Phil Bradley's weblog

Regator

Curated Blog Search and Discovery I really do need a category called 'Oh dear, what a pity, never mind', because this blog search engine would fit right into it. I did a couple of searches (National Libraries Day and CILIP) and in both cases the most recent references were a couple of months old. Simply not acceptable when dealing with blogs - anything more than 2 days ago is pretty close to unacceptable in my view. They say of themselves "Regator uses qualified human editors to carefully select only the most relevant, useful, well-written blogs in each of our 500+ Topics. That means you won’t have to deal with the spammy, poorly written, or irrelevant posts that clutter up many other sites." Which is great, until you realise that unless you're interested in stuff like the Oscars, this engine isn't going to get you anywhere.

To be fair, if you browse through their categories you do find recent material, but again, do any of us want to try and wade through a category as broad as 'Academics'? No, I didn't think so. May be worth a look to see if your particular subject of interest is listed, but otherwise, I wouldn't hold out much hope with this one to be honest.

Great Blog statistics

I found some great statistics from The State of the Blogosphere by Technorati via the Search Engine Journal
* More than 133,000,000 blogs have been indexed by Technorati since 2002
* 77% of Internet users read blogs according to Universal McCann
* Two-thirds of Bloggers are male (c%u2019mon ladies, start Blogging!)
* More than half are married and more than half are parents
* 60% are 18-44 * 75% have college degrees and 40% have graduate degrees
* One in four has an annual household income of $100K
* Around half of Bloggers are working on at least their second blog
* 68% have been blogging for two years or more
* 86% have been blogging for at least a year
* 70% of all respondents say that personal satisfaction is a way they measure the success of their blog
* 72% say they blog in order to share their expertise.
* 61% say they blog in order to supplement their income.
* 53% of professional Bloggers are interested in attracting new clients from blogging.
* 72% of those who are self-employed and blogging are interested in attracting new clients.
* 57% say that their future plans include blogging even more (including 74% of 18-24 year olds).
* Part-Timers, Pros, and Self-Employed Bloggers are blogging as much as or more than ever (73%, 76% and 80%, respectively), while Hobbyists are blogging somewhat less.
* 15% of Bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging.
* One in five Bloggers report updating on a daily basis.
* The most common rate of updating is 2-3 times per week.
* The majority of blogs use tags (85%).
* 82% of respondents say that they post photos to their blog, making images the most popular form of multimedia.
* Bloggers participate in an average of 5 activities to drive traffic to their blogs.
* 72% of respondents are classified as Hobbyists, meaning that they report no income related to blogging
 * 56% say that their blog has helped their company establish a positioning as a thought leader within the industry.
* 58% say that they are better-known in their industry because of their blog

TypePad continues to dumb down

TypePad - Features - Blog It. I really do despair of TypePad. They have some really nice people who work for them; polite, responsive to questions (though not so quick off the mark with answers), and they're out there on Twitter and so on. They're also producing and upgrading their resources. Why then am I *so* disappointed with them?

Let's take one example - the quick post bookmarklet. In the 'old days' when I started to use TypePad, if I found a page that I wanted to blog about I could call up my little dialogue box, add in my content, format it, add in any HTML code that I wanted to include images, save the post and I was done.

Then they 'improved' the service by removing my ability to add in my own HTML code into the quick post option - in order to do that I'd need to go to the site by opening up a new tab, write my post and add in my extra content. There's also some other fun functionality that has me scratching my head. The linking text appears in the post at the beginning. If I delete all of that, when I start to write - hey presto! I'm linking to the page because TypePad hasn't been intelligent enough to delete the HTML code and because I can't get to it, I can't do it myself. All I can do is click and drag the link after I've written more of my post. How mad is that?

Anyway, we've now got the new version of their quick post bookmarklet. Can I choose which of my blogs I want to post to? Yes I can. Can I then choose the category I want to post to? Seemingly note. Can I add in links to different places? No. Can I add in my own images that are not on the page? Apparently not. How is REMOVING functionality helpful TypePad?

I appreciate that I can add in pictures from the page I'm blogged about easily. I appreciate I can add in YouTube videos easily, but here's a heads-up - I used to be able to do that ANYWAY! You're going on about these functions as though they're new and exciting. They're not. They're merely a simple way of doing what we've been able to do before.

TypePad is simply doing one thing - dumbing down the functionality. I realise that not everyone wants to play around with HTML, but some of actually do, and we know how to do it. So you go and remove that function from us. Tell me TypePad - HOW helpful is that, exactly?

