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I think there are some understood, and yet not understood underground ethics that have been emerging around blogging.  I thought I’d discuss a few of these and get your feedback.  A corporation may want to consider some of these topics in their blogging policy.  I recommend the bloggers code taken from Journalists Code of Ethics as a template for your policy and maybe a bit of copy and paste from these with proper citation… (This will be funnier and make more sense after you’ve read the post.)

1. Plagiarism is the biggest and scariest – There is actually a http://www.plagiarism.org setup to help define it and is an online resource designed for INTERNET plagiarism.  "Plagiarism is the practice of claiming or implying original authorship." Source: Wikipedia… now there’s a challenge for plagiarism.  There are some excellent resources there, but let me "borrow" 🙂 and repeat their definition with the proper HTTP citation. I quote from the plagiarism site…  "The fact that many of these sites have become profitable ventures (complete with paid advertising!) only attests to the unfortunate truth that plagiarism has become a booming industry."  My recommendation is we should be careful to get permission to repost entire posts, especially when including content in books.  Many of us are happy and willing to share some of our posts with the proper citation.  All we really want is a bit of credit.  Is it ok to repost someone’s entire post without their permission.  Simply.  No.  Is it cool to just include a link to a blog, not these days.  Much cooler to at least tell us why you like it or what’s cool about it.  I see some bloggers with simply just link lists, but that maybe useful for newbies, but once they get a blog reader they can just as easily sift through all the SharePoint bloggers posts, but if someone wants to sift through them for us, please tell us what’s cool or good about it.  If someone lets say wanted to translate my content into some other language, I would totally want to discuss that with them.  I’ve allowed that a couple of times.  (Haven’t turned anyone down for including content in books either…)  SharePoint best practices don’t have anyones names on them, but occasionally I hear things that I came up with and people put it on their blogs as if it were their ideas… It is flattering, and evolution will happen with ideas, the idea of no harm nor foul and as long as it’s honest intentions, I’ll forgive you Bill.  (Just kidding.  I know there’s a hundred SharePoint Bills, and each of them are thinking I’m referring to them.  I’m not.)  We’re all just trying to do what we do best, and not trying to intentionally hurt anyone else.  This post isn’t to rile up anyone, but more to help people thing through stuff.

2. SPAM and Viral Marketing – What is spam outside of email.  SPAM exists nearly everywhere these days.  Is it possible to spam on Facebook?  Did you ever get the "What Microsoft Product are You?" That viral marketing campaign required you to send the "app" to 10 friends before you could find out what product you were.  I was Windows 2008.  It told me I was arrogant, I think I filled out the form too quickly (which I know I did) or was it someone who created an app to make Microsoft look bad?  Why would they force you to send it to 10 people before you can use it?  I definitely have seen that issue a few times.  Forward this image real fast and you’ll see something cool happen.  Yeah, and Bill Gates might give me a million dollars and send me to Disney World if I send it to all my friends really fast too, yeah really.  No he’s sent me to Orlando a few times, like next week, but not because of spamming anyone… well, I guess that’s debatable too 🙂  Just kidding.  I hate comment spam.  If you’ve got a blog, you may have had to wade through that muck.  I hope none of you ever get involved in that, I also hope the SharePoint PMs look at blogs and see the Internet and SPAM as a real reality.  Products have to be designed with SPAMMERS in mind.  Trackbacks as well, who came up with Spam trackbacks needs to be… 

3. Ads (Can you read the content) – I’m still out on this one in terms of details.  I know I am annoyed when there is more ad than content.  Please let me know if you wouldn’t mind if I put up adds or linked anything like a book to an amazon account.  I don’t have a problem with either of these, but I do hate seeing my own posts surrounded by ads.  I think that’s my biggest internet pet peeve is seeing half of a post or even full posts of mine surrounded by ads on some other blog.  It’s really irritating when they are getting better comments.  Specifically Google ads these days, It’s normal to see one column of them, but do we have to see 5 columns top bottom left and right, with a sliver of content somewhere in the middle… maybe?  I’ve heard other MVPs suggest that a blog is "google ad driven" and that the poster is simply trying to make money.  I think that’s sad if it’s true.  I’d hope that all SharePoint bloggers have pure hearts, but I know we’re all still trying to make a living as well.  I know I’ve bought books and the links that referred me were Amazon referrals.  Didn’t make the books more expensive, but adds do sometimes make it harder to read.  So let’s agree it’s cool for one column if you can still distinguish the content and can read it without getting caught in the ads?  Let me hear your thoughts.

