Exhausted from a long day of work, late last night Victor passed along a link to an informative article in The Economist, called “Going Pro.” He asked that either Mike Neel or I share it with the rest of the Knoxbloggers group as a follow up to his presentation last Wednesday.
Mission accomplished, and thanks for the heads up, Victor.
Victor Agreda did a fantastic job of sharing his experiences in monetizing his blog at tonight’s meeting of the Knoxbloggers group. And he gave us several useful tips about how we might follow his lead and do the same with our blogs. It was, to me, a very interesting meeting.
A number of people expressed an interest in attending, but for some, prior commitments stood in the way. This meeting generated a lot of interest, as you might imagine. Perhaps second only to a topic like “sex” or the offer of free beer, few things capture people’s attention quite like the mention of making money. If you missed this event folks, you really missed a worthwhile meeting.
Because we had previously considered capturing the audio content of some of these meetings and because we had a specific request to do that for this meeting, Mike and I pooled our audio resources and set up our motley collection of equipment to capture tonight’s session for a podcast, or an audio blog post as I am calling them now. I arrived at around 6:30 PM and conducted some preliminary tests so that we’d be assured that we could capture the audio adequately. We had the room mic’ed very well, and the playback of our tests sounded quite good really. If we needed to run the resulting audio, once captured, through a noise reduction filter or an expander to make sure the sound was loud enough or that there were no irritating extraneous noises, that would be no problem. Post-processing for sound quality wouldn’t be half the problem that editing the almost 2 hours of material might prove to be.
We used Mike’s older, personal laptop and the trial copy of GoldWave to record the audio, and it performed beautifully in our tests. We conducted three or four trials to make sure the recording levels were satisfactory. And they were.
But unfortunately, Murphy was also in attendance at tonight’s meeting.
I asked for an intermission after about an hour or so, and saved the file in MP3 format. That save took almost 15 minutes and resulted in an 82 Mb file, which was about one-tenth of what it would have been if I had saved it in *.wav format. That intermission was a little longer than I had intended it to be, but everyone was understanding and eventually we got back to recording for another 50 or so minutes. The second file proved to be 62 Mb once it was saved in MP3 format.
Mike burned the two files to a CD so that I could bring them home with me and devote most of tomorrow to editing them down to the essence of what was said. But after doing so, he decided to play one of them back. What he heard was an audio file that sounded like it was a 78 rpm record played at 33 rpm speed, a slowed down version of the actual audio. I was hopeful that when I got back home, I would be able to increase the speed so that it might actually be rescued. Alas, it was not. I could increase the speed and make it sound almost like the appropriate pitch, but there were gaps that made the content unintelligible.
The problem, I realized after it was too late to do anything about it, was that I had failed to install the lame encoder in the GoldWave folder. So when I saved the file as an MP3 file, the audio was distorted beyond recognition. The error I made was that I failed to save one of our audio tests to see whether the saved file sounded as good as the playback of our tests when we listened to them.
So once again, I am wiser as a result of this experience, but I am very disappointed that we did NOT capture the audio from tonight’s meeting, and therefore I am unable to share it with you in an audio blog post. My apologies to all concerned, and especially to those of you who were depending upon being able to hear this recording.
“Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.” — Vernon Sanders Law
One of the websites that I follow through it’s RSS feed is Mediashift by Mark Glaser. In yesterday’s entry, he reports that last Friday in Berlin he participated in the jury that selected the 15 Best Weblogs in the World for 2006, or “the BOBs” (Best of the Blogs), from among the 5,500 that had been nominated from all over the world. His entry explains the various categories from which the winners were chosen and the difficulties attendant with doing so. The competition is sponsored by the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
The weblog that won the first place overall was Sunlight Foundation that was founded as a 501 (c)(3) educational organization in January of 2006. This quote from their “about page” summarizes the essence of their mission:
The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. We are unique in that technology and the power of the Internet are at the core of every one of our efforts.
It doesn’t surprise me in the least that the top blog was more than a one-person review of technology, a recounting of the events of someone’s daily life, a biased political rant with an idealogical ax to grind, or just a digital version of a vanity press for someone’s purple prose. The top blog, it turns out, has a purpose that is actually worth achieving.
Naturally, I have added Sunlight Foundation’s RSS feed to the list of feeds that I monitor daily. Perhaps I’ll learn something about blogging from reading it. And if not, perhaps I’ll just end up being a better-informed citizen. Either way, I think I’ll benefit.
When I began using Firefox 2.0 as my browser the other day, I needed to replace Flock’s “My News” to keep track of the RSS feeds that I monitor. I chose to subscribe to Bloglines. It is “a FREE online service that helps you subscribe to and manage lots of web information, such as news feeds, weblogs and audio. Bloglines tracks the information you’re interested in, retrieves new stuff as it happens, and organizes everything for you on your own personal web news page.” (That quote is from their help file.)
