Gonzo poker bloggers bring World Series to life in real time

July 19, 2005 by

12:56am… Jesus has been lurking around press row. He’s doing play by play with Hellmuth now. — Dr. Pauly, Tao of Poker blog update on World Series of Poker

Strange things are happening again in Las Vegas, and “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” That Hunter S. Thompson quote couldn’t be more apt in the world of professional poker, a backwater outlaw pursuit that’s risen to the level of hipster cool thanks to TV shows, glossy magazines and the glitzy World Series of Poker that has crowned two unknown online-qualifier champions in the past three years.

Stranger still is the rise of live Internet coverage and blogs on poker, started only as game logs for hobbyist players that turned into gonzo commentary on the surreal scenes where guards with shotguns stood beside obscene stacks of cash.

In some ways, the geeky world of blogs and the math geeks of poker were fated to collide, and you just can’t sit through hundreds of hours of unedited live TV coverage of tournament poker and stay awake. Blogs offer the chance for people to check in throughout the tournament, keep up on chip counts and see who’s dropped out and moved on up.

But still, one pioneering poker blogger who goes by the nom de blog Iggy, could barely believe that I was interviewing him for a story about poker blogs. “The fact that someone would want to interview me is really insane,” Iggy told me. “I’m shocked about the popularity of the whole thing. The whole scene came together in such a way that was so organic you couldn’t recreate it if you tried.”

Iggy is an old master, having written rambling posts at Guinness and Poker blog, for almost two years. He has been known as the Blogfather of the scene, a la InstaPundit, for helping mentor other poker bloggers and spending a lot of time linking to new blogs and other online content. But rather than the pithy one-liner posts Glenn Reynolds often employs, Iggy rolls his rants and links into what he calls uber-posts.

“Both poker and blogging are solitary pursuits, but they both have communities, message boards, newsgroups,” Iggy said. “The poker community leans on each other for different things. It’s kind of a blending of those two solitary pursuits. They work together very well. I would guesstimate there are 300 to 400 poker blogs and probably more. Two years ago, there were only a handful.”

Though the poker bloggers are a diverse group, their No. 1 profession is computer programming. Just as the early bloggers were focused on technology, the early poker blogs came from the world of information technology. And poker requires a lot of skill with statistics and math to keep up with the odds of each situation in a rapidly moving environment. Not surprisingly, one of the big crossovers in poker is Wil Wheaton, an actor who had been on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and a prolific blogger.

Perhaps the biggest driver for poker blogs was the advice given in many poker books for players to keep a journal of their play. Weblogs were the perfect way to share stories of conquest and defeat, while allowing budding players to pool their knowledge. Now, the growing poker blogging community has met for two private tournaments dubbed the World Blogger Poker Tour, and even did an online memorial tournament for player Charlie Tuttle, who died of cancer in June.

Dr. Pauly and the Poker Prof

Meanwhile, at the 2005 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, which wrapped up last week, the blogging star was Paul “Dr. Pauly” McGuire, a struggling screenwriter and novelist who became a poker fanatic. He started writing about his poker proclivities on his regular blog, The Tao of Pauly, until it angered his friends who were tired of reading about poker. Thus, the Tao of Poker blog was born, where McGuire gained enough fame to start freelancing for FoxSports.com and Poker Player Newspaper. He’s also done commentary for the Lord Admiral Card Club weekly podcast.

The Tao of Poker is now McGuire’s perfect writing notebook, written as a stream of consciousness about everything he experiences — from Subway workers he hits on to poker stars he urinates next to.

“The best part of the World Series of Poker was that I was doing a lot of live blogging,” McGuire told me. “It was a notebook for all my other articles I wrote. The blog entries were an invaluable source of notes for me. So whatever I wrote in my blog, I could fix it up for short stories, for novel ideas. It’s been a good tool, and it gets me out there every day. [Editors] can stop by my blog and see writing samples.”

