mediajunk

SixApart, the company famous for designing the MovableType System (used to publish weblogs) has just received a new round of funding and is poised to become an important player in the web industry.

Also this week, the company hired three of the web's best known (or "A-list") bloggers, including Michael Sippey, Brad Choate and Jay Allen.

Just three years old, the company has recently released version 3.0 of its popular software, making it for the first time a commercial vendor, rather a shareware distributor.

The long-awaited googleblog is now live. Once again, you heard it first on MediaJunk...

Yes, *that* Chomsky. The reputation of the blogosphere as populated by left-leaning liberals has just been rubber-stamped with the addition of Noam's weblog.

I've been anticipating the mass arrival of moblogs since January 2003. Until now, moblogging has been practiced only by the ultra-geeky, since it involves the manual combination of MMS messages and weblog software. One Irish company called Newbay offers a "foneblog" software product that integrates the two, but the phenomenon was unlikely to take off unless one of the major players began offering such a service to its customers. Enter Nokia who, according Niel McIntosh at the Guardian, will next week unveil its new "Lifeblog" app, which will enable phone users to create a "multimedia diary" on the web. It will be interesting to see whether phone users take to this technology. The history of phone/internet overlap has so far been one of much hype, but little consumer action.

A study by the The Pew Internet and American Life Project has found that, after an initial rush, the number of practicing bloggers has reached a plateau. CNN cites the report as revealing that "somewhere between 2 percent and 7 percent of adult Internet users in the United States actually keep their own blogs. Of those, only about 10 percent update them daily, the majority doing so only once a week or less often." I'm not surprised. Blogging is a commitment, though not a "feverish" one, according to Lee Rainie, the Pew project's director. "For most bloggers, it's not an all-consuming, all-the-time kind of experience." Had the study considered demographics however, it may have discovered that there is a disproportionately high number of teenage bloggers, which perhaps points to higher growth in the future. Then again, who knows what the web will be like in 10 or 20 years' time? Will the weblog concept still exist, as we know it today? I lie awake at night wondering about such things. (Yes, I am joking. Sort of.)

Picture phones are soooooooooo dated. Haven’t you, like, upgraded to a video phone? Well, maybe not just yet. But mobile phones that can send live video streams, or recorded segments, will be with us in the not-too-distant future. Already, the BBC has been testing just such a phone, says a report today in Cellular News: “Simply using their mobile phones, which are equipped with Philips' multimedia camcorder software, BBC journalists can conveniently and rapidly record video clips, up to 15 minutes in duration, and transmit them instantly to the studio for public television broadcast ... even from difficult or remote locations. Added to this are the considerable savings in equipment and time. The BBC has carried out a number of news broadcasts using video captured and sent with the new mobile technology, including a bulletin from a tugboat maneuvering in harbour.” Meanwhile, the growth of camera phones, and moblogs, continues to accelerate “after a sluggish start,” according to a recent report on (co-incidentally) the BBC news site: “Their popularity has been boosted by more users to send images to and people finding novel uses for them. These include snapping broken plumbing fixtures to send to plumbers and taking pictures of car number plates after hit and run accidents. … Hairdressers have been getting in on the act too by letting customers download shots of possible hairdos to show their friends before going for the chop.” The rapid spread of the phones has given rise to privacy concerns. When posted to moblogs, images become accessible to a worldwide audience within seconds of being taken. “Around the world, gyms, cinemas and offices have banned the use of camera phones after complaints about invasion of privacy.” There you have it: a thoroughly modern excuse to avoid going to the gym!

Emily Nussbaum has written a lengthy, insightful article about the phenomenon of teenage blogging -- one of the largest sectors of the blogosphere. I was surprised to learn, among other things, that blogging is not confined to geeks, and that cliquishness exists within the teenage blogging community: "Blogging is a replication of real life: each pool of blogs is its own ecosystem, with only occasional links to other worlds. As I surfed from site to site, it became apparent that as much as journals can break stereotypes, some patterns are crushingly predictable: the cheerleaders post screen grabs of the Fox TV show ''The O.C.''; kids who identify with ''ghetto'' culture use hip-hop slang; the geeks gush over Japanese anime. And while there are exceptions, many journal writers exhibit a surprising lack of curiosity about the journals of true strangers. They're too busy writing posts to browse." If anybody thinks that weblogging is a fad (some people still think the *internet* is a fad!), just wait until this generation of high-school bloggers reaches the workplace. Given the way these kids wholeheartedly embrace the medium, blogging -- and the web -- are sure to grow in new and exciting ways.

Ever wondered what a weblog would look like if it was freed from its browser & scrolling constraints? No, me neither. But thanks to sippey.com's weblog snapshots, I have nevertheless found out. Looking at these emancipated blogs, it struck me that their shapes resemble ancient papyrus scrolls. Nothing in today's print world is formatted in this way. Blogs, more than any other type of website, have taken advantage of the fact that users don't mind vertical scrolling ... to a point, at least. Finding that point can be tough. I recently reeled in the length of this mediajunk homepage as I felt it was just too damn long. Looking at Sippey's array of weblogs laid flat, I now realise I wasn't the only culprit. I guess that about halfway between the longest and shortest of Sippey's examples is optimal. But that's not a usabilty study; just my guess.

Beth Bartel is Antartica's first (I presume?) blogger. I expect someone will be blogging from Mars before too long...

I’ve added a few more links to my list of celebrity weblogs (bottom of the right-side column) – thanks to Kaye Rulz for bringing them to my attention. My celeb blog list is still shorter than most other similar lists out there. I’m trying to avoid including blogs that are obviously just PR gimmicks, and/or where the celebrity in question does not show any real commitment to blogging, or any understanding of what their fans (or potential fans) like to read. I’m pleased however that the list is showing signs of growth -- even if the trend is taking longer to emerge than I’d predicted. That’s good news for Kaye, as she is in the early stages of a PhD on celebrity weblogs. I’m sure that the subject will be a hot topic by the time she is finishing. Of all the blogs on the list though, I'm most impressed by that of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver (who shot to fame with his "Naked Chef" TV show in the UK). Jamie’s site has a nice balance of photos and text (he provides the latter personally), updated frequently enough and with interesting content, giving the reader/fan a friendly insight into his personal life. And it’s all framed in a cute design. Take note, too, that Jamie’s blog also comes up number one in Google on a search for “Jamie Oliver”. This is what I have been calling internet identity management -- and you don’t need your own television show to use it to your advantage.