UPDATE: After a few back and forth emails with Ryan Boren from WPvia the above mailing-list, fixes were made and uploads now work again.To get the current 2.0 working, please apply the following changes to wp-includes/functions-post.php:

Replace line 897:

$new_file = $uploads['path'] . "/$filename";

with:

$new_file = $upload['path'] . "/$filename";

Yes, that's one single 's' you have to remove...

Replace line 912:

return array('file' => $new_file, 'url' => $url);

with

return array('file' => $new_file, 'url' => $url, 'error' => false);

However... with these fixes in place, you cannot specify destinationdirectories anymore. In ecto, if you reveal the attachment settingssheet, you must leave the “Destination:” field blank. Ifyou prefer to specify your own upload sub-directories, use the xmlrpc.php file from an earlier 2.0 beta version, which I kept around.

Now ... this is a temporary fix.  I hope that the WP folks will get back to all of us in the offline editor space soon with a game plan.  Regardless ... kudos to Ecto and thanks for the tip.

Technorati Tags : Wordpress, Wordpress+2.0, Qumana, Ecto

Ads are a permanent and expected part of our daily lives .. and as often as not, we like them ... so says Seth Godin.

But the promos--they were constant (five or ten an hour) and constantly changing. MTV created an entire gestalt (it even became the inspiration for a pop hit and a video compilation). It turns out that we liked the ads.

Try reading a copy of Vogue without the ads. Totally useless.

And at a trade show (which people invest huge amounts of time and money to attend), the only reason to go is to see the ads, the banners, the paid-for booths and self-promotional speakers.

Public radio is no longer a bastion of silence. Every station is filled with self-promos, often twenty an hour, along with interruptions from sponsors and of course, pledge week. And the bumpers and audio cues that the stations use become part of our experience. We miss them when they're gone.

And then he turns his attention to blogs ...

All as a way of introducing you to my dilemma about blogs.

In email, no one, at least no one I respect or believe, enjoys getting spam. Ads in email don't work because email is a tool, not a medium. If I subscribe to a permission-based email campaign (like those notes from Amazon or a gift certificate on my birthday from Yahoo) then I look forward to it and respond. But ads in the sense of unanticipated, impersonal and irrelevant... not on my agenda, or yours, when it comes to email, or RSS for that matter.

But the blog experience is different. Maybe.

He wonders about promoting .. things, services, events .. and promoting oneself, and makes the point (which I think is accurate) that

1. we have grown used to this surround-sense environment

2. we *ignore* most, of not all, advertising UNTIL it strikes a chord with us, for whatever reason.


Looking at and thinking about (and using) an advertisement is NOT the same as thinking about something and going on a deliberate search for it .. and most of our minds don't work in the same way after thirty or more years of the increasing presence of advertising.

The reasons we *use* advertising are very diverse, and not necessarily linear or causative. They form part of our constant background, and come to the foreground when we realize that we want or need something, or have a further interest in knowing more.

So .. Seth goes on to set up an argument in which he suggests that bloggers are learning to use this new medium (blogging) in different ways .. sometimes expressing points of view or publishing analyses to generate interest and conversation, and sometimes working diligently to promote products or services or events, and sometimes some of one and some of the other.

The post below this riff is about my new seminar, given next month. The writer part of me wants to believe that my alert, quickwitted readers only need to see it once, and that they're mature enough to make a decision about whether they want to come or not. Of course, I'm completely wrong. I mean you are in that esteemed category, but most people are not. Most people need to see that link three or four times a day, several times a week, and then they'll take action. And they'll be glad they did.

I regularly (as in every day) get email from people who bought this book or that book or even this book and are surprised that they didn't know about it and are glad they discovered it. Does that mean that it's my job to advertise them incessantly, regularly reminding people that they exist?

Imagining for just a moment that there's no self-interest, no profit motive, imagining that the blogger is doing what is in the best interest of the readership--what's the right balance? Is it one ad per page? 25? Is it no promotional links to new projects (from you or from those you respect) or is one the right number?

Underneath that point, I think he is suggesting that pointing readers to something once and thinking that is sufficient isn't really the way *attention* works these days ... that it is pertinent to work at understanding the dynamics of ongoing flows of information, and to consider readers' interests while at the same time offering them focal points *advertisements) that may interest them when THEIR attention may come into alignment with the subject matter of the advertisement.

This attention is often indirect but contextual .. which is why, I suspect, Google ads work well .. off on the sidebar, stacked in twos or threes or fours. Equally, ads pulled and placed using the combination of Qumana and Adgenta offer the publisher some choice and control over how he or she wishes to address readers' attention.

Set finishes off his thoughtful exploration by noting:

When Katrina hit, blogs broke all their rules about promotion. It was understood by readers and by bloggers that the cause was good enough that people really needed to be pushed. Do you need to be pushed?