While the ESPN commentators and other journalists on the scene stuck with the tried-and-true interviews with players as they exited the final table of play, McGuire was using johnny-on-the-spot tactics to get relaxed banter from the stars. Part of his epic post from the final day (and night and day) of coverage from the World Series, included this nugget:

Last 3 Pros I Took a Piss Next to:
1. Greg Raymer
2. Phil Hellmuth
3. Mike Matusow

Hellmuth: Hang in there Mike. You have chips. Plenty of chips. You got over $2M. Just play smart.

Mike: I told myself I wasn’t going to play any big pots today early. And I played three. Fuck.

Hellmuth: Tough spot in there. It’s hard to lay down Kings preflop like that.

Mike: The guy next to me said he folded two hearts too. Can’t believe it. I flopped a set too. Fuck.

And yes, Mike didn’t wash his hands as he left.

McGuire’s partner in crime is Joseph “Poker Prof” Smith, who birthed the LasVegasVegas.com site with his retired father, a 40-year poker veteran who snapped photos at the event and blogs under the name flipchipro.

As the No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em Championship, a.k.a. the Main Event, was winding down on Thursday and Friday at Binion’s Horseshoe, McGuire was pounding out minute-by-minute accounts in a dark corner of the room, while Smith was in his techno-bunker in an undisclosed location in the Nevada desert making sure the operation was running smoothly. Smith is a former programmer who traded in Linux security work to try to become an online poker magnate.

“I’m the server administrator [of LasVegasVegas.com], I’m the programmer, I’m the editor,” Smith said. “And when you suddenly have 100,000-plus page views coming in, in 24 hours or less, that shared account you got for 9 bucks a month isn’t looking so good.”

McGuire estimates his blog got over 1 million hits in the last two weeks of the tournament, largely driven by people refreshing their browsers to see if there were updates. Smith says his site and McGuire’s each averaged about 100,000 hits per day or about 40,000 unique visitors per day during the peak of the tourney.

Selling out or buying in?

While McGuire and Smith have been able to support themselves with their various sites and blogs, they’re not sure how sustainable it will be in the long run. Online poker rooms are illegal to run in the U.S. and questionably legal to play from the U.S. Those services such as Party Poker and Noble Poker will pay bloggers in an affiliate deal; if the blogger signs up one of their readers for the service, they get a cut of the action. Poker blogger Bill Rini used his math skill to figure out that these deals wouldn’t bring much money to bloggers.

Iggy has played both sides of the affiliate program, making a big joke of his affiliate tag, “Code Word: IGGY,” while also running a slew of affiliate banner ads and even changing his blog title to “Party Poker Blog.”

“I think it’s part of the game,” Iggy told me. “I personally would never recommend a poker site that I don’t play at personally. I make it clear on my site that I love Party Poker, because there’s no other site that has a table selection, there’s no other site with 70,000 players. My shilling is just white hot noise behind the content. That’s where the uber-posts came from, from guilt for the shilling — I felt like I had to overcompensate for shilling with more content.”

Despite the paltry payday from affiliate deals, there have been other opportunities to cash out, so to speak. Brad “Otis” Willis got a full-time gig as the official blogger for PokerStars, one of the online poker services. Willis is a former TV news reporter for the NBC affiliate in Greenville, S.C., and started blogging with a friend a couple years ago at Up For Poker.

“When I joined PokerStars … I quickly discovered that people like to read about big-time poker tournaments as they happen,” Willis told me via e-mail. “They don’t want to wait until they can see them on TV. When I live-blogged a WPT [World Poker Tour] event earlier this year, thousands of people logged on every day, every hour, and sometimes refreshed every minute to check in on the action. This year at the WSOP, people were coming to the PokerStars blog up to 100,000 times a day.”

Smith, a.k.a. Poker Prof, says he doesn’t take affiliate deals and knocks the corporate blogs at sites such as CardPlayer.com (an adjunct to the granddaddy of poker mags) for not having any outbound links.

“The only traffic that those pseudo-blogs enjoy is from their parent site,” Smith said. “I believe that’s a tell-tale sign when you’re depending on your parent site to succeed.”