This morning I’ve taken advantage of another of its features and created an additional blog called, “My reading list,” to which I post the links, and my comments about them, to the articles that I read each day and find worth posting. I would invite you, if you wish, to visit that link and see the things that in the past (say in the 1990′s) I might have sent out in an email to 100 or so of my closest friends with a recommendation that they “check it out.” Now I don’t have to burden them with the extra email in their inbox, but if they are really interested, they can visit this page and see the things I find interesting. In fact, they can even “subscribe” to the feed for that page so that they don’t even have to visit the page.
I would encourage you to check out Bloglines, as I’ve encouraged you before to check out RSS feeds. It makes it much easier to keep track of what’s going on online using this strategy than it is to remember to visit 20 to 100 web pages each day.
I see that Mike has already added the description of the agenda for the November Knoxbloggers meeting. Good for you, Mike. It looks like it might be an interesting meeting, because it deals with almost everyone’s favorite subject — making money. Check it out, and come and join us if you can. It could prove to be 2 hours well spent.
In what I suppose will come as a shock to some who think of me as a ”SuperFan” of Flock, I’m announcing that during the last week I have decided to change my default browser to Firefox 2.0, just as Tish is getting on the Flock bandwagon. The primary reason for the change, in my case, is speed or the relative lack of it in Flock. It may be just my system or it may be that because Flock aspires to do so much, it will always be slower than FF, but whatever the reason, there is enough of a speed difference that the extra effort required to make this change seems justified.
Last week when I noticed the difference in the speed of the two browsers, I pulled up Process Explorer and checked the properties of both browsers side-by-side, and this is what I saw.
For those really interested, clicking the image above will open a larger version of it that I hope you’ll be able to read clearly. (Update: After posting this I notice that the “expanded view” of the graphic above displays at the same size as what is within the post. Here is a larger display of it.) The memory usage in Flock seems to be almost twice as much as in Firefox. In all fairness to Flock, it must be acknowledged that it is at version 0.7 or thereabouts whereas Firefox is at version 2.0. I’m sure I’ll be testing each version of Flock as it comes out, so the change I’ve made is not necessarily permanent, but for now you can color me as primarily a Firefox user.
So what “extra effort” you may ask yourself is required to duplicate all the functions that Flock makes available in its default installation when one chooses to use Firefox instead? Well, that’s an interesting story to me. In many ways, I think it says some positive things about Flock that there is a lot of things that I must activate to recreate its built-in functions, and there are some things that I can’t duplicate in Firefox at all.
First, let me describe the things I am able to duplicate.
Since I used Flock’s built-in “My News” to track the RSS feeds that I follow, I’ve opened a Bloglines account and am systematically adding the feeds to it that I previously followed in Flock. This would be a lot easier to do if Flock had a capability that Mike Neel has been requesting for a while — the ability to export the feeds from Flock to an OPML file. But it doesn’t yet have that ability (see Update #2 below for a correction), so I’m having to go through the feeds one at a time and subscribe to them in Bloglines. Fortunately, Bloglines offers a widget that you can add to your Bookmark Toolbar so that you can subscribe to a feed easily. I’ve also set my Bloglines account as one of the two Home pages that open when I open Firefox, so that provides the same function as Flock’s notification that a feed has been updated.
I’ve had to add a del.icio.us widget to my Bookmark Toolbar so that I can tag items for my del.icio.us account, whereas when I “starred” a favorite in Flock, that gave me the option to do both things at once. That is a feature that I’ll welcome being able to get back when Flock improves its speed and I return to it as my default browser, because the way Flock stores favorites gives me a capability that I can’t recreate in Firefox. But I’ll say more about that later when I discuss what I can’t duplicate in Firefox.
Flock has a built-in blog editor that Erwan Loisant is working to improve. However, I have already begun experimenting with a number of the other blog editors that are available. At the moment I am using Windows Live Writer for this post, and that is the editor I usually use when I want to add a graphic to the post anyway. WLW gives some additional capabilities for formatting the graphic at the time it is added, so I prefer it for that function. I’ve also installed Performancing into Firefox, and I use that for quick posts directly from the browser. And on those rare occasions when I want to post a podcast, I use the Write panel in my WordPress installation so that I have access to the podPress add-in that I have installed there. I don’t think it is likely that any one of these various blog editors will ever have all the features that are unique to the others, so I am content with having a number of tools to perform the specific task I want to accomplish.
