January 22, 2003

Weblog and/or aggregator growth and usage stats?

Alright, it's time to invoke the Lazy Web again...

If you watned to gather some statistics about the usage and growth of blogging and aggregators, where would you get 'em? I'm talking about the kind of numbers that make a slightly pointy haired boss think twice about ignoring the blog world.

I'd be grateful to anyone who has seen some hard or even semi-hard numbers that might be useful.

Posted by jzawodn at 09:18 PM

MySQL and Ruby

Paul DuBois, the author of several MySQL books, has a couple articles up on his web site that will prove helpful to anyone looking to get started with MySQL and Ruby programming. First is Using the Ruby MySQL Module (PDF) and second is Using the Ruby DBI Module (PDF).

Good stuff.

Posted by jzawodn at 06:07 PM

Weblogs vs. Centralized Message Boards

I was recently involved in a discussion at work about blogs and message boards. I argued that blogs would likely replace message boards (such as those hosted by Yahoo) to a large degree in the not-too-distant future. I'm not referring to e-mail based services like Yahoo! Groups (formerly eGroups), but more tradtional message boards.

Someone asked me how that would happen.

This was my response.

How is difficult to say. But given the amount and pace of innovation in various cross-blog threading systems (summarized on Ben Hammersley's blog: http://www.benhammersley.com/archives/003862.html) I'm convinced that it will happen
And when you compare the average quality of the discourse on moderately trafficked blogs with that of a random Y! message board, it's hard to argue with blogs winning in the short term.
I still see a future for large centralized message boards, but realistically the more sticky, in-depth, hardcore stuff will probably continue to reside in specialized forums and a growing number of weblogs.
This is going to be a very big year for blog growth.

What do you think? Am I on crack?

Update: One of my co-workers has posted his views on the topic. I see where jr's coming from but don't entriely agree. In my view, the current state of blogging isn't all that different from home pages back in 1997 or maybe 1998. As the technology improves (it will) and people realize what the benefits really are, we'll see blogging evolve in several directions. I happen to think this is one of them.

I'd say more, but I'm tired and still have lots to do... like getting that presentation ready for tomorrow.

Posted by jzawodn at 05:51 PM

PC Mag Safari Comments

In their Safari review, PC Magazine says:

Most Mac fans have been surfing with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x, and the Mac browser market has been in a rut. In addition, IE, although well-designed, is notoriously slow in rendering pages.

Are they smoking something? According to my referer logs IE isn't terribly popular on the Mac. A lot more folks are using Chimera or Mozilla. And what is this "rut" they're referring to? Chimera, IE, Mozilla, iCab, Opera, OmniWeb, and now Safari are all available for the Mac.

Posted by jzawodn at 04:17 PM