Squidoo gives you the power to write simple web pages on any subject of your choosing. It’s free - and you can even earn money from it for yourself or for charity.

Why would you want to do this? Well, increasing your online presence is generally good for business. You can add links back to your own site to your “lens” (Squidoo-speak for a page) which - providing they are relevant to the subject of the page - can help raise the credibility of your site in search engines.

Not only that, if you write something interesting and worthwhile, you may gain a wider audience for your ideas and opinions. That can’t be bad, can it?

As a taster, here’s a page I’ve just started about Drupal development.

I’ve just added a LinkedInABox widget to this blog and it prompts a thought about personal profiles. I don’t know how many you have, but I have several that I can think of off the top of my head:

• On this very site
• On LinkedIn, of course
• Ecademy
• My wacky Livejournal
• My odd books site
• MyBlogLog

To some extent these all serve different purposes but wouldn’t it be nice to have them all managed in one place? Unfortunately most sites don’t let you add dynamic code to your profile, otherwise one could imagine a universal profile widget which would supply the required text for whichever site it was placed on.

Still it would certainly be possible to make something similar to LinkedInABox that would work for other sites like those I list, an aggregated profile widget if you like. It wouldn’t reduce the number of profiles you have to maintain but it might inspire you to update them more regularly if more people got to see them.

From techdirt:

Stuffy Economist Magazine Experiments With Social Media

One of the mistakes many companies make when trying to embrace social networking or social media is to think that they should just build their own version of MySpace, or clone of some other popular site. For various reasons, these attempts almost always end up as failures. Jane Galt, who writes for The Economist, points to a nice example of how her magazine is turning letters to the editor into a form of social media that makes sense for the publication.

[via Techdirt]

The characterization of the Economist as “stuffy” has excited a few commentators. I must confess I’ve not read it in years but its reputation has always been for conservatism with a smallish ‘c’. A quick look at the online edition confirms that view to some extent, presenting the image of a serious, slightly pompous magazine proferring options that most Times readers would feel comfortable with - though Economist readers probably regard The Times as a little downmarket these days.

The readers of publications like the Economist have always been a very important part of their appeal. I’m sure I’m not the only person who finds that the letters page of many magazines present more stimulating reading than much else of their content. The blog format is a great way to translate the letters page to the online world as it offers the opportunity for immediate comment and participation.

Getting the character of a social networking forum right, as the Economist has arguably succeeded in doing, is a new skill: people are becoming increasingly choosy as the range of potential networking sites increases. Subtle differences in such areas as the modes of interaction, the amount of jargon used, typefaces, colours, and the level of advertising, will help to determine which sites capture their markets. Expect some really great user interface designers to set the bar - and the rest of us to strive to emulate them.

At last! No need to agonize any more over what to put in your blog! Instead use this simple formula to generate fabulous attention-getting content:

Q_bw = (5N_qob + 2N_ol + 7N_ofbo)² / Q_bjli

where Q_bw is the Bloq Wondrousness Quotient, as calculated from N_qob (the number of Quotes from Other Bloggers), N_ol (the number of Outgoing Links), N_ofbo (the number of Outrageous Flame-Baiting Opinions) and Q_bjli, which is your quotient of Burbling Jargon-Laden Incomprehensibility (to be calculated according to the Goldacre algorithm).

This formula has been arrived at using the same strict scientific methods as were followed in developing the Rackspace formula for a perfect website, and has just as much mathematical validity.

As Digitalghost said recently in a slightly different context “you don’t want to pony up for yet another report on the effectiveness of blogs“, and anyone who disagrees with that is obviously a victim of CIA mind control.

I’ve previously posted on this journal about the accessibility of forum software and indicated that I was working on an adaptation of Phorum to make it more accessible.

Since some other open source packages suffer from the same problems I thought it would be worthwhile creating an umbrella project for similar endeavours, which I’ve called XReach.

From the XReach site you can download an early release version of the forum software or have a look at it in use as the discussion area for the site.

It’s very much a work in progress at this stage, but I think it represents an improvement over the base software from an accessibility point of view.

I’m keen to get other people on board, since I don’t know everything there is to know about web accessibility - by a very long way - and I probably won’t be able to spend as much time on the project as I’d like. So if you feel you could contribute in any way, please get in touch. I’m looking for end users, especially those with disabilities that affect their use of the web, as much as developers. Anyone with ideas for improving the user experience would be very welcome.

If you are interested in participating, please either register on the XReach discussion area or send me an email.

From Techcrunch:
Yahoo Buys MyBlogLog. No, They Didn’t. Wait, Yes.