Willis has mixed feelings about doing a more corporate blog alongside his personal poker blog. He declined to get into a public scrape with Smith, a friend of his, but took a more balanced view of more commercial blogging efforts.

“Corporate blogging is like commercial radio to traditional blogging’s pirate radio philosophy,” Willis told me via e-mail. “I appreciate and participate in both. I can understand why old school bloggers would feel like their medium is being co-opted by corporate bloggers. To them (and me to some degree), it must be like being the first guy to have a barbed wire bicep tattoo, only to see it marketed to the masses.”

[Post Script: Chris “Jesus” Ferguson was the person Dr. Pauly referred to in the opening quote. Jesus won the main event in the World Series of Poker in 2000. Hallelujah.]

* * * * *
Poker Blogger Profiles

A deeper look at the characters who inhabit the poker blogosphere:

Paul “Dr. Pauly” McGuire
http://taopoker.blogspot.com

Age: 32

Locale: Lives in New York City; now stationed in Las Vegas for various tournaments.

In a Previous Life: Was a stock broker on Wall Street, screenwriter in Hollywood and fine-arts painter in New York.

Dreams: To live-blog the Oscars and the Cannes Film Festival, and to write novels and screenplays full time.

Strangely Enough: He writes books under the pen name Tenzin McGrupp, and runs a blogzine called Truckin’.

On the rise of poker: “When I told a girlfriend that I was making more money with poker than freelance writing, she wasn’t too thrilled with it. But she ended up realizing that everyone in her acting class was psyched to watch ‘Celebrity Poker Showdown,’ it became this cool, kitchy thing. Once the hipsters got ahold of it, it became something big. That’s where it is right now, everyone wants to learn how to play. I just happened to be writing about a very popular subject.”

On the fall of poker: “On several levels, the legality issue is still up in the air. We have no idea what will happen with legislation for online gambling. And the second thing is that people are going to go broke. There’s new fish coming in every day, but someone is losing in this deal. … At some point, people are going to get sick about poker. Every time I turn on TV, there’s another poker show. … I’m just going to ride the wave until it crashes and then get out, hopefully.”

Iggy
http://guinnessandpoker.blogspot.com/

Age: 39

Locale: Cincinnati; formerly lived in Las Vegas.

In a Previous Life: Programmer and direct marketer for advertising agencies.

Dreams: To get a full-time gig as a blogger.

Strangely Enough: Some of his blog readers believe he’s really a housewife, while others think he’s a dwarf.

On the smarts of poker players: “I think poker is a deep subject to mine for the intellectually curious. It’s a subject you can’t master, it’s a game of incomplete information unlike chess. There’s so many different styles and ways to be successful. It attracts bright, curious, intellectual people. But there are a lot of people out there doing it [blogging] for themselves, to document their own play, their bankroll. That’s why I started mine.”

Poker advice from his blog: “Long ago, a poker coach once told me to take a week and never call a raise if I could help it. Talk about stretching your game — playing ‘raise or fold’ is now a game I am damn comfortable with. It’s a concept that doesn’t work as well in family pots, but is still an exercise you may want to explore for a session or two. Remember the basics: you need a better hand to call a raise with than to raise with yourself. Don’t worry if you lose — embrace the concept.”

Brad “Otis” Willis
http://www.upforanything.net/poker/
http://www.pokerstarsblog.com/

Age: 31

Locale: South Carolina

In a Previous Life: News reporter for NBC TV affiliate in Greenville, S.C.

Dreams: Living it.

Strangely Enough: Started a non-poker blog, Rapid Eye Reality, before Sept. 11, 2001.

On whether he’s a player: “In the taxi, the cabbie had asked, ‘Are you a card player?’ At the time, I barely thought before responding, ‘Yeah, I’m a card player.’ It was an easy response to an easy question. But sometimes, responses aren’t answers. And frankly, I’m not sure I know the answer to that question. What’s more, I’m not sure I want to know.”

