Mossberg blows it on blogs
Walter Mossberg writes the Personal Technology column for the Wall Street Journal. In general, it's good stuff; he champions the 'regular guy' user, and he regularly brings Fortune 500 companies to heel when they have dumb problems with their products. Wired calls him The Kingmaker.
This week, he wrote a review of Microsoft's new blogging system, MSN Spaces, and did a rundown of several other hosted blogging systems. ('Hosted' means you do it on their server; as opposed to having to install software on your server.)
Interestingly enough, he explicitly mentioned all the leading services, except one: Typepad.com.
Strangely, he even mentions Typepad's owner - Six Apart - but only in the context of their recent acquisition of LiveJournal (whose product is interminably bad, and yet used by millions of high school students.)
I've playtested them all and Typepad is far and away the best and easiest. The blogs that Typepad creates are visitor-friendly and easy to manage. On the back-end, they're easy to set up and easy to customize.
At $5/mo for the low-end, and $15/mo at the fully-customizable super-high-end, they're damn cheap too. We recommend Typepad to many of our clients, and have helped quite a few set up blogs. (You're looking at a Typepad blog right now!)
Typepad can also handle some serious traffic - one of our blogs, BlueOregon.com, is currently picking up 20,000 page views a week.
Sure, I've got my quibbles about the interface - and a long list of features that I wish they'd implement sooner rather than later. But, having swum in everyone else's pool, this one is the warmest and cleanest.
Kari Chisholm | April 22, 2005 | Comments (6) |
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Unfortunately, there's one feature Typepad doesn't provide, and that's the one that keeps bloggers from sending a trackback ping to another blog's post without mentioning or linking to that blog.
Not cool, amigo.
Posted by: Eric | Apr 22, 2005 4:59:00 PM
Eric, you're missing the point of trackback.
One way to use it is to say "Hey! I linked to you!"
A second way, originally written into the spec, is to say "Hey! We're talking about the same thing!"
While the first use is the more common one, the second is actually more useful to blog publishers, blog readers, and to the Net in general. It helps create a contextual network, even when you're not explicitly linking in the content itself.
I'd suggest reading the original Beginner's Guide to TrackBack.
Posted by: Kari Chisholm | Apr 22, 2005 5:12:21 PM
"warmest" part of the pool is not necessarily the cleanest
Posted by: Chuck Sheketoff | Apr 22, 2005 5:28:55 PM
Nice, Chuck.
Posted by: Kari Chisholm | Apr 23, 2005 1:06:54 AM
I'd also suggest reading that guide to trackback, which Kari always tells people to do, but which he apparently keeps not reading himself:
And why would person B be interested in what person A has to say?
Person A has written a post on his own weblog that comments on a post in Person B's weblog. This is a form of remote comments--rather than posting the comment directly on Person B's weblog, Person A posts it on his own weblog, then sends a TrackBack ping to notify Person B.
Person A has written a post on a topic that a group of people are interested in. This is a form of content aggregation--by sending a TrackBack ping to a central server, visitors can read all posts about that topic. For example, imagine a site which collects weblog posts about Justin Timberlake. Anyone interested in reading about JT could look at this site to keep updated on what other webloggers were saying about his new album, a photo shoot in a magazine, etc.
Neither one of which is an example of the way Kari uses trackback to get traffic to his site without the reciprocity of providing traffic to the pinged site as well.
Posted by: The One True b!X | Apr 23, 2005 4:13:20 PM
Bix, you're wrong. I'm doing exactly the second method - content aggregation.
I'll continue to argue that a higher and better use of trackback is for *ad hoc* aggregators of comments. (Mostly because we don't have any centralized topical comment aggregators.)
Seriously - ponder it for a moment. Let's say that there are 14 blogs talking about a single topic. Most of them have a slightly different take on the topic. Wouldn't it be quite excellent if each of them had a link to each of the others? That would be a service to readers, as well as to searchbots, would be able to create networks of context. (Which, ultimately, is of use to readers.)
Now, should we require that each content author dummy up outtakes on each of those other 14 blogs? That would be redundant and probably boring. A better thing is for each of the authors to throw out a trackback to the others to declare "Hey! We're talking about the same topic!"
I trackback to you, and then you trackback to me. That closes the loop and creates the context network - or ad hoc comment aggregator, if you will. Readers are better served, as are blog authors.
What's wrong with that? And other than the 'ad hoc' part, how is different than the original intent of the very people who *invented* trackback in the first place - and wrote that Beginner's Guide?
I believe strongly that this is a place where the "accepted etiquette" is a misplaced understanding of the nature of context networks and, ultimately, a disservice to the readers.
Posted by: Kari Chisholm | Apr 23, 2005 4:50:25 PM
