I just got inspired for this article here, where Aditya Mukherjee talks about how and why he blogs.I want to talk about that and about why I read blogs - as this is something many people here in germany don’t understand or just don’t want to do.

Aditya Mukherjee tries to get better, develop his way of writing and wants to present his ideas to the world. He tries to keep track of his personal progress. These also motivate me to blog. I’d also give people I know the possibility to read my ideas even when we don’t have real-life contact, as this makes people keep connected. And keeping connected is important to everyone of us. Its not the meaningless facebook-friendship, but the possibility to read, what the other person’s up to. Thats also why I’d love to see more people I know blogging or at least using Twitter. They might think I don’t care about them, but the point is that nobody likes to ask everyday “Hey, whats up in your life?” - and given that you have more than one or two persons you know, its better to have a push- instead of a pull-mechanism to get their updates. When something is important to a friend, I’d like to know it. If he put it on twitter, I get that update. If he even writes a longer blogpost, I still can decide if I’d like to read that thought of if its not important to me.

And writing blogposts isn’t a big deal wither. Okay, it takes some time, and at the moment I can’t find much time to do that either, as I just finished studying and will begin working in a software company tomorrow - and just bought a flat with my girlfriend (well and you have no idea how much time it takes to pick the tiles, the lamination, every bit of the kitchen and get all the bureaucracy done). But writing helps me to order my thoughts and to improve my english. And perhaps someone I happy to hear from me again. You never know.

Same with reading blogposts. I began subscribing to a small number of XML-feeds (from blogs of people I know), but learned some other great blog, that I like to read. Some of them are technical, some are philosophical, some are both. Lately, I posted a blog-link to someone who might have been interested in it, about a management technique that is used in his work and what often goes wrong with it. The response I got was “I don’t have time to read blogs - and this stuff in blogs is all pure theory and has nothing to do with the real world work. And by the way, everyone can read blogs.”

This somehow stroke me. Someone who doesn’t read blogs tells me that everyone can do it. Well, I agree that everyone can read, but reading blogs with content that is about your profession or about stuff you care about is important information for your life. And of course you can’t do that if you don’t take time for it. Some people read the newspaper to know what happens in the world - and they take their time to do that. Some read professional magazines - and also take their time to do that. So whats wrong about reading blogs?

Well, I guess the problem is, that its not really commonplace in Germany to do that. People here are always 4 years behind compared to the trends in the USA - and blogs in Germany are often thought of as homepages where people show off the newest funny stuff they found on youtube. If you’re really picking the good quality stuff, you get much more personalized information than you’d find in any newspaper or professional magazine. The writers are not professional all the time, but who cares? Iknow my posts are not too well thought-out too, but hell where’s the problem? You can skip every blog entry as you could flip a page in the newspaper.

Now back to “everyone can read blogs”: indeed. But not everyone can be patient enough to read blogs, to find blogs that delivers good content and to digest that information in a ways that helps you in your everyday life - or work. Its the same with books. Everyone can read them - but that doesn’t mean everyone takes time to do so. Hell, perhaps it would be better to read books, but if you’re into computers you’ll soon realize that the world changes too fast for books to be cutting-edge.

Well, nevermind. Just a lifesign from someone who doesn’t find much time to blog at this time.

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I just finished my final presentation as the finishing-line for my studies in computer science. I wrote about the inclusion of a RDFa-Editor in a blogsystem, where a user can include semantic annotations in their posts. The goal was to create a tool for editors that would enable them to enrich the posts they make with individual semantic markup. Its mainly focused on usability and is based on the WYMeditor and two servlets. It should be easily portable and perhaps this can be an inspiration for CMS-vendors, so normal people without domain-knowledge (in RDF and Ontologies) will be able to post semantic markup for their contents.

The presentation is made with the flash-tool of prezzi.com and is completely in GERMAN. You can find it shared here. Let it first load the media before you go on watching. If you experience lags, you can download the more smoothly runningoffline-exe-file.

If someone needs a translation, I might invest the hour of work doing so (just post a comment). This is the presentation … click on the forward button to move forwards, in the downloaded version you’ll find the forwards/backwards-butons in the lower right corner and can also use standard powerpoint-presentors:

I hope you like the idea - and I hope that the semantic web world gets more usable for “usual people”, otherwise it might not come to reality for many more years. If you’re interested in the thesis, let me know.

