David Sirfy's State of the Blogosphere came out recently. What is interesting is that Dose picked up the story and ran with it. On the cover of one of their recent weeklies was the logo of the biggest and best blog search engine: Technorati, along with a full report on page 2 of David Sirfy's findings.

So big media, at least by Canadian standard as Dose is owned by one of the larger media companies in the country, has not only sat up and noticed blogging, but they have used a blog as the primary soruce of their information. This is all backwards. Blogs are supposed to generate their content from big media, not the other way around.

The other thing is that the Dose article mentions that Blogs are not going to be over-taking big media quite yet, because only 4 independent blogs are in the top 10 (or something). The thing is, blogs work on the Long Tail principle. Most good blogs appeal to a smaller number of people due to their topical nature. So while the overall trend is that the large media companies get more hits then Knitting and Kitty Blog X, Knitting and Kitty Blog X gets more hits from people into cats and/or knitting. Well that is my suspicion anyway. People who are into Knitting, The Iraq War, and Pervery will get an RSS feed of a few different knittingblogs, pornoblogs and warblogs, rather then hitting CNN. And this trend will continue. People are mixing up their own news sources, rather then turning to something "authoritative".

We've already seen some interesting things when blogging and big-media intersect. I suspect as blogs get bigger and better, this will only continue.

I haven't had much in the way of time to blog. I have entries filling up in the queue, but no time to finish them and publish them.

Sorry about that folks. This weekend I'll be finishing off a large chunk of them, and maybe next week there will be more consistent updates.

All this on account of my new job, which totally kicks ass so far. Right now, I am at the office, and I am about to go downstairs for breakfast.

Goodness.

You'll notice that the Tag cloud has returned, as well as a radical shift in the weight of most of the tags due to a great blog-fission that has happened. Right nwo I just have to clean up after a few missed entries, and the split will be complete.

It is almost enough to make me consider using a WYSIWYG editor. When you are blogging, or at least, blogging intelligently, you are essentially writing content that will be consumed by 2 to 4 different consumers:

1. HTML, to be consumed by a browser
2. RSS to be consumed by an RSS reader
3. ATOM to be consumed by an ATOM reader
4. XML to be consumed by an XML parser (such as a feed reader, or perhaps a screen scraper, browser in the case of XHTML, etc.)

The implications are however, that youmust be careful about what you write. Now, I guess I should be clear here. If you are one of the few friends whom I have said "You need to start blogging, lemme set you up." I would set you up with a WYSIWYG editor, and leave it at that, so you don't have to worry about character entities messing up your RSS feed.

But if you are like me, and you find the most flexible thing to write your blog entries is lightly transformed HTML (essentially I have every new line being turned into a <br/> tag), then you need to be careful, specifically in the case of entities (" and & especially). This little exercise in feed validation has exposed 2 of my blind spots:

1. Embedding javascript inside of blog posts
2. using & when I should be using &amp;. (particularly on the URL)

So what to do? For now I am going to run each posting through an XHTML validator, that should fix about 80% of my problems, which is good enough for me.

Thanks again to Sam Ruby for catching my validation issue.

Gonna do a little meta-whoring here. Feel free to skip.

Its my 2nd year blog-a-versery coming up on Wednesday. Thats right, I've been at it for 2 years now. So now is the time to think about what kind of (digital) present you can give me. Original drawings, referring links, damning with faint praise, praising with faint damn...

Man. I'm such a whore. Look at me, give me stuff, look at me, look at me!

If you are observant, you will notice some new functionality to the burning bunny. There is a "Gallery Display" link to your right, under the "Meta Bunnies" heading. You can view the contents of my "Media Library" using that link. Basically the Media Library is a repository of things, mostly pictures, that I have referenced in my blog.

Update: Temporarily disabled. It will return in a week or two.

Podcasting is a way for you to subscribe to an RSS feed, and have it send you MP3z automagickally. There are all kinds of ways you can hook yourself up to podcasts, Ask Ninja for an excellent explanation of what podcasting is. iTunes supports podcasting right out of the box. Other media players... well I'm not sure. You can always download a podcast client that will download the mp3s for you and store them somewhere. Juice Receiver is open source and cross platform. Apparently the de-facto Mac podcast client is iPodderX a piece of software that is totally unavailable while going through a re-branding. (This is so completely stupid as to boggle the mind.) So if you have a mac, just get Juice Receiver, that is, if you don't want to use iTunes.

have been podcasting for ages. Any time I have a new song, a new sketch, or someone does a remix, I put it up on my "podcast"... which is to say, I put it up on my blog, and it automagickally handles the funky-techno-mojo that it takes to make it a podcast. You just have to subscribe to my regular RSS feed. Or, you can subscribe to my 'podcast' tag: http://blog.jonnay.net/rss.php?serendipity[tag]=podcast which will only contain actual podcasts.

So sign up for your Jonnay Apple Pies now.