What’s the difference between a blog post and an “article” or a “story”? By those terms, I mean content that isn’t as ephemeral as posts that hit the site every 15 minutes.
Blogs are, by definition, transient — they’re time-based, and items get essentially dropped into a stampede that tramples down the front page. What if you want something to rise above the stampede?
Here's a fact: intranets don't have to be crazy-complicated. Intranets are fundamentally about sharing simple information, which is not as hard as some people make it out to be. As simple as this is, most organizations either have no intranet, or a smattering of HTML pages someone threw…
Aaron Mentele is asking about posting practices for people who blog a lot. But while the first part of my prediction seems to be true, I can't say the same about posting getting any easier. Deane Barker tells me he spends 15 minutes on each post with the exception…
Crap Filter: Entertainment news, reviews and commentary: This blog does something I like -- it has "feature" links at the top of the home page to link to "major" posts ("important" posts? -- don't know how to phrase that). These are posts that are getting a lot of traffic…
I was reading a little e-book by Seth Godin the other day called "Everyone's an Expert" which turned out to be a big promo for his new venture: Squidoo (it's not live yet -- so there's not much to look at). In this little book (it's quite good), Godin brings up…
Blogging systems have always confused "posts" and "pages." We've talked about this before: what is the difference between a time-sensitive "post" and an "eternal" page? At what point does a "post" get re-visited and revised enough that it should become a page? We wrote about this at length almost…
Hurricane Ivan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Wikipedia coverage of Hurricane Ivan is just phenomenal. They have hotlinked satellite images, all the latest announcement and statistics, links to about everything you need to know, etc. Like the Madrid bombing coverage and the Olympics coverage, Wikipedia again gets the official "Pretend…
Integrated Quicklinks Tutorial: This is a handy thing. I've always been tormented (high drama here) with the disparity between post styles. Some are long manifestos, and some are just a quick link. ...here's a brief tutorial for MoveableType on combining regular weblog entries with quicklinks (basically, entries from two…
Waxy.org: Andy Baio lives here: Andy created a "mini-blog" on the right -hand side of his site for stuff which doesn't rise to the level of the "actual" blog. Boing Boing has done this too — allowed "guest" bloggers to have a space on the sidebar. This brings me back…
I'm about to admit something odd, and perhaps career-threatening: I'm sick of learning. There, I said it, and I feel better. It's true: learning about new technologies and new ways of doing things is something that plays on an addiction of mine and of many other geeks, I'm sure. …
I've been involved with Web development work at my church for several years now. In that capacity, I've been confronted with (1) the huge need churches have for Internet development, and (2) the general inability of churches to pay for it. Good Web development is expensive, and churches…
I just pulled a log file for the last week and cranked up Webalizer. It took me 30 minutes or so to screen out all the spiders I could find and all IP addresses that might be someone associated with this site, but after finally getting some clean stats,…
I got to thinking the other day that the content management field is flooded, especially the open-source systems. Go to sites like CMSInfo.org, OpenSourceCMS.com, CMSWatch.com, etc. and you'll see hundreds of them. Then, every week, I get notifications that new ones have been released: NetWizard Matrix, and Tiki,…
I've always been a big believer in legible URLs. There's nothing more annoying than a URL that stretches into hundreds of characters — ever tried to email one of those to a mail client that wraps at 76 characters? Additionally, I've written before about the need to support…
First of all, you're way over thinking this. I'd tell you that you need a hobby, but this is it.
I think that at some point in it's life Gadgetopia will become a place for 'articles' and more than just a blog. I look for 'articles' from reputable news or information sources. Don't get me wrong. This site provides great content. Most of it however, is a collection of items found elsewhere or thought provoking short essays. I view articles as original, investigative content. If I want 'articles' or reviews I'll go to a site that I believe has close ties to the industry. One site in particular is pocketpcthoughts.com. It offers simple blog type posts which are generally product annoucements as well as more indepth articles. The articles appear within the blog as they are posted, but remain in a separate article list at the bottom of the page. (Suprisingly, this site is built on phpbb. All front page posts appear in the forum as a topic.)
Another difference I see is that sites with 'article' type content have generally grown so big or have commercialized themselves to the point where you can't find the content among all the ads.
Keep in mind that there is nothing wrong with being a blog -- either philosophically or mechanically.
Very interesting and beautiful site. It is a lot of helpful information. Thanks!
