seeing in a mirror dimly

At the prompting of Dave Miers, I’m toying with the idea of revamping this old blog…

It’s been a few years since I’ve worked in the online IT world, but I think now’s the time to resurrect some of those skills.  My area of expertise was in the realm of online adverting at Sensis (Yellow Pages, White Pages, Whereis, Bigpond, Telstra etc) and am keen to see what sort of interesting things I might be able to conjure up…. And thus, I’m going to try and step this site up a notch and see what happens. But I really want you to tell me what you think makes a good blog site or website generally:

- Layout – do you like a 2 or 3 columned look?
- Audio/Video/Text – What do you mostly scour the net for?
- Blog posts – Do you like short or long posts?
- Other sites – What other sites do you really enjoy visiting? Why?

Basically, any thoughts on what you like in blogging websites, I’d love to hear!

Much love in Christ,
Mark

I stumbled across the Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008 report tonight, and it’s fascinating.  I’m not sure whether I’m surprised or not in the general volume of blog traffic, but there are some interesting statistics to be taken note of.

comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)

Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US

Facebook: 41.0 million | M

ySpace 75.1 million

Total internet audience 188.9 million

eMarketer (May 2008)

94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)

22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)

Universal McCann (March 2008)

184 million WW have started a blog | 26.4 US

346 million WW read blogs | 60.3 US

77% of active Internet users read blogs

 

From reading over some of these stats, I really do feel like this is a great thing to do in 

service to our Lord.  Perhaps some of these stats might shape the direction of our blogs and link into what’s going on in the blogging world around us!

…. to the Fox! Firefox 3 that is.

Having been a Fox (and of course the attendant Linux and Thunderbird kit) fan from way back, I’m really struggled to be content with my Windows usage since getting this darned laptop. As a side note – I had two years of no PC, and that was pure bliss. Anyhow, after bumbling around with IE on this new laptop for a while, I’ve come back to the good side and have installed ‘THE FOX’. The new version of the fox too! Copied straight outta compton… *ehem* straight out of Between Two Worlds (www.theologica.blogspot.com), here’s a couple of cracker quotes from the nerds at PCMAG:

“Three years in development, over 15,000 bug fixes and feature improvements, a new page rendering engine, remarkable performance gains, multiple OS integration — you could say the several hundred engineers working on Firefox have been busy. And their work has paid off.

Speedy performance, thrifty memory usage, and, in particular, the address bar that now predicts where you want to go when you start typing (what Mozilla insiders refer to as the Awesome Bar) firmly plant Firefox at the top of the Web browser hill, flying the flag of our Editors’ Choice for browsers.“

In particular:

“The top new feature has to be the address bar, what Mozilla types call “The Awesome Bar,” but which the development team has officially dubbed the location bar. As you type into it, a list of suggested Web destinations based on your browsing history pops up.

It uses what Mozilla’s phenomenologist Mike Beltzner has coined “frecency” — a combination of frequency and recentness — to determine the best suggestions. And, as icing on the cake, the search bar is now resizable, so you can divvy the space between the location and search bars to your taste.

When I tried it, the location bar’s first suggestion was right on the money most of the time. Knowing that hitting the down arrow and Enter will usually get you where you want to go — not to mention save you untold keystrokes and time — will change your browsing habits.“

So, now I’m just trying how best to configure my RSS Reader and I’m interested – what readers do you use? Help!