4. Changing Content in posts – I’ve read blogs should not be changed or rewritten.  I know I’ve been guilty of updating content, but another blogger suggested that I put <update 1/1/80></update> tags with dates so people can tell that the post changed.  If you look at the Top 100 SharePoint Blogs post for example, I’ve changed that post more than 10 times since my original posting trying to make it more correct and adding additional columns to make it more valuable to my readers.  With the typical blog, you wouldn’t be changing old posts, but I’ve found when readers make suggestions I want to make the post more accurate, and I think that’s got to be ok.  I think the update tags are a decent way of keeping us all honest.  This is an area where I think as long as it wasn’t meant to deceive it’s not as big of deal as the other areas, but there might be some deception in some cases.  Did you realize there were strike out HTML tags?  That should help to show changes.  <strike>No longer truth</strike>

5. Conflict of Interest – With my recent consulting gig with Nintex and the course I’m teaching with Shane Young at the Ted Pattison Group and a Planning and  Governance one I’m developing with Nicola Young and John Ross, it’s important for me to disclose that the posts like the recent Reporting launch announcement is essentially sponsored.  I hope it’s obvious, but often I assume someone reading a post has read the previous ones, and I think I need to be more careful about that assumption.  I ran into a payperpost service where they pay people to post blogs, you’ll find at that link they have been explicit about conflict of interest and citing paid sources.

More Articles on Blog Ethics

Great writeup… quite historical as well Rebecca Blood -Weblog Ethics, 2002

Funny example of a guy who summarized Rebecca’s article into a simple list.  Cool or not cool?  Definitely seen this. Note that he didn’t add his own take on her work or add anything original, but at least he included a link to the source.

An entire blog devoted to the discussion of Blogging Ethics.

WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) Code of Ethics – 10 Principles – they suggest reading the "10-item checklist with which to make sure that they are always appropriate and ethical when communicating with bloggers"

I am a fan of this simple "Bloggers Code" by CyberJournalist and after just reading it realize we agree on a lot of things.

I’d like to take that Bloggers code and have us plagiarize it and make it a SharePoint bloggers code where we all agree to give each other proper credit and all be a big happy family.  I think overall we’re all pretty cool to each other and the newbies that may copy and paste are learning that the internet makes it way to easy to compare and find the original source.

No harm nor foul.

– Joel

• Title
• Author
• "Google Reader count"
• Categories DEV, IT, Business/IW
• Author Titles – MVP, MS, Analyst other other distinction
• Total Post Count
• Creation Date
• Most recent post (date)
• Frequency (Posts per week)

A Joel’s "Top 100" and "Top 10 SharePoint Blog" badge will be coming soon…

Note: I’ve posted this post for comparative reasons with the previous post.  Apologizes for any mistakes or missing blogs.  Also please note that some blogs were removed that were considered aggregated feeds or didn’t primarily contain original content such as mirrors, news or republished links.  Although this update may look like a major update, additional updates may be made over the course of the week with a refresh of blog listings around August/September 08.

About RSS and Subscriptions… Although some of the best indicators of blog popularity are unique blogs that point to your blog, and links that point to your blog… RSS subscribers are a very telling story.  For this reason I’ve included some stats from Bloglines.com an online RSS reader.  I assume these stats don’t account for even 5% of readership, but can give an indication of popularity.  A more ideal number would be the actual feed statistics such as through feedburner.com.  Unfortunately, these statistics are only available if they are published by the owner.  I for example, as recent as May 14th had 3,516 subscribers  to my feedburner feed, while looking at bloglines you see only 75 as online web based subscribers happening to be using the bloglines interface to subscribe (it’s amazing how many hundreds I can lose over a weekend). Another 29 are subscribed directly to the old feed of the archive site (hence the calculated number in the table). 

According to Andrew Connell’s feedburner stats on his site he has around ~3200 subscriptions, while Bil Simser has ~2500.  It’s fun to analyze.  I hope you enjoy this data and understand this is all in good fun.  Here’s an interesting break down by client consumption.  You can see what small percentage (2%) is taken by bloglines with Outlook 2007 (28%) and Google Feedfetcher (27%) being the two most popular RSS clients for my feed (the very Pro already upgraded Office 2007 client with Outlook 2007).  Very savy indeed.

Something I’ve done more since leaving Microsoft is catch up on blogging and reading MVP and other SharePoint community blogs. 

My most recent freeware RSS client is "snarfer" from snarfware.  It had the most downloads on download.com for free RSS readers.  It’s forced me to get a bit organized around my feed consumption.  In my attempts to find the best SharePoint blogs I came across a post which listed the top 100 Analyst feeds.

In my various searching and digging I came across a few good aggregated feeds, here are the best aggregations I found.  SharePoint is a common term across facebook, twitter, blogs and searches.