Ok so it’s official and confirmed from Yahoo: They bought MyBlogLog. This was first rumored to be happening in November, but was never confirmed and we updated our post to reflect that. This morning the news broke again but was pulled immediately afterwards. Now it’s popped up again. …

(Were Yahoo waiting for me to get an account?) MyBlogLog is a happening place right now, and the supposed price paid is small change for Yahoo, so I don’t think this is a bad move on their part. In the past they’ve been criticised for the quality of the user experience on their home site, so let’s hope they don’t try to mess too much with what’s made MyBlogLog what it is.

In part I’d attribute MyBlogLog’s success to the relative simplicity of its interface. It’s easy to find other users and make a tentative initial contact with them which can be firmed up over time. The other factor is its perceived utility in bringing traffic to your blogs, which is why a large part of the community seems to be SEO experts, or those who claim to be such.

If Yahoo sticks to doing the right thing - beefing up server capacity, dealing more rigorously with spammers, adding new features only after careful consideration and consultation - this could be a good thing for MyBlogLog. But new owners of online services often kill the golden goose when they don’t pay enough attention to the cultural side of what they’ve bought, so this gets a very cautious modest thumbs-up from me.

Garett Rogers writes:
Use your own domain with new Blogger feature
A brand new feature in the “New Blogger” lets you associate your own domain with an account without worrying about FTP settings or being stuck with a “blogspot.com” address.  My first blog about Google was Google Addiction hosted on Blogger — but it would have been really handy if I could simply point that domain [...]
[via Googling Google]

After Google became a domain registrar speculation was rife as to what they were up to. Recently they’ve started making new domain-based services available including a version of googlemail. With their acqusition of Blogger.com, therefore, the abiliity to associate a Blogger account with a personal domain seems like a logical step.

Domain pointing is nothing new. Years ago I set up my first site on Freeserve, bought the oddbooks.co.uk domain and pointed it to my Freeserve domain. But for pointing to work, the hosting service (in this case Google) needs to let you configure its settings to recognise the pointing domain. That feature is what Google have added.

If you have a blog hosted by Google you might consider this as a step towards creating a full-blown website of your own, by getting your domain out there and linked. Presumably Google’s search will not penalise such domains for duplicate content, though that remains to be seen.

I posted previously (27 November 2006 and 12 December 2006) about my efforts to find an open source message board product that was suitable for creating an accessible forum. I’ve finally reached some conclusions, which I’ll summarise here.

The products I checked out are as follows:

1. phpBB
2. PunBB
3. MiniBB
4. bbPress
5. Vanilla
6. Phorum

Evaluation criteria

I was looking for a package that would meet the following requirements:

1. It generates valid HTML or XHTML, or it can easily be configured to do so.
2. The HTML it generates is configurable. (Of course if it passes this requirement, it will generally also pass the previous one, but not vice versa).
3. What is presented on a page can be configured. For example, in a list of forums, the time of the last posting, the number of posts, the title of the last post and so on should all be available for display (or not) as required.
4. New functions and facilities may be added to the board, as far as possible without altering its code. In other words, a plug-in type of architecture is preferred.

Other general quality measures such as maturity, ease of installation, wide acceptance and security were also taken into account.

phpBB

phpBB is the most widely used bulletin board package but - based on previous experience - I eliminated it as unsuitable because extensions to its functionality almost always require code patches. This makes it hard to keep your modifications up with date with new releases.

PunBB

PunBB is simple and lightweight. However, it’s really only configurable through CSS. The HTML it generates, while of a relatively high quality, is not separated from the logic of the code and thus is not suited for any serious degree of customisation.

MiniBB

MiniBB came very close to meeting all the requirements, although the default templates that it comes with are a long way from what I was looking for - meaning a lot of work would be required to develop my own. Also it is not very widely used, relatively speaking. For these reasons I marked it down.

bbPress

bbPress is interesting. As you’d expect since it comes from the same stable as Wordpress, it has a nice user interface and it’s compliant with web standards, but it’s very new and the current version is not ready for serious use yet.

Vanilla

My experience of Vanilla is summarised in a previous post to this journal. In some ways it is very good, but it is let down by some poor design decisions.

Phorum

Phorum is the nearest thing to a perfect solution to the requirements, although as with MiniBB I was at first put off by the quality of the default templates it comes with. Then I discovered the Eugenol template, which is very close to what I was looking for as it consists of (almost) valid HTML with a clear separation between presentation and logic.

The module (functional extension) and template (user interface customisation) architecture of Phorum also makes it practical to extend it without touching the core code. There are some headaches in keeping in line with new releases, especially in the area of multilanguage support (sometimes the symbolic name for a text string changes between releases for no clear reason), but overall Phorum has a very sound approach to configurability.

The winner is … Phorum

For all-round flexibility, maturity and architecture, Phorum comes out as the best open source product to use as the basis for an accessible forum. The next step is to actually carry out the customisations needed to make it truly accessible: this is currently work in progress, with an initial release to be announced soon.