Meta/Site News

Getting started with your own blog is so easy today that many people never get to actually doing it. One of the goals of the Putting Visualization on the Web workshop was to get more visualization blogs and websites going. So here are some pointers and a few tips on how to avoid some pitfalls that are especially dangerous for technical people. The goal is not to point to millions of resources, but to narrow down the choices so you can get started writing.

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p>I just deactivated anonymous comments completely. If you want to leave a comment, you will have to create a user. I hope that I can turn them on again in a few days, but for the moment, this is the only way I can stop the relentless spamming.

There is a problem with the Atom feed for the site. While I'm trying to figure out how to fix it, consider using the RSS feed instead. There is no difference in content.

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p>Update: The feed is fixed now, so if you still see broken items, try to do a reload in your feed reader. I will remove this entry from the feed in a day or so.

I got the domains EagerEars.org and EagerEars.com for my April Fool's joke. Now the question is: what to do with them? If you have an idea and want to have the domain, let me know. You can have it for the remaining period it was registered for (until January 2010), and then decide what to do with it. I will keep some control over it until then though to make sure EagerEars does not become a spam or phishing site.

When I look around my little corner of the Internet, I see a few other people doing related stuff, but I also see a lot of unrealized potential. Why are there so few people in the visualization community who run a website? Why are the most popular visualization-related sites almost entirely about pointing at colorful pictures done by others, rather than doing their own? And how can we get more original, quality visualization content on the web?

VisWeek 2008 was an interesting set of conferences again. The live-blog is now archived, and here are a few thoughts on blogging a conference. I had a long summary written up, but it was mostly redundant with the live-blog, so it makes more sense to go there. I will write up further things at greater length over the next few weeks.

I just published the first two glimpses in the live microblog from VisWeek. The microblog appears as a box on the EagerEyes frontpage, you can't miss it (unless you're reading this in your RSS reader). There are links at the bottom of the box for more postings and for the RSS feed (glimpses do not appear in the main site feed).