Participating in the 2.0

There’s a new hosted blog solution in town, and it’s creating quite a bit of buzz. It’s called Squarespace, and while they don’t have a free option (they have a free trial, but for any ongoing blog there is a cost), they do have quite a following online. Kevin Rose has his blog hosted there, and Leo Laporte is in the process of moving over to them.

It looks like a really nice option for complex looking sites that are actually easy to build using their software. I’m keeping an eye on this one.

Here’s the video of the presentation that I did on the Future of Blogging in London, UK, back in December of 2008. The audio quality isn’t the best, but it definitely works for getting the gist of what I’m talking about.

Wordpress 2.7, codename Coltrane, is now official. You can download it from the normal places, and below is a video introducing the various new bits. Enjoy!

I’ve been invited to speak at Online Information in London, UK, on the topic of…..drumroll….Library Blogging! I’ve titled my talk “Beyond Blogging: the future of the format” and my goal will be to talk about where blogging is going in general over the next couple of years.

I’ll post the talk up here as soon as I get it done! Still working feverishly.

Wordpress 2.7 is being developed even as I type, and the list of possible additions/changes is long. Lots of great stuff coming from the WP camp.

Wordpress 2.6 was just released…if you’re interested in the details, here’s a video overview:

IMG_4271.JPG, originally uploaded by griffey.

The book really exists! After so long, it’s amazing to finally hold one in my hands. It looks great, and will hopefully be available at bookstores very soon!

More importantly, it should be at ALA Annual 2008! As soon as I find out which booth Linworth Publishing is, I’ll post it up!

EDIT: Linworth Publishing will be at booth #2553 at ALA Annual, with Library Blogging in hand.

One really cool thing about having a book website is that we the authors, can keep readers (and potential readers) up to date on stuff that has changed since the book went to press. It also provides a venue for us to expand on some of the things we DIDN’T cover in the book. After all there are only so many pages of manuscript. In our case, we had lots of types of blogging software to cover so we didn’t got in to extreme detail about any of them.

But this isn’t to say we don’t have experience and knowledge in these areas. In the last year, I’ve been doing a lot of Wordpress work, particularly with WordpressMU. I knew when we started the book this was an area we weren’t going to delve in depth into. But having spent some of my own time learning about this stuff as part of getting WordpressMU running for UH and helping maintain LITA Blog, I’ve learned a lot. So I think this is an area well worth expanding upon. So look for some serious Wordpress tips and tricks from me: Widget, Templates, more on Wordpress as small scale CMS.

I also think we are going to have to do an in depth Wordpress 2.5 update. Jason has posted a little bit about it already but I’m guessing that each of us will have our own opinions and favorite features. So you are likely to hear about our Wordpress 2.5 experiences as soon as we each get it installed on our personal blogs.

For those that use Wordpress, just a note about the upcoming 2.5 release: it rocks on toast. I’ve been using the Release Candidate 1 for WP2.5 for a week or so now, and the improvements in the admin interface are enormous. Better organization, more ajax interaction, just much, much smoother. Every time I’ve gone to do something in the last week I’ve been surprised at the ease.

This isn’t to say that you won’t have to update your plugins, as always…but WP2.5 finally has one-click automagic updating of plugins. This isn’t quite ready for primetime, but it’s very close.

I haven’t dug into the hardcore coding changes yet, but if the things I have noticed are indicative of the things I haven’t yet, I’m really looking forward to this release.

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Here is a tag cloud for Library Blogging, the upcoming book from myself and Karen Coombs…this is the top 100 terms, ignoring common English words. If you’re wondering what the book is about, here’s a good sampling: