February 2005

As I mentioned in my previous entry about Adam Gaffin’s new “Blog Log” column in The Boston Globe and published at boston.com, I emailed boston.com to ask them about their linking policy and why they do not link to websites other than the third-party stock info website. This is the response they sent to me in email.

Dear Susan:

Thank you for writing to Boston.com. At the bottom of the article you’re referring to is a link to Universal Hub, www.universalhub.com/globe/0227. This link list all the blog mentioned. Due to time constraint, we cannot add any additional links.

You saw links in some business articles because it is automatically generated in our publishing tool when there is a publicly traded company. We hope this clears up the confusion.

If you any additional questions, please let us know.

Kind regards,

Customer Support
Boston.com

This is what I sent to them in response to that.

Hey there:

Thanks very much for your reply.

You noted in your reply that the bottom of the article includes a
link. Almost … but not quite. The link is listed, but it’s not a
link that you can click on — it’s just regular text … meaning you
have to copy and paste it into your browser to get to it.

Would it be possible to at least make the link to Universal Hub’s site active?

Also, I wasn’t confused. I’m not sure what gave you that idea. I
asked for insight into your linking (or lack thereof) policy. I don’t
see how my lack of insight into your policy could be considered
confusion.

Susan

In 1999 I worked for a television show and website called Wild, Wild Web. We used an oh-my-god-we-paid-you-how-much-money-for-this craptastic content management system (Vignette) to publish website articles that were the online companions to features on the television show. Somehow, way back then, we managed to make that awful Vignette system work so that links could be easily inserted into the web articles. I can’t imagine it would be all that difficult for boston.com to do this in 2005.

Is it really a time constraint issue for boston.com or do they only want to link to a site that they may (?) get a kickback from such as that stock portfolio website?

Adam Gaffin has a new column in The Boston Globe called Blog Log. It seems like an excellent column to start using links at boston.com — something they have yet to do unless it’s a link to a company’s stock profile on a third-party website. Unfortunately, there are no links in Adam’s column. A URL at the end points you to a location at Adam’s Universal Hub website where you can pick up the links.

I sent a note to boston.com asking for clarification about their linking policy. Hopefully they’ll write back and offer some sort of explanation.

Austin’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival is coming up in a few weeks: March 11-15, 2005. It’s the only web conference I travel to beyond the East Coast. While nagging a friend that he should go, he mentioned that he was concerned it might just be a lot of hype based on an NPR article he read last year that blathered on about participants talking about blogs.

If you do anything on the web: labor of love or commercial, you should be at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. It’s been around for over ten years and that includes all those pre-blog years, too. The festival is a few parts spring break, inspiration and fun.

And it’s cheap. The walk-up rate for the conference is $275. If you register early during the months leading up to the conference it’s as low as $175. I’ve used hotwire.com for three of my four trips to the festival. This year I’m flying out of Manchester, New Hampshire and staying at the Crowne Plaza Hotel (where I stayed last year — they’ve got free internet in the rooms). The total cost was $425 including fees/taxes, roundtrip airfare and the hotel room for five nights. Amusingly enough, the Crowne Plaza is listed as $139/night on the conference website. I figure that I’m paying about $30/night with the hotwire.com deal. Austin is a very walkable city so you save money not having to take many cabs depending on where your hotel is located.

There’s also the SXSW Baby! website for participants to conspire before the festival and post panel notes. Thanks to a post on the site I found out there’s a cheap bus from the Austin airport to downtown for 50 cents. Nice!

People are talking about the possibility of Google working on a calendar tool. That would (no doubt) be very cool. Is it an application or a search tool? If it’s the latter, would it make my Exploit Boston! project (when it’s updated more regularly) turn up in even more search results?

Several years ago (1999ish) I worked as the copywriter on a project with Boston’s Razorfish office to redesign AnyDay.com’s website. AnyDay had a really cool and useful web calendar tool that made it easy to publish personal and group calendars plus restrict who could see individual tidbits of information. They were aquired by Palm in 2001 who later abandoned the service. The closest thing I’ve found useful since then is PHPiCalendar that interfaces with Apple’s iCal application to publish ical files to the web. I found it last Fall but it doesn’t seem to be under active development anymore.

The AnyDay.com redesign was one of the weirdest freelance jobs I’ve ever had. They cancelled the project somewhere in the middle but I got paid anyway.

tag: Google Calendar

I really wish Alan Herrell (The Head Lemur) would tell us what he really thinks when he writes on his weblog about topics such as advertising in RSS feeds. He’s always so vague.

Really If I want to spend my fucking life reading or being exposed to advertisements, I will shove a shopping channel TV Up my ASS. I will swallow a transistor radio.