On making money from blogging: “There are some blog purists who believe that blogging is for starving artist types. In reality, blogging is just another form of freelance writing. If someone wants to get paid and can find people to pay them, more power to them. I, personally, have no ads or affiliate links on any of my blogs, but I don’t avoid blogs that do. It’s all about content. If a blog offers good content and also has ads or afffiliate links, I’ll still read it for the same reason that I’ll watch a good TV show or read a good magazine that has advertisements.”

Joseph “Poker Prof” Smith
http://www.lasvegasvegas.com
http://www.lasvegasvegas.com/pokerblog/

Age: 27

Locale: Las Vegas.

In a Previous Life: Programmer doing Linux security firewalls.

Dreams: Turning his site into the online poker gateway for Las Vegas.

Strangely Enough: His dad, known as flipchipro, once sold an old 25-cent poker chip from the Dunes hotel on eBay for $190.

On scammer sites: “Sometimes there’s a content-scraper site that aggregates feeds or cuts and pastes [other people’s] posts on a blog. In between the posts are the ads for poker room X. And the blogger community will very quickly turn against a site like that. They have no interest in poker. They’re doing it in the hopes of turning it into a profit center and are basing it on the hard work of a lot of dedicated and passionate people.”

On affiliate programs: “Like so many questions in poker, it just depends. … People who are really blogging are doing it out of their passion and interest in poker. Once you start a poker blog and get any traffic you can’t help but be approached by poker rooms who pay you for getting them business. It’s a great opportunity for bloggers to get value for the time they put into their projects. I’ve never taken one affiliate offer. I’ve personally always been against it, not for any ethical reason, but I don’t think the online poker rooms are offering up [a fair deal] for having links on a successful poker blog.”

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: ,

Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool?

July 13, 2005 by

“Blogs Will Change Your Business” declared the front cover of the May 2, 2005 Business Week. Without question, the Web publishing format is gaining popularity as a legitimate business and marketing tool. Technologically savvy businesses are using blogs, or weblogs, to build relationships with their customers by sharing information, corporate culture and expertise. Technologically savvy publishers, from the New York Times to freelancers, are also jumping into the medium.

Journalists (or would-be journalists, depending on whom you talk to) find blogs are an ideal format for handling breaking news situations and commentary or columns. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, maintains a local breaking news blog that keeps readers abreast of current stories with local significance.

But before the fun of posting about earthquakes or political squabbles can start, every new blog publisher faces the problem of selecting, installing and configuring blog software. The array of possible options and configurations varies widely. While all blog software involves a learning curve, the amount of customization possible means that selecting the right software is important for a quicker, easier start.

There are two kinds of blog software available to the hopeful blog publisher. The first is hosted blog software. A hosted blog is one where all data and the publishing interface reside on the server of the blogging software company. The alternative is independent blog software that must be downloaded from the blogging software company and installed on a Web server. There are pluses and minuses to both. Your decision may be influenced by everything from how fast you need to get your blog up to how much control you want to have over the final design.

In both cases, the blog is set up and controlled by a database that handles the posts and the way they may be sliced and diced for display. Nearly all blog software stores your posts in a database, which permits handy things like searching and archiving.

Your blog’s appearance and layout is usually controlled by a set of templates that includes information about things like the background color and logo placement, as well as the formatting information for how many posts are displayed on the front page. The power of databased content and templates working together has produced the Weblog phenomenon – easily updated Web sites that usually display updated content from most to least recent, along with reader comments and feedback.

Blogging jargon

Whichever blog software package you chose, there are a few technical options you may want to look for. Here’s a short glossary of blog technology:

Post: Every time you put an update on your blog, you create a post. In typical computer jargon fashion, this noun can also be used as a verb: You can post to your blog. Posts are also sometimes called entries.

Comments: Blogs are often referred to as conversations, and it’s the ability of your readers to leave comments on each post you make to your blog that creates the feel of a conversation. Comments are usually time-stamped and identified by the author’s name and perhaps a link to their Web site or blog. On some blogs, comments are threaded so that readers can comment on other comments, but on most blogs comments are simply displayed chronologically.

