.)

We think our homepage is great if you want to sign up or sign in, but what if you just like to watch? Tonight we’re changing things up to add a bunch of new ways for you, either deliberately or serendipitously, to find new and interesting blogs to read.

There’s the new Blog Search (which searches more than just Blogger). Type in a word or phrase to see people talk about it, or type in a URL to see people link to it. We’ve moved Blogs of Note from the depths of the dashboard to front-and-center, so you can see our selection of the most interesting Blogger blogs in zippy, side-scrolling goodness.

You can jump right into Next Blog, the I’m Feeling Lucky of the blogging world, and embark on an insightful journey (or just kill some time), and do it nearly spam-free. And, to top things off, we harnessed the power of the latest buzzwords to create a list of updated blogs that always stays fresh and new, no matter how long you leave your browser window open.

Poke around and enjoy the sites, but don’t forget to login and post something of your own. As Puffy McBlogsearch says, “my banner is teh rox0rs.”

Jason Goldman saying goodbye to Blogger Buzz's founding father.

Good luck at Odeo, Biz!

Photo-A-Day is a picture from each day of Tim Halberg's life from August 31, 2005 on. (Via being jennifer garrett - yet again, I know). I'll make this a blog of note tomorrow from the office if I can remember.

Katrina Thanks is a public forum to express thanks to individuals, organizations, and countries that have assisted with relief efforts. They've got mail-to-blogger set up for easy posting and they're also using audioblogger if people prefer to phone in their posts. Here's their web feed.

The UK newspaper The Guardian recently underwent a complete redesign and now the editors there are letting us behind the scenes with their Editors' Blog.

Welcome to the Editors' blog, where senior Guardian staff write about the decisions they make, and the reasons behind them. Today, Victor Keegan is following the production of the first Berliner edition of the Guardian, to be published tomorrow.

A while back, Jen Garrett made a pledge to visit 100 blogs in 100 days. That is a bold endeavor and only the most stubborn among us could possibly honor the commitment. So, I thought we should check in on her. So far, this is the impressive list she has so far come up with.

1. The Complex Mind by Mr. Ortiz
2. Pencil Revolution
3. Number 4 of 5
4. The Swashbookler
5. Pamie: Pop Culture Princess
6. Las Fashionistas
7. A Strip A Day
8. Watch Out for Falling Debris
9. The Call of the Green Monster
10. Absolutely Ordinary
11. It's Raining Noodles!
12. Foreign in Frankfurt
13. Life Is Sweet, Baby
14. Journal of the Unintelligent
15. A ... my name is Allison
16. All Out of Angst
17. Edify

So far so good! You can read her archive pages from August and September to see why Ms Garrett has picked these particular blogs. Jen, are you going to make the full list of 100 blogs with your notes available when you're done? Feedster 500, you will meet your match when the Jen Garrett 100 is finally released.

MobMov is a grass roots guerilla drive-in movie event type of thing. They represent the future of going out to watch movies with friends. Do they have a blog? Of course they do, they're revolutionaries.

Matt Haughey has inspired other bloggers to organize an official day to help us find spam blogs. This is such cool idea! In addition to helping Blogger find and delete spam this will also help us fine tune our spamless nextblog algorithm. Ultimately and hopefully, finding spam blogs by clicking nextblog will be a challenge. Please note that flagging a blog doesn't mean we'll delete it. Spam blogs are unique in that we have no qualms about rooting them out and bringing them to a desperate and violent end. Maybe we should attach a bloodcurdling scream to our spam-deletion scripts? Something to think about. If you're not sure what the flag button does, you can read more about it here. Thanks Matt!

Check out these Writing and Blog Prompts, Topic Generators, and Photo Inspiration: "Need an idea or a writing prompt or two to get you going? Try out these resources and generators featuring free writing prompts, photo inspiration, daily writing exercises, journal and blogging prompts, visual art prompts, and other imagination prompts." The Next Prompt Button is kinda neat too.