Magazines run ads.
Books don't.

What are blogs?

My take on it ? Sometimes blog posts are like mini-chapters in a book, or if a blog is dedicated to serious analyses, like a string of mini-chapters - or maybe like a professional journal in a given domain (which, incidentally, carry domain-specific and domain-related advertising) .... and sometimes blogs are like magazines (on any and all subjects under the sun) wherein an individual pulls together what she or he is interested in and feels like sharing.

And while books don't carry ads (except on the back pages, sometimes), books are often heavily marketed and equally as often are an advertisement themselves, for the author's expertise, point of view or ego. And books support or enable an awful lot of related contextual advertising.

Contextual advertising online can only grow and get more refined with respect to enabling connections between readers' interests, attention and their behaviours regarding the *use* of that advertising.

AdGenta is the "pull-and-place" advertising service that allows bloggers to choose the advertisements that they want to use ... using keywords to pull an advertisement that may be pertinent. Don't like the one that you've pulled ? Delete it, and try again or use another similar keyword.

Tthe main issue today is the depth and breadth of advertising inventory, which will improve as we develop more complete relationships with advertising suppliers, AND as advertisers grow into recognizing the oportunities to provide useful and relevant advertising to the millions of niche *attention* markets in the blogosphere.


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It is now official. Today, he has launched a new company, called Automattic, a bootsrapped operation (no, the company is not looking for venture capital) founded by a handful of folks (with a heavy Texas contingent) to manage WordPress, WordPress.com and Akismet (a service to help block blog spam). For now, Matt is working out of his San Francisco apartment. SiliconBeat

One of the things we have to deal with at Qumana and AdGenta is the age old advertiser question ... how many impressions are you getting?  Now, while granted this is important, it isn't the whole story.  One of the hallmarks of blogs are their ability to attract an audience of like-minded people.  People who might be small in number, but have large influence.

Good thing I'm not the only one saying this ...

"When advertising, don't be concerned with the lack of traffic. If you reach your target audience a few hundred visitors to the blog may be great for you to advertise on," said Bill Flitter, Vice President, Marketing for Pheedo. Source

Tags: rss, online advertising

Dave Pollard, who is the ex-CKO of Ernst & Young (Americas) and Canada's top blogger, writes fairly often, very prolifically and with authority on Personal Knowledge Management.

He also has written some seminal posts on blogging ... why to blog, how to blog, and what makes for interesting blogging. In fact, his thoughts on the last point are permanently displayed on the right-hand sidebar of his blog How To Save The world.

Today Dave has written a good essay on the future of blogging:


It's been awhile since I forecast the future of blogs. I am increasingly convinced that what will drive almost all technologies for the foreseeable future is simplicity, disguising under-the-hood sophistication, enabled by elegant design.

The digital divide is getting ever-wider, and we need to have tools that will let us more easily pull friends, colleagues and family members who are quickly being left behind, into the information age. As I've mentioned before, my father is my benchmark for technology -- I can get him to use e-mail (though attachments are a challenge), and Skype, and even to view our daughter's wedding pictures on Flickr, but not to get a webcam or to participate in online forums. That's the dividing line that will, I believe, largely determine the future success of technologies, including blogs.

What is the simplest way to allow people to 'publish' and otherwise share their stuff with others? Drop it in an electronic 'mailbox'.

Bandwidth and storage are now both so cheap that we will soon not care about 'mailing costs' or 'storage costs' for information, photos, software, or anything else that can be represented in bits.


Dave goes on to talk about a shareable folder that sits on your hard drive into which one can drop what they want to share.

Hmmm .. first, Qumana's current capabilities have evolved from a previous technology .. ThoughtShare ... that did pretty much exactly that .. or could have with a few relatively simple tweaks.

Second ... the current version of Qumana does offer (imo) *simplicity, disguising under-the-hood sophistication, enabled by elegant design* .. although it's probably pompous to claim *elegant design* and readers and / or users of Qumana can form their own opinions about that.

And third, picking up on Dave's question re: *What is the simplest way to allow people to 'publish' and otherwise share their stuff with others ? Drop it into an electroinic mailbox.*

Well, that's pretty much what you do with Qumana .. except that the sharing happens by publsihing to a blog, or publishing to email, rather than dropping it into an shareable folder on your hard drive.

At the present time, we do believe that using Qumana is *simply the easiest way to publish*. Why don't you try it out ?

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Dave, your a good guy.  I really likereading your stuff.  Really.  Okay and this piece on Kryptonite made methink and did clarify some of the myths surrounding thewhole saga, but ...

First here's the intro ...

I recently chatted with Donna Tocci, Public Relations Manager for Kryptonite, a company well-known in blogging annals for some damaging information that was disseminated through weblogs back in the early days of blogging, 2004. She kindly consented to answer a number of my questions, some of which will serve to acquaint you with the situation, while others offer great insight into how to address damaging information in the blogosphere.

