NevOn

Constantly waiting for TypePad

'Waiting for TypePad...' is a phrase I have now memorized when it comes to publishing posts to any of my blogs. This last week has been exceptionally frustrating.

I write posts offline using ecto for Windows, currently version 1.7.5, and publish them to TypePad. It should work, but it doesn't.

What's been happening is that, on average, about two posts out of five don't publish correctly usually due to a server time-out or data-receive error. That's generally been the case for many months. It means I then have to log in to TypePad and re-publish from there. A real pain.

This past week, though, such errors from TypePad have been the case with every single attempt at publishing a post.

Today it's worse - when I start ecto and it checks in to the TypePad server to refresh the published blog entries within ecto, it gets a server time-out or data-receive error. So well before writing and posting, there are server time-outs.

The ecto error log shows one of these phrases in every entry:

System.Net.WebException: The operation has timed-out.
System.Net.WebException: The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a receive.

While I've asked TypePad Support about server time-outs before, I've sort of lived with these errors as they haven't totally prevented me from posting. Until now. It's got beyond purely a pain - this is massive frustration.

I posted a TypePad support help ticket yesterday. No reply so far, although it's only 24 hours.

What is going on here?

In discussion a few weeks ago with Alex Hung, one of ecto's developers, in the ecto Windows support forum, he wondered whether there may be issues with TypePad's servers (overloaded) or that my blog databases are too big. I have no idea!

All I know is that whenever I use this software tool (ecto) to publish content to my blogs, it either doesn't do it properly or doesn't work at all. Is this an ecto issue or a TypePad problem? I have no idea, although I'm pretty sure it's more likely a TypePad issue - other ecto users are reporting similar issues with TypePad.

I wish someone could simply say "yes, this is a problem and here's how it is being fixed" with the fix either being something TypePad has to do, or ecto has to do, or I have to do. Or some mixture of the three of us. I really don't care who has to do it - let's just fix this damn thing.

I'm not writing this post in ecto, by the way - pointless at the moment. I'm not writing it in TypePad, either - when I click on the 'save' button in the edit window, all I stare at for ages is "Waiting for www.typepad.com..." in my browser status bar.

So I'm writing it in NoteTab Light, a really good plain-text editor that also has very good HTML capabilities, which I've used for years for plain-text editing. I can add any HTML code and then paste the content into TypePad's editor in HTML mode.

Hmm, maybe this is what I should stick with.

Does this post read like a rant? Well, I guess it is one.

Still time to vote in the Podcast Awards

The first Podcast Awards contest closes tomorrow, 31 July. For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, the bi-weekly show that Shel Holtz and I co-host, is a finalist for Best Business Podcast.

Contest organizer Todd Cochrane says that the contest site has seen over 640,000 unique page loads so far and voting in the hundreds of thousands. This is quite a competition.

Shel and I would really love to win our category! Thanks to everyone who has told us they've voted for FIR. And if you haven't voted yet, there's still time...

Newsworthy 30-7-05

> Is Skype up for sale? Is Google the likely buyer? Or Rupert Murdoch, who almost bought it last week for $3 billion? Growing speculation and some rumours in the past few days. Robert Scoble links to a few discussions. Stuart Henshall in Skype Journal links to a few more. Meanwhile, Skype continues looking after its users with another SkypeOut Gift Day today and a reduction in SkypeOut call costs to over 30 countries.

> You can now filter keyword searches on Technorati by languages other than English. Now, you can search for blog posts in the top 10 languages Technorati sees in the blogosphere right now (Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and All). More to come as Technorati sees them appear in the blogosphere. More Technorati news - a special version for handhelds and mobile phones. If you've got a web-enabled mobile device, just visit m.technorati.com for a Technorati experience designed especially for small screens.

> Charlene Li on Yahoo's recent purchase of Konfabulator: "This is where I think Yahoo! gets very, very interesting with Konfabulator. As a developer tool, it may have some interesting potential for developing neat interfaces into Yahoo!’s vast stores of content and information. But if Yahoo! can put the power of widget creation into the hands of end-users, it would give us end users the power to not only create custom content streams a la RSS and MyYahoo!, but also allow us to filter, distribute, and combine that data in any way we see fit.[...] Proposed RSS extensions from Microsoft, Yahoo, etc, will provide additional structure around which widgets can be built - think shopping alerts.