Michael Homan shares his personal account, One of the Millions of Hurricane Katrina Stories. "There was a group of officials going around and taking people’s animals away. It was then that I decided to try to escape." He's safe in Omaha now after sneaking out of a refugee camp to escape New Orleans with his dog.

I am sure that many of you enjoy clicking the "Next Blog" button on the Blogger Navbar and browsing the fascinating blogs of fellow bloggers. As of late, annoying spam has managed to spoil this experience. The more you clicked "Next Blog" the more you saw automated zombie-like blogs often filled with link spam. Today, we put some artificial intelligence to work in an effort to make "Next Blog" fun and useful again for readers of blogspot blogs. This is the first of several steps we are taking to root out spam blogs from
Blogger and blogspot. What we learn from cleaning up "Next Blog" spam can eventually be applied to other areas such as our changes file so that services which depend on this file will also enjoy less spam. Okay, back to my nextblogging.

Eugene Smith is posting a monster a day over on his new blog, Monstercake.

Spooky.

Blogger user Jeremy Blachman has a great Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, for his writings on Anonymous Lawyer; here's a snippet:

"It used to be that if you wanted to know what it was like to work for a law firm or a beauty magazine, you had to have a friend on the inside. But now that everyone can publish online, we can get these incredible glimpses into worlds we might otherwise never get to see. People across the world can share stories, commiserate and connect with each other. Potential employees can see beyond the marketing pitches."

[via Micropersuasion]

One night the gifted young pianist Jeremy Denk accompanied Emma Bell in Mozart and Debussey songs, and also played Bach's Third English Suite. He's a powerful, intelligent musician, as severe in Bach as he is sensuous in Debussey. He is also a blogger, of all things.

- Alex Ross, The New Yorker, August 29, 2005

Heck yeah, he is.

Pencil Revolution is a blog about pencils. "Wooden wisdom." Nice. I like the list of famous pencil users including Leonardo da Vinci, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Key, John Steinbeck, Henry David Thoreau, and Vincent Van Gogh. Impressive.

Blogads is having a Logo Contest and they hope you (the bloggers) can help. $1000 to the creator of the new logo and $300 to the blogger whose post refers or inspires her or him.

Do you use BlogThis! ? Ever wish you could customize how it works? Ken Dyck had some good ideas and decided to do something with them. Check it out: XBlogThis!

This handy little JavaScript link lets you use the regular BlogThis! window, but with some extra options: blockquotes, Technorati tags, and customizable link text. So if these are things you typically add to your posts, then XBlogThis! is what you need.

And while I'm here plugging our clever users, I'll just mention that we keep a whole list of cool ideas like this that people have sent in, over in the Blogger Hacks section of our Help site. If you're itching to do some neat stuff with your blog, take a look over there and see what you like. And if you come up with something brilliant of your own, let us know!

Scott Dunlap wrote in to let us know that his blogspot-hosted A Trail Runner's Blog was voted Best Health and Fitness Blog by Forbes Magazine.

Nice work, Scott!

BW Online is running some surveys.

For the next five days, we're running a series of surveys that give you the chance to vote on the best Web sites and services, whether they're for work, for home, for fun, for the greater good, or just for getting things done. We'll keep a running tally.

One of them is for blogging tools. *Cough*

Jennifer Garret is going to read a new blog every day for 100 days. That's the idea anyway.

I'm trying to broaden my horizons, so I'll go to blogs that may not immediately scream JenGarrett -- but I'm not going anywhere that promotes any kind of love for the Yankees. There has to be a line somewhere, people.

She aims to "post about the blog of the day every day" though she makes no promise that she will not "come home tipsy at midnight and cheat and change the time of my post to make it onto the previous day." That sounds fair. I'm looking forward to seeing what she finds.

Communication Nation: "Communication is one of the most important skills anyone can have, in business and in life. As individuals and as a species, I believe we will be both happier and more productive if we can improve our ability to communicate. This blog is dedicated to that effort." (Via Evhead)

There have been some good questions sent in about the new Flag feature. One thing we've seen is the worry that blogs could be removed because of accidental or repeated voting. Or even just because some people considered a blog to be distasteful. There a couple reasons why this won't happen.

