The BBC echoes my sentiments (actually, that’s probably a little self righteous - I’m sure they’d have said that anyway!) on how the web has created a fantastic outlet for both journalists and citizens in passing on the latest news about disasters.

The bombings in London in July, and hurricane Katrina this month have sent all sorts of citizen journalism through the roof. From up-to-the-minute first-hand photographs of the bombings aftermath, to Wikipedia’s constantly-updated Katrina page, the will of everyday individuals to pass on what they know has quickly created a very respectable source of information.

Storm blogs offer Katrina insight [BBC]

Techie blogger Nugget thinks that Google are walking away from a chance to open up instant messaging in the same way as SMTP opened up the world of email by disallowing users of their Google Talk service access to the world’s Jabber servers.

All Google has done is create yet another closed-loop system. They’ve made it just a little bit more of a burden for people to reliably have IM connectivity to all their friends. They’ve made it a little bit harder for people to communicate. They’ve made it a lot harder for the overall state of instant messaging to progress.

His comparisons, or not as the case may be, with the state of email 10 or 15 years ago, make a lot of sense. All I hope is that Google sees sense and incorporates it in the future, perhaps when they take the ‘beta’ seal off of it.

Have a read if you’re interested.

On Google Talk, I apparently talk a lot (cheers to Oishii)

Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1 and injured many in Florida a few days ago, has reached New Orleans on the south coast of the USA.

Coverage is all over the Interweb of the terrifying windstorm - in which gusts of wind have been recorded up to 200mph. Here are some links to keep up with the news:

News sources

Hurricane set to lash New Orleans - BBC News
Reporters’ Log - BBC News
Hurricane Katrina Smashes Gulf Coast - National Geographic
Monster Hurricane Hits - Sky News
Google News search for ‘hurricane Katrina’

Other sources

Flickr Hurricane Katrina - including the amazing photograph of the Louisiana sky on the left.
Deadly Katrina - a hugely in depth specially made weblog detailing events.
Hurricane Katrina - another blogger’s story.

66% of ‘typical’ blog readers don’t know what RSS is, according to a new report published by Nielsen//Netratings today.

Their ‘Understanding the Blogosphere’ survey came to the conclusion that “nearly five percent of blog readers use feed aggregation software and more than six percent use a feed aggregating Web site to monitor RSS feeds from blogs”.

However, exactly half of the thousand asked said they had never heard of RSS before - these are people who “claim to read blogs regularly”, remember. Do they browse blindfolded? Insults aside, with all the techie buzz around RSS at the moment, these figures might well be a bit of a shock.

Contrary to the flavour of most of my posts, I’m surprisingly critical of most new technologies - I don’t like management speak, and I don’t like all the industry buzz about silly little things, but RSS really is a great idea, and most of the newsreaders around are very capable of making the most of it.

Instead of spending hours and hours trawling through sites checking to see what’s new (and although I miss that odd jollity, I wouldn’t read half the amount of interesting stuff as I do now), you can check 10, or 50, or even 100, sites in the same block of time.

You can subscribe to a feed to keep up with the latest BBC news, or you can get a customized search feed to find the latest blog posts about “socks” on Technorati. The blogging world is so huge these days that it’s almost impossible to read every post you’d like to within the hours in a day, so you need to use RSS to get the most out of it.

I hope Microsoft keep going with their ideas of incorporating RSS into the very centre of Vista - whether they patronizingly call them ‘web feeds’ or not - because hopefully then people will realise it’s not just another cheap geek gimmick - and that it’s actually useful.

Neilsen//Netratings (via The Register)
Read the report in full (PDF download)

Tags: RSS, blog

GVisit allow you to track your site visitors on a Google Map, for free. For an example, here is the log for Infinity Plus.

The service only requires you to add one line of Javascript to the head section of your webpage, and it even works on blogging services which allow you to directly edit the template, such as Blogsome.

The free service tracks the last 20 visitors, but a donation of any amount will upgrade you to the last 100. Interesting stuff.

If I followed my own advice, then I’d be a lot more interesting than I am, but hey, what’s wrong with hypocrites? Here’s some tips for beginner bloggers so you can always find something to write about.

Get an RSS reader

Even if you have Firefox, with it’s ‘live bookmarking’, you sometimes need a lot more than 10-15 RSS feeds being monitored, plus Firefox has no update alert capability, to inform you when something’s new.

Some good RSS readers are:

NewzCrawler (free 14-day trial, $24.95 to buy)
FeedDemon (free 14-day trial, $24.95 to buy)
SharpReader (free)
RSS Reader (free)

There are also online versions, which keep your feed preferences remotely and allow you to visit the website (from anywhere, of course, which is a bonus) to check for news whenever you want. These include:

Bloglines
Feedster
NewsIsFree

Subscribe to great feeds

Of course, having a good newsreader is only half the job. You then need RSS feeds which are really going to interest you. Of course, yours will be different to mine, but one of my personal favourites is Boing Boing, which really lives up to it’s “a directory of wonderful things” tagline. Lifehacker also deserves a mention. Try searching on feed search engines like Feedster.

Keep track of links sites

Websites that track the current climate of the web are very useful. Sites such as Del.icio.us, while letting you keep track of your own web bookmarks, also let you view popular links from others. Their own Popular page, along with services such as Oishii, come with their own RSS feeds, allowing you to keep track of popular pages people are bookmarking right now.

Often new services, news and interesting blog posts will be bookmarked by hundreds of people, keeping you up to date with what other people are interested in. This is obviously very important to keeping your blog posts time-relevent and interesting.

That’s all I can think of right now, but if anyone has any more tips, do comment on this article and I’ll add them.

R Todd King is currently blogging about his experiences at the sixth annual Ice & Snow World event in Harbin, China. Some of the pictures he has been taking are quite incredible, and I urge you to take a look if you have a free moment.

Ice & Snow World 2005 [via BoingBoing]