> Blogging is booming in the UK, according to Netimperative quoting research data from monitoring firm Hitwise: Visits to blogs in the UK currently account for almost 1 in 200 visits to all websites, representing a huge 130% increase on last year. Hitwise figures showed that MSN Spaces and LiveJournal dominated the market. Myspace is rapidly gaining in popularity, with a 500% increase since it debuted in the Hitwise ranks in September 2004. Currently the fourth biggest blogging site in the UK, Hitwise says that Myspace has seen a particularly sharp surge in traffic over the last six months as word-of-mouth popularity has spread, causing it to become the 25th most visited destination in the UK in June.

Support a charity trek in Peru

In September, three women will be trekking the Inca Trail in Peru to raise money for a worthy charity campaign.

One of the three is Pam Hobson, my sister, who says:

Between 14th & 27th September I will be undertaking the most arduous challenge of my life! [...] With my friends Karen Slatford and Fiona Coughlan, we are raising much-needed funds for The Prince's Trust to help young disadvantaged people in Berkshire in the UK.

Starting from Cusco, the capital of the Inca Empire over 500 years ago, they will spend four days and nights trekking to Machu Picchu.

Their trek is tough – while only 43km (26.6 miles) long, it involves climbing over 3,000 steps at altitudes of between 2,400m (9,000ft) and 4,198m (13,700ft) and coping with extremes of temperatures in the day of between 10-20C, falling to as low as freezing at night. The three women will probably experience some frost or snow on some of the higher passes.

So if you would like to help Pam and her friends achieve their goal of raising ₤2,000 for The Prince's Trust, the charity founded by the Prince of Wales in 1976, please consider donating a few euros, pounds or dollars.

You can donate online at a secure website and your donation may be tax deductible. Thanks.

BlogHer today

There's quite an event taking place today in California - the BlogHer conference.

The brainchild of Elisa Camahort and Lisa Stone, BlogHer will answer this question:

[...] Men, as well as women, have been asking, "Where are the women?" And we have been responding...we're right here. That the same question is being asked now as was asked one year ago or two years ago is frustrating, but the real question is: what, if anything, do women bloggers want to do about it?

Some 300 people - 20 percent of whom are men: no gender issues - will be discussing these primary topics today:

1. The role of women within the larger blog community
2. Examining the developing (and debatable) code of blogging ethics
3. Discovering how blogging is shrinking the world and amplifying the voices of women worldwide

See the programme schedule for full details. Each of the 20 sessions will be audio-recorded and made available as podcasts via IT Conversations. Fantastic!

Although the event has been sold out for weeks, you can still participate via the BlogHer Global Chatroom which will be live from 2pm GMT today until 2am GMT on Sunday.

Congratulations to the organizing team - Elisa Camahort, Jory Des Jardins, Purvi Shah, Lisa Stone and Katrin Verclas - and to everyone there!

Technorati: blogher

Changing the 2015 history lesson

If you read US journalist Bob Cauthorn's lengthy post on Corante's Rebuilding Media, you might get a strong impression that blogs and mainstream media are a mixture that should never, ever, come together.

Ne'er the twain shall meet, in fact:

[...] Memo to mainstream media: You don't get to blog.

You have a publishing apparatus. So you don't get to blog. You have a broadcasting apparatus. So you don't get to blog. In case you missed the point while you were reading up on youth slang, I'll repeat it for emphasis. You. Do. Not. Get. To. Blog.

Not that you won't try. Currently, there's a rush among traditional media outlets to get into that wicked bitchin', snaps inducing “blogging thing.” Almost all of these efforts are agonizingly misguided.

I had to read the story more than once to try and get the point of Cauthorn's argument. I could boil it down to this: if mainstream media approaches blogging on the basis of 'getting on the bandwagon' to grab the youth market, they will fail.

Well, it doesn't take a Ph.D in anything to figure that one out. Cauthorn gives an example or two of mainstream media who really don't get it to support his argument. That argument is not only applicable to mainstream media, by the way - apply it to any individual or organization who's thinking about 'getting into this blogging thing' (think of the Ketchum PR agency, for instance).

I believe more mainstream media 'get it' about blogging than you might think, even if what you tend to notice are the rather lame efforts some are engaging in, especially in the US.

But don't knock it - everyone is experimenting and some will screw up, no question. That, though, is one of the great things about such an open and transparent environment in which to experiment where failure means learning not necessarily extinction. It's not (wholly) Darwinian in its brutal reality.

