| 11. | A simple way to simultaneously send new blog articles, as they are posted, to any number of user-maintained, editable e-mail lists (from which people could easily unsubscribe, of course). |
| 10. | An automatically maintained Table of Contents with one-sentence abstracts for each of your blog posts, editable by you and sortable by your readers by title, date, and category/sub-category. |
| 9. | A simple, meaningful measure of total readership, that weighs blog hits, visits, average duration of stay, RSS subscriptions, inbound blogs, e-mail subscriptions, and visits to copies of your posts on aggregators. |
| 8. | An ability to create standing-order ‘profiles’ for all blogs, as you now can for newsfeeds, so that you can receive a single daily e-mail or web page that aggregates everything posted that day, anywhere in the blogosphere, on a specific topic or containing specific keywords or phrases. |
| 7. | A gigabyte or two of free storage on the hosted blog server, so you can keep a copy of your entire My Documents folder on the server, link to anything in it from your blog without having to FTP a copy, and be able to access your entire ‘e-filing cabinet’ from any computer anywhere anytime. |
| 6. | An easy migration path from the asynchronous, polished anonymity of the blog to the real-time, one-to-one, face-to-face or voice-to-voice, halting interactive iterative intimacy of other media, media that move you from talk to action. |
| 5. | Inclusion of our posts, if we want them to be, in Google News. |
| 4. | More first-person accounts, first-hand news, live photos and reports, and investigative reporting in the blogosphere. |
| 3. | A blogging tool so simple even our parents can maintain one. |
| 2. | No more fear of your blog or your computer crashing and irretrievably losing everything you’ve written on your blog. |
| 1. | The end of the terms ‘weblog’, ‘blog’ and ‘blogger’, and to be simply called An Online Journalist. |
11: Laughingly easy.10: Ditto.Dave, did you know that your blogging solution is really primitive? If I were you, I’d move to a proper hosting server that gives you access to php and databases etc. and migrate to WordPress.9. This is not easy, but is just a programming issue. What does ‘visits to copies of your posts on aggregators’ mean that RSS subscriptions does not?8. Pubsub. It’s definately doable, and free. Unless I misunderstand what you’re wishing for here.7. Hmm. Basically you want a local folder synced with an online one? This is REALLY easy, and many FTP programs can do it. Or is this wish more about space than about functionality? Two gigs is a lot of space :) Would cost you like $30/month at least, I think. 1 gig is at least $20 I’d think, but not sure. Anyway, all you need is a decent FTP program and a host who provides FTP access. 6. So you mean like, I read a post, and then click ‘ask for audioconferencing possibily about this topic’, and you get an email and set an appointment, etc.?5. I don’t care about this issue either way.4. I think you’ll see the trend you wish for come true :) People are actually trying to build companies around this kinda thing, so there’s more incentive.3. Blogger.com?2. That is truly a Christmas wish :) Won’t happen. Just as cars won’t stop crashing, computers won’t either. What you want is *easy* backup solutions.1. I’d call myself a blogger but definately not a journalist. Calling bloggers online journalists is really exclusionary–it expels diarists, photobloggers who just post pictures of their shoes and other such mundance things, etc. I’m quite comfortable with being called weblogger, and I don’t need another badge of accreditation unless I’m writing up news. Weblogs are just tools, you can create any type of publication with them. (This actually reminds me of people wanting to get ISSNs for their weblogs. Why, for god’s sake? You have a URL, why do you need a library serial number?)
Firas: I guess your technical knowledge is far beyond mine. These are far from easy for the average blogger, and Blogger.Com is far from easy enough for most parents to manage. As for #1, I’m using the world ‘journal’ and ‘journalist’ in the broadest sense of the word. A diary is a journal. A magazine is a journal. A professional periodical is a journal. A newspaper is a journal. A photojournal is a journal. The word literally means ‘something published daily’. It’s not wanting accreditation, it’s wanting to get away from the ‘million guys in pajamas’ stigma of blogs. It’s to be recognized and referred to, just like those who get paid for it, as someone who publishes something of value every day.
I just realized that my post may have come off as cocky–my technical knowledge is really primitive too! By “laughably easy” I just meant that it’s definately doable–I personally would have to ask for help and/or google around too. Just trying to help :)Is (8) what you were looking for? And could you clarify what you were looking for in (7) that the suggested solution doesn’t provide?(Would you be interested in checking out WordPress, by the way? I have a website with WP lying around that I don’t use, and the hosting is free so I don’t need to pull the plug on the account either.)
(Just came back to clarify that I don’t have any connection to WP whatsoever (it’s free and open source); I just think that Radio sucks and figured that if the ‘beautiful archives’/mailinglist issue was important enough to you, you may decide to jump ship.)
For #9, I’d add Number of Reader Comments to your list. I personally think this is one of the more telling indicators of a blog’s popularity. If a blog is able to stir people to participate in the conversation, then surely that’s an important sign of success.
11. An easy setup I use for some community-driven sites is the open source mailing list manager phplist ( http://tincan.co.uk/?lid=453 ). It enables you to link a subscription list to an rss feed. A subscription to several of these feeds, still results in one e-mail that aggregates and sends all new items from your subscriptions. Users can set the frequency themselves to daily, weekly, monthly or “none” (= immediately). You ‘ll have to trigger the script once in a while (e.g. every hour or day) by a cron job.BTW: this “system” powers the PHPBB-fed mailinglists of phplist itself: http://forums.phplist.com/lists/?p=subscribepascal van hecke
For #11: I stumbled across this today. Should do it. (Free).
Oh, WTF. I just noticed it on your sidebar….nevermind.
Re #7, are you using Radio’s www folder or actually FTPing your files yourself?