Jason Clarke

Michael J. Totten, a freelance reporter, spent some time in the northern Iraq city of Erib and files an engrossing first-person report on his time there.

Michael’s braveity in venturing into Iraq virtually on his own is to be greatly admired. Perhaps even more so is his willingness to report back with candor, narrative, wit, and depth.

My picks for 2005 Blogs of the Year:

5. Scripting News - Dave Winer / He’s often infuriating, especially in a disagreement. But there’s no doubt that Dave Winer is the unofficial Chief Technical and Philisophical Officer of the living web. While some people find one or two interesting things to say every couple of years, delivering brilliant treatises- in text or audio- appear to come so easy to (and from) Dave via his blog. Better still, he’s one of the rare few who pontficiate, yet also spend an equal amount of time delivering with real tangible actions- or in Dave’s case, software, ideas, and movements.

4. Instapundit - Glenn Reynolds / Reynolds, my top pick for 2004, continues to outshine 99.999% of the blogosphere with his quality, frequency, variety, and intelligence. He’s always said he’ll blog as long as its fun. I only hope 2006 is his most fun year ever.

3. Micropersuasion - Steve Rubel / Steve Rubel blogs in a cheifly friendly, yet authorative voice, and manages to cover nearly every single emerging trend from RSS to online advertising to identity/attention to videoblogging. If I smell a trend on the web, I turn to Steve for updates and insight.

2. Lifehacker - Gina Trapani, et al / Lifehacker came out of the gate in early 2006, capitalizing on the mini-craze of ‘lifehacks’ popularized by Merlin Mann’s 43Folders site (and others). Lifehacker was great early and spent all year getting better thanks to Gina Trapani and later a stable of supporting bloggers. Keeping track of new software, tools, services, and trends can be mind-numbing, but Gina and Co. have made it fun while keeping coverage both deep and varied.

1. Scobelizer - Robert Scoble / Robert Scoble did the almost unthinkable this year. While Microsoft was busy making strides with RSS, open formats, and more, (yet not its browser) Scoble managed to put a human, friendly, aware, and intelligent face on the borg. Best of all, he emerged as an outstanding rolemodel for fairness and tranparency in blogging as he continually proved his will to discuss controversial issues again and again. Scoble’s fairness, honesty (he’s a geek, in case he hasn’t reminded you lately) and his sense of narrative (he’s just one of us, guiding us through Microsoft, and through the software industry) combine to make him the most enjoyable, revealing, and interesting blogger in 2005.

WordPress.com, the hosted blog service developed by the WordPress team (the gears running this site), is now out of private beta and is public.

I’ve been using the service for about two weeks now (but I’ve only posted to once so far, to my detriment). My reaction is split down the middle, as I stated in my lone post at jasonclarke.wordpress.com:

1. The blogging interface in hosted WordPress is vastly improved, while looking quite similar (and that’s outstanding from a usability standpoint). Especially appreciated are two key features: the “add category” functionality and the “upload/add images” function.

2. Alternately, two major drawbacks made the WordPress hosted service largely undesirable for me. One was the inability to edit your templates- even font faces and sizes were blocked. The other was the inability to map a domain to the service.

Unfortunately, neither of my major cons have been addressed with the WordPress public launch. But I know that offering customziable templates has to be on their horizon; it’s only a matter of time. One major advtange of the service that I failed to mention in my initial review: the comment spam blocking seems to be around 1 million times better than it is for me on my installed version of WordPress.

My review of Measure Map generated two comments. One was by Jeffrey Veen, a partner in Adaptive Path, the consulting firm that built and is launching Measure Map. Rather than reply to Jeff’s comment with my own comment (which would bury the conversation down a layer) or reply to him with an email (which would take the conversation of the public eye), I’m going to respond right here in this post.

Jeff writes:

“[T]here is one feature notably absent from Measure Map that I’ve missed already: the ability to see a list of users browsing your site right now.”

Thanks for the great review, Jason. I’m curious about the feature you describe above, however. Could you say more about it? What would you want to see - a list of IP addresses? And what would that information help you do?

Thanks for taking the time to comment, Jeff! To answer the question, first let me throw a caveat: as I said in my review, I’m talking about a pretty non-essential feature here- a bit of fun is the key. But since Measure Map’s big advantage is that its interface is far superior, why not throw in some fun features to further elighten the user, right?

