MT3 Bible available!

Rogers Cadenhead’s portable, affordable Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition is now available from Wiley.
I’d love to get my greasy little fingers on a copy of this book!

Hunting for work via eBay

Professional weblogger Jeremy Wright has figured out that an eBay auction and a press release may do a better job of advertising his availability than a listing at Monster.com (Investor’s Business Daily: Breaking News).

Disclosing blog sponsors

Now that Marc Canter is spearheading a kind of transparent blog-payola system for compensating bloggers, the issue of full disclosure of one’s sponsors and or influences seems all the more important.
For example, here is the disclosure about the ZeroDegrees sponsorship of the new Operating Manual for Social Tools weblog: About The Project:

ZeroDegrees has agreed to sponsor this site for the next four months to provide a forum for the discussion of rules and expectations for online social networks that will make social networks more useful while respecting the needs and privacy of their members. ZeroDegrees has agreed to exercise zero influence over the content of the discussions. The paid contributors are working for a fixed, non-renewable term. ZeroDegrees has further agreed that if the contributors feel ZeroDegrees has tried to influence them in any way, they can resign from the project but will still be paid.

As for me, no one pays me to write this weblog. Nor does anyone pay me (directly) to write The Power of Many, although you can think of that blog as being sponsored by my book of the same name. Finally, I am paid a retainer to contribute to the Personal Democracy Forum blog, a site for which I am formally a Contributing Editor. No one pays for any product placement, etc., anywhere that I write.
Further, it’s worth noting that from July to November this year I was a paid employee of Armstrong Zúniga, a political consulting firm run by Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong, proprietors of Daily Kos and MyDD respectively. We have parted ways amicably and I am still in a position to refer business or share leads with them, but there is no direct compensation passing between as at this time.
For the record, I am entirely willing to sell out personally, but will only blog about what I want to and will continue to be completely transparent about anyone with whom I have a business relationship.

Blogger dinner in Berkeley, Thursday, December 2

Not sure if it’s appropriate to add semi-public events to Upcoming.org, so I’ll just mention this dinner here. I plan to be there, perhaps with some copies of the book in the trunk of my car.
Blogger Dinner Thursday, Dec 2 in Berkeley, 7pm:

7pm At Beckett’s. 2271 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley. (510) 647-1790
Doc Searls is going to be visiting and we were talking about how there are rarely blogger events in Berkeley, and we’d like to have one here. Please send me email at mary at hodder dot org to RSVP so that we can give Beckett’s some idea of how many.

Firefox taking the Web by storm

If Dori at Backup Brain is right, a large chunk of the tech-support generation have installed Firefox on their parent’s computers over Thanksgiving or will do so during the coming Christmas / Hannukah / Solstice holiday, tipping the new browser war just a little more away from Microsoft’s IE.
For anyone trying to learn how to popularize an open source project and promote and distribute it correctly, Firefox is a good model to emulate.
If you want to help evangelize Firefox, there’s even a community site for that (Spread Firefox – Igniting the web) build with CivicSpace.
(And now I hear that Netscape is becoming an ISP – things are feeling very retro on the Web these days.)
Expect blog posts to ramp back up again around here.

Blogging the Ukraine revolution

If you want direct reportage from the Ukraine on their election crisis, then don’t miss this Ukraine Revolution weblog.
This post includes a link to a “smoking gun” MP3 sound file documenting plans for vote fraud:

Voice records containing voices of members of Yanukovich head-quarters and government discussing the methods and ways of falsification were published by Ukrainian security services. It’s interesting – will government “notice” it?

