Blog News Watch

As the diversity of material on the Web continues to grow to encompass audio, video, games and all manner of data services alongside traditional documents, it’s becoming very essential to label the contents. In coming years it might be the difference between trust and distrust, so let us start from basics.

What is Content Label?

In literal meaning, content label indicates the label/marking on contents(physical). You may observed content labeling all around you, for example-the coffee you bought from store, also have content labeling, to let you the consumer know the ingredients, manufacturer, expiry date, warning, Side effects etc. Not only the coffee, almost all the products contain content labeling which let the producer be transparent and consumer to be conscious about the product.

Importance of Content Labeling on the net

There are millions of website, online organizations as well as growing numbers of blog/social networking sites throughout the net. Different organization/individual has their own different policies, i.e. no standards between them. Unless you are familiar with the site/blog/the group/the individual you do not have any clue what you are getting into. For example-

A novice user who isn’t familiar with blogosphere, is seeking some information about “how to get most out of adsense”. He will end up with nearly millions of results on search engines, of which 70% will be splog or crook sites. There is no way for him to identify crooks/spam without surfing it, who knows he might even got infected with Trojan or something.

Yes i do know Google and other search engine do trace known Spammy sites and give a warning before you visit. but how many? and they trace only 5% of what actually exist. There goes fear of reaching inappropriate content. There are more, like who is actually providing true information, who follow actually code of conducts(that’s another story!), participating in which site is illegal in your country etc. Final conclusion, you never know what you are into, until you surf, read and do background research. The original content owners also do not have any ways to let the consumer know about them, their products or services, policies, ethics, code of conducts etc. Hell we don’t have even ways to know if we are landing in a weblog or a website.

If you are regular surfer on the net you might have noticed “Hacker safe”, “SSL protected” or different trust logos in some sites. But unless you visit the site, you won’t have any ways to know it. So we need something like “content label” for marking each and every sites/blogs. A standard system,how content providers can inform search engines, aggregators and other data systems, that their content is of a certain type, fulfills certain criteria or meets given requirements.

W3C Content Label Incubator Group, is working on this since last year March. A company name segala is also working on this for bringing it to public. Previously Segala worked on O2 to certify their site WAI compliant (code of conduct). Consider it certification of the website for “codes of conduct” and the rest of the essentials. They also developed a Firefox Plugin called SearchThresher, which allow users to set preferences to only show those sites that are WAI certified. i.e when you use a search engine it will only show the sites that adhere to the agreed code of conduct and filter out the rest. Now Segala is working on ContentLabel.org, for new codes of conduct and have set up an internet wide content-labeling. Not just for static website but as well as blog and e-commerce sites. And that is open for everyone to participate and contribute.

We need this to distinguish the good from the bad, otherwise soon enough there will be just distrust all around us. Daniel K. Appelquist of Vodafone has more technical details of this Content Labeling, you might wanna check that out.

Content Label, Trust on the web, W3C, Segala

Behind every successful blog apart from blogger there is one more individual (or group). Yes your guess would be right, if it is the designer you are guessing. Designer play no less major role than blogger to make the blog successful. Most of the time it is hard to come buy a successful blogger you is into designing too. But we are lucky to find “Thord Daniel Hedengren“, who is known also as TDH. TDH isn’t mystery man in blogosphere. He is the man behind unique creation like “Bloggertalks“, former Blog Herald contributor and now blogging in David Krug’s 901am. That is just a fraction of what his diverse talents. He is known as a creative blog designer who designed Swedish videogames website Kong and couple of Syntagma Media’s blog. He is into so many things that i will need a whole article for that (His About section will help you to feed your curiosity).

So what more better way to understand the designs effect in blog than asking a pro who rides on the both side of the track (Blogging as well as designing). So i set an interview with the man himself, here it goes–

You are into lot of things, like blogging, blog designing as well as game development. But from the blogger perspective can you tell us how blog design impact blogging?

Well, I’m a firm believer in that content is king, but that doesn’t matter at all if your blog looks awful and is hard to read. You can have the best content in the world, but people won’t read it if it isn’t presented nicely. A blog needs decent design to make it big. It doesn’t need to be kick ass Web 2.0 shiny with gradient, just decent so that it doesn’t scare people away and present the content in a good manner. However, having a great design that fits your content will attract more visitors since it helps deliver a more complete product.

In your opinion what should be a designer’s priority concerns when building a WP theme?

Any website should think about these things-

1. Easy to read (colors, font sizes, line spacing…).
2. Simple navigation so that the visitor finds his way around.
3. Don’t overdo it with gizmos, widgets, gadgets and flashy stuff - less is actually more.

A designer doing a Wordpress theme should make sure that it works cross platform, Firefox and IE might be the biggest browsers out there, but you should support Safari and Opera as well, at least. Also, don’t fiddle with core files - a theme should only use theme files, approved template tags and hooks, as well as plugins that will work out of the box.

This is just general advice, what it all comes down to is what purpose the design has. If you want to show off your Flash experience, then you should, for instance. And if you’re building a custom Wordpress site for a client that will need hacks to core files and “ugly” solutions, then by all means do - it all comes do to the purpose.

Among your many talents, which one do you use for living? Would it be the same in coming 2007?

I write and design for a living. The design part have been a sidetrack since late 2006 actually, I used to just write. I’m expecting to combine the two in 2007, as I have in the latter part of 2006.

