Archive for the 'Blogging' Category

Site owner blocks Firefox users!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 24/8/2007
in Blogging, RSS and blogs
. 12 Comments

I saw this story on Techmeme this morning and I simply couldn’t believe it - but it is true!

A guy called Danny Carlton has decided to block ALL Firefox users from his site because:

The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software

Now, you will be aware that not all Firefox owners have installed Adblock but no matter, Danny is blocking them too. As he says himself:

If you are offended by the Mozilla Corporation’s endorsement of dishonesty please contact the Mozilla Foundation and ask them to stop empowering internet theft.

This is so silly as to be laughable. Either the guy is trolling looking for links (you won’t find any here Danny) or he really is a tad challenged!

In the first place, as Mike Arrington notes

I wonder why he continues to provide a full content feed, sans ads, at jacklewis.net/weblog/atom.xml (and it has been reposted here). Those users are “stealing” his content, too. What about them? Perhaps he’ll now turn his attention to the evils of RSS.

and in the second place, there are adblocking plugins available for Internet Explorer, as well as Firefox.

Will Danny now block Internet Explorer users from accessing his site too?

Google Reader quick comments

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/8/2007
in Blogging, RSS, Web 2.0 and blogs
. 4 Comments

I have now completely moved over to using Google Reader as my primary RSS reader. And it appears I am in good company!

I started using it regularly while on holidays on my phone and I grew to like it - particularly the ability to Star and Share posts.

Now I’m using it full-time, not only for these features, but also because I can use it on my Vaio, my MacBook Pro and my mobile phone (I still read and Share many items on the phone at home).

There is really cool trending software in Google Reader as well to help you figure out which blogs update regularly (with a one-click option to unsubscribe from ones which don’t), which blogs you Star and/or Share and it charts your reading activity by day (and by time of day).

The only thing which annoys me about it is that the list of unread items my phone displays differs from the list my computers display. I don’t know why this is, they are running from the same account, reading the same subscription list. Has anyone else noticed this?

If you’d like to follow the items I’m Sharing from my subscription list (i.e. follow what I am recommending) you can:

BlogTalk 2008 to be held in Cork?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 14/8/2007
in Blogging, Conference and blogs
. 13 Comments

BlogTalk is a big international conference around the Social Media space.

The last BlogTalk conference was in Vienna and featured speakers such as Danah Boyd, Suw Charman, and Matt Mullenweg.

Thomas Burg, John Breslin and I are going to see if we can organise the next BlogTalk conference for Early March 2008 in Cork.

All in favour say “Aye!”

Full feeds lead to more page views

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 14/8/2007
in Blogging, RSS and blogs
. 6 Comments

TechDirt has an article explaining why full feeds lead to more page views on your site than partial feeds.

From the article:

Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two.

I have long had full feeds on this site and have written numerous times about the merit of full feeds.

Further, I don’t subscribe to any sites which only publish partial feeds - it is a waste of my time having to click through to read the full article on the original site.

You can be sure I am not the only one who thinks this way!

Congrats to Conor O’Neill

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 13/8/2007
in Blogging, Web 2.0 and blogs
. 1 Comment

on the launch of Blognation Ireland earlier today.

Conor (from review aggregator LouderVoice) is the editor of Blognation Ireland and the publication promises:

to bring you all the latest news from the world of Web2.0 and mobile in Ireland

Subscribed.

Sky Handling Partners engage in fraud and libel against blogger? - contd

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/6/2007
in Blogging
. 2 Comments

Sky Handling Partners have a shitstorm on their hands.

Yesterday someone in their organisation committed computer fraud (a criminal offense)  and libel against Damien Mulley - seemingly in revenge for a post he published where he outlined how poorly they treated him after losing his luggage!

Now, instead of trying to engage with Damien. Instead of contacting him and saying, “Look Damien, we’re really sorry about this - what can we do to make it right?” Or “Look Damien, we dropped the ball and you had a bad customer experience, we know we have issues and are working to address them. Would you like to be a member of our Customer Service Improvement Committee and work with us to create a better experience for all our clients?”

No.

Instead of that, what do they do? They set their lawyers on him, demanding that he take down his posts about them!

Good God, just who advises these people?

First they piss off one of the more influential people in the country. And then they try to gag him when he complains! Clueless personified.

This is likely to be a real Man bites Dog. We are used to hearing stories of Blogger sued by Large Corporation but this looks increasingly likely to be the first Large Corporation sued by Blogger story.

Go for it Damien.

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