RSS advertising is every bit as filthy a practice as spyware, viruses, trojan horses, pop ups, and rich media Insertion.

Michael has had a personal website and weblog longer than most people; but he’s pretty low key about it. Which is probably why most people don’t know about him. He wrote something about this last night after reading something on Ezra Klein’s weblog about the perception that there aren’t many female political bloggers. Add his RSS feed to your news reader. He’s got a way with words. The guy makes sports sound interesting for one thing.

The title of Ezra Klein’s entry is “Girls with Keyboards.” Maybe it’s just me but I always feel a little annoyed when I see the word “girls” used like that.

Long time web guy Jason Kottke’s announcement that he quit his web design job to work on his personal website fulltime seemed curious. Of course, a (big) part of me is jealous because I have long wished I could focus entirely on my web projects and not work for other people, so to speak. Getting paid by Marqui to link/mention them the past three months has certainly helped.

It’s interesting that he’s calling donors “micro patrons.” Micro? What’s so micro about contribting the (suggested) $30? A few years ago when people were sending each other fifty cents through PayPal — that seemed to be about micro payments. If I give someone $30 to help them out, I’d rather just be called a patron — leave out micro.

I wonder how taxes factor into this. Does he have a corporation or is he self-employed? If it’s the latter, he’ll have to say goodbye to about 37% of the donations. Unless there’s some sort of loophole I’m not familiar with.

I’m curious who else is testing out new ways to make a living without a typical 9-5 job. A few I know about include:

Update: These people aren’t necessarily doing their creative projects fulltime. That’s what I get for writing an entry while still half asleep.

• Heather Powazek Champ : print club
• Derek Powazek : photography
• Noah Grey’s photography

Who else?

I mentioned the other day that I was moving my event mailing list from sooz.com over to WhizSpark. Mission accomplished! If you were on my list before and you did not receive an email via the WhizSpark system alerting you of the new list, you can sign up via my profile page at WhizSpark. It looks like 50 or so people were not added which was probably a copy/pasting oversight on my part and then a few unsubscriptions, too. If you’ve never been on my list before and you’d like to be alerted when I’ve got new events on the horizon, please sign up.

I’ve been going through old event photos and plan to move them over to my flickr account. Here’s one of my favorite sushi fest photos of Mark Bernstein. It was taken with an instant camera that we passed around the table at the sushi fest dinner party in 1999 at Guyuhama on Boylston Street.

I recently passed on the organizer role for the Boston Blog Meetup to Jack Hodgson. He wasn’t able to attend the January meetup at Christopher’s Restaurant in Porter Square so I filled in for him at the last minute. A freelance writer for The Boston Globe surprised us with a visit and told us she had an article about the meetup in the works.

The article mixed up a few tidbits. There was some confusion between the meetup and my bostonblogs.com website. The latter has been around since 2002 and is at the top of the Google results page for “Boston blogs”, not the Blog Meetup. It’s not a huge deal but would have been an easy enough thing to clarify.

While growing up in Nebraska, I participated in a youth bowling league at Hilltop Lanes in Dodge, Nebraska. It’s unfortunate that I no longer have the patches from my various winnings. I haven’t gone tenpin bowling in over a decade and I’d probably not be all that good at it these days. Fortunately, New England has candle pin bowling which is a lot easier. Partly because the balls are not as heavy and you get three turns instead of two.

The next bowling posse outing is on Thursday, March 3rd at Sacco’s Bowl Haven in Davis Square at 8:00 PM. If you’d like to join us, you can RSVP at the Bowling Posse event page at WhizSpark. The cost is $10 and that covers two hours of bowling and the shoe rental.

I’m starting to dabble more with WhizSpark’s hosted DIY event planning tools — in particular the ad-free, customizable tools that are under development. Overall, I like what I see. Hopefully the ability to adjust the layout (perhaps similar to how TypePad lets you move content around on the page) and link colors (I had no choice but to use the red links if I wanted a black background) will be a possibility someday. Peter Caputa, the president of WhizSpark, has been generally responsive to my ideas, feedback, nagging and criticisms.

I’m in the process of moving several hundred sooz.com event newsletter subscribers over to WhizSpark. It will be interesting to see what sort of feedback I receive once I start to send out event invites through the WhizSpark system. One thing that is new is that if someone wants to register/reply/RSVP for an event, the person first needs to create a free account. WhizSpark has an anti-spam policy as far as how users can and cannot use data in the system; but the policy does not address how WhizSpark itself will not use contact information in their system. Hopefully that’s something they can directly address in their policy soon.