I was at BarCamp Brussels 2006 yesterday and took a lot of video, which I posted on my Dutch language blog: http://www.blogologie.be/2006/05/accessibility_d.html#more
There are some English language presentations there too, so if you don't speak Dutch, have a look anyway!
I just opened a new blog (blog.maartenschenk.be) in Dutch, because I keep feeling the urge to write about local Flemish issues, family stuff and other personal things that I don't feel 'Live from Brussels' is the right place for. And because English is not the right language for it.
So if you read Dutch, check it out. If you don't, don't worry: updates to this site will continue. Just more focused on things I'd like to share with an international audience.
For those of you who don't read my Dutch language work related blog: a few days ago Telenet, the largest broadband cable internet provider in Flanders, launched its blogging service, and on TypePad no less. More info on Blogologie, my other blog.
I just added The Angry Economist to my blogroll, something I should have done a lot earlier. Russ Nelson, the writer, is an economist who gets really angry about people not understanding economics who then start to believe in all sorts of things like communism being workable, minimum wages being good for employment and many other leftist dogma's.
Take this quote, which I found really funny (from an article about growth):
...leftists (by which I mean non-economists; leftists who understand economics become libertarians)...
Oh, and by the way, the blog's lay-out is really cool too. I guess he must have reasoned there was no economic benefit in making his website pretty, when most readers probably use RSS to read his articles anyway...
Last monday I was in Paris for the Les Blogs conference (I blogged a lot about it on my Dutch-language blog, in fact). During the breaks, I recognized a couple of familiar names on some badges: none other that Perry de Havilland and Adriana Cronin from Samizdata.net!
Here is Adriana talking to Hossein of Hoder.com (he is also known as the Father of the Iranian blogosphere)
And here she is showing off the cool Samizdata logo on her phone:
I immediately thought:
And so I did!
(Sorry, Perry, I wasn't able to find a picture with you in it...)
By the way, we had a very enjoyable conversation at the party later that night, in which high taxes were deemed to be a bad thing, Monty Python was refered to and the possiblity of getting subsidies to start a Belgian Samizdata site was briefly entertained.
I hope to see them again some day at one of their famous London blogger bashes!
For my Dutch-speaking readers, I just started a new weblog called Rijmelarij & dergelijke, containing some Limericks I wrote after feeling inspired again by seeing some posts about limerick-writing on another Flemish weblog. Let's see if I can keep it up, if not, it'll be some fun.
I alreaday posted it on my Dutch language blog: last night I released SuperBlog, a small hobby project of mine that I threw together over the past two weekends. What is it? Basically a Dutch-language service that allows anybody to quickly set up a PlanetPlanet RSS/ATOM-aggregator page with the latest entries from a number of other websites that provide RSS or ATOM feeds.
The reason I wrote it is that is just too hard for a 'regular' weblogger to install and configure PlanetPlanet (you need a webserver, you need to edit configuration files, you need to set up crontab jobs...). Basically with SuperBlog all of that is taken care of automatically, all the user needs to do is enter a site name, some URLs (feed autodiscovery is supported) and click a button.
Maybe I'll do an English version if it takes off in Dutch, who knows...
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Blogologie, my newest weblog. It is primarily aimed at a Dutch-speaking audience, hence it is also written in that language. This new site is going to be about all things blogospheric, with a special emphasis on what is happening on Flemish and Dutch weblogs. That means links to interesting weblogs, the latest controversies, useful tools for bloggers, tips and tricks to get the most out of your weblog, news about Six Apart in general and in the Benelux, scathing reviews of the competition... (Just kidding about that last thing).
In the past few days I've been diddling away during my spare time to set up an aggregator site containing the latest posts of the best Dutch-speaking Flemish weblogs. It uses RSS to gather and combine them into one blog-like site (without comments though), where each entry links back to the original entry on the excerpted blogs.