I'll admit up front that my bias is that the adverse effect of the blogosphere on corporations is much overblown, and as you'll see as you read this Q&A, Donna thinks so too. That's not to say that blogs and bloggers aren't an influential voice in the marketplace, but just to help clarify that there are still definite limits to its influence and it's well to keep that in mind as you craft your next marketing plan or public relations budget. [Link]

The latest addition to Yahoo's Web 2.0 arsenal is del.icio.us, a "social bookmarking" site that zoomed to popularity over the past year or so thanks to the sharing of bookmarks via RSS feeds and other methods. Although some observers of the deal (including Canadian-born columnist and venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky on his blog Infectious Greed) have expressed skepticism about the benefit of acquiring a small company that has no obvious business model, and is based on technology that is freely available to other social bookmarking sites (which include Digg.com and Reddit.com), others say the purchase was worth it -- if only to show that Yahoo is committed to the new "social" Web 2.0.

All guest bloggers will be allowed to link to their blog/website on each and every post made, here. Guest bloggers are allowed to post on any subject, although individuals who are posting on the same general subjects as this blog will be considered, first. As an added incentive, guest bloggers will be able to place Adgenta (Qumana), Amazon Associates, CJ, and Zoundry affiliate ads/links within their posts, using their own IDs.

A while ago I was approached to be interviewed for an online publication for High School students planning careers.  Thanks to Jim for letting me know that the article has come out.  I'm blogging about this not only because there is really good advice in there, but also that Qumana's own Arieanna Foley is featured in the article as well.  So, can problogging be a career?  Time will tell.  Will the skills required for professional blogging be required in the business world of the present and future?  Certainly.  This is how I put it:

Hussey describes blogging skill this way: "Okay, the bottom line is that you have to able to read a lot, quickly, follow memes [units of cultural information] and threads of patterns, condense them (I call it gisting -- from the novel Digital Fortress) and write them. Writing is key."

Bottom line for students.  That's right here ...

Advice for Students

At this moment, it is impossible to say whether there is or will be a career as a professional blogger.

"A high school student should go to college, study what he or she wants to study, learn to write very well, learn computers and then see what happens," advises Halvorson.

"I think you'll see blogging evolve as a career to some degree," says Chaney, "though I'd be reluctant to say it's something a high school student ought to set their sights on per se. However, I do think that having experience in blogging is an asset and something that students should be involving themselves with."

How do you get this blogging experience? By blogging, reading blogs and working with blogging software. Start your own blog; you don't have to make it public. Then pitch an idea to a blog network and see what paid blogging is like.

"Some topics are really easy for high school students to get into -- fashion, studying, clubbing, nightlife, celebrities," says Foley. "Lots of blog networks would be open to pitches in these areas."

As for a career in blogging, the best advice for now is to follow a career path that's a little more clear-cut, and develop some expertise in subjects you're passionate about. In the meantime, hone your blogging skills and keep looking for those "ins" that could lead you down the pro-blogger path. Complete article

Some of the feedback we get from some users is that we are (perhaps) too focused on the potential benefits of inserting relevant advertising (relevance to improve as access to inventory grows) as opposed to the end-user experience.

It's true that we are paying attention to, and working on providing effective functionality to those DIY publishers who want to work on making attention-driven advertising work for them

It's also true that we are deeply involved in paying attention to, and working on. providing a very easy to use blogging application that enables users to connect their thoughts with *gestures* in order to increase the effectiveness of the personal workflow.

I use the word *gestures* for a couple of reasons .. Steve Gillmor has recently been talking about what he calls the Gesture Economy, by which it can be inferred that reading, think, writing and publishing on the Live Web involves *gestures* ... how you personally interact with the mouse, the keyboard, the screen, etc ... what you pay attention to, how much time it takes, and what the results of your gestures are as you complete a sequence or reading, talking, thinking, writing, linking and then publishing. Then, you browse along to the next set of gestures (browsing itself being a subset of gestures).


The Gesture Economy's power derives from its obedience to the time constraints of the user-in-charge. The key to understanding the inevitability of this transformation is the profound effect the gesture dynamic has on the content that it refers to. Where current information is created in a broadcast, attention-seeking environment, Gesture-triggered data is generated as a result of multiple preferred contracts with users.

It's the opposite of invasion of privacy, the invitation of privacy. A request for proposal, complete with cues as to how to prioritize the inflow of information to deliver the most time-efficient transfer.


Qumana's *DNA* ( a perhaps over-used term) comes from a gesture-based application developed from 5 or 6 years of cognitive science research into how computer users instantiate thoughts, as a first step in creating a chain of thoughts which leads to the organization of microcontent into a coherent larger *thought*, which for our purposes we will call a blog post.