SharePoint Aggregated Feeds:

• On Demand Mirror of many SharePoint blogs (Feeds added by Request) – (ex.. Mark Harrison, AC, Chand, End User, Bob Fox, etc…) http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mirror/rss.aspx
• SharePoint Experts Bloggers (Dustin, Heather Solomon, Todd Baginksy, Matt Passannante) (low volume)  http://www.sharepointblogs.com/MainFeed.aspx?GroupID=7&amp;Type=AllBlogs
• Minsharp Blogger feed of their instructors (Bill, Todd, Ben, etc…)
  http://mindsharpblogs.com/MainFeed.aspx
• U2U Trainer blog feed (Patrick, Kevin, etc…) http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/U2U/default.aspx

SharePoint MVPs

• SharePoint MVPs blogs only (English only/Medium Volume) http://feeds.feedburner.com/sharepointmvpblogs

SharePoint related Blogging MS Employees

• Individual Blogs (Arpan, Paul Andrew, Chris Johnson, Charran, Mike Watson, etc…)  http://feeds.feedburner.com/sharepointmsblogs
• Team Blogs (SharePoint, ECM, Designer, etc..) http://feeds.feedburner.com/sharepointmsteamblogs

SharePoint Community Lists and OPML (very verbose)

• SharePoint Community Bloggers from Mark Kruger Bloglines’ SharePoint OPML (define:OPML) or view Public Bloglines
• Daniel Larson shared his OPML with me from newsgator.  Very rich on the MVP side.

I took a stab at trying to put together a 100 Top SharePoint Blogs based on Technorati and was planning on using some influence from Google Page Rank, but it ultimately was tough to integrate the two, so I’ve sorted by Technorati Rank.  First let me caveat this list as incomplete.  This was taken from Mark Kruger’s old list of SharePoint blogs, the old most comprehensive one that I knew of, and then blogs from various MVPs blog rolls.  This list need not be complete.  This is a stab at getting something that I think will become more useful in the future.  Don’t shoot the messenger.  Please hold your harsh words with a better attempt at the essense or spirit of what I was going after…  ultimately a list of bloggers that we can subscribe to, to understand what’s going on in the space… right?

So after getting this huge list of close to 200 SharePoint Community blogs I tried to think like a developer would.  How could I automate getting some useful information on these blogs.  You know I’m not much of a developer, so this should be interesting 🙂  I figured there had to be a web service to gather the data and sure enough…

For Google Page Rank I simply used a page which allows you to check 10 at a time.  Obviously they are hitting a service in the background.  You can add a simple snippet to your own site to show page rank and other ranking sites:

<a href="http://www.wholinks2me.com/" title="Click here to see who’s linking to my site.">Who links to my website?</a>

For Technorati, a service I’ve ended up putting most of my trust in, I dig some digging and found a very useful web service, A Developer API called BlogInfo.  Here’s some information on the service.  Simply pass in the URL and a key which you can get by signing up on Technorati.  (note this service has a 500 per day query limit).  I was thinking about putting this in some kind of page, but the 500 per day limit prevents that.  The useful thing I’ve found with httprequest.vbs is you can hit any web page on the command line.  Very useful for warmups and for automation, you can grab that in the warm up zip attachment on my old blog.

"The bloginfo query provides info on what blog, if any, is associated with a given URL.

The call is made using a REST-ful interface. Send either a HTTP GET or a HTTP POST to http://api.technorati.com/bloginfo?key=%5Bapikey%5D&url=%5Bblog url] with mandatory parameters "key" and "url" and one optional parameter to request various formats.

Here’s what the XML output looks like:

Success

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- generator="Technorati API version 1.0 /bloginfo" -->
<!DOCTYPE tapi PUBLIC "-//Technorati, Inc.//DTD TAPI 0.02//EN" "http://api.technorati.com/dtd/tapi-002.xml">
<tapi version="1.0">
<document>
<result>
  <url>[URL]</url>
  <weblog>
    <name>[blog name]</name>
    <url>[blog URL]</url>
    <rssurl>[blog RSS URL]</rssurl>
    <atomurl>[blog Atom URL]</atomurl>
    <inboundblogs>[inbound blogs]</inboundblogs>
    <inboundlinks>[inbound links]</inboundlinks>
    <lastupdate>[date blog last updated]</lastupdate>
    <rank>[blog ranking]</rank>
    <lang></lang>
    <foafurl>[blog foaf URL]</foafurl>
  </weblog>
  <inboundblogs>[inbound blogs]</inboundblogs>
  <inboundlinks>[inbound links]</inboundlinks>
</result>
</document>
</tapi>

Here's an example of what I put together using Notepad and Excel (x200 lines).  

cscript.exe httprequest.vbs GET http://api.technorati.com/bloginfo?
key=1347df90&url=http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewat/ /out:1.XML //B
cscript.exe httprequest.vbs GET http://api.technorati.com/bloginfo?
key=1347df90&url=http://giraudyp.perso.cegetel.net/ /out:2.XML //B
cscript.exe httprequest.vbs GET http://api.technorati.com/bloginfo?
key=1347df90&url=http://mikewalsh.bilsimser.com /out:3.XML //B

The example above is all put in a single .cmd file and then I pass in the method "GET" with the URL to httprequest.vbs which accepts a URL as a parameter then output to a filename. Here’s what the output looks like with real data in it.

