I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0. The initial shift went smoothly enough, with the usual hiccups, but some problems may pop up over the next few days.

If anyone has suggestions for plugins or other features beyond the minimal set I have now, I’d be grateful. I’ve had to abandon Textile, as it doesn’t work with Live Comment Preview.

I’m going to practise what I preach and take it a bit easier over the summer. That includes a less regular schedule for blog posting from now until I get back to full speed some time in January. I plan to keep the regular open threads going, and I’ll also be happy to publish guest posts (subject to the usual blog rules).

It should be easy enough to keep things going along in my semi-absence. Two threads have managed to pass 200 comments with only occasional intervention from me, and with the usual wanderings off-topics. A two-line post on Peak Oil has produced 210 comments on such issues as the electrical conductivity of gold and the theory of market failure, but is still focused on energy issues. A piece on American labour markets turned into a pile-on demonstrating the statistical illiteracy of Donald Luskin. That’s how it goes.

It’s the time of year for blog contests, and the inevitable sore losers are a lot sorer given that one of the contests involved real money. Hosting service Smartyblog put up $10k, for a contest won by a site about Singing Bridges. Kinda strange, but that’s the magic of the internets. Not having got off onto my bottom to put in an entry*, I’m not going to second-guess the judges. Gianna shares the pain of her defeat here

While I’m at it, I should note the departure of Margo Kingston’s departure from Webdiary (apparently to continue as a group blog). Margo was one of the first mainstream journalists to realise the significance of blogging, but her efforts to make a living at it have not worked out.

More personally significant to me is the closure of Robert Corr’s Red Rag, as Rob is now “Another Suit on the Terraceâ„¢”. Insofar as this blog has a blogfather it’s Rob. Not only did his blog encourage me to start, but he provided support and hosting during my move away from the training wheels of Blogger. Good luck with your new career, Rob!

* Being officially ranked the best blog in Queensland, at least until next Australia Day, I can afford to be complacent.

HTML tags haven’t been working in comments for a while. Prompted by Andrew Reynolds, I checked and found the problem was a plugin, which I’ve disabled. So you can all go back to including hyperlinks, as well as bold and italic tags. Just part of the friendly service.

I’ve also switched the RSS feed to provide the entire article rather than just the summary. Some people wanted this, and it seems like the way of the future, but feel free to discuss.

The 30 000th comment on this blog[1] has just been posted. I was going to award a prize but, rather embarrassingly, the comment was one of mine. So I’ll announce a shared award between comment #29999 (Andrew Bartlett) and #30001 (still working it out).

More seriously, thanks to everyone who’s helped to make the comments threads on this blog some of the best on the web.

fn1. That’s in the Movable Type and WordPress incarnations, not counting comments made in earlier systems such as Haloscan, and those lost in the great database disaster. of 2003. Including these lost contributions, the total number is probably close to 50 000. WordPress numbers comments at about 38500 suggesting a loss of 8000 or so in the database disaste.

i got a note from James Gross at Feedster.com to say this site has been picked as Feed of the Day by Feedster.com. which seems to be an RSS-based version of blog search services like Technorati, Blogpulse and IceRocket.

Obviously, part of the implied social contract in such selections is a reciprocal plug, which I’m happy to provide, since I think RSS is a really big deal.

Following on from my previous post, I’m a bit dubious about the potential for RSS-based advertising, at least for general rather than product-oriented blogs, but Feedster seems to have the lead running in this field, and it will be interesting to see what they can do with it.

With the general resurgence in Internet-related commercial activity and speculation, it’s not surprising that a fair bit of attention has turned to the commercial and advertising possibilities of blogs. Blogging as a large-scale phenomenon came too late to cash in on the dotcom mania last time around, but plenty of people are keen on a bite at the cherry this time around. The multi-million dollar purchase of Weblogs Inc got lots of people thinking about how much their site might be worth.

But just like last time around, there are plenty of reasons for scepticism. Looking at the prices being charged by leading bloggers on Blogads, it doesn’t seem as if many people are making a lot of money. Nic Duquette did the sums and concluded[1] that a site with 10 000 page views a day ought to be able to gross around $US4500 a year. Putting in 10 hours a week for this kind of return amounts to a wage of $US9 an hour, and that’s before you allow for any costs.
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I spoke at this forum on Monday on the topic “Where to now for Telstra?”. There was an interesting session on the future of the Internet, with a paper by Alex Burns and Darren Sharp which included a screen shot of this blog; the discussion of blogs and wikis was spot on, though it was striking that even with a communications-oriented audience, these concepts seemed to be new to many.

I’ll try to upload my presentation soon.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is campaigning to defend bloggers’ rights. Most of the action is in the US, but many of the same issues arise here.

The availability of search engines like Google provides an easy way of checking on factual claims you may find questionable – just enter the relevant keywords into a search engine and see what comes up. If such a search produces nothing to support the claim, or evidence to refute or qualify it, then it’s time to start demanding evidence.

This started me thinking about a more general problem with search engines. Using search engine results in the way I suggest rests on the assumption that a given query will produce given results. The same is true if I want to say “Site X is the top result on engine Y for query Z”. But what happens if, as is already possible, search results are personalised, based on, say, previous search history and choice among search results. The same search, undertaken by someone else, might produce completely different results.

Personalisation has some obvious benefits. if I’m searching for bus routes in Brisbane, I probably don’t want results about Brisbane, California. But it undermines the usefulness of search engines results as evidence in analysis or argument.

Full-scale personalisation might get us to the point feared by writers like Cass Sunstein. Dogmatic leftwingers or rightwingers, supporters and opponents of the Iraq war, and so on, might be presented exclusively with search results that confirmed their prejudices, and might never realise that they were looking at a completely different Web to that seen by someone with different views. This process would work only for people who usually don’t follow search results that lead to views contrary to their own – personalisation would reinforce this tendency until it became automatic.