So my answer. If I were to add a “current visitors” metric to Measure Map as it is now, I’d probably place it directly above the four main graphic headers on the account overvie page. Without hogging too much of that important screen space, I’d suggest:

A smallish, wide but not too tall horizontal graphic indicating, in linear fashion, each current user according to how long they’ve been on the site. This graphic, taken from a stats program I’ve used before called LiveStats, shows what I mean:

Below that graphic, It would also be neat to see a list of the top 5-10 users currently browsing the site, with at the least, the user’s hostname and time spent on the site. Above both the graphic and this list would be a big Measure Map-esque heading: “24 users are browsing your site right now.” And then perhaps below that (instead of the standard “That’s x more than the average day.”), something like: “Current users have spent an average of 24 minutes on your site.”

That’s today’s Measure Map minute. Thanks again to Jeff Veen for responding to my initial review.

Measure Map is a new blog stats (really, analytics) tool developed by usability consulting firm Adaptive Path and currently in private alpha mode for the time being. (Whoah- will alpha become the new beta?)

By entering you email address at the service’s homepage, measuremap.com, you’ll be added to the waiting list to receive an invitation to test out the service. I’ve been lucky enought to receive an invitation, and today I finally opened the email and signed up for the service to track this blog.

My first impressions, after using it for just a few hours, are that it is quite usable and very attractive. Unfortunately, this blog generates such little traffic that I don’t quite have the data set I’d like (or is really necessary) for a proper experimentation. Nonetheless, I can comment on the interface, as sparsely full of data as it is, and what I’ve seen so far I really like.

First, the signup process. (more…)

I’m incredibly honored that Mickey Kaus and Robert Wright, the 3-D, Max Hedrom-esque Blogging Heads, linked to my recent post praising their new videoblogging venture, Bloggingheads.tv.

Mickey’s kausfiles is one of my earliest inspirations towards working and writing on the web (remember when Kaus’ paragraph-style blogroll called Wright’s Non-Zero “fab big think”?). Now it’s a bit funny, and entirely fitting, that while I’ve got my own experiments in videoblogging going on (nothing public yet), inspiration for those trials would come from the same source that led me to blog.

And now that we know they’re furiously searching Technorati for the latest links to bloggingheads.tv, let me just drop one in the suggestion box: Would it be uncool to devote just a minute or two of an upcoming episode to explaining some of the technology used to create their blog-show-whateveritis?

During the summer I made much hay about being disgusted with Technorati’s absymal level of service, uptime, and results. It’s only fair, then, to note that in my own anecdotal experience I’ve noticed a signifigant improvement in Technorati’s service over the past few weeks.

Congrats to Technorati for listening and responding to the complaints of its users. Technorati, at least for now, is back, and I for one am glad to have them.

This is really cool: Mickey Kaus and Robert Wright have launched a new site called bloggingheads.tv (a take-off on “talking heads”, hehe).

It’s a video blog of sorts, with Wright on the left side of the video and Kaus on the right. The unique part: Both men are sitting in (apparently) their own separate offices, speaking into video cameras and communicating with each other via microphone. Somehow, they’re splicing each of their own videos into one, creating a single show with a split screen (Okay, I’m not explaining this all that well. Just go check it out).

Some quick reactions: This is a unique, innovative take on video on the web. Both commentators are smart and funny. As is necessary, the site provides plenty of contextual, metadata about the video. Especially valuable is a “topic view” where you can click directly to video clips pertaining to a particular topic. Also great: you can subscribe to either a video feed or an audio (podcast) feed of the program. Really, really excellent stuff.

This is a “talking head” show with no bombastic, idiotic host asking insanely stupid questions. Instead, it’s two smart folks talking about current events. So far, blogging has had a revolutionary impact on newspapers. Next up in 2006 and beyond: TV.

Steve Rubel is what I like to call “a blogger’s blogger”- among other reasons are his long series of posts about how to extend/improve your blogging/online geek experience. So, here’s an idea for Steve, a post I’d like to see him write:

“How to maintain multiple blogs”

Now that Steve is maintaining not just his own Micropersuasion blog, but also one on skin cancer (not to mention his Across the Sounda podcast with fellow PR guru Joseph Jaffe), I’d like to hear his unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities of being a multiple-blog-blogger:

* How do you maintain interest (and quality level!) in two blogs, each with divergent subjects?

* Do you set any “rules” or guidelines for how often you’ll post to each?

* How do you shift mindset when shifting from writing about one topic to another?

* Does one blog have to be your “default”- or, let’s say you were sick or busy and you only had time to update one, do you update one or neither?

* It’s hard to “launch” a blog- how do you get a 2nd (or 3rd?) one off the ground while serving the audience of the first?

Just as I was editing my long post on “2005: the year of the buyout!”, I learned that Weblogs, Inc. has been bought by AOL.

Holy crap!!