From a technical standpoint, we are able to detect when multiple votes come from the same source. We prevent against ballot box stuffing.

But most importantly, we're not automatically removing content based on the flags. We're using the feedback from Blog*Spot readers to help assess what the community has noted as potentially objectionable.

In the cases where objectionable content has been identified, the most common action is for the support team to "delist" the blog. This simply means that the blog is not promoted in areas of blogger.com like Recently Updated - but it's still viewable on the web. The content is not blocked or removed in anyway when the blog is delisted.

To clarify, our primary concern is to avoid promoting objectionable content in places like NextBlog or the Dashboard. In no way are we automatically removing such content.

We've just introduced the option to require word verification for comments. This option (off by default) gives bloggers a tool to prevent the automatic creation of comments by nefarious ne'er-do-wells (e.g. spammers).

Features like comment captcha and flag as objectionable are not complete solutions to the problem of spam. But they are additional tools that can help address it.

Have you ever found yourself clicking the Next Blog button over and over again only to come across a blog that wasn't exactly to your taste? Maybe it was politically incorrect, potential hurtful, or just plain gross? Well, one person's vulgarity is another's poetry. Or something like that. When it comes to judging which is which, things can get a little tricky.

That is why we have launched a new feature on the Blogger Navbar called Flag As Objectionable. This feature allows the blogging community as a whole to identify content they deem objectionable. Have you read The Wisdom of Crowds? It's sort of like that. For more information on how this feature works, read What is the "Flag" button?. (Note: a blog has to be republished in order for this new button to show up in the navbar.)

Work Blog - A Third of Your Life, All of the Time is a blog from Work Magazine. It's a good blog and they have this thing that lets you search for a new job on the sly while you're at work. It's called the Sneaky Bastard Worksheet and it's job search results as a spreadsheet.

We've got this new thing. It's a free plug-in for Microsoft Word that works with Blogger. We call it Blogger for Word. Catchy? Maybe. Useful? You bet. With this little number, you can work in Word like you normally do and then save your document as a post to your Blogger blog. Once you install the plug-in and restart Word, some buttons will appear. These buttons allow you to publish, edit, and save as draft from within Word.

Cloudburst Mumbai: "News and links to news about the cloudburst on the 26th July, 2005, and its aftermath." (Via BoingBoing)

Hey you, with the camera. You've been posting tons of photos with Blogger Images. Good work on that. I liked the one with the baby and that one of your friends at the party was fun. But that one with the two Russian guys dressed up as... nevermind. The point is, I thought you might be interested in knowing that issue number three of JPG Magazine is out.
This issue is called "Fabulous" and it features work by photographers just like you.

The Nonprofit Blog Exchange "will be a day (or whatever is decided) where nonprofit bloggers will exchange blogs. This is for any blogger who works for or with mission-based organizations." Good idea.

There's a Family Guy blog with posts from writers, directors, interns and others that work on the show.

Word on The Internets has it that Eric and Kathleen were married by blog. Apparently, there's a little known law governing informal marriage in Texas. For a marriage to be legal, the law requires a public declaration of the marriage with local witnesses. Since there are blog readers in Texas, Eric and Kathleen's public posts meet those requirements. Here's Kathleen's explaination. Congratulations you crazy kids. (Via Kottke)

Sometimes I can sense what people are thinking. It's weird. However, when it comes to improving Blogger a more scientific approach is recommended. To that end, we've come up with a short survey that will help us help you. If you sign in to Blogger and follow the user survey link in your Dashboard, we can get to know a little more about you and what you want from us.

Also, we're offering $500 gift cards to three lucky respondents. As if you needed an incentive to fill out a Blogger survey. You love those.

Lucas writes in to say:

I hate your Blogger Mobile Jingle!!! It's SO catchy that I haven't been able to get it out of my head!!! Who makes these things?!

