Yearly Archives: 2006

Another Free Blogging Service

This entry was posted in Blogging on by

The Typepad folks, yes the same ones that also provide Movable Type and Live Journal are now offering a free service called Vox. There is also another entry page with a different presentation:

Vox is a free blogging service that lets you share stories, photos, and videos about your life — in privacy with friends and family, or openly with the world. It’s easy, fun, and works well with the other web things you do.
Create your own blog:

1 Choose from over 100 designs — from landscapes to pets to cycling.
2 Write about what interests you. Add mobile phone pics, images from your computer, books from Amazon, video from YouTube and iFilm, photos from Flickr and PhotoBucket, and more.
3 Post photos of your favorite things — they’re automatically collected for you.
4 See what your friends and family are up to.
5Control who can see your content — friends, family, or the world.

Hmmm, two thoughts. First, Blogger seems to have a pretty big lead in this space but some good competition should advance the state of the art. Second, how much will this service cannibalize six apart’s for fee services?

Via Alex Tabarrak.

Ping’m

This entry was posted in Google on by

My first reaction to finding out about Google’s new pinging service was, well, COOL.

Today we’re launching the Google Blog Search Pinging Service, which is a way for individual bloggers and blog platform providers to inform us of content changes.

Yep, I was thinking that they would acknowledge the changes quickly and the content would show up in Google’s search indexs as fast as stuff shows up on Technorati after you ping them. It looks like that may not be the case. From the Google Blog Search FAQ:

5. I pinged the Google Blog Search, but why don’t I see the results in Google Blog Search?
While the Google Blog Search Pinging Service helps us stay informed about updates to your blog, it doesn’t guarantee that your blog will be included in our Blog Search results. Since our inclusion process is automated, many factors, such as delays between when we receive the ping and when we then crawl your blog, can affect your blog’s inclusion.

I’m going to give this a try and hopefully the results are a bit better than their apparently broken change log.
You can ping them manually or if your blogging platform supports it you do it automatically.

Via Bloggers Blog.

Friday Ark #107

This entry was posted in Bird Blogging Cat Blogging Dog Blogging Friday Ark Invertebrate Blogging Pet Blogging Weekend Cat Blogging Weekend Dog Blogging on by

We’ll post links to sites that have Friday (plus or minus a few days) photos of their chosen animals (photoshops at our discretion and humans only in supporting roles). Watch the Exception category for rocks, beer, coffee cups, and….?

You can find out how to board the Friday Ark at the Arkive page.

Cats

Invertebrates

Birds

Dogs

Other Vertebrates

In Memoriam

Didn’t Make It

  • x

Exceptions (inclusion not guaranteed)

  • x

Extra, Extra: All Ark boarders are invited to shout out at the Friday Ark Frapper Map. (73 shouts as of 10/5)

Dog folks: remember to submit your links to the Carnival of the Dogs hosted by Mickey’s Musings. Also, there are more doggies at Weekend Dog Blogging hosted this weekend by Dispensing Happiness.

Cat folks: remember to submit your links to the Carnival of the Cats which goes up every Sunday and the 132nd edition, 10/1 is up at Pets Garaden Blog. The 133rd edition will be hosted by Curiouser and Curiouser on 10/8. There are more weekly cats at Weekend Cat Blogging hosted on 10/7 by The Hidden Paw which has many participants who may not be familiar to Ark or Carnival participants. Do go shout out at The Catbloggers Frappr Map.

Bird folks: I and the Bird: A Blog Carnival for Bird Lovers is published every 2 weeks. The 33rd edition is up and hosted by Don’t Mess With Taxes. The 34th edition will be hosted on 10/12 by Tortoise Trail.

For the spineless: Circus of the Spineless. A monthly celebration of Insects, Arachnids, Molluscs, Crustaceans, Worms and most anything else that wiggles. The 13th edition is up at Deep Sea News. The 14th edition will be hosted at the end of October by The Neurophilosopher’s Blog.

For other current carnivals check out The Conservative Cat’s Carnival Page, The Blog Carnival and The TTLB Uber Carnival

Note for Haloscan Users:

Haloscan started (the end of July) rejecting trackbacks if they were submitted “too rapidly” by the same host. I don’t know what the timer is but it is long enough so that it was very difficult to ping everyone that is using Haloscan for trackbacks. I’m sure that they are doing this to try to hold back the tide of trackback spam but it makes the service pretty useless for carnival type posts. Perhaps you can contact them and urge some different solution. Update: Typepad appears to be doing the same thing. Everytime I update the Ark it appears the timers are reset and the long list of MT autogenerated pings fail. Yecchhhh….