The site wasn't completely ready yet, but this morning I managed to call into a national radio show that was talking about weblogs, and I took the opportunity to plug my url on the air, so check out Planet Vlaanderen (if you read Dutch).
Very interesting post at elise.com: Weblog Tools Market - Update February 2005. At least, if you're interesting in weblogs, weblog tools, market shares and that sort of stuff :-)
Very interesting tidbits:
But enough tooting our own horn, go read it for yourself...
Stefan & Stefan, two old friends of mine, recently started their own marketing agency, called Antenno. So if you need a marketing campaign, just drop them a line and tell them Maarten sent you. ;-)
They just launched their new website, and it contains a TypePad powered weblog, which makes me very happy. Check it out for a great example of how you can use weblogs as a marketeer: AntennoBlog.
One of the discoveries I made at the recent Geek dinner is that not everybody in Belgium prounounces 'blog' in the same way. Personally, I pronounce it as if it is a shorten form of 'weblog', namely with the 'we' dropped, and the 'b' voiced (in 'weblog', the 'b' is voiceless and pronounced as a 'p' when spoken quickly).
But other people were pronouncing it 'b-log'. At first I thought they were talking about Belgian blogs: .be logs, or something. but it turned out it was their way of saying it.
Any other ways people are using?
Luc Van Braekel launches a discussion on his weblog: should govenment ministers in Belgium blog and RSS more (Ministers moeten meer bloggen en RSS'en).
The debate seems to have taken a turn in the direction of: they shouldn't be blogging, they should be governing the country more properly.
While I certainly think it would be interesting if these people blogged, I think members of parliament, or aspiring politicians that haven't been elected yet, can get more use out of blogging. After all, it is the task of the legislative branch to debate and represent the people, two things weblogs can help them with.
The executive branch however can also benefit of blogging, because it makes it possible to comunicate quicker and more efficiently than via the 'normal' channels.
Anyway, if the subject interests you, head to Paris, where my boss is organising an event about blogs and politics next month...
News at Six Log: Support for nofollow. Six Apart, Google and a whole bunch of other blog-related companies have jointly announced support for the 'nofollow' attribute in links.
What?
Well, in recent times, people have been spamming the comments and trackback sections of various blogs with links to their porn sites, online casinos and other dodgy enterprises. They did this not only to get visitors coming in through these links, but mainly to raise their ranking in search engine result: a link from a well known blog is worth a lot of respect from Google and others. And spammers know this.
So, what is this nofollow thing about then? Well, Google and other search engine makers have announced that any link that is tagged with the rel='nofollow' attribute will not be used for calculating the rankings of a page (it can still be used for spidering though). And Six Apart and other weblog-toolmakers have announced that all links in the comments and trackback sections will automatically be labeled with this attibute.
This will take away an important motivator for spammers. Still, hitting them on the head with blunt objects would also motivate them to stop spamming, I think...
Luc Van Braekel announced Blogium today. What is it? In short, it is a Belgian version of services like Technorati, Blogdex and Daypop, scanning Belgian blogs to see what they are currently linking to and which links are most popular at the moment. This enables visitors to quickly see what's hot in the Belgian blogging world...
Congrats to Luc on this long overdue service!
BlogPulse is a service that automatically keeps track of a whole bunch of weblogs in order to seek out what is hot and what is not in the blogosphere. Their setup enables them to collect some pretty interesting data. Here is their look at last year: Intelliseek's BlogPulse: 2004 Year in Review.
Just saw on LVB.net that TerZake, the main current affairs show of the state TV channel, would be airing a piece about weblogs tonight. I managed to watch it, and it was quite nice. Basically they interviewed three webloggers, each with a completely different type of blog.
First of all, they spoke with Kelly, aka Lilith, who maintains Tales from the Crib, a typical lifeblog, with stuff about daily life, funny pics etc. (I noticed she is using Movable Type as her blogging tool, by the way, good choice).
Next came Herman, who maintains Wereldkeuken, a photoblog. They showed him while taking pictures and later while putting them on-line.