Comment spam: Sad to say, spam is a problem on blogs just as it is in email. Comment spam, as you would expect, is left in the comments of a blog. It usually includes a few words and a link to a Web site. The point for the spammer is to get as many links as possible to the Web site, giving it higher search engine rankings.

Categories: Categories permit a blogger to subdivide content, putting posts about politics into one basket and posts about celebrities in another. Categorization helps readers read only what they are most interested in and is a good tool for those scanning a blog’s archives.

Trackbacks: Trackback technology helps bloggers link back to other posts on related subjects. Functionally it’s a little complicated: If you’re posting about something you’ve seen on another blog, look for the Trackback URL. Paste that URL into the allotted spot in your own blogging software, and the two pieces of blog software will communicate, building a link from the original post to yours (without the other blogger having to life a finger).

Trackback spam: Like comment spam, but done via Trackback.

Pings: There are several blogging tracking Web sites where you can search for other blogs and look for recent posts. If your blog software allows you to ping those sites when you post, that post gets included in the ping site’s index, potentially increasing your traffic.

RSS/Atom feeds: In the blogosphere, syndication is a big deal. With millions of blogs to read, many consumers use news aggregators, or readers, to pull in posts and read them, rather than visiting 150 blogs every day. RSS and Atom are two flavors of blog syndication.

Blogroll/lists: Ever noticed those long lists of other blogs alongside the posts in a blog? That’s a blogroll, a list of the blogs read by the blogger whose site you are on. Sometimes lists are also kept to recommend books and other media, as well.

News aggregation: Many blog software packages allow you to pull in and display the RSS or Atom feed of another blog. This is useful if you want to create a site with constantly updated content fed by blogs. For example, a blogger who posts about politics could pull in the feeds of other political blogs.

Moblogging: Moblogging is the short form of “mobile blogging.” Lots of blog software lets you post by e-mail from your phone, PDA, or anything else that allows you to send e-mails.

Blacklist: Blacklists are usually lists of URLs that have been identified as spam URLs, and that are therefore eliminated from comments and Trackbacks on your blog. With most blog software, the software company builds and maintains a common blacklist for all users to which individuals can contribute.

Captchas: Captchas are an additional security feature for commenting and user registration. By providing an image that includes letters and numbers, and by requiring the user to type in those letters and numbers, blog software can eliminate some of the comment and Trackback spam produced by robot programs.

URL Redirection: In an effort to render comment and Trackback spam ineffective, links included in comments and Trackbacks are tagged with the NOFOLLOW tag, which indicates to search engines that it shouldn’t be counted when tallying search engine rankings for a Web site.

Skins: Most blog software includes a set of pre-designed templates that give the blog a certain look and feel. These are called skins.

Post scheduling: Some blog software allows you to write posts and schedule them to be published at some point in the future. This is handy for vacations and holidays.

Bookmarklets: A bookmarklet is a link directly to the new post page of your blog software. If you add this small Javascript to your browser toolbar, it’s a shortcut to posting quickly.

The tools

This chart reflects the features and options configurable in the default installation of each software application. In some cases additional modules and plug-ins can add functionality that is not available in the default installation.

Blogger
Blogger is a free, hosted blogging tool. It’s one of the oldest blogging tools around and today has millions of users. Blogger promises that you will be blogging within 10 minutes of coming to the site, and in fact does deliver on that. This tool is about the simplest one around, and though free, nonetheless has an impressive array of features.

The biggest hole in Blogger’s offerings is the lack of post categorization, followed closely by the need to know HTML and Cascading Style Sheets to make custom changes to the templates provided. Unlike some of the most complex hosted services, Blogger doesn’t make customization easy, though it does provide some attractive skins to choose from.

One unusual feature of Blogger is the integration with the Audioblogger service. Program the Audioblogger number into your phone, and you can put audio recordings on your blog quickly by simply calling the number and recording yourself. This offering is unique among blog software packages.

