A Consuming Experience

Thursday, 23 June 2005

Blogher bloggers' conference: in London?

[Added 13 July:] It's off, but there's another meet you can go to if you're interested in meeting fellow bloggers - see this post.

[Added 5 July:]With very many thanks to Cory Doctorow and Gwendolyn Carpenter of the Stanhope Center, we now have the possible offer of a venue in Central London for Sunday 31 July. Probably late morning/early afternoon. However it's not worth going ahead if not enough people are interested. So if you're a UK blogger and would like to attend, can you please let me know ASAP by posting a comment or emailing me? Ideas for topics are welcome too but I thought if nothing else we could mirror some of the topics to be discussed at Blogher. As with the Blogher conference all would be welcome, female or male, newbies or long-time bloggers.

I posted about this conference before, and a contest (which has now closed) for a free place. The Blogher conference (see http://www.blogher.org/) is happening on Saturday 30 July in California ("specifically cultivating the female blogging community", but open to all bloggers including men and beginners).

Personally I'd love to go but it's too short notice, I only heard about it about a week or two ago, and even if I just went for the weekend and took 2 days off work, to be frank the plane flight will cost too much (700 quid *gulp!*) for just a weekend there - wish they had one several days or a week long, or that I'd had time to combine it with a week's holiday in California afterwards!

There was a suggestion of people meeting up anyway, wherever they were: "Please use this post to link off to your blogs, where you can suggest a time and place for a July 30 BlogHer meet-up near you. Bring on the jpegs and podcasts!"

So if there was a venue available, perhaps we could have a simultaneous(ish) parallel meet up in London? Maybe even with a broadband connection set up so we could watch or listen to some of the live streams, over here? With the time difference (8 hours behind GMT) we can probably only catch the morning sessions live, as their afternoon ones will take us way beyond midnight.

In which case alternatively we could maybe meet on the Sunday 31 July and catch up with the previous day's podcasts etc there, and then perhaps discuss it?

It's a thought… is anyone interested, and if so do you think Saturday 30 July or Sunday 31 July is better? Most importantly, is anyone going to offer a venue or suggest a possible one? (Gotta be London, out of sheer self-interest, I'm entitled to say that as I think I'm the first one to raise the idea of a UK parallel meet - "conference" would be too grand a term for it!)

Technorati Tags: Blogher, Blogher conference, blog, blogs, blogging, bloggers conference, meetup, meeting, bloggers meeting, bloggers conference, London, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience, Consuming Experience

Wear red to win?

Being very behind the times on this, but I noticed some publicity following articles in Nature, National Geographic (which also mentions red conferring a mating advantage for monkeys, from research by Cambridge University primatologist Joanna Setchell) and Livescience about a month ago on research by Russell Hill and Robert Barton of the University of Durham (UK).

They analysed combat events in the last Olympics where contestants were randomly assigned red or blue outfits, and the Euro 2004 soccer tournament. Those wearing red won 55% of the competitions (or 60% where bouts were evenly matched) in the Olympics case, or tended to perform better when wearing red than when they were not, in the case of the soccer. The "red edge" was found to be statistically significant.

Wearing red didn't however help if there was a big difference in skill but gave the edge if the two were otherwise of a similar level.

Possibly this is because "red seems to be the color, across species, that signals male dominance and testosterone levels".

A couple of the articles (including one in the Financial Times) pointed out that some consistently successful English football teams wear red: Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United.

Who knows, but every little thing helps, so it looks like I ought to be changing my wardrobe, at least when I play sport!

Technorati Tags: rules, rules of thumb, heuristics, life, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience, Consuming Experience

Saturday, 18 June 2005

Blogger: deleting the navbar or Blogger button

Bloggers who use Blogger with Blogger's free Blogspot hosting service sometimes wonder whether they can get rid of or hide the Blogger navbar (the horizontal bar at the top of Blogspot-hosted blogs, which starts off as orange though you can change the colour - effectively the Blogger header), or delete the "Powered by Blogger" button from their template.

Well there are ways of "deleting" the navbar, and the Blogger button is easily got rid of just by deleting the code for it in your template - but Blogger don't want us to. (Unless you host your blog elsewhere - if you do, and use ftp to upload your blog posts to another provider, you're fine - Blogger don't mind your deleting the navbar in that situation.)

Their terms of service don't actually spell out that, in return for our being able to publish our blogs to Blogspot for free, we have to retain the navbar and the Blogger button. (In fact their TOS don't even seem to have been changed from the days when Blogspot offered a paid-for premium option, so it seems rather in need of updating).

They do suggest that the navbar should be retained, in their Navbar help page ("Unless you publish your blog via FTP, the Navbar cannot be disabled" (my emphasis)) - but that's an ambiguous "cannot" and could refer to the mechanics, which is initially what they said to me (In fact, they said that if they hadn't provided an option to do something in Blogger, then it mustn't be done. I queried that very narrow view, as you can imagine - there are loads of areas where Blogger haven't provided an option to do something, but that doesn't mean everything they haven't specifically provided an option for is therefore forbidden by their TOS. If such a rigid view was taken, that might mean no hacks were allowed, which surely can't be the case!).

Now if only they'd said "must not be disabled" in the TOS or even help pages, we would all know for sure where we stand. I suppose they could say that not including the navbar and icon would be against the "spirit" of their terms (see item 9 of the terms), but "spirit" is just so vague. [UPDATE: it's good that Blogger have now updated their TOS to remove the "spirit" requirement. Good for them.]

However, that is indeed what Blogger require, so Blogger support told me. Let's hope that their legal team will update their terms to make it very clear what the bare minimum is that Blogger requires of its members. Most of us want to be good citizens and to do what we're supposed to - at the very least it's only fair, when they give us a free publishing tool and free webspace for our posts - but it's not easy to do what they want us to, if they don't spell out exactly what it is they require of us.

Anyway (unless anyone has been told differently by Blogger?), that's the long and short of it, folks: don't delete or hide the navbar or Blogger icon, or you may find Blogger taking down your blog or stopping your hosting on Blogspot. They might not in fact do anything as drastic as that in practice, who knows, and maybe they have better things to do with their time than track down and warn the offending bloggers or worse - but it seems that they're saying they think they have a right to. Best not to risk it, in my view.

[Updated 23 March 2006]: Blogger have now come right out and said very clearly that they consider it a violation of their TOS if you modify the navbar. I think this has to include hiding it altogether too - see my post.

Besides the navbar has its uses - it can be used to search Google's index of your blog (see the Navbar help), without your having to do anything more (assuming your blog has been indexed by Google, of course). And you can change its colour to tie in better with your blog's colour scheme (in your Dashboard go to Template, the Change the Blogger NavBar dropdown menu is above the template box). Plus the button can be changed a little to blue and orange, grey and orange, or silver and - yep, you guessed it - orange!