Flock’s integration with Flickr is sweet, and I prefer its uploading capability to either the Flickr Uploadr or the web interface at Flickr. However, I can subscribe in Bloglines to the RSS feeds for those of my Flickr contacts that I want to stay informed of when they update their photostream. So in one sense I can duplicate Flock’s notification that one of my contacts has uploaded a new photo. However, one feature isn’t available by doing that. In Bloglines, I can only see the Public photos that my son uploads, not those that are designated as available to only Family and Friends. However, I can live with that limitation because when I visit Flickr, I can see that other group of pictures.
And finally to draw this epic post to a conclusion, let me say that the thing I can’t duplicate in Firefox that I miss most from Flock is the ability to easily change which collection displays in my browser in the place where the Bookmark Toolbar is displayed in Firefox. I have used the “collections” feature in Flock extensively, and I really liked being able to display across the top of my browser the links in the different collections so that they are easily accessible while surfing.
I look forward to Flock’s further development and the improvements I hope for in its performance. You haven’t lost me as a SuperFan Flock. I just need a little time away to play for a while in the fast lane.
Update #2: Daryl points out to me in a comment to this post that Flock does indeed have the ability to export news feeds to an OPML file. And upon looking more closely, I did discover that ability. Thanks, Daryl. Sorry to have inaccurately criticized Flock regarding a feature that was already there. I guess it lends support to your frequent comments about the importance of discoverability. 
Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 are out and available. I’ve installed Firefox 2.0 on my own computer and yesterday, I helped my friend Paul install IE7 on his. He described IE7 as the Rolls-Royce of browsers, but I countered that it is more like getting a new car of the same brand. There are a number of new bells and whistles, but it is the same kind of car. I like it much better than IE6, but it is a matter of preference as to whether it is that much better than FF 2.0. I do like the way it does RSS feeds, however.
If you are still driving the old version of IE, I would think you would want to add IE7 as soon as it is convenient. It is purportedly more secure than IE6, and it certainly has enough enhanced features that it is worth the trouble to install. If you aren’t yet bold enough to add it now, it will be installed automatically through Windows Update sometime in November, I understand.
I’m sure I’ll be writing more about these browsers in the days ahead, so stay tuned.
Update: Mike Neel has also posted his comments about these two browsers, in which he goes into more detail about the differences and similarities between them. So rather than my reinventing that particular wheel, let me recommend that you check out his review.
powered by performancing firefox
For some time now, I’ve been disturbed by the fact that the theme for this blog didn’t display the same way in Internet Explorer as it did in Firefox (or Flock). This morning, I’ve used widgets to display the items in the sidebar and in the process, that has seemed to clear up the problem of how it displays in IE. I may continue to tinker with other themes, because though I like the clean look of the Barthelme theme, there are many, many more options out there and I may be able to find one I like better.
If any of you IE users experience problems with this theme, I would appreciate the feedback.
Blogged with Flock
I notice that Barry has responded to Tish’s request to make the full text of his RSS feed available rather than just the first 255 characters. Thank you, sir. I think it makes the aggregated feed at KnoxBloggers.com more readable and symmetrical, given that the rest of us send the full text in our RSS feeds.
Blogged with Flock
Since Mike has reported on the content of what we covered at last night’s KnoxBloggers meeting and Tish has shared her impressions of it, all that remains for me is to upload the pictures.
While my photography may not be the greatest, at least these pictures document the event and those present (at least those present at the time the pictures were taken; Cicelie came in later). From left to right in this photo, you’ll find Maja, Mike and Tish. Sorry Tish that I got you with your eyes closed, and Maja I apologize for the fact that the flash didn’t seem to reach you, but such things happen when the photographer is an amateur.
Lidia had a chance to pose for her photograph, since I missed her in the other one. Also she got the benefit of the full flash saturation, so congratulations Lidia on being so photogenic.
I’ll also add a brief comment to what Mike posted about what we covered.
One of the things we did while talking about blogging was to set up a blog at Blogger and one at WordPress.com, just to demonstrate how one would do that. Since most of us already had some experience with using Blogger and fewer of the group knew much about WordPress.com, we issued invitations to those present to get an account (username and password) at WordPress.com so they could make some practice posts on the demonstration blog we set up there. While WordPress.com says there is no limit to the number of blogs you can create, it made more sense to avoid littering the landscape with individual test blogs and to concentrate our efforts on one blog. One advantage of this strategy, it seems to me, is that if several of us are blogging together we can provide each other feedback or help when problems are encountered.
I want to encourage those of you who received invitations to the WordPress.com demo site to go ahead and get your account at WordPress.com so that you can begin to experiment. And I’d like to invite you to ask Mike or me if you have any questions about what you are doing there. We’ll be glad to try to answer or help you find an answer to your questions, if we don’t know.