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Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I heard about someone (I won’t name) who tries to make money from blogging. Therefore he uses a completely different approach than just to start writing about somthing he cares much about or is very familliar with. No, its just a bunch of different blogs, specialised to certain up-to-date themes that you don’t necessary need to know much about, but that hit the vibe.

The idea in this is to place blogs on the web that satisfy a certain niche, that may get big soon, or are underrepresented in the web. Just pick a nice, suiting theme for a blogging-system of your choice and put some general pages up … get your info from WikiPedia, Google and other blogs. Get yourself some specific feeds on the topic. Keep posting news from the sector or random thoughts you come across in that topic. Crosslink the blogs and use the multitudes of web-directories for all blogs that you set up. Use a Twitter-Plugin and a follower-unfollow-script to gain followers. Watch the stats. The higher the stats, the more effort is to be put into the blog. Try to get advertisment for good blogs or use services like Trigami or AdSense to generate money.

Don’t be fooled: Using this method, you sure can make money on the web through blogging, BUT its a full time job and it will take a couple of months or maybe even years to get something out of it. If I could write good content in a well-written manner with a speed of 10 posts in two hours I’d for sure be a money-blogger … but I can’t. And I don’t think its the golden money source, as you’d need a lot of time to build up PageRank, reputation and readers using this method - especially if you’re not really apt with the topic you’re writing about.

Personally, I don’t gain much from watching such a blog and it won’t land in my feedreader. The Admarkets is flooded anyways, and I wouldn’t advise anyone to go down this route. If you really want to make a blog, then for chrissakes write about something you care about or just write about yourself and your experiences.

And one final note: Too many people on Twitter and in different blogs scream into the world how to make money with blogs and “online-marketing” - as too many computerkids out there dream about money from doing basically nothing - and I hate it. Its only blogged about to draw pageviews onto their sites, and as you’re reading this, you also might be a victim of the blogging-to-money-lie. Good content surely don’t come from nowhere. You need to be a very good writer to do this. And even if you have good content and if you can keep up the good work for a very long time that it will take for your word to spread, can you be sure that you’ll love to do it for a living? Can you be sure that its enough money compared to a random job? Do you feel challenged by this?

A second final note: Yes everyone can open blogs this way. We’ve got a lot of good CMS that make it possible. Don’t you think the commercial market will die out even more with even more people doing this sort of “work”? Did you hear about AdBlock Plus? Roughly half of your visitors won’t even see your ads.

A third, but final note: I got a lot of feeds from people who really blog good stuff. I love good blogs and good content, and I really think this is worth good money. But I also believe that this money isn’t earned because it was the purpose of this blog to make money but because the writer is just talented or has a lot to talk about. So please give up on the “get-rich-blogging-lie”. Thanks for listening.

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Google and Yahoo just announced that they’re going to support RDFa (and Microformats). Be sure that you understand what that means: This is the dawn of the Semantic Web (or you may also call it Web 3.0) and the beginning of the end of old ways of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In this post you’ll find some more info explaining what RDFa is, why I state that the Semantic Web will now emerge and why it soon will not be important to put the buzzwords into Headline-Tags (<h1>Buzzwords here!</h1>) but to link the word your content is about to the rdf-Source of what that word really means.

Talking about Google. Google is THE defining webtechnology company. The google page rank is the most important factor that a SEO cares about, and he would be doing anything to get a high page rank, as this would rank his site higher in the google search. And google search is the main entry point of the average surfer to get to content he cares about. Being highly ranked in google’s search is like being well-known and this holds a lot of marketing power. Google (and the other search engines) are doing their best for about 20 years to understand a given HTML-site and its contents, to know what to show their users when they search for a keyword. But they can never know what you mean when you talk in your blogpost about Big Ben. Do you mean the Volcanic Massif on Heard Island labeled Big Ben? Do you mean the world champion jumping horse that held this name? In this article, I marked up these three words with their meaning … you can’t see it, but google can (well in fact that might be a stupid idea, because Google will think that this post might be about these items … but anyways, if you find it in the sourcecode, you’ll see what I mean, just in case this wordpress blog won’t have shreddered what I just typed in).