The parties to blame are Biz Stone (lyrics) and Grant Shellen (music). If you haven't heard the song of the year, check it out at go.blogger.com. (You've been warned.)

And Cruz asks:

I recently read and article on opportunities on how bloggers can make money. I was wondering if I created a blog through your web site if that will prevent me from benefitting financially?

Heck no! In fact, all Blogger users are eligible to sign up with Google's AdSense program - an easy way to add content targeted ads to your blog. Check it out.

Identical twins Cameron and Damien Barrett from Brooklyn, NY are long-time bloggers using a blog to try and up their chances of getting cast on CBS' hit show, The Amazing Race.

This site, therefore, is a grand experiement. How much influence can we generate from the blogosphere and fans of the show? Will we succeed in getting the casting directors to take a second look at our audition tape? (Some estimates put the number of tapes they receive each season is upwards of 20,000 to 30,000.) Do we have any natural advantage because we are identical twins and long-time bloggers?

How cool would that be? I've never seen that show but if these guys got on it, I would watch and I would tell everyone I know to watch. Good luck Barretts!

The Nonist has published (in PDF form) an interesting little pamphlet called What Everyone Should Know About Blog Depression.

There is a growing epidemic in the cyberworld. a scourge which causes more suffering with each passing day. as blogging has exploded and, under the stewardship of the veterans, the form has matured more and more bloggers are finding themselves disillusioned, dissatisfied, taking long breaks, and in many cases simply closing up shop. this debilitating scourge ebbs and flows but there is hardly a blogger among us who has not felt it’s dark touch. we’re speaking, of course, about blog depression.

That's some deep, dark stuff. Nice! (Via zephoria.)

Director Kevin Smith's blog is called My Boring Ass Life. What's in a name?

Blogger and news correspondent Kevin Sites has been nominated for an Emmy. Congratulations Kevin! (Via BoingBoing)

Aliens love blogs too!

Alien Blog IconSome 60 years ago humans first began transmitting television signals powerful enough to reach beyond our earth's atmosphere. Since then the media has continued to broadcast messages from I Love Lucy to the five o'clock news into space, potentially reaching intelligent alien life forms beyond our solar system. Blogs In Space is the first entity to allow everyday bloggers to transmit the news and thoughts of an everyday person into space. Simply put we take your feed and transmit it out on a powerful deep space transmission dish.

From CNET's latest top 10 list: "Whether it was dancing hamsters, a kid enjoying his day as a Jedi Knight, or the sudden ability to publish your thoughts online with just a few simple clicks, the following 10 Web fads still make us laugh, make us wonder, or make us feel guilty enough to update our blogs."

At #9, it's neat that Blogger is both on this list of memes as well as the means by which such memes are propagated. Take that Kiss Me Mahir!

Also, it reminds me that we should make some new t-shirts.

Wired News has published an article about Blogs Taking Off in Cambodia.

A Cambodian nonprofit worker traverses the country, teaching students to publish blogs. The project promotes democracy and spurs internet use in a land where few people have access to the web. Matt Reed reports from Phnom Penh.

Page two of the article links to this list of Cambodian bloggers.

This slideshow of photos from some photoblogs over at the BBC's web site is neato. Should you be so inspired, remember that you can upload photos to your blog for free. So, post 'em if you got 'em.

I was just reading BoingBoing and found this blog by incessant doodler Paige Pooler. She's got a little blogfolio going over there. I like it.

Daddy Types calls attention to some interesting developments of the blogging-at-work variety. There was this Nanny, see. And she had this blog. And her employers started reading it and they didn't think it was the best thing ever so they fired her. But they didn't just fire her. They sifted through her blog looking for anything that could be pulled out and made to sound unseemly. Then one of these former employers published an essay in The New York Times which began thusly:

OUR former nanny, a 26-year-old former teacher with excellent references, liked to touch her breasts while reading The New Yorker and often woke her lovers in the night by biting them. She took sleeping pills, joked about offbeat erotic fantasies involving Tucker Carlson and determined she'd had more female sexual partners than her boyfriend.