All I want, and it's very simple - is to be able to use a quick post bookmarklet to add my own HTML, to edit any HTML that you put in, to add my own photographs that I've got elsewhere, to choose the categories that I want and to get on and do things the way that *I* want to - you know - the person who is paying you £90 a year for the pleasure of less functionality every time you 'improve' your service.

Luckily I can still use the older, better and unimproved bookmarklet option. Not the really old good one that worked, but I suppose I'll have to cope with that. I'm just hoping and praying that you don't do any more deciding what is good for me by killing that off. If you do that, I think it's going to be time to call it quits quite frankly.

Lijit search - your own search engine

There are lots of custom search engines around - Rollyo, Google Custom Search and so on, but the Lijit search is designed to take all your created content from your blog, website, Flickr account, twitter and so on and create a single resource for you. It seems very simple and straight forward - although given that it's quite late at night I'm taking a chance on creating, configuring and then posting about it. However, here it is:

Lijit Search

HotStuff 2.0 - Librarian weblogs

Dave Pattern the Library Systems Manager, University of Huddersfield has recently created the HotStuff resource. This is a collection of feeds from almost 1,000 library related blogs, which are collated on a daily basis to discover new and or interesting topics. He's also added in a 'hot or not' page. The word of the day for January 6th is 'potato', surprisingly enough. (Think couch potato)

Really fun resource and a great way to discover new blogs to follow.

Loaded Web blog directory

If you're fed up using more traditional weblog search engines such as Google Blog search, Technorati or Icerocket, AND if you're American/Canadian AND you're interested in geo-centric searching, try Loaded Web  instead. It's still in its early stages yet - there are 799 blogs listed in 450 different (US) cities. Searchers can also go into the Local Business Directory by state and then search by city. Once you're in the city section you can then search by business.

They make the point, and I quote here 'Blogs are displayed in completely random order!' - this in the Blogs in Richmond section. I think this is fine if you have a small collection, but they're going to need to ramp up quite quickly to add a proper search function - which they could actually do now with a custom search engine.

Very specialised and niche at the moment. Doubtless they'll let me know when they broaden it out and they do have an option to add your own blog as well.

Weblog: Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century

Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century. No, I am NOT making this up. It is there, complete with pictures.

Twitter for teachers

If you're a teacher and are using, or thinking of starting to use Twitter you might find this resource useful - twitter4teachers  - it's a PBwiki listing teachers of different subjects, grades and countries who use the microblogging resource.

Techcrunch helps nail the lid on Bloglines.

Destruction Of Bloglines Now Complete; Founder Prepares To Switch To Google Reader. This is the title of a post from TechCrunch which makes for damming reading. Mark Fletcher, who sold Bloglines to Ask in 2005 said in Twitter that he was considering going to Google Reader.

I've mentioned my dissatisfaction with Bloglines a few times, and I know that several of my readers and colleagues are similarly fed up with it, or have already moved across to Google Reader, and I've done the same thing. I think this is just symptomatic of the way that Ask is falling to pieces - they've dumbed down the web interface, made it more difficult to use, and given us less flexibility in the latest incarnation. The writing was of course on the wall when they dumped Gary Price earlier this year along with other key employees. Their position in the top 4 search engines is now looking very fragile indeed, and I don't really regard them as being a credible resource any longer.

βloglines continues to decline

βloglines is unfortunately continuing what appears to be a rather sad decline. Two of the people that I follow on Twitter have expressed considerable irritation that it's not updating properly. Bloglines made a couple of very unfortunate changes to the beta interface recently - it was very difficult to tell the difference between read and unread posts, and links to the original postings were not working. While the link issue has been addressed it's still very hard to see the difference between two close shades of grey. I gave it a couple of weeks and then I walked away out of frustration, and it looks as though more people are doing the same.

I did a quick check to see what people were saying in their blogs and sample comments are
"lately there have been more and more problems, and the past two days, it's been completely dead slow".
"Bloglines just frustrates me."
"Bloglines has been having some serious problems. Often I’ll open it up and none of my feeds in the left sidebar will show. I’ve contacted Bloglines about this but haven’t received a response."

Up until now I've used Bloglines when I've been teaching RSS and encouraged people to use their service, but I'm seriously thinking of calling time on it completely. It'll be a shame, because I've really enjoyed using it over the years and have found it elegant and fun to use, but if it can't do the job it's a hinderence, not a help.