One of the key reasons we designed the Qumana blog editor with the drag-and-drop functionality of the DropPad was to honor the fundamental cognitive science of instantiating thoughts through the drag-and-drop gesture.

It basically doesn't get any quicker or easier than that, when you spy something you're reading r looking at that you then want to comment on or build a blog post around.

Exceot for ... when you are reading along, have a thought, and want to do something with that thought.

Well, all you need to do then is double-click on the DropPad and then start writing. It takes less than a second, and you're into the process of creating a blog post.

Let's extend this utility even a bit further.

I believe that I am noticing a movement towards, or a coalescing around, the point of view that IM combined with buddylists will become a center of many DIY publishers social interaction on the Live Web. Stowe Boyd says as much in a recent post titled "The Buddylist Is The Center Of The Universe 2.0 - A Call For Interoperability".


My prediction: instant messaging will become the domininant metaphor for Universe 2.0 -- which subsumes Web 2.0, by the way, but reaches out past the Web to include every connected communication device, like cell phones, entertainment systems, games consoles, and the connected refrigerators and cars of tomorrow -- and email will become a footprint on the path of this communications evolution.


Well, we've been wondering for a while whether or how to have Qumana *interoperate* more effectively with the ecosystem of applications that let users gesture to start the next round of communications .. extending *conversations* into blog posts, emails, documents, etc.

That said, the fact remains that designing Qumana to sit transparently (and we hope unobtrusively - you can read through it) ) on your screen whilst you browse, IM, talk on Skype or other VoIP applications, etc., has made it pretty *interoperable*, so to speak.

And then, anytime you want to, just double-click to start writing and linking, or drag-and-drop some piece of microcontent onto the DropPad and get going.

Have a thought ? Make a gesture, and then write up your thoughts and publish. It's that easy. Extend your thinking, and the ways you use your browser, through the simple gestures that Qumana enables.

And , of course we are seeking and listening to feedback from users as to how to do this even better, in more flexible and versatile ways. We'll be honored if you help us, by giving it a good test-drive and telling it how it can be made even better.

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The "tipping point" for offline ad dollars moving online may be here in the second half of 2006, according to a report by Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy.

The speed of online advertising's growth, its benefits to offline campaigns, and recent online ad spending increases from major marketers all seem to be converging, according to Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray.

"We believe online media now receives about 5 percent of total marketing spending, up from 3 percent two years ago. However, online is on its way to a 10 percent share much faster then we anticipated, and we believe we are now approaching an inflection point when spending growth could accelerate," Rashtchy wrote in a newly-released report. "This point is likely to be in the second half of 2006, as the full impact of some of the recent allocation increases from major marketers becomes evident and creates a momentum that will attract more spending by advertisers who are on the sidelines now."

Rashtchy's "conservative" estimate is that online advertising will exceed $55 billion globally by 2010, a 27 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over 2005. He points to large advertisers like Absolut Vodka, GM and Ford, all of which plan to spend 20 percent of their marketing budgets online next year, he said.

"These allocations are now creating a new momentum in the online advertising space which we believe will be most evident in the first half of 2006, creating the background for the inflection point in the second half of 2006," Rashtchy said in the report. Source: ClickZ

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A new report - 'The Changing Face of Advertising in the Digital Age' - claims spending on Internet ads will account for 10 per cent of all US ad dollars in 2010, from 5 per cent in 2004.

It also claims that almost 21 per cent of surfers consider Internet advertising as the most relevant ad format for them, outscoring more traditional media formats such as newspapers, magazines, and radio. Source MacWorld UK

Using interactive to facilitate the move from desire to buying or to help consumers get the best price at the point of purchase is what the Web is really good for. Interactive can grease the skids, but someone must be on the skids to begin with, something traditional advertising is particularly good at. By going too far either way -- rejecting interactive out of fear or rejecting traditional advertising for being too old fashioned -- we risk not utilizing each medium for what it's best at. Prada probably shouldn't stop advertising in "Vanity Fair," but it'd better make it a lot easier for someone to find its bags via Google. Source: ClickZ

"This is going to be our recommended (sales) channel for small business," he said [Anil Dash].

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo said it will offer commercial blogs based on Movable Type as part of its existing small business Web-site management service.

Yahoo provides customers with a unique Web address, blogging tools and business-class e-mail services with spam and virus protections for less than $12 a month.

Movable Type is commonly used by businesses, Web designers and professional bloggers to create easily updated Web sites. Other blog software such as Google Inc.'s Blogger, WordPress, Xanga and Six Apart's own Live Journal, are more often used to create blogs for individuals.

Yahoo hosts roughly 30 million individual Web sites, including hundreds of thousands of small business sites, said Rich Riley, general manager of Yahoo's small business unit. One in eight U.S. online stores are hosted by Yahoo, he said.