Finally they had Luc from LVB.net himself, a political blogger. His most surprising statement was that his blog got more hits than the website of the VLD, one of the big political parties in Flanders.
I bet it won't take long before you can watch the video at LVB.net :-)
LVB's site even went down for a short moment due to the increased traffic. Frankly, I was quite surprised by this: when he was mentioned in some newspaper a while ago, his traffic barely went up.
It's been relatively quiet on this site for the past few days, and the reason has been that me and my co-workers from Six Apart Europe have been burning the midnight oil in order to launch:
Movable Type 3.14, The International Edition
Available in:
Get yours today! Finally you can use Six Apart's award-winning publishing platform in your own native language... Get them while supplies last! Perfect for your school, company, university or organisation. Multiple users and weblogs supported, out of the box. More info here.
But enough with the marketing-speak.
Did I mention it is free for personal use? No? Well, it is free for personal use... there, I said it! Go ahead, have fun! Or, as we say in Dutch: "Amuzeerdudermee!"
I just had word that the new version mentioned in this article on Mena's Corner: Upcoming Release to address Spam Issues, has been released. Head on to www.movabletype.org if you have a Movable Type weblog and have had problems with spammers sending your server load skyrocketing... This latest release should kill that problem *dead*.
To the scummy lowlifes that think blogspamming is a valid business tool: I hope you all go broke very soon. And may other unpleasant things happen to you.
Found this via Slashdot: Foreign Policy: Web of Influence.
It is a long article that does a good job of explaining what weblogs are, how they grew and where they are going, not only in the U.S. and Europe but also in the rest of the world. It highlights the recent ways in which blogging has impacted journalism (Trent Lott, Rathergate, the Bush bulge...) and talks about how blogs are finding their way around oppressive regimes.
If you are interested in the blogging vs. journalism debate, you should read this.
I wonder if the guys who created Blog Torrent realized what they just did. Overnight the number of open bittorrent trackers has become imensely larger. By tomorrow or at least by this weekend, a Google search for the string "Powered by Blog Torrent" will give you access to an unlimited number of open trackers. (right now it comes up with zero results).
Pirates and peddlers of illegal smut involving minors can now use a new tracker every day, making it much harder to pin them down. I guess efforts can still be made to find out who the initial seeders of such files are, though.
At least until the makers of Blog Torrent figure out that even seeding files is too difficult a concept for most users and integrate that function into Blog Torrent...
Anyway, I guess that's why there seems to be some kind of login system available on the current version, although it isn't documented yet.
If you know bittorrent but never figured out how to create and host your own torrent files, but you do have access to your own webserver with PHP installed, check out Blog Torrent - Simplified bittorrent by Downhill Battle. It makes sharing files with bittorrent as easy as selecting which file to upload.
I installed it myself here, go ahead and try, upload and share some files.
Disclaimer: none of the files that you or anybody shares will be on my server. The only thing that will be on my server is a small file that indicates who is sharing which files so that other people can download from them. I reserver the right to remove any or all of these files from my server at any time, for whatever reason.
In other words, don't upload kiddie porn etc., as
A) it will only be hosted on your own server
and
B) you'll be telling me where your server is so I can tell the cops
The second part of the evening was supposed to be a debate about new digital media and journalism, but devolved somewhat into a narrower discussion about weblogs vs. journalism.
I and some other people got into a heated discussion with journalist Fransicsco Van Jole. Francisco has been at the center of a dispute in the Dutch blogosphere recently between traditional media and some of the more popular Dutch blogs (nicknamed shocklogs for their content, by the way) like fok.nl, retecool.nl and geenstijl.nl.
Basically his argument yesterday was that journalism is a craft, and that it is way too easy and cheap to bash journalists, because they work really hard and check their sources and follow certain guidelines, while webloggers are just people with a keyboard and an opinion (which is often wrong and unfounded).