Of special note is that Blogger does allow you to FTP the files generated for your blog to your own Web site. Used together with customization of the Blogger template, this fairly unique functionality means that your readers may never realize that you are using Blogger. It also means that you can publicize your own domain name, rather than the more usual Blogger URL: blogname.blogspot.com.

Blogger is perfect for the future blogger who’s in a hurry and less than interested in design customization. If your priority is to start blogging now, you can’t do better than Blogger. Clearly, it’s also a great tool for those on a budget, since there are absolutely no costs. In fact, you need not even have a Web site or a domain name, so you can literally get started using Blogger without spending a penny.

Very few professional Bloggers stick with Blogger for very long, if they even start there. Because it is so simple, and perhaps because it is free, most professional bloggers choose to use blogging software that has more prestige (read: is harder to set up and install). However, it is an ideal tool to use when first beginning, especially if you want to test blog for a couple of weeks before devoting any serious time or money to a blog.

Cost: Nothing
Time to launch: 10 minutes

Typepad
Typepad is one of Six Apart‘s hosted half blogging software services (read about Movable Type below) and one that has proved very popular with journalistic blogging efforts. Jim Romenesko uses Typepad for his Obscure Store blog; Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post writes Achenblog using Typepad.

The Typepad pricing scheme and features are divided into three levels: Basic, Plus, and Pro. Design customization is extremely limited at the Basic level and only fully accessible at the Pro level. If you want to run a group blog, or give some people editor access and others publishing access, you must go with the Pro account.

At all account levels, Typepad has a built-in feature called Typelists that allows you to build lists, associating each item with a URL. These lists can be added with a minimum of fuss to the left- or right-hand column of your blog – no need to touch the templates. Use a Typelist for your current reading list, links to other blogs, or links to new stories.

In some ways, it is actually more usable than its elder brother Movable Type. Typepad is a good option for users who want to get started quickly but still want all the bells and whistles. Customization is possible, but complicated, so it’s also a good option for those who just want a blog that works without fussing too much over how it looks. However, Typepad Plus and Pro do a better job than most blog software at allowing you to configure layout options without having to go into the templates.

Cost: $4.95 – $14.95 monthly, depending on level of service chosen
Free trial: 30 days
Time to launch: 20 minutes

Blogware
Tucows is the creator of the Blogware blog software package, a robust system with a great selection of the top blogging tools. Blogware, like Typepad, can be difficult to customize, even for an experienced HTML jockey. However, it also provides a fair number of options within the administration interface to let you set up layouts and styles without getting into the templates.

Purchasing a Blogware blog is a little different than some of the other blogging software packages; you must get your Blogware blog through a reseller, so expect prices and packages to vary. It’s a good idea to shop around to get the best package for your needs. A good reseller to start with is Blog Harbor.

It’s unusual – and useful – that Blogware permits you to upload files via FTP to the server where your blog is hosted. If you’re looking to create a blog that has a few non-blog pages, this is especially helpful.

Cost: varies by reseller, but expect to pay from $8-$15 a month
Free trial: usually offered for 30 days
Time to launch: 20 minutes

WordPress
WordPress is a solid, powerful blogging system ideal for publishers who are on a budget but who don’t want to give up any functionality. Professional blogger Darren Rowse maintains nearly 30 blogs using WordPress, from his popular ProBlogger to an Athens Olympics Blog. In two weeks the Athens blog received close to 2 million readers, said Rowse – a real testament to WordPress’ ability to handle heavy traffic loads.

Each WordPress post is formatted with search engine friendly URLs that also look good to humans. Comments can be extensively moderated: you can review them before they go live. You can also filter comments containing certain words or more than a certain number of links.

WordPress’ built-in blogroll management tool allows you to categorize blogs, set criteria for the display order of the links, and turn off and on visibility. You can also import an existing blogroll from some link manager services.

This software has inspired numerous developers to write plugins and extra features for use with WordPress, which makes plugin installation a quick and painless affair. You will find that the selection of additional themes (or skins), for instance, numbers in the hundreds, and that WordPress fans and friends have developed tools for adding photo galleries, a music player, an event calendar, and even geo mapping.