There are many fancy themes for WP, how should users pick their themes? Since I have seen quite a few blogger insisted not all the themes are Search Engine Friendly, what you have to say about that?

Just go with a theme that you like and you feel fits your content. As SEO goes, it’s way more important to use permalinks and set up sitemaps for search engines than to try to make sense if the theme you want is super-optimized or not. If you pick a theme that you’re comfortable with, then you’ll be more motivated to write quality content, and that’s where the real SEO is.

My buddy Chris Pearson has a great series on simple SEO optimization going on. Check it out.

So finally what would be your advice to newbie WP theme designers who intended to go pro?

You need to get your work out there so that you have both live references, as well as a personal portfolio. I haven’t done the latter one (yet) but have been lucky enough to get assignments based on my own projects. The Bloggertalks design was well received and that certainly helped, I’m sure. If you’re good then you’ll get work, and if you’re not, well, then you won’t. It’s tough business and if you want to go pro as a Wordpress theme designer you’re in for quite a challenge.

TDH, Thord Daniel Hedengren, Bloggertalks, 901am

Interestingly last few days i have been watching a lot of bloggers taking up super hero test, so i decided to put myself into the test to figure out which super hero does really characterize me. It’s fun way to start a new year don’t you think, since super heros does boost our courage and somewhat gives us a boost in will power. I would love to know which super hero dominates blogosphere., have fun nothing serious about it. My super hero test result came up this–

You are Batman

Click here to take the “Which Superhero are you?” quiz…

Super hero test, Batman

When I was covering the “TechCrunch UK Heat”, I came across with so many articles regarding comment etiquette and policy. Different bloggers have different views of comment policies but somewhat the suggested etiquettes are similar. This whole year I have seen lots of “Ego war” in blogosphere, some of them turned into ugly word exchange, which gives me a strong feeling that bloggers needs to draw an outline of comment etiquette and policies of comments. This will help blogosphere to be clean, well mannered. When an outsider (someone who doesn’t blog) will come across to any blog won’t say we are bunch of baboons. Additionally we need strong and standard comments policies regarding- moderating, removing and altering comments.

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A lot of time I faced the question “what am i good at?” especially after i officially declared to my friends and family i am a full time blogger. All the people personally knows me (they have very little idea about blog) at least once asked me “what I actually do?” . Very few of them actually believed me when i said  write articles, since i never went to journalism school or had any previous skills on writing any sort. I remember last Saturday when i went to my brother-in-law’s house to attend a family get together event, someone throw me a question that- you are writing but aren’t you supposed to be a computer scientist/programmer? That question i couldn’t reply back, and brings me a question in my mind too “We Bloggers what we are supposed to good at?”

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So far MySpace didn’t had any big legal trouble, they just faced minor legal setbacks that’s all. But now MySpace is in real trouble, as Worlds largest music group, Universal Music Group suing them for uploading copyrighted music content.  So far MySpace was watching and enjoying Google’s YouTube trouble, well the show is over baby! now you are in the show.

According to UMG the News Corp.-owned social networking website has participated in copyright infringement by formatting videos in a way that lets members play and redistribute the content. They filed the suit on Friday in California. The one MySpace proud of “User generated Content”, UMG called it “User Stolen” content. According to the article of CBC news:

“The foundation of MySpace is its so-called ‘user-generated content,’ ” says UMG’s statement of claim filed in the Central District of California, Western Division court. “However, much of that content is not ‘user-generated’ at all. Rather, it is the ‘user-stolen’ intellectual property of others, and MySpace is a willing partner in that theft.”

This isn’t the first time a social networking, or user content sharing got into law suit. YouTube go sued so many times. In fact now “Social Networking Sites” are more of a synonym of “Legal practice sites”. In my sense as web 2.0 world is beginning to expand and User-generated contents are getting more attention/focus, the non web based content selling businesses (ex- music, newspapers etc. ) are getting upset. These rain of lawsuits against almost every large social networking sites are giving me this thought. I am not saying that in social networking sites there are no copyright violations, there are a lot (maybe 30% to 40%), but looks like 60% original contents are not the one getting attention. This never ending battle between web 2.0 world and mainstream is not going anywhere, just making those lawyers rich.

Its about time the biggest heads of Web 2.0’s start to brain storm how to stop content stealing. Maybe MySpace will getaway with some green, but ultimately if Social networking sites (Not Only MySpace) can not  provide protection against copyright violation, Social networking will lost trust. I don’t understand most of these social networking sites have enough funds to buy or research on digital signature of contents. There are alternatives too, like if its music video, getting scan copy of pictures of person appeared in video(if the creator and singer is same)  authorization letter (if the person uploading is not the same person in video). No celebrity video should be allowed to be uploaded, social networking sites can hire a bunch of moderators for that. I know these things will reduce the super flow of contributions, but indeed will preserve the rights of owner and quality web 2.0 provide. There are many other ways social networking sites can prevent, or at least minimize copyright violations, why not spend a portion of their huge earning into this research and implementation. Social Networking will be a history if we ca not protect rights of contents. Why people crowded in social networking? since its credible(well a lot more then mainstream, since corporatism is minimal), democratic  and fast. So if SN looses credibility, what difference it will have then mainstream?

MySpace, Copyright, UMG, Universal Music Group, Stealing Content, 451 Chit-chat