I repeatedly interjected and said that weblogs are just tools, just like pencils, paper or keyboards. It is perfectly possible for somebody who follows all journalistic rules to put his output into a weblog and call it journalism, if you ask me. But he seemed to dissagree, pointing out that weblogs show items in the order they came in, not in order of priority/importance, which is what journalists are supposed to do. (If that is the case, I wonder if AP or Reuters dispatches on a telex can still be considered journalism?)
I'd like to offer following analogy here: weblogs are hammers. That's right, a blog is a hammer. A simple tool. Anybody can use one. But not everybody who uses one can be called a carpenter. Because carpentry, like journalism, is a craft. Most carpenters are very good at what they do, and have worked very hard to gain their skills. Mind you, there probably are many shoddy carpenters too, or incompetent ones who still style themselves as being master carpenters.
Hammers are excellent tools to bash such people, just as weblogs can be used to bash shoddy journalism. On the other hand, hammers and weblogs can just as easily be abused to randomly bash people.
The trick is, which basher to believe? In my view, webloggers have reputations, just like mainstream media publications. Publish too much nonsense, and people will stop believing you. Don't believe just anything you read on the internet, but don't believe anything that's in print or on TV either. Media-consumers have to try to get to know the bias of their sources, and rate their credibility accordingly.
In my view, most people are capable of doing that. The weblog-revolution (if you want to call it that) won't be so much that everybody will become a publisher, but that everybody will be much more aware of which news sources they (don't) trust and why. Francisco seemed to dissagree with me here, by the way, saying that people are not capable of making such judgements. When I asked him if people were dumb, he said no, but they can't make out the truth without the help of journalists (or something, it was in the bar, and it was late; and yes, this is shoddy reporting, so shoot me, I'm not a real journalist and you, reader, probably know that, thus proving my point).
Honest and hardworking journalists have nothing to fear from this reputation-based system: if they practice their craft according to their established rules, their credibility and reputation will guarantee their status in the media landscape. But if they do shoddy work and cut corners... whammo! There comes the hammer!
(And the same goes for people who use weblogs to report news, by the way. It works both ways.)
As to random and uninformed bashing, the best defense is the truth. Spread your version of the story, and if it is more credible, the random basher's credibility takes a hit. But don't base your defense on your good name alone. Use facts, and let people decide for themselves. It really works. Look at the many allegations made during the U.S. presidential elections: lots of the mud that was slung by the candidates and their supporters ended up right back in their own face, with the resulting loss of credibility.
Another report of the evening can be found by Jeroen at minitrue.nl
Yesterday I drove for thee hours to the Netherlands (to cover 130km, traffic jams like you wouldn't believe it), in order to attend a lecture and debate about journalism and its relation to digital media, weblogs etc. The evening was organised by the NVJ (Dutch Journalists Society) and the Dick Scherpenzeel stichting, by the way.
Guest of honour was Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi weblogger who sort of got dragged into covering the Iraq war on his blog Raed in the Middle. Originally, his blog, like so many others, was meant as a way to allow some of his friends and family to keep track of his daily life. In the run-up to the war, his blog (and that of his friend Salam Pax) was 'discovered' by the outside world and many people started going there to try to get a picture from inside Iraq. Today, he still maintains his blog, but he warned the audience: he does not speak for the Iraqi people, just for himself. People tend to forget this.
Most notably, Raed is a secular, educated person who speaks and reads English. As he himself pointed out, most Iraqi's aren't like that. But he said he is qualified to write about what they think, because he has traveled the country extensively and talked to many people during his work for the NGO 'Emaar' (reconstruction).
Personally he was against the war. In his view, freedom, liberty and even the 'American Way of Life' are nice things to have, and most Iraqi's would want them, but he is opposed to 'American Foreign Policy'. In his view, the Americans have made mistake after mistake in Iraq, thus culturally alienating and humiliating many Iraqi's. He would have liked for regime change etcetera to have come about from the inside.