I'll mention at this point my favourite business quote, from Esther Dyson - keep making new mistakes.

So, Cauthorn's is not an especially remarkable blog post so far. But if I ended my post here, that would miss the extremely interesting and real point that he makes - what he says in the first part of his post is really a little smokescreen - as you get into his lengthy story:

The Hobson and Holtz Report - Podcast #54: July 28, 2005

Content summary: Listeners' comments discussion (on getting value from FIR and where to listen; European digital rights); BlogHer on Saturday; Dave Winer's OPML editor launched; Podscope indexing every podcast; indie podcasters On A Podcast; made up quotes in press releases; PR bloggers should quit whining about being pitched; the missing link in mission statements; blog search tools comparisons; upcoming interviews; Podcast Awards.

Show notes for July 28, 2005

Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a 74-minute conversation recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Download the file here (MP3, 25MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as the free iPodder, DopplerRadio or iTunes 4.9, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

In this edition:

Intro:

• 00:32 Shel introduces the show; how to give your feedback; show notes; vote in the Podcast Awards.

Listeners' comments discussion:

• 02:58 Trackbacks to the last show's show notes from Angela Booth, Tom Murphy and James Cherkoff
• 04:06 Frank Meeuwsen on the value he gets from FIR and how he listens; and wonders about upcoming podcasting conferences
• 11:08 Nicole Simon on her pledge for a European digital rights initiative and why communicators should pay attention

News and Features:

• 20:42 BlogHer on Saturday 30 July - the open and inclusive forum to discuss the role of women within the larger blog community, and much more; and how you can participate even if you're not there
• 22:20 Dave Winer launches an OPML editor; OPML's key role in producing content for the web
• 25:08 Podscope plans to index every spoken podcast on the web by the end of August
• 27:30 Indie podcasters don't do it for the money and are here to stay - the message in our bonus music track from Cruisebox: On A Podcast
• 35:17 Making up quotes in press releases - should you be shocked?
• 41:20 Some PR bloggers want to be treated like journalists but complain about being pitched. Andy Lark and others say "Quit, you whiners!" What can PR bloggers do to make their interests clearer to pitchers, before they pitch?
• 48:27 The missing link in mission statements is employee understanding of the organization's mission and its relevance to them - assuming the mission is clear from the outset, that is
• 57:13 Mary Hodder's post on blog search tools and the comparisons (PDF) highlight the differences in how the tools work; the competitive edge Blogpulse has with its Blogpulse Profiles offering

Outro:

• 65:53 Neville outros the show; how to give your feedback; show notes
• 67:22 Upcoming confirmed interviews - Constantin Basturea on August 9; Pete Blackshaw, Intelliseek, on August 16; to be confirmed: Jeff de Cagna of Associations Unorthodox
• 68:48 Shel introduces the music

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show:

Intro - Podcast Awards.

Listeners' comments discussion - Angela Booth, Tom Murphy, James Cherkoff, Frank Meeuwsen, 9rules.com, IBC 2005, Portable Media Expo, Podcast Hotel, PodcastCon UK, Amy Gahran, Nicole Simon, Nicole's pledge call for European digital rights, EFF, EDRI, Reboot7, Flickr, Tris Hussey.

News and Features - BlogHer, Dave Winer, iPodder.org, Podcasting News, Podscope, iTunes, AAC file format, Blinkx, Business 2.0, Greg Lindsay podcasting article, Shel's podcasting post, Neville's podcasting post, Cruisebox, On A Podcast, Adam Curry, Daily Source Code, iTunes Podcast Directory, Dan Gillmor, Steve Crescenzo, Cluetrain Manifesto, CEO Blogs List, Andy Lark, Steve Rubel, Om Malik, Marketing 1 to 1, Neville's post on mission statements, Financial Times, Avis, NASA, Disney, Mattell, Hasbro, Dilbert's Mission Statement Generator, Sue MacDonald, Intelliseek, Blogpulse, Technorati, PubSub, Robert Scoble, Mary Hodder, Bloglines, Feedster, Ice Rocket, Dave Sifry, Blogpulse Profiles, Ketchum.

Outro - Podcast Awards, Constantin Basturea, Pete Blackshaw, Jeff de Cagna, Podsafe Music Network, Lejeune, Dead Again, For Immediate Release, A Shel of My Former Self, NevOn.

