"True technology blogs"

16 Apr 2007

Tags: , , ,

Oh dear, I'm "blogging about blogging" again.  I apologise in advance.  And although I know it's silly to talk about "true blogs", I'm going to do it anyway.  More apologies. 

The "technology" section of Amatomu (maybe I should suggest mod_rewrite to them for prettier URLs...) is starting to get a bit crowded.  If it isn't gadgets, it's games.  Both of which I think should be considered "lifestyle" more than "technology".  Sure, there's the occasional useful bit of technical information about the gadgets or games (or their platforms), but the primary point of interest on those sites is the gadget or game, which while made from technology, is mostly about the experience of owning it or playing it.

Similarly, online advertising and online marketing are not "technology".  It's "internet-related", perhaps, but it's not about technology.  Explaining how the Google PageRank algorithm works is technology.  A set of tips on how to abuse this algorithm for short-term gains and fleecing people until they get more sophisticated (also known as "SEO") is not technology.

And then there's a wonderful post (gah, I'm going to improve their Amatomu rank, even though I'm using rel="nofollow") on "SeachEnginePower" on "SEO" that doesn't even tell you _how_ to do something - it just tells you that they offer a service.  Thanks for news on that massive technical innovation, guys!  You're so "technological"!

5 old-style comments

  1. salvo — April 16, 2007 at 12:09 PM.

    I agree with your re-naming idea, those things are definitely lifestyle items, rather than technology items.

  2. Bryn — April 16, 2007 at 02:37 PM.

    Amatomu's categories are a bit problematic - I'm in technology as well, even my posts tend to ramble on about a bunch of other things too. But I'm definitely not Sport or Entertainment or Business. I feel the categories are too strict, I guess; I'd prefer a multi-category/tag-based system.

  3. Vincent Maher — April 16, 2007 at 04:53 PM.

    Guys we thought about all of this and that's why it says "roughly in..." obviously one category can never apply to an entire blog but we'd be happy if you could come up with some realistic suggestions for this. We thought about letting users tags their content but the vast majority won't be bothered, which means we can't make it applicable across the board. Email me if you have any ideas.

  4. Neil Blakey-Milner — April 16, 2007 at 05:55 PM.

    Vincent, I'm with you on the "generally about this topic" thing. It's actually little to do with Amatomu's features - I'm more talking to the people who are self-categorising themselves as "Technology", suggesting they rather self-categorise themselves as something else.

    The games people can use "Entertainment". The online marketers can use "Media and Marketing". The gadgets people can use "Life" (is that meant to be lifestyle, or some deep philosophical stuff?)

  5. SearchEnginePOWER Team — May 10, 2007 at 10:58 PM.

    Dear Bloggers. We see that our site was mentioned in your post above. We do apologise for the entry that appeared to be too much marketing than technology. With your input we have now learnt to put the blog to better use. We hope in future you find our blog on SEO a little bit more informative! Please feel free to contact us in future as the best kind of feeback is public feedback. Regards
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Hi, I'm Neil Blakey-Milner, a technology generalist most interested by open source, security, and building scalable systems (especially if I get to use the Python programming language).

I "work" at the incredibly fun web-sites-for-everyone startup SynthaSite based in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa.

What I do

  • StarCamp

    I was the main instigator behind this 2-day unconference in December 2007 in Cape Town. There'll be another one in Cape Town around July.

  • GeekDinner

    I help out in making these geek social events happen every two months in Cape Town since March 2007.

  • SynthaSite

    I make sure that the systems run smoothly at this Cape Town-born Web 2.0 startup.

  • Presentations

    I speak publically on a number of topics - generally related to technical aspects of open source software or on software development.

  • Code

    I've written a few software projects of my own over the years (although mostly I'm the only user of them).

  • Photos

    I'm far from an artist, but I enjoy capturing my experiences on camera.

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