Other things I managed to remember from his talk: he sees this war as a religious thing, American christian fundamentalists versus islamic ones, as it were. He thinks it is no coincidence that pictures like these are appearing in U.S. media:
It might have been his English, or my interpretation of it, but he seemed to be under the impression that in general the U.S. media were overwhelmingly in favour of the war and the Bush administration. He also complained about new laws in Iraq that banned newspapers if they weren't pro-U.S. enough.
As to his relation with traditional media: he sees himself as sometimes reporting things directly that he has witnessed, other times clarifying or correcting news about things he has more background on than the journalists writing the stories.
Although I disagree with certain of his interpretations on his weblog, I must say he was quite an interesting and likable fellow, who is clearly using weblogs as a tool for reporting, criticizing and putting out his version of events. Is it journalism, is it not? Some people agree, some disagree, but more on that in my next post...
I had been working with them on this for a few days, but I just noticed they officially made the switch: De Standaard, one of Belgium's biggest newspapers and (AFAIK) the only one with a blog, has switched to TypePad for their blogging service! Check out their weblog: "En nu even ernstig".
Although I don't always agree with their editorial line, I heartily agree with their choice in weblog service! Congratulations to them and may they welcome many more visitors to their blog...
Over at the MEMORI weblog they seem to be impressed by my demo last week of TypePad and Movable Type. Thanks for the praise, guys, hope to talk to you soon again!
I spent a very nice afternoon in Mechelen last Friday. First I had a quick lunch with Nijn, from nijn.typepad.com, one of the first TypePad users in Belgium. We had a nice chat about blogs and blogging in general, and also talked about journalism a bit. Nijn studies journalism at the KHM in Mechelen, where I happened to have an appointment that day to talk about blogging.
More specifically, I had an appointment with some of the folks at MEMORI, one of whom I had met earlier this year at the BlogTalk 2.0 conference in Vienna (hi Tom!). I was there to talk about blogging and its uses in knowledge management and educational settings, and also about the features of Six Apart's products in that respect. Of course there also was a demo, that explains the picture below.
All in all, I tremendously enjoyed giving the presentation, and I'm looking forward to working with the people at MEMORI in the future. By the way, they also have a weblog, have a look!
Right now I'm watching the pre-debate coverage on CNN, with Luc Van Braekel on the VoiP chat and ready to get on the Command Post chatroom as soon as it opens.
Impression so far: the onlookers and audience seem to be going nuts... There are Nader signs, regular Bush/Kerry signs and signs asking "How many times have you been arrested".
You might have noticed the slightly rearranged lay-out of this site. I moved around some stuff and also added a little thingamajig from Bloglet in the right sidebar that allows you to leave your e-mail in order to subscribe to this blog. If you subscribe you automatically get an e-mail each day listing the new posts on this site. Handy if you don't have the time or patience to check for updates five times a day...
This bloglet thing is actually quite nifty: it works with a variety of blogging tools, using either a direct API or even RSS feeds to build the daily e-mail. When you have it on your blog you can also keep track of the number of subscriptions to your site and of the ranking your blog has among other bloglet-users (based on subscription numbers). So help me rise from #5411 to somewhere higher, subscribe today ;-)
Brilliant genre pastiche by Iowahawk. What if Rathergate was a cheap detective novel: iowahawk: MY TELEPROMPTER IS DEADLY. Go read it.
Michelle Malkin wants a Movable Type plugin to automaticaly superscript the 'th' in Dan Rather and to automatically add scare quotes around 'news' in CBS 'News'...
Her wish is my command.
(Unzip and drop in your plugin folder. Rathergate appears as new text formatting option...)
I did a new survey via the Krantenkoppen.be website of European newspapers mentioning the CBS scandal. Here is the query I used.
The results:
That's it!
Other stories that are mentioned: lifting of sanctions against Lybia, new Kerry criticisms on Bush, and the fact that there will be three presidential debates.
