Bill Gates worries that, perhaps, there may be consequences for mowing down the competition

The behemoth that is Microsoft announced yet another innovation yesterday, this time for the weblogging community: MSN Blogbot. Essentially a tool for searching weblogs, MSN Blogbot is set to début before the end of June. MSN Corporate Vice President of MSN Information Services, Yusuf Mehdi, announced Blogbot along with MSN Newsbot (which will be released separately), a news search engine also in development.
And then there’s something else — Answerbot. This will be a search feature that will retrieve answers to questions posed in natural language, along with links to related sites, although Answerbot is probably a few years away from launch.

Continue reading Microsoft Rules the Universe: Introducing Blogbot →

Howard Rheingold contemplates blogging

In an interview with BusinessWeek Online, digital culture guru Howard Rheingold — Editor of The Whole Earth Review and author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution — predicts the rise of online advocacy groups. Howard Dean’s Presidential campaign was built upon Rheingold’s ideas, using the Net to organize large groups of backers — getting them to contribute millions of dollars. Dean’s blog-friendly campaign proved to be very successful, indeed.

“Rheingold thinks that’s just the start of a long battle on the part of activists of all stripes to seize some of the power now wielded by political professionals and large media companies.”

The BloggerCon conference — to be held at Harvard University, in Boston, on April 17 (the cost of attendance is free, if you can afford the air fare and accommodation) — will explore many of Rheingold’s ideas, with a focus on journalism, education, science, business and politics.

“We’re interested in people’s experiences with weblogs, now that they’ve been in use for five or six years … This is not a technical visionary venue, nor is it a place for political activism. Our interest is in the use of weblogs. Of course technology and politics are related to the use of weblogs.”

On the BloggerCon web site, there’s also an interesting essay by Clay Shirky, titled “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality” that is well worth reading. Jeff Jarvis will speak on the money-making possibilities of blogging.
Thanks to the ever-productive Debra Galant for pointing us to this story.

Yesterday was the first time that VanRamblings was hit with pornography spam in the comments section of published articles (the porn comment links have since been removed).
For those of us intent on remaining credible on the blog front, and keeping spam away from our sites, help is finally on the horizon to prevent blog spammers from posting their unwanted material. Coming later this spring: TypeKey for MovableType 3.0 — and, soon after that, for TypePad.

Andrew Stuart Morrison plotting the overthrow of the Bush administration

Today, we introduce you to Times New Roman Online, Andrew Stuart Morrison’s “Canadian Opinion from the Left Coast” wherein he keeps “score in an increasingly rough neighbourhood”, which is to say, as a neighbour to the increasingly scary and unstable political behemoth to the south.
Although a “Canadian and … interested in Canadian politics and the general matters that effect us all,” Morrison “has been steered of late by a compulsion towards reporting on the Bush administration’s direction and handling of the War on Terror, simply because it is the biggest story of (his) lifetime,” and because he disagrees utterly “with the ways in which this child president has steered the U.S. ship of state (and Canada by proxy)”.
Morrison is a regular commentator at Billmon’s Whiskey Bar, which was voted Best American Political Blog (his site is linked there). He’s also listed on the U.S. website Political Puzzle, and comments regularly, on Tacitus, Eschaton, and Washington Monthly’s Political Animal, among others.
“It’s weird being a Canuck, stuck out here in West Van, finding myself wading knee-deep amongst the heavies of the United States, the strength of my arguments being the fact that I come from the Great White North. Of course, I’ve been thoroughly insulted by U.S. right-wing commentators as a Canadian, been described as a Commie, decried as a meddler, and told categorically to put my own house in order (ie. Canada) before daring to question our southern neighbour. After all, I’ve been told, if it wasn’t for the U.S., we’d all be speaking Russian up here in our igloos. Silly bunch, these Yanks … sort of an anthropology project at times.”
“Nevertheless, to be ‘keeping track of an increasingly rough neighbourhood’ is a continuing joy, and I wish I had more time to dedicate to TNRO. I am a workoholic with a young family so I sometimes have to skip a day or two. At other times I have trouble turning the tap off.”
One of the most readable and consistently articulate / well-written blogs I’ve run across in my (relatively) short life as a blogger, Morrison’s Times New Roman blog offers cogent opinion on topics ranging (today) from an incisive commentary on how Dennis Miller has ‘irresponsibly squandered’ the goodwill that he was afforded by many in so carelessly adopting the agenda of the American right, to a short essay on President George Bush vs UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and commentary on the recent election in Spain, following the devastating Al Qaida attack of March 11.
Also one of the best progressive ‘link’ sites I’ve found (go see for yourself), do yourself a favour: check out Times New Roman Online, bookmark it (also available as a weblog link, to your right, under BC/Vancouver), and visit Andrew Stuart Morrison’s ‘left coast’ blog often.