Most people that want to “invent” the semantic web like Qimaya think they can derive semantic meaning from webpages by emulating a human brain which just understands the words. They sell this idea to investors who don’t like technical terms like RDF or Ontologies, because those investors hope that the Web will become “semantic” by magic instead of hard-to-understand science. If that would be possible … don’t you think Google would have already implemented it? Nevermind … we all need some fantasy.

RDFa is a way of embedding RDF into HTML. RDF is the Resource Description Framework, and with that its possible to define semantic meaning. In RDF, you have a Subject, a Predicate and an Object as in real-world speech. You could say “This article (subject with the unique URI http://www.ithoughts.de/google-supports-rdfa-seos-work-changes-forever) is about (standard-RDF-predicate) the semantic web “and Google would rank your article way higher when someone wants to know something about the Semantic Web and uses this keyword in Google Search. You could also model these triple-sentences to make a connection between defined resources. “I’m interested in the semantic web” could be a triple you can put directly into HTML. Google could derive a logical connection here.

Google will first use some use-cases, like that of the ratings. Say you define your blogpost as a rating about a product like some special laptop, and you define it unambigously by using a unique id (in fact a unique URI, perhaps that will be the product page at the laptops vendor), Google has a lot of info that it can directly parse from your website: Its about a certain laptop, you have rated it, and maybe you also give information about yourself. This is all machine-extractable structured data, that can be used by webspiders like Google Search. With these definitions about products, ratings, companies and people, a lot of the central data that a lot of people search about in Google can be automatically extracted from average users like you and me - if we know how to embed that data. This might become a central interest of all SEOs out there - understanding RDF and implementing RDFa into webpages might be the next thing in terms of “Semantic Page Rank“.

Its some kinda funny, that I’m working on an RDFa-Editor for a semantic blog in my thesis. Seems like I have to include Googles usecases in it, or it might be “outdated”. If you have any questions, just add a comment. By the way: Welcome to the Semantic Web!

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Some corporations fear that their employees might tweet something that hurts the corps reputation. And you should too! Most young adults that use twitter or a blog don’t think much about the consequences. Whatever you say/tweet/post might be available to the whole world forever - indexed by seach engines - and for everyone. This includes future bosses you might have, girlfriends and collegues. So if you post something that might be causing a bad reputation to you, try to take it off the net as soon as you realize it and just hope that it didn’t already spread around! Blog entries can be deleted, tweets can be deleted and most sites you post something onto give you the possibility too. Just do it before others recognize it and copy-paste it forever. And hope that the search engines won’t cache it forever.

Whoa! I just took a look on my blog-mainpage and needed to wait VERY long. Okay, I think my blog is pretty much cluttered with wordpress-plugins and some JS and flash-stuff, but I never waited THAT long. After all, I must realize that the pictures that I link through zemanta have this slowdown effect … its not even zemanta’s fault, but loding so many different pictures from different sources just cuts the speed. So I need some posts without too many outbound pictures within, and this one is the first.

Don’t get me wrong: Zemanta is a wonderful firefox-plugin that helps writing blogposts in many ways, and you wouldn’t see this problem when you only look at one post, but the mainpage is dragged down a lot. Perhaps Zemanta should warn its users, that it may be easy to get fitting pics for their posts, but that they shouldn’t use that too extensively.

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AssertTrue(this) is a great blog. Its about programming in general and also a lot about (W)CMS-systems. The author Kas Thomas writes in a very nice way and regularily makes me laugh. I even envy his superb blog-title.

I might be writing the same stuff in 10 years - but as I’m still learning a lot, I more feel qualified to talk about little gadgets that I can understand to a reasonable extent. He blogs very actively and when I just started my feedreader and read some of his latest posts, I just needed to point your programmer’s noses to this blog.

This reminds me that I need to rework my blogroll and seperate it in something like recommendedreading, friends and just links (that link points to a very good blog too btw, just don’t try to read it without a feedreader, the design is pretty ugly).

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• Blogrolls (mohammeda09.edublogs.org)