This time from Search Engine Journal on search engine-friendly URLs and search engine optimisation.

Movie trailers on the web? Big deal. How about an entire film on your mobile phone? According to this article, that’s just what’s happening with “Rok Sako To Rok Lo“, an Indian production which you can also watch on the big screen. Of course this could just be a publicity stunt and they really don’t expect anyone to sit in front of their phone for a couple of hours, but that would be cynical…

While I begin to summarise my own thoughts on what makes a good blog, how to define blogs and so forth, check out this man’s advice, which some useful areas of focus.

And the winner for best awards title goes to… The BOBs!

More prosaically known as the Deutsche Welle International Blog Award 2004, the BOBs (Best Of [the] Blogs) have been announced with a raft of categories and an impressively global array of winners, with Best Blog going to a Chinese site, which had an innovative way of getting around the fact that you can’t talk about human rights in the country, and Best Journalistic Blog: English going to the more famous Lawrence Lessig. Silver prize winner Editor:Myself is a bit more interesting, written by the Iranian-born Hossein Derakhshan about his home country.

PS: For another blog awards check out the rather ugly-looking Weblog 2004 Awards, which includes a rather bizarre vote based on the blogosphere ecosystem.

Or you can check out the Bafta Interactive Awards, with the BBC leading the nominations, according to the, erm, BBC.

Update (9Dec04): Yet another blog award is announced by A Fistful of Euros.

Good to see that Simon Waldman, who runs Guardian Online – one of the few excellent examples of online journalism in Britain – has started a new blog. Consider this the first step of me buttering him up as I seek to enlist his support in my research into the medium…

While blog may be word of the year in some quarters, recent days have seen bloggers described in less than flattering terms: in America, CNET reports NBC news anchor, Tom Brokaw,

“compared blogger criticism of Dan Rather’s “60 Minutes II” report on President Bush’s military service record to a “political jihad.” Brokaw’s designated successor, Brian Williams, also appears less than enamored of the blogosphere. During a recent panel discussion organized by Time Magazine to discuss candidates for Person of the Year, Williams suggested bloggers were “on an equal footing with someone in a bathroom with a modem.”

Meanwhile, in Australia, The Blog Herald reports:

“political gossip site Crikey.com.au has slammed bloggers in an section of its subscriber email of 2 Dec (second edition) with this reference in relation to the proposed Australian Blogging Conference “Four-eyed nerds from everywhere will be converging on Melbourne in February for the 2005 Australian Blogging Conference. Losers, lepers and social misfits who have previously only been able to interact with the world through the safety of their blog spots will come out into the light to meet their brethren face-to-face for the first time. What will happen? Only time will tell.”

Rather helpfully, the report then suggests sharing your thoughts with Crikey editor Stephen Mayne at boss@crikey.com.au

My eyes are stinging from another afternoon spent exploring the world of blogs – this time blog promotion. Thanks to this article in the Search Engine Journal I finally embarked on the epic journey of submitting my blog to a raft of blog search engines: Daypop; Blog Catalog; Feedster; Ice Rocket; Bloogz; Blogstreet; Blogwise; Blog Search Engine; Blogarama; Blog Rankings; Blogexplosion;Weblog Link Directory; WorldGlobe of Blogs, and thanks to the poster who suggested BlogDigger. The process surprisingly was much easier than when it comes to listing on general search engines.

The interesting problem came with Ice Rocket, which refused to list my site because it was not an RSS feed. Now this prompted a visit to the Blogger Help pages on syndication – specifically about getting RSS to work. Are you thrilled? Read on…

Here I learn that Blogger, which does provide an atom feed (this page explains that bit of jargon), requires you to pay to have an RSS feed. To its credit Blogger does point you towards FeedBurner, which allows you to make your feed work in any reader by creating a new page: in my case, this one – although I could have simply used http://veryniceman.blogspot.com/atom.xml. So, now I have an RSS feed page and am listed for all the world to ignore. (Actually, this turned out to be far from the case. In the 24 hours since I did this, the number of people viewing my profile rose from 4 to 16.)

So, I now have even more lovely badges on my site and a whole new collection of blog discussion sites to visit: Blogdiscussion and BloggerTalk being just two. It’s good to talk.

UPDATE (13 June 05): Now also added to Blogdigger and Feedmap.
UPDATE 2 (20 July 05): Now also added to Britblog.

One of the biggest restrictions on web design and online journalism has always been connection speeds of the user – so it’s amazing to read new figures from ACNielsen NetRatings that in the last year broadband has more than doubled in the past year to over 11 million (report in PDF here).

The Guardian quotes ACNielsen’s European internet analyst, Gabrielle Prior, as saying: “Twelve months ago high-speed internet users made up less than one quarter of the audience. Now they are more than 50% and we expect this number to keep growing.”

It goes on to identify broadcasters and record labels as those likely to take advantage of the new opportunities – but it also means more fleixibility for the interactive journalist too.

It took the BBC a day to catch up with a story I read a dozen times on my RSS feeds: that ‘blog’ has been chosen as the top word of 2004 by US dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster. Personally I think ‘cicada’, coming in at no.6, is far more interesting, while ‘chav’ for me still wins the battle in the UK, as defined by the publishers of the Oxford Dictionary.

That’s the upshot of this posting on The Blog Herald regarding Rachelle Waterman, a 16 year old Live Journal blogger of Ketchikan, Alaska, who has been charged with 1st degree murder following the killing of her mother:

“Her last post to her blog (since removed) indicated that her mother had been murdered and the police were about to seize her computer, however she gave no indication of her role in the conspiracy.”

What’s most eerie about this is the fact that you can still access her blog and – it being in diary style – gain an idea of her life, her thoughts, and so on. Delving deeper, you can read her profile, and even access listed friends such as bobtheshoe. Of course there’s a huge ethical issue here of prejudicing the judicial process, but since when has that stopped some journalists?