We all love AC, here’s the XML output for his.  I did find that the UTF-8 encoding was sometimes problematic and I ended up parsing out some of the headers that I found detracting, then pulled them all together and doing some munging and proprietary Excel skills to put this in a table.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!– generator="Technorati API version 1.0" –>
<!DOCTYPE tapi PUBLIC "-//Technorati, Inc.//DTD TAPI 0.02//EN" "http://api.technorati.com/dtd/tapi-002.xml">
<tapi version="1.0">
<document>
    <result>
        <url>http://andrewconnell.com/blog/</url>
                    <weblog>
                <name> Andrew Connell [MVP MOSS] </name>
                <url>http://andrewconnell.com/blog</url>
                <rssurl>http://feeds.feedburner.com/AndrewConnell</rssurl>
                <atomurl></atomurl>
                <inboundblogs>194</inboundblogs>
                <inboundlinks>495</inboundlinks>
                <lastupdate>2008-05-16 19:40:04 GMT</lastupdate>
                <rank>36939</rank>
                <authors>
                        <author>
                        <username>aconnell</username>
                        <name>Andrew Connell</name>
                        <description>Microsoft MVP for MCMS, I’m a .NET developer focusing on Microsoft Office System solutions.</description>
                        <url>http://technorati.com/people/technorati/aconnell</url>
                        <photourl>http://static.technorati.com/progimages/photo.jpg?uid=109121</photourl>
                         </author>
                 </authors>
            </weblog>
                            <inboundblogs>194</inboundblogs>
                            <inboundlinks>495</inboundlinks>
            </result>
</document>
</tapi>

The most important things to note are some of the blogs returned nothing.  What does this mean?  This means that technorati hasn’t crawled the blog, or it has no incomming blogs, or no links.  Technorati is by far not the only way to rate blogs, but it really is focused on some of the key algorithms that I find useful.  As you look at updating frequency, links and blogs pointing to your site, you’ll see the most important is the number of unique inboundblogs.  Blog rolls are quite important in defining the importance and ranking of blogs.  When I first started looking at my blog on technorati,the best I got was in the under 10,000 somewhere around 8900, and that was when they were tracking 3 million blogs.  Now they are tracking nearly 10 million blogs and I’m lucky to be as high as I am.  That blog will obviously continue to drop as people update their blog rolls to my new blog at http://www.sharepointjoel.com and the update frequency drops.

More info in the following blog with the rating table!  Please don’t hate me for this…  Add comments in this and the next post for missing blogs that have 10 plus inbound blogs.  I’d like to do an update to this in a couple of months.  We can call this a first stab, and unofficial… giving more of a chance to capture a more verbose list.  Any comments on the unbiased, but automated ratings, I’m open to that as well.  Check out blogged.com, they have some ratings on ~75 SharePoint blogs, but I found it incomplete and needing to be updated.  Again, no offense to what you’ll see in the next post 🙂 

Your friend… Joel

A special once in a lifetime event is happening this summer.  Shane Young and I are joining forces to bring you a special variation of SharePoint Professional Administration 401 we’re currently calling "The SharePoint Administrators Survival Camp" with much more depth and much more detail.  We’ve revamped the agenda and added a day.  We’re hoping to attract the real die hard SharePoint Admins that want to come and rub shoulders with us, and have real meaty conversations around disaster recovery, authentication, and share real world troubleshooting horror and success stories with us around the camp fire.  Ok, maybe no campfire, just the fire from the Mirage.  Yes, we’re going to do this amazing event in Las Vegas, July 14-18, 2008. 

I wanted you to hear it here first.  I am partnering up with the Ted Pattison Group to develop and deliver some training.  The TPG website hasn’t yet been updated with this info, but I’ll add the link here when it does become available.  I’m sure it will fill fast.

I bet they’d let you get on a pre-sales list…  (In addition, I noticed coupons on the home page for $400 discounts, not sure how long those will be there.)

1(866) 475-4440

Registration Now Open for SharePoint Survival Camp for Admins.

info@TedPattison.net

I’ll ask for forgiveness later.  More details to come.

Joel