The case of the missing comments

So this weird thing happened over the weekend. Somehow, Monday morning, none of my bloggers were able to post to any of the blogs I host with Movable Type. And MT was acting strange in other ways. It listed each of my hosted blogs as having no comments at all. Actually, it didn’t list 0 comments it just left the space where the number would appear in the blog listing on the main MT blank, and for each blog it didn’t list comments at all above the list of the last five incoming pings.
At the same time, if you clicked on a comment or comment author you got an error page.
The problem was maddening and I couldn’t figure out what had caused it. Had I deleted all the comments somehow in an overzealous attack of spam-cleaning? No, because then MT would just know there were no comments and that would be that. Instead MT expected there to be comments but wasn’t able to access them.
Had someone hacked into my mySQL database? It seemed unlikely, but I still have no idea what caused the problem.
Stranger still, sometime today I got a spam comment notification which tipped me off to the fact that my comments were working fine again. Back in the MT backend all the comments are listed as they used to be, so whatever the problem was it has gone away. This is cold comfort as I’d rather know what the problem was so I could know whether to expect it to crop up again.
Then this evening I was reading blogs in my newsreader and I noticed an entry at Adam Felbers’ Fanatical Apathy (Vast Conspiracy):

I don’t know, folks, I just don’t know. But it seems as though all your fine comments are now inaccessible. I’m not sure if this is a Movable Type glitch or the result of a huge covert operation perpetrated by a cabal of shadowy men determined to silence me.
I’d prefer the latter, of course. Who wouldn’t? But it’s probably just a bug.
Come to think of it, it’s not ME they’re silencing right now. It’s YOU. I always knew you were untrustworthy. Sneaky. No wonder those dark forces want to keep you quiet.

Curiouser and curiouser. Sounds like the same problem I was having. A time-sensitive bug in MT?
Anyone else have this problem? I’d love to know what caused it.
It was strangely frustrating losing control of all my blogs. I felt truly stymied and helpless. I’m still disconcerted. Now I’m off to backup the database….

How-To: Podcasting (aka How to get Podcasts and also make your own) – Engadget – www.engadget.com ++

Engagdget published a guide to podcasting (time-shifted syndicated online audio/radio type content developed and popularized by Dave Winer and Adam Curry) by Phillip Torrone back in October of this year (pretty fast out of the gate):

Quoting from How-To: Podcasting (aka How to get Podcasts and also make your own)

:

This week’s How-To is a three part special complete with our first Engadget “Podcast” MP3. The first part is how to get “Podcasts” on your iPod. So what’s a Podcast? To put it simply, a Podcast is an audio file, a MP3, most likely, in talk show format, along with a way to subscribe to the show and have it automatically delivered to your iPod when you plug in to iTunes. The show isn’t live, so you can listen to it whenever you want.
Doc Searls may have said it best: “PODcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well.”

(via Micro Persuasion)

Yet another must-read blog: Operating Manual for Social Tools

Looks like Corante’s got another blog (Operating Manual for Social Tools) that I should be following here at POM. Where does David Weinberger find the time to contribute to so many weblogs? Also, I’m a little unclear of the overlap between this and other Corante blogs, such as Many-to-Many (to which danah and David contribute) and at least one other one that David contributes to.
<huffy>Plus why has Corante never asked me to write for them?</huffy>

Anyhow, here’s a taste from the new(?) weblog (quoting from sociability first, technology second, posted by danah boyd):

Does blogging need an ethics committee?

Quoting from Blog Ethics Committee, Blog Publishers Association, and the evil Word of Mouth Marketing folks – The Jason Calacanis Weblog – calacanis.weblogsinc.com

:


Nick Denton put up a pleasantly surprising post today, complimenting me for being a “volunteer watchdog” for blog ethics. He proposes Jeff Jarvis and I start a blog ethics committee in order to create some standards in blog advertising. It’s a great idea, a lot of work, and very important to the blogosphere.
If you’re blogging— for money or not—we all have an interest in having a level of comfort when we’re consuming and creating media. Who doesn’t want to know if a blogger is getting paid to write about something? Who doesn’t want to see advertisements clearly labeled and outside of the content space? I can’t think of one reader of blogs who wants to be deceived….