Brian Sweeting

I found this chart about New School Marketing compared to Old School Marketing on the Creating Passionate Users weblog. It was a graphic and I converted it to text (with a few edits) so it can be more easily incorporated into other things.

* Alex Wipperfurth, author of Brand Hijack, defines the co-created hijack as, “…the act of inviting subcultures to co-create a brand’s ideology, use, persona, and pave the road for adoption by the mainstream.”
** Real is relative to the desires and perceptions of the user.

MIT is conducting a Weblog Survey.

The Bad Behavior WordPress plugin has been a lifesaver. Between it and WordPress’ spam prevention measures, I find that I spend no time at all anymore deleting comment and trackback ping spam.

Bad Behavior was designed and built by watching actual spambots which harvested email addresses, posted comment spam, and used fake referrers. By logging their entire HTTP requests and comparing them to HTTP requests of legitimate users, it is possible to detect most spambots. Bad Behavior blocks spambots with a 412 error. It also has three configurable User-Agent lists for spambots and other malicious bots which actually identify themselves.

The plugin is of course just a PHP script, so even if you don’t use WordPress, you can integrate it into your site.

I’ve transitioned this weblog from Movable Type to WordPress. The template is the default that comes with WordPress, so I’ll need to make some changes to that, but overall the process of moving was pretty simple. I installed WordPress, imported my MT entries, and used mod_rewrite to ensure that all of my old urls worked. I’m quite impressed with WordPress and it seems to fit my needs a little better. Movable Type is a great tool for an organization that needs multiple weblogs, and a single place to manage them from. WordPress also seems to fend off comment spam a little better than I was able to do with MT and MT-Blacklist. I was getting deluged by spam with MT, and so far I haven’t had a single one with WordPress. I’m sure it isn’t completely prone to comment spam, but so far so good. Another change I made is that I’m using FeedBurner and all of my RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom feeds are consolidated into one feed. I’m using Redirect Permanent in my .htaccess file to redirect all those feeds, so the feed readers should handle the transition correctly, if not, you can always just subscribe to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/sweeting

The buzz going around today is that Google is to introduce a new method for qwelling comment spam. Essentially, what this would be is that any anchor tag with the attribute–rel=”nofollow”–would be omitted from it’s PageRank calculations. This is a good step, but I don’t think this is the “Silver Bullet” we’ve been looking for.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Pew Internet & American Life Project conducted two studies regarding blogging and came up with some interesting results.

8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs.

- Pew Internet & American Life Project

The study did find that “62% of internet users do not know what a blog is”, but I predict almost every internet user will know what a blog is by the end of the year.

Ever since I started using del.icio.us, I wanted to use my links as a replacement to the recent links section on my side bar, which were just Movable Type entries assigned to a “Recent Links” category. I found several ways of doing it using third-party services, but in the end decided to use a method that relied less on third-party services.
Read the rest of this entry »

Six Apart has just launched a new feature for Typepad, their hosted weblog service. Rich text (or WYSIWYG) editing is now available. I am hoping this means that this feature will find its way into Movable Type in the near future. I don’t personally require rich text editing, but I’ve run into several cases recently where Movable Type would serve as an excellent CMS for a client website. The only problem is, the client usually doesn’t have the ability to edit html.

If you are a blogger in the Salt Lake area, make sure to come to the meetup tomorrow night (Wednesday, September 15, 2004) at 7:00pm. Get the details.

Today Blogger launched a new WYSIWYG editing feature.