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at comments@forimmediaterelease.biz, or call the Comment Line at +1 206 984 0931. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 5Mb attachment, please!). We'll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

So, until Monday August 1...

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel's and my podcast blog.)

Podcast your blog with Talkr

An interesting concept - write your blog posts and then make that content available in audio format for anyone to listen to your blog.

This is what Talkr does using text-to-speech conversion technology that takes a blog's RSS feed and converts such machine-readable content into speech, creating MP3 files of each individual post. You can then subscribe to the Talkr service and get those MP3s via RSS and into your podcatcher.

Here's how they pitch the service to listeners:

Do you have enough time to read your favorite blogs? Are you staying current with the blogs that cover your profession? What if your computer could download a spoken word version of any text blog, and automatically put it on your mp3 player? Wouldn't that make your commute more interesting? Talkr continually monitors the web's most popular blogs and makes them available to your mp3 player - 24 hours a day.

You can sign up to get three blogs as podcasts without cost. More than that, you need to sign up for the subscription service which starts at $4.95 per month for up to 20 hours of audio.

To get your blog posts re-purposed as podcasts, you join the Talkr Partner programme. This is free as your posts will become the content that listeners sign up for. Talkr offers an earnings model where they pay partners a revenue share if one of their readers subscribes to Talkr's service. And if you opt in to have Talkr include ads in your blog post podcasts, there's a revenue share opportunity there, too.

I've listened to a couple of MP3s from blogs already in the service, and I'm quite impressed by the quality of the voice I hear speaking the content of a blog post. A female voice on the ones I've listened to, an American accent, has pretty good natural voice intonation and rhythm. A bit of clipping here and there but almost conversational. That's a key element to the service - what you hear has to be easy on the ear: easy to understand and spoken in a way that doesn't give you a headache.

So I've signed up for it. My interest is seeing how this all works, not the revenue opportunity, and whether it is an idea that could catch on. I've not opted in for ads.

If you want to listen to any of my blog posts, here's the link:

In Windows, right-click on the image, copy the shortcut and paste it into the appropriate place in your podcatcher to subscribe to the RSS feed.

I'd be most interested to hear what you think.

Blogging a business closure

BL Ochman writes about her client and friend, Paul Purdue, founder of iFulfill.com, who is in the midst of every entrepreneur's nightmare - he's going out of business, and he's using his blog to chronicle what he calls "the demise."

This is a brave thing to do. Having read Paul's announcement on Tuesday, I admire his transparency and openness at a time that's clearly heart-breaking for him and pretty alarming for his customers, as evidenced by some of the comments to his posts.

Yet the reality is that his firm is going out of business. He's chosen to openly write about the closure on his blog. His posts seem to make it very clear exactly what he's doing during the closure to ensure his commitments to his customers are fulfilled.

BL's post on Tuesday has more details on the background leading up to the closure.

I wish you the best of luck, Paul.

[UPDATE 5/8/05] A parallel and potentially larger story developed - Business Week published the iFulfill.com story online and in the print magazine, quoting BL who quickly said that she had been misquoted. Full marks to BW's Stephen Baker who publicly admitted yesterday that he had misquoted BL. Story corrections to come at Business Week.

Anti-piracy measures now include Windows Update

BBC News: Microsoft has stepped up its fight against software piracy by requiring users to verify their copies of the Windows operating system. Anyone downloading updates for Windows XP will be required to check that their operating system is genuine.

This validation process is in place right now as I discovered when I visited the Windows Update site today to install an optional update.

Upon landing on the site, I was presented with a screen saying that I needed to upgrade some components. Clicking OK resulted in a dialog with progress on installing those upgrades, which included software to validate my copy of Windows to show it was not an illegal or pirated copy.

The result was a success as the screenshot shows.

If it had not been a success, the consequence would be no access to any Windows updates except for security fixes.

Thirty-five percent of the software installed on personal computers worldwide was pirated in 2004, according to a recent study by IDC for the Business Software Alliance. The study said that worldwide losses to software publishers due to piracy increased from $29 billion the year before to $33 billion in 2004.

And with Windows accounting for 90% of operating systems sold worldwide, cracking down on the pirates is one of the few ways for Microsoft to expand its business, the BBC report said.

More info on Microsoft's validation system at Genuine Microsoft Software. Also, see the guide on how to tell if your software is genuine or not.