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Posts from September 2010

links for 2010-09-15

15 September 2010 in DailyLinks | | Comments (0)

Like Poetry Recitations? Have You Checked YouTube?

Normally, I think of YouTube as a delightfully weird home for bad dance videos, bootleg partial episodes of TV Shows, cute cat videos, weird marketing shills, hilarious PhotoShop tutorials and lesbian web series.

I discovered today that it is also a gold mine of poetry readings.  Often set to music.

Earlier this morning I was reminded of a favourite poem of mine, Ithaca from C.P. Cavafy, by by Gretchen Rubin of the Happiness Project (one of my fav books I read this year - if you haven't read it, definitely check it out). Gretchen quoted a stanza from it which made me want to read the whole poem.  In doing a search, I discovered a cornucopia of readings of it on YouTube:

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised when this three-year old's poetry recitation is the latest video hit (the YouTube link doesn't allow embedding so I'm using the Yahoo version where he has received over 2 million views).  John Lundberg has a nice little piece on this reciting phenom over at Huff Post.


3-year-old recites poem, "Litany" by Billy Collins @ Yahoo! Video

14 September 2010 in Language | | Comments (2)

links for 2010-09-10

10 September 2010 in DailyLinks | | Comments (0)

links for 2010-09-09

09 September 2010 in DailyLinks | | Comments (0)

More on Choosing a Blogging Platform plus a Serendipitous Lesson about Graphs

Following on my post yesterday about choosing a blogging platform for small and medium businesses, Catherine Winters asked if I had any market share data about the different platforms.  Good question.  So I did a little searching and Señor Google did have a few interesting things to say ...

First, I liked this piece by Pingdom on the blogging platform of choice for the Top 100 blogs.  About 2/3 of them use a self-hosted service - so those aren't really relevant.  But a 1/3 or so use a hosted platform and it was interesting to see those results.

Popular Blog Platforms 

I liked the Pingdom piece (even if the data is from Jan 2009) because it included only "real" blogs - there are a lot of spam blogs out there.  This is what concerns me a little about the report from BuiltWith (a site I totally didn't know about that tracks technology changes and trends).  It looks at the whole universe of blogs and I feel fairly certain that a large number of them are spam.

Blog Technologies

Wordpress is certainly the most popular - especially in articles about which blogging platforms are the most popular :)  There are a lot of those articles out there.  This one from Fuel Your Writing was the best written one I found.  While he doesn't quote market share stats, David selected four platforms that he was familiar with (Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr and Posterous) and shared his well-thought-out pros and cons.  I only wish he would have included Typepad since it would have rounded out my recommendation list nicely. 

David comes to one of the same conclusions that I did - you need to choose your platform based on your needs - which is why I was trying not to focus on "feature set" in my blogging platform recommendations, but on other "meta" issues around blogging.

Oh ... here's the other neat piece I discovered.  ProBlogger has done a survey of the blogging platforms used by his readers for the last few years. Great data - again, Wordpress on top.  What I was delighted to discover what this companion piece by Jon Peltier where he uses ProBlogger's data to improve the graphs used to visualize the data.  If you're interested at all in data visualizations and how to use graphs to improve your content, read Peltier's piece - I love how step-by-step and clear it is.

And I'm still looking for any "meta" criteria (vs features) that you would add to my list when choosing a blogging platform.

08 September 2010 in Blogs and Blogging, Design, Infograph-tastic, Technology & the Internet | | Comments (1)

What To Look for in a Blogging Platform

Update: I've written a companion post about some of the market share info I found about blogging platforms as well as a bit about data visualization.

I'm teaching a class this fall at UBC on Social Media Fundamentals.  Very excited about it!  One of the areas we're covering is, as you would expect, blogging.  I wanted to put together a little comparison table to help people choose a blogging platform.  I'm making some assumptions: that the platform will be hosted (no Wordpress self-installs) and that the people who will be managing the blog are not super-technical.

So, I put together a list of criteria.  It includes:

  • Cost (both initial and "add-ons")
  • Allows a unique domain name
  • Is there a theme library and/or a template designer
  • Easy to Use for Non-technical users (1=easy; 5=hard)
  • Allows you to export your content
  • Analytics options

If you were a small or medium business owner, what else would be important for you to know.  I'm not doing a feature by feature comparison because I don't think it's necessary.  Most of the features are similar (e.g. offering both "pages" and posts) - to me, the true difference comes down to how intuitive and "friendly" the interface is.

Am I missing anything really important?

The blog platforms I'm including are:

  • Typepad
  • Wordpress
  • Blogger
  • Tumblr
  • Posterous

I've embedded the doc below (or follow the link) if you want to take a look. And I realise that the 4th criteria (easy to use) is completely arbitrary. So you Wordpress fans - don't jump on my case. My experience of Wordpress isn't delightful. And, I recognize that I have a bias towards Typepad since I've been using it for 5 years. I promise I will disclose all my biases to my class :)

06 September 2010 in Blogs and Blogging, Technology & the Internet | | Comments (2)

links for 2010-09-01

01 September 2010 in DailyLinks | | Comments (0)

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