Movable Type Blog Migration
Over the last week, usually in the mid-to-late evenings — after Catherine falls asleep, I have been slowly migrating my B2-based blog to Movable Type.
I must say that for the most part the process has been fairly straight forward. The MT system installed smoothly and customizing the core MT templates, while time-consuming getting them to fit my old B2 template, were rather easy and extremely flexible.
However, during the migration process I had some interesting obstacles. In particular, I wanted to seamlessly maintain the entire URL-space of my old B2 blog with my new MT blog. My initial thinking was that with a little data-scrubbing and massaging I could export the MySQL table data from B2 and import the data into the MT table-space.
Is Comment Spam Cost Effective?
I’m getting my fair share of comment spam like many other bloggers, but I can’t imagine that the cost/time ratio is actually worth it.
I think Sam Ruby sums it up best:
“65 minutes to create. Carefully crafted to appear to be on topic. 10 seconds to wipe out.”
LOL! Dumb asses!
Salesforce.com on Social Networking
Ross Mayfield posted an excerpt from an interview with the CSO of Salesforce.com in regard to Social Networking. The interview was conducted by IBDN, but I wasn’t able to find a direct link. However, here’s a quote from the M2M blog:
IBDN: We know that consumers will pay to find a date, but will they pay to find business contacts?
FULBRIGHT: Yes, one name for them is “leads,” and sales and marketing organizations pay thousands of dollars for leads today. Leads are the life-blood of every business. Another type of paid business contact is called “candidates,” and again companies have been paying recruiters or internal referrals thousands of dollars for great candidates for at least 50 years.
NewsGator posting plug-in for B2
Cool! Greg has released a NewsGator posting plug-in for B2! (hopefully this will work!)
NewsGator 1.3 Released
Greg Reinacker has just released NewsGator 1.3, which includes initial support for Pie/EchoAtom feeds, among many other great new features!
Congratulations (again) Greg!
Study shows blogs are under-represented in Google
Interesting study released by Microdoc News debunking (mathematically) that blogs are clogging Google
[Estimations show] “there are about 150 million webpages that belong to blogs. Out of 3.8 billion webpages 150 million is about 3.9% of all pages in Google and blogs appear in the top ten results only 2.1% of the time. It seems to me that blogs are being under-represented and not over represented in Google.
Link to Microdoc News via Anil Dash
Going Commercial
Like many other bloggers, I’ve decided to give Google’s AdSense a test run.
I suppose I’m most interested in the type of Ads that get served on subsequent posts. Specifically, the context matching of content to Ads. So far it seems to be working well.
However, I do wish Google offered more flexibility with the style and sizes of the Ads.
WordPress b2/cafelog derivative
Congratulations to Matthew and Mike on the release of WordPress, which is the official fork in the b2/cafélog blog tool.
On a test server I converted the data from my current b2-based blog to WordPress with very little trouble. Especially helpful was the handy upgrade script included with WordPress.
For the most part everything seems to be working well. I was even able to get the search-engine-friendly URLs working. I may in fact upgrade my live b2 blog with the new WordPress code. However, I want to run a few tests and see if any bugs pop-up before I take the plunge.
Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story
Ok, I suppose my post is a reaction or vote to
Microdoc News Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story study, which not surprisingly is tracking on Blogdex.
Whatever the case, and the label for what I’m doing here, I do find Microdoc’s study to be quite interesting. In particular, the following quotes…
Microdoc News has developed a picture of how a blogosphere story gets started, how that story develops and then how it then comes to an end. While each blogosphere story has its own pattern of development, the similarities between one story and another is intriguingly similar. The smallest blogosphere stories can have as few as fifteen bloggers, the average story has between 40 and 60 bloggers, while the largest one to date had about 285 bloggers involved. A blogosphere story can be as small as 180 posts in total, while the largest we studied has numbered 7,540 posts in total.
[… and later …]
“Perhaps the last conclusions we came to in this study is that blogs cannot be read in isolation from each other. Blog stories are understood and appreciated in aggregate and not in isolation. On the other hand, mainstream media stories tend to be read in isolation rather than read and compared.