WordPress promises a 5-minute installation, but for that to be true you do have to have some familiarity with uploading files to a Web server and using an FTP client.

Cost: Free
Time to launch: 20 minutes

Movable Type
Movable Type, created by Six Apart, is perhaps the best known of all blogging software tools. Built by a husband and wife team looking for a better tool for blogging, the system is powerful, but not simple to install or use. Although it has been used to create Web sites that don’t look entirely like blogs, doing so requires quite a bit of code tweaking. Movable Type is used by blogger Joshua Micah Marshall to create Talking Points Memo, and by Kevin Roderick who writes the L.A. Observed blog.

As a blogging tool alone, Movable Type has nearly every feature you might desire, and continues to add more. Many of their users are highly technical themselves, and have created additional plug-ins that can be added to the standard installation. You might say that Movable Type is the blogging package chosen by bloggers who care what other bloggers think, and who notice and appreciate other Movable Type blogs. If you are looking for street “cred” in the blogosphere, this is the software for you.

The least attractive functionality of Movable Type is the need to rebuild the blog whenever you make a change to a template, a configuration setting, or add a new category. Waiting for the rebuild is annoying, to say the least, and certainly slows down any customization work you do to the design or layout. This can be addressed by turning on dynamic page-building, but some users have found that the server load that occurs as a result is unacceptable to their Web host.

For the non-technically inclined, installation of this software can be quite a challenge. Don’t attempt it all if you aren’t already comfortable with uploading and downloading files to a Web server. There are several Web hosts that offer Movable Type installation as part of their package of services.

There is no trial period for Movable Type, but there is a free version of the software that you can download and install. The paid license entitles you to support, some promotion, and discounts on future upgrades.

Cost: MT’s pricing scheme is fairly complex. Personal users will pay at least $69.95. Commercial users pay at least $199.95.
Time to launch: 2 hours

Expression Engine
pMachine’s Expression Engine isn’t well-known, but that shouldn’t stop you from giving this powerful and extensible software a try. It is technically more accurate to call Expression Engine a content management system, rather than just a blogging software tool. However, it grew out of blogging and has all of the blogging bells and whistles: moblogging, Trackbacks, archiving and so on. Dennis Lloyd uses it for the independent information resource iPodlounge.

In addition to the usual set of blogging functionality, Expression Engine has incorporated modules for image galleries and a mailing list. Uniquely, you can crop, resize, and rotate images in the Expression Engine photo gallery tool, in addition to batch processing a set of images. The people and search engine friendly URLs the system generates are of particular interest to bloggers looking for good search engine listings. You can run multiple Weblogs through the same installation of Expression Engine, and each “new post” page can be customized exactly to fit the use. Most blog software limits you to title, entry, extended entry, and excerpt fields. With EE, you can rename those to suit your publication and add more as needed.

Templates are editable online through a simple textbox interface, but you can set up the system to generate files you can download and edit with an HTML editor. Learning how information relates and how to link across the site is a challenge: expect to spend several hours learning how to use this system. Your reward will be incredible flexibility in building a site that has constant updating needs, blog or not.

Expression Engine is ideal for publishers that need to do more than just blogging; this system is ideal for handling hundreds of members, multiple user groups with different editing privileges, and sites with several blogs. Technically speaking, it’s not for the faint of heart.

Cost: $149 for a non-commercial license, $199 for a commercial license
Free trial: 14 days if installed on your own server, 30 days with a hosted version
Time to launch: 2 hours

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: ,

And why not a wiki?: Blogosphere lights up over 'wikitorials'

June 16, 2005 by

[Let’s get to the disclaimers right away, rather than burying them at the end, after you’ve read the piece: OJR Editor Robert Niles is a former member of the National Conference of Editorial Writers and newspaper editorial writer. He also has worked as a Senior Producer at latimes.com and staff writer for the Los Angeles Times.]

Let’s back off Michael Kinsley, okay?

