Hi people. Just a small notion: I won’t blog a lot as long as I’m employed, so if you wanna keep informed with what happens here, use the RSS feed with a RSS Reader.

Since I’m going to work by bike and need between 15-20 minutes, I begun listening to podcasts on the way. I like tech stuff and software development stuff - so if you like that I’ll give you some hints here. The podcasts I listen to usually go between 1 and 2 hours.

Software Engineering Radio | The Podcast for Professional Software Developers: A nice english podcast (from the accent I think everyone can guess that these guys are germans after all) about software engineering in general. Mostly interviews, nicely prepared, no queer stuff, interesting interviewees. My favourite podcast at the moment. Gets updated all two weeks.

Z! - Zeitgeist, Entwicklung, Technik - der Technik Podcast: A german podcast from two guys about tech-news that I like a lot - updated about every two weeks. Decent and well structured usually. I prefer this one to the next…

Bits und so: … which is another german podcast about techie news. Nevertheless I listen to both of these, to keep myself informed and listen to different views on the things that go on in our binary world. This podcasts most of the time sports about 4 people, so even if they’re pretty good organised sometimes it’s quite a mess. Another negative factor is a lot of commercial stuff in there and a focus on the Apple side of software - but its entertaining and the “picks” where tools get recommended is nice.

.NET Rocks!: As fresh .NET newbie I tried out this english podcast and was pleasantly surprised with its quality. Its fun, updated once to twice a week and usually sports a lot of .NET - tech and interviews with .NETters.

Die Drei Vogonen: I only tried this german podcast once so far, so this is more of a honorable mention. When I looked on the duration of over 6 hours, I was appalled a bit, but took the test nevertheless. First, it was only 3 hours long, then the whole show began anew - to technical issues on this one. Then the guys were more relaxed, also talking about personal stuff like where they went for vacation … and it was also pretty unorganised, despite a well structured layout with picks (same as in Bitsundso), short news (that are too short compared to some beekeeping-hobby-tales) and “deep thoughts” where a certain topic gets highlighted (but in the case of GPG the speakers just didn’t have a clue what they were talking about). So preparation minus, organisation minus, nice ambience plus. As time is limited (in fact the most limited resource in our short lives), I’ll ignore this one till the others have no more stuff for me.

I also tried the chaosradio, but I didn’t like the style and attitude of this one. Oh, and I need to try out TentacleprOn by tante soon.

Just in case you didn’t see this video yet, take 5 minutes to watch it … please. Its about what you should NOT vote in the upcoming german election and about the censorship in germany.

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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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Robert Scoble (who’s on Twitter about 24 hours a day) did an interesting post about how he uses Twitter today - after he unfollowing a whole lot of people and shutting down his autofollow-bot he still follows about 2k people (about 1300+ that he met and 600+ that he’s interested in). This is one of his accounts that he uses for the “filtered information flood” as I’d call it. All people he follows are from a certain area of expertise that he’s interested in most or people that he’s met and therefore might be interested in their tweets. These people he met are also followed by Scoble on another account.

Scoble tells us that he switches Twitter clients pretty often, and therefore can better filter information by following a certain target group with different accounts. And he also tells us that its pretty impossible to read the tweets of 90000 people anyways.

I must say that I think the same way. But I don’t have time to be on twitter everyminute of the day (as Scoble and some other “Social Media Guru Expert Evangelists”), so I even have to filter some more. First, I took my ithoughts_de account and only followed people I like to read and who tweet interesting stuff. As I don’t have too much time and don’t want to clutter my timeline with people who tweet way too often (like Scoble) or only tweet a lot of completely pointless stuff (like Ashton Kutcher or Tila Tequila), those get removed rapidly. Following 250+ people is pretty easy to keep up with, if you look for the filtered information of the day. This is the source of knowledge, that will always instantly tell you important stuff - much earlier than official magazines or websites. No matter what, I still get a lot of information in there, so I can’t always be on that account when I want to use my time effectively.

Therefore I set up a protected account for myself, where I only follow people I know personally (one exception). Here in germany Twitter STILL didn’t break through to the usual webuser, so these are only six people (if you leave out doubleaccounts). That I’m pretty sure that only friends can read it lets me also dump my own pointless stuff without much information value there AND I can use it for communication. I also use this account with my iPhone, so if I make a pointless TwitPic I won’t scare away my ithoughts_de followers (that I believe are there for the good links I find and share).

After all, I also set up a follower-bot thats nicely working in the background to build up followers slowly with 3.4k followers atm. You never know when you wanna have that audience around (that might mainly be bots, but who cares - sometimes also numbers count).

New Idea for Twitter.com

I think if you know about Twitter you could also drive this to the extreme and make different accounts even for different topics of interest. Every account could follow some special breed of people and you could tweet your links to the group of people who follow your account dedicated to that single topic. In facts, this is one of the features that twitter should integrate into (premium?) accounts: using their REST approach they could let you divide your stream into topics and also let you assign your friends (the people you follow are called ‘friends’ on twitter) to that topic. This topic-centered URL would look like http://twitter.com/ithoughts_de/topicjava/ instead of just http://twitter.com/ithoughts_de and you also wouldn’t have to set up 100 accounts then. A nice drag-and-drop webinterface could let you customize your topics and sort your friends in there and you could decide if you follow a person or only one (or more) of his or her topics. Some microsyntax like “§topicjava I found a nice Java-related article that I want to share” could work for older twitterclients while Twitter expands their API by one more parameter called ‘topic’, so updated clients could directly post messages into topics.

If you like this idea, please share it on Twitter … lets hope someone at Twitter sees it. They could also do this thingy for their premium accounts. *cough cough … I didn’t say that you must be mistaken*

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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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Image by magerleagues via Flickr

Well most of you reader will have recognized that my blog was loading pretty slowly. I now decided that I should do something about this. When I thought about my blog and why it loaded so slowly, I recognized that I was loading A LOT OF outbound pictures. I first thought it was only the Zemanta-integrated pictures that took too long to load because of their filesize, but after all I saw something more more slowing: the sociable-plugins POST TO SOCIALNETWORKS-buttons.

“But they are very small! Filesize = extremely unimportant?” Indeed. But each of these elements with a src-Attribute makes the browser perform an HTTP-Request, and browsers don’t do too many of those a time. Especially if they’re on different hosts, like all those socialnetwork-sites.

After all I think every “good” social networking site has their own means of posting good stuff (like the Digg and StumbleUpon-Toolbars or one million clients and browserplugins for Twitter), so I decided to just remove them. If you like my posts, you’ll Tweet them or Stumble them anyways, even if I don’t put two million buttons on my page, I guess. Hmm …. so few pictures … I have to post some more content now I assume.

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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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