(One wonders how they are going to explain if the CBS moderator of one of the debates has to be replaced by someone from another network. My guess is they probably won't even mention it.)
CBS's apology has been reported on by Reuters in this article. They are not kind to CBS:
The admission by CBS News on Monday called into question both the credibility of what was once America's premier broadcast organization and that of its leading newsman, Dan Rather.Rather has anchored the CBS Evening News since 1981, when he succeeded Walter Cronkite -- dubbed "the most trusted man in America" for his perceived honest, objective and level-headed approach to news.
Nice. Maybe now it will get some more coverage in European media...
(De Telegraaf and the Frankfurter Allgemeine have articles about it now)
So now CBS was forced to admit the documents they had the utmost confidence in... could not be proved authentic and that it was "a mistake" to air them. They apologize profusely for being "misled".
Well, that's one way of putting it.
Another way to say this is that CBS did not do their basic journalistic duties, either out of incompetence or out of some other motives. Maybe this picture can shed some light on that...
Either way, how about someone getting fired for this? Hey, CBS shareholders, do you want incompetents or frauds working for you?
As you may have noticed, I have added Google Ads to my sidebar as an experiment. Since they are mostly text ads I don't think they will cause much interference with the rest of the blog.
Google claims that the ads that are being shown are related to the content of the page they are displayed on, in order to be more relevant (and hence more likely to be clicked).
Let's wait and see how long it takes for an ad selling IBM Selectric typewriters to show up...
It looks like the move to the new house will be completed between October 1st and 15th... Which means we'll be nicely settled in well before November 2nd.
On November 2nd, as most of my readers probably know, the U.S. presidential election is held. Due to the time-zone difference, results will be coming in very late during the night here in Belgium.
Hmm, a house with lots of space, a TV, an internet connection (wired and wireless), late-night politics marathon on TV, Mc Donalds less than 10 minutes away... looks like the perfect setting for a blogger bash!
So if you have a blog and want to liveblog the results together with some like-minded souls, how about coming to Houthalen in Belgium that night, for a beer-and-pizza fuelled night of marathon blogging...
(sleeping arrangements TBD).
Any takers? Drop a line in the comments!
Carlo at G-blog.net, also known as Gossip, has written a post describing the sputtering start of a project to use weblogs in the company he works for, in order to improve management communication.
Because management isn't totally clued in to blogging yet, it seems they made some pretty bad mistakes and the project was off to a shaky start. I just love this quote:
We might have upgraded our tools to be tools of the 21st 21st century, but in the end it probably means we just poked our eye out with a state-of-the-art laser-guided pickaxe.
It seems like brilliant essayblogger Bill Whittle has awoken from his weeks long slumber, and has posted this teaser about two new essays that are coming: Eject! Eject! Eject!: THREE, TWO, AND...
Another reason to love RSS feeds and readers: when a blogger like this disappears from view for a while, you're among the first to know he has posted something new...
Check out Mena's take on it. Or, as I now should probably call her, my boss's boss ;-)
My boss, Loïc Le Meur, has got a blogging problem. See for yourself here. I think he needs professional help ;-)
P.S.: Only kidding, why didn't I think of this ;-)
Some visitors to my old blog http://brusselsblog.blogspot.com might be wondering why they are being redirected here. Well, the answer is quite simple: as of today, I am working for the European branch of Six Apart, the company that runs the TypePad hosted weblogging service (among other things).
So quite naturally, today I converted all my old postings to TypePad format (which was dead easy), then I unleashed my 31337 P3rL haxx0r1ng s|<1LLz to make sure the titles I had manually put in all my blogger postings got properly converted to TypePad titles (which has an actual field for putting in the title of a posting, which is nice), and then I figured out a way to include a link to the old, external comments system I had to use on blogger in each converted article so I wouldn't lose all my old comments.
The result you now see on your screen. I hope you enjoy the new digs as much as I do, I'm looking forward to adding some more bells and whistles to the sidebar soon...
