The mo'Times

Articles of interest about mo'time, the blogosphere, culture and society

More new stuff!

Here are some more improvements that we hope you will enjoy using... We are still tweaking out little bugs; let me know if you find any. (Some of these new bits will be on/off for the next couple of hours or so.)

User profiles: If you're logged in, the title of this paragraph will take you directly to your new profile control panel. We have added some new fields which will allow you to find each other more easily -- by geographic location (temporarily suspended, back soon) you add, however, the easier it will be for your blog to be found or, rather, YOU to be found.

The geographical location fields are pretty much self-explanatory. Interests, however, merit a brief explanation. Think of them as keywords, separated by a space. Do not insert commas. You can enter up to 50 (!) different words that you think will describe your personal or professional interests.

To make it all work, you can now browse through the new profile attributes. After having added location and interest information, all profile pages will have clickable links for both categories. For example, click here. Click on any of the links and you will be on a profile search page, like this one.

Since this is brand new, I'm pretty much the only one who's filled out an extended profile. To the rest of you I say, "GET TO WORK."

New functions: There is a new section, mo'timeNow, that will be the center of whole new set of functions as we continue to update our tools. For now, it is simply a page from which you can download our instant messenging client. Watch this space.

We've also fixed a few bugs and reorganized the interface a teeny bit:

• The "Messages" tab and link has been folded into Community;
• "Subscribers" to ALL your blogs are found in Community->Contacts->Subscribers;
• "Access" settings to your blog are now found in Blogs->Settings->Access.

posted by: howard at 16:43 | link | comments (6) |
updates

Back by popular demand...

 We put the 7-day history back on the home page next to your blogs after hearing from a few of you on the subject. It was missed! In order to squeeze everything in, the navigation links are icon-only, but with a description that pops up when you put your mouse pointer over the icon. Oh and there's a little legend up top.

posted by: howard at 22:13 | link | comments (6) |
updates

Changes, Part II, continued...

From 'Categories' to 'Tags':

Those of you who use categories to organize your posts are probably wondering what happened and, most of all, why. The rest of you are saying, 'huh'?

Tags, as used here, may be thought of as keywords that you apply to your posts, quite similar to categories in that they are both ways to organize posts by subject matter. I'll first explain the theory, than the "how to". Skip down to "Here's how to get started" if you're impatient!

The simplest explanation of the difference between the two is that tags have powerful search and socializing features that categories don't. Yet, at the same time, they allow a  similar navigation function on individual blogs.

There are, however, two limitations with respect to categories. There are technical reasons for these restrictions and we are researching ways around them. For the forseeable future, however, that's the way it is. Tags cannot contain accented characters, special characters such as asterisks or dashes or non-latin characters -- only alphanumeric characters from the latin alphabet. The other drawback is that you cannot easily have a link "description" for the category links on your blog. In other words, when the mouse pointer hovers over the link, you cannot display a customized text title. (There may be a way to do this by hand coding in your template, however.)

On the other hand, the positive elements that convinced us to implement this system are pretty cool and should become more obvious and useful with time.

Principally, there are two enormous advantages. Your tagged posts have a greater chance to be found and read by other people interested in the subject of your tag, and you, as a reader, will be able to more easily find new and interesting blogs to read, organized by subject. Blogs, by their very nature, are often not about only one subject, they are quite hard to categorize by traditional means. Individual posts, however, can often be characterized by one or more commonly used keyword and tags allow you to apply multiple keywords to your individual posts.

Once you start applying tags to your post (it’s VERY easy to do, read on), other people will be able to navigate through the most recent posts on mo’time by tag. And not just by a single keyword, but with several. You click on one word, "photos" for instance, and then you will see a list of all the recent posts that contain that word, PLUS a list of other related keywords, posts that have been tagged not only with "photos" but with other descriptors, "landscape", for instance. Clicking on "landscape", you will then see a list of all posts that have been tagged with both words, PLUS a list of other posts (assuming they exist) that have been tagged with a third term. Go to recent posts and click around to see how it works.

At the start you will notice that most single tags will catalog the posts of a single person. This is because the relatively few people who have been using the categories function have "seeded" the database with their naming conventions.  As you guys use the system, that will change and the tags will be distributed across many different blogs.

Exploring the combinations of tags, you will make some great discoveries of new blogs through surprising combinations of subject areas and will learn how to apply combinations of tags to your posts.

You will find things that you didn't know you were looking for.

Once you get the feel for this, you can start tagging your posts according to your own whims. You will see, however, that the closer you follow the more common tag names created by our community, the more chance you will have of being found by interested readers.

OK, enough theory.

Here’s how to get started. If you’ve already got categories, you’ll have noticed that they have been automatically converted into tags. Spaces may have been changed to" _" for now, but we are still in the de-bugging phase. The underscores will eventually disappear. Special characters will have been changed to unaccented alpha-numeric characters in the latin alphabet. To correct or edit your old category names, simply click the "Edit" link in your post editor, on the right side next to the Tags field.

If you’re just getting started, there’s nothing to it. You will see the Tags field on the right side of your editor. Before you click the Publish button, just write in the tags that you want to apply to the post separated by a space. That's it. Afterwards, they become are automatically added in to a list in your editor. To change a Tag, click the Edit link next to the Tags field.

Guidelines:
- All tags must be at least 4 characters in length.
- Tags ideally should be single words. If you must use more words (as in "rock and roll"), put them in "quotes".
- Use common descriptors (see these examples) rather than funny, ironic or obscure words, if you’d like the tag to be most useful in the community context. If, on the other hand, you want to use them just to navigate the categories on your own blog, be as personal as you like.

Background and further reading:

The concept of tags as a social system is fairly new, but there is already quite a lot published on the subject, considering its recent pedigree.  It is sometimes referred to as "folksonomies"... Want to read more about this stuff?

Wikipedia on Folksonomy
Taxonomies_and_tags
Folksonomies
http://del.icio.us/
Technorati tags

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome. More importantly, I want you to get out there and start using tags!

posted by: howard at 16:13 | link | comments (9) |
updates, tags

Changes, Part II

to be continued tomorrow...but I did want to announce that I have activated the new category system. They are now called tags and I'll tell you all about them very soon.

posted by: howard at 01:51 | link | comments (22) |
updates

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!!

Update Part I:

One of the first things you will notice is that the logged-in Home Page has changed slightly. Apart from the toned down colors of the right column, there are 2 new functions on your blog list: an Edit link and the Blog Center link.

Post and Edit: These functions are no long found on the same page -- editor above, blog preview below. Now each has its own full page and you should find it easier to work in both settings. We englarged the posting area to allow for easier editing and composing of longer posts. There is a preview button to see how it looks on the  blog without actually posting it to the public.

As soon as you click Post and Publish, the page will refresh and you will be transported to the editable preview of your blog in full page view. We think you'll agree that these full page views are easier to work with.

Blog Center: Clicking on this link, you'll find an Easy-Access to common tasks that you can get to without navigating all the tabs and buttons. The links are redundant; you can always get to the commands the old fashioned way, too.

The Profile Page: This section has also been redesigned; it's better organized and contains more useful info, check it out.

Coming soon (tomorrow, in theory): folksonomy tags! HUH? Wait until tomorrow or figure it out yourselves!

posted by: howard at 00:38 | link | comments (26) |
updates

Timeout for an upgrade...

On Wednesday night we will be upgrading the system and mo'time will be unavailable for several hours. See the status blog for details!

posted by: howard at 00:07 | link | comments |