Friday, February 24, 2006

David Wilkinson has a mockup of an OPML Editor 1.0 website for review. It's a little homey, imho, I was hoping for more color, like the Firefox download site. Maybe even with rounded corners and Ajax-ish tech. 

I'm thinking about a series of OPML Roadshows in April, to take the 1.0 release around the U.S. to show it off. So far I've asked about venues in Cambridge, New York and Seattle. Obviously there would have to be one in the Bay Area. Maybe this time (I'm going to get in trouble for this) London.  

It was a rougher week on the net than you could see on the mail lists. I'm getting pushed around again, that's the bad news. The good news is that a bunch of people wanted to get a flamefest going with me as the guest of honor, and it didn't take root. Even so, I have reached a new level of exhaustion, and that's not a good thing. In some conversations, I've tried, to no avail, to explain that I am a real person, not an object, and I'm just asking to be treated as you would treat anyone else. But I'm also an A-lister, and a celebrity, and being treated like an object comes with the territory. But I'm also a blogger, and I'm sorry, I just doing go for the regal treatment. Anyway, maybe next week will be better. I sure hope so. 

Sean Kaye: "My great concern is that companies like the ones above will 'simplify' the standard for themselves thus making it considerably more complicated for everyone else and far less effective than it is now." The companies are Six Apart, Feedburner, Technorati, Newsgator and Socialtext. 

Thanks to Dave Sifry at Technorati for helping RSS get out of conflict.  

Press-Republican: "Dr Robert Johnson, a Democrat from Sackets Harbor, near Watertown, who is challenging incumbent Republican John McHugh in the 23rd District, said he was denied access aboard a Continental Airlines flight to Florida on Jan 17 from Syracuse after officials informed him that he was on a 'no-fly' list." 

Essay: It's their world, not mine. 

Rex Hammock: "It's a mistake when anyone attempts to place mass-media business metrics to defining success or failure of a weblog." 

Blogging for newbies 

When I encourage people to start a blog here's what I suggest they do.

First, create a new weblog on one of the free services, like Blogger or MSN Spaces. It takes about five minutes, and is about as hard as creating an email address on Yahoo or Hotmail, and represents less of a commitment. Then make your first post, something like Hello There, or Testing 1-2-3. Once you've verified that it works, you can stop there.

Then someday, when you're in the shower or lying in bed in the morning and get an idea that you wish you could tell everyone, remember that you have a blog, and go to the computer, and write it up and publish it. That actually feels pretty good, even if you think no one will read it, because you got it off your chest.

Then in a few days Google will probably visit your site and index the post, and then when someone searches for that subject, your page will come up, and maybe you'll pass that idea on to someone who can use it, or meet someone who agrees, or someone who disagrees. And that's blogging, and that's all it is.

To illustrate the point, this morning I woke up thinking that I should really post my standard blogging pitch. And there, a few minutes later, it is.

The elevator pitch for OPML blogging 

At lunch on Sunday with Rick Segal, the Toronto venture capitalist, and ex-Microsoft fighter pilot, he asked if anything new was coming in blogging. I said yes, there is, something big.

And so there is. People who use the OPML Editor for blogging know what it is. And I even have the elevator pitch, and it's been tested on Rick Segal, and it works. It goes like this.

Did you ever have an idea you wanted to post on your blog that didn't seem big enough to be an essay? An idea that could be expressed in a sentence, or less, but still deserved to get out there? In writing school they teach that less is better. If you can say someting in three words instead of twenty, say it in three. It communicates better. Well, none of the existing blogging tools can do little sentence or phrase-size blog posts.

That's what we're doing, perfecting a tool for easier, quicker, blogging on a smaller scale.

Don't forget 

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