Zing! Do you take salt or lemon with your wound? But the nanny is not the sort to take this lying down. She blasted back on her blog. See how that works? That's good stuff. And now the nanny, a student of literature, is being read by thousands of people. So you see, there is a silver lining to all things. (Also? The NYT illustration portrays the nanny as having man-hands and dating The Rock. I'm no lawyer but that very well could be libelous. I mean, he's the Scorpion King, that could reflect poorly on her future prospects.)

The Daily Show recently underwent a set redesign and people are not happy about the fact that the couch is gone. Especially this guy.

I spent last week in Boston. However, before I left I went to an Ottmar Liebert concert at the Saratoga Mountain Winery, the beautiful venue pictured above. In addition to playing some amazing music, Ottmar is supremely *with it* Free Culture style. (This came as no surprise of course since it was Eric Case that turned me on to his acoustic stylings and geektastic leanings.) Ottmar is blogging, he's podcasting, and he's released his music under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. Here's what he said to much applause at the end of strong set at the winery:

"I decided that copyright, it sort of seemed like everybody was holding on to everything. So as an artist I thought, "What can I do?" Open the hand. So what we're doing is releasing the album with a Creative Commons license. It's a sampling plus license."

If you get a chance to go to one of Ottmar's concerts, I highly recommend it. If you can't make it to a live show then listen to his music online or buy his current release. It's good stuff.

Got a photo of Blogger cavorting in an exotic locale? Let us know.

We've re-enabled post counts on the dashboard. But remember, it's quality not quantity.

Via BoingBoing comes this post at The Republic of Geektronica: The Strange World of Blogspot Spamblogs, which points out a new kind of spam on Blog*Spot. People are creating seemingly legitimate news blogs which contain spam links cleverly hidden by CSS. Geektronica, you rock. Thanks for finding this sneaky spam. We're hoping to leverage more of this kind of help from the community in the future.

But wait! There are a few things I'd like to address in the Geektronica post. The post states that Blogspot "apparently does not have a policy against" spam but our Terms of Service states that we will terminate spam (and we do). It also says "Blogspot now requires CAPTCHA authentication to start a new account." We require CAPTCHA authentication to create new blogs, not new accounts. There's a big difference there because one account can have many blogs. While we're on the subject of CAPTCHA let me say that we never thought it would "fix the problem" of spam. CAPTCHA has had an impact but also has accessibility drawbacks that prevent it from being a complete solution.

The braintrust here at Google has lots of experience dealing with spam and the Blogger crew is actively leveraging this talent to find new ways to combat the problem. Kudos to The Republic of Geektronica for taking note of this new wrinkle and yes, we are working hard against spamblogs.

And Blogger users get a special discounted rate. I went to the last one and it was great. This time, the BBS is being held in a palace. An actual palace. The Palace in San Francisco, to be precise. Publish and Prosper August 17-19, 2005.

We have a fix for Blogger users experiencing template woes due to our recent update. First, I'd like to explain what the issue was.

In order to provide the layout options in our newly released Blogger Images we had to wrap all posts in a <div clear:both> tag. For some users this resulted in template formatting issues (even without uploading images). So today we introduced a new setting to suppress that markup.

Please note that suppressing the markup will result in layout problems when using left or right alignment for images. You should only change this setting if you are currently having trouble with normal posts.

How To Use The Setting

1. Sign in to your Blogger Dashboard
2. Click the "Change Settings" icon next to your blog
3. Click "Formatting" under the Settings tab
4. Choose "No" on "Enable float alignment"

That should do the trick. Thanks for being so patient while we got this figured out and implemented.

Update#2: There is a way to fix the layout problem without using any special code. It is now just a setting in Blogger: Read all about it.

Update: We've got a solution that provides users an easy way to disable the markup that is causing them some layout glitches with their blog. It will allow those who have custom templates and certain older templates to fix their blog up right proper. We're building and testing the solution now and we'll let you know when it is ready.

As mentioned on our status blog, recent updates to Blogger are causing annoying layout problems for some of our users. We are working on the bigger solution for this but in the meantime we've got a quick workaround for what appears to be one of the biggest culprits--the big space at the top of your blog, most notably blogs using the Bluebird template. This workaround requires that you modify your template. Here's how to do it:

Just below the line that says <style> or <style type="text/css"> try adding this:

#main #menu {
position: absolute;
right: 21px;
}

Then save and republish. This should help with the big space issue. Some modified templates might not respond to this. We'll continue to work on this but let us know (bloggerbuzz@gmail.com) if this doesn't work for you. Remember to copy and save your template in a text editor before you make any changes and for more information about editing templates visit our Help site.

The reponse to Blogger Images has been huge! There's LOTS of images being posted and we're psyched. Some users did experience a template issue which I just posted about here and we're working that out now. (Keep an eye on the status blog for that.) Otherwise, post 'em if you got 'em. Like so:

Portabella's are $5.00 a pound. How about that?

As you can see by this screenshot of the Blogger.com front page featuring my cat, we have launched Blogger Images. Now you can put a photo (or any JPG, GIF, PNG, TIF or BMP format image) into your blog posts easily and for free. From your hard drive or from the Web. How do you like that? Also, since I can just click a button, here is a photo I took earlier today:

I'm pretty sure local laws require a doctor to be on-site wherever deep fried twinkies are being sold. (If they don't, they should.)

Found via BoingBoing is this blog called Squattercity about squatters and squatter cities around the world. The blogger, Robert Neuwirth, is a writer who spent two years living in squatter communities on four continents and has published a new book called Shadow Cities in an attempt to humanize these maligned settlements.

MIT's running a Weblog Survey, if you've got a few spare minutes.

Here's five links I spotted recently rounded up for your clicking pleasure (in case you didn't spend all week reading blogs).

• A trans-siberian train journey blog
• India to accredit bloggers as journalists
• Steve Jobs' commencement address at Stanford
• 50 tools to help you in writing
• How to blog according to Trae

In other news, I hope to see Batman Begins tonight. Hope it's okay-ish. Goldman seemed to like it but he was hopped up on Reece's Pieces and something he calls "cheery icee" which might be French, I'm not sure.

Webvisions 2005 is July 15 at the Oregon Convention Center. It's a one day conference exploring "the future of design, content creation, technology and business strategy." Join some web thinkers for the day and discover "how the Web is interacting with digital devices to change the way we communicate, access information and do business." I'd like to do that, wouldn't you? Here's an idea: Tell your boss you need to go, take notes, and then share what you have learned with your fellow coworkers. Nice.

Hey! There's this thing tomorrow night at the Apple Store in San Francisco. You should go if you like sharing photos on your blog and you want to learn things and meet nice people.

The EFF has published a legal guide for bloggers.

Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Internet bullies shouldn't use the law to stifle legitimate free expression. That's why EFF created this guide, compiling a number of FAQs designed to help you understand your rights and, if necessary, defend your freedom.

(via BoingBoing)

Hosted by KRON/Channel 4, San Francisco.

wikiHow is "a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest how-to manual."

So. Cool.

Examples:

• How to Start a Blog
• How to Switch from Yahoo Mail to Gmail
• How to Carve a Coconut
  

[via To-Done via Ev]

If you've ever blogged about politics in the US, this might be of some interest to you. The Federal Election Commission is considering rules (Proposed Rules PDF) that would apply federal campaign finance regulations to online speech. The FEC says it wants to regulate only paid advertising on the Internet but the proposed rules seem to go well beyond that. For example:

Proposed Rules for Bloggers
• Mandatory disclaimers on political blogs
• Team blogs must register as a "political committee"
• Bloggers to file campaign expenditure reports

The Center for Democracy and Technology and the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet at George Washington University have launched a campaign to educate the FEC, and have posted a helpful website where you can learn more and take action.