The L.A. Times Opinion Editor and his staff have been catching heck from some writers after Editorial Page Editor Andrés Martinez announced last week that The Times would introduce “‘wikitorials’ — an online feature that will empower you to rewrite Los Angeles Times editorials.”

“This week The Los Angeles Times announced its intention to exile the square and stodgy voice of authority farther yet,” The New York Times’ Stacy Schiff declared. “Let’s hope the interactive editorial will lead directly to the interactive tax return. On the other hand, I hope we might stop short before we get to structural engineering and brain surgery. Some of us like our truth the way we like our martinis: dry and straight up.”

Cute, but Schiff’s dig assumes the pros always get it right. Let’s just say that if structural engineers showed the same skepticism toward their work as many professional editorial writers showed toward the U.S. administration’s claims about Iraq, I’d be choosing the ferry instead of the bridge whenever I needed to cross a river.

Talk of wikis inevitably elicit rants about Wikipedia, the free-for-all dictionary where users can create and revise entries, even to the point of rewriting history. Neither Martinez nor Kinsley have publicly revealed details of how their “wikitorials” will work. But the Wikipedia model need not be the only one to guide wiki publishers.

  • At OJR, we restrict editing access on our wikis to our registered users, who must provide a working e-mail address to register.
  • A news publisher could limit write access on the wiki to an invited group of readers with first-hand experience on a topic.
  • Or, a publisher could adopt an “open source journalism” model, opening a wiki to revision for a limited time, with an editor stitching together the best evidence and arguments from its versions for later print publication.

    “We are no longer couch potatoes absorbing whatever mass media many funnel our way,” OJR Senior Editor J.D. Lasica writes in his new book, “Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation.” “We make our own media. In many ways, we are our own media.”

    So why not try something different to engage the digital generation?

    Despite the protests, what The Times has proposed is not all that radical a change. On a limited scale, newspaper editorial writing shares much in common with wikis. Both are collective efforts, reflecting the view of a group of writers, rather than that of an individual. And both strive to report an enduring truth that rises encompasses more than just a single point of view.

    While Schiff lambasted reader participation in the editorial process, Timothy Noah at Kinsley’s old site, Slate, suggested that Kinsley abolish editorials at The Times altogether, arguing that papers ought to expand op-ed columns into the editorial page space.

    “The genre has certain built-in defects,” Noah wrote. “One is that editorials typically lack sufficient length to marshal evidence and lay out a satisfactory argument. Instead, they tend toward either timidity, at one extreme, or posturing, at the other. Almost every editorial I’ve ever read in my life has fallen into one of two categories: boring or irresponsible.”

    Having spent a few years’ of my life on an editorial page staff, I will not dispute Noah’s pessimistic view of the craft. Too many editorials stink. But a great many columns and traditional news stories die on the page, too.

    Too much traditional journalism amounts to little more than stenography. If a source fails to provide an appropriate conclusion, the reporter will not draw it – even if all necessary supporting evidence is there.

    Editorial writing not only allows conclusions, it demands them. Great editorial writers work like appellate court judges, weighing available evidence in the context of past decisions. Yet they must write for more than attorneys and scholars. Their words must engage and inspire an entire community to appropriate action.

    Yes, most editorial writers fail by those standards. That’s because too many publishers treat the editorial page as a dumping ground for aging reporters, or, worse, a private forum to do favors for or settle scores with the paper’s sources. Either way, readers don’t matter.

    Trashing the editorial page to give newshole to columnists won’t change that attitude. Nor will it give journalists, including opinion writers, additional resources to do more reporting.

    News publishers would do better to refresh their editorial pages with innovations that draw more readers into the process of crafting this institutional voice. Why rely on the limited knowledge and reporting resources of a handful of editorial writers when you could ask your entire community to gather and examine evidence?

    Sure, some papers ask established community leaders to sit in on an editorial board meeting now and then. Yawn. Declining readership and diminished influence demand a more aggressive response.

    What news publishers need is a tool that will allow any interested readers a seat at the table, with the ability to help direct what ought to be their community’s most powerful voice.

    Something like, oh, say, a wiki.

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