Tom Deprez wrote:

I'm interested to find some information on the term 'weblog' (like Squishdot refers to). Anybody who can refer me to a place where it is it explained from where it comes, for what it is used, .... other systems

[Martijn goes into industry pundit mode] 'weblog' is the new up and coming hype. It has been 'portal' for a while now, but that's old and they're hyping weblogs now. Weblogs have been around for quite a while and you might be familiar with some of them. One of the most popular ones is Slashdot (news for nerds). Squishdot is inspired by it. Slashdot features news on computers (nice new hardware, linux stuff), science, star wars and lots of other stuff. Often it links through to other sites (often news sites) which contain articles, sometimes it features articles of its own. New headlines arrive every day. Another feature of Slashdot and many other weblogs is the 'discussion' feature..people can post comments to the stories that are posted. On Slashdot too often these are paranoid rants about Microsoft (granted that some paranoia about MS might be a good idea, the Slashdotters definitely overdo things :). Also too many Slashdotters have the unfortunate habit to send out flames to anything and anyone even mildly criticizing Linux. Others are informed, it's too bad the flamers tend to spoil things. Another interesting thing is the dreaded 'Slashdot effect'. When some new link to an article is posted on Slashdot, the poor server on the other side suddenly gets a huge number of hits due to all the Slashdot readers clicking through -- often this causes the server to slow down to a crawl or die completely. Anyway, Slashdot is neat to check if you're interested in the news they present, just ignore most of the rabid comments. :) http://www.slashdot.org Some other weblogs: http://www.linuxtoday.com (news on Linux) http://www.mozzilazine.org (news on Mozilla, the next generation netscape browser in open source development) http://www.segfault.org (computer humor) http://www.linuxgames.com (news on games and gaming on linux) The most common feature is simply a list of headlines (such as on the Zope site itself). A weblog proper perhaps also needs to support user comments to these headlines. I suspect the reason that they're hyped so much now is that people tend to visit them often. This means you can bind customers and do bannerads and such. I tend to visit weblogs more often than portals myself, so they may have a point. Before all the portal craze it was search engines. In a few months they'll probably figure out something else which is popular on the web, give it a name, and hype that. Perhaps it's "Weekly news": http://www.lwn.net (linux weekly news) http://www.kt.opensrc.org (kernel traffic..summaries of the traffic on the Linux kernel mailing list) And of course our own Zope weekly news. :) Or it might be web comics. I read: http://www.userfriendly.org (computer humor) http://www.sluggy.com (completely insane, very funny) Be sure to read the comic archives first and achieve complete productivity collapse while reading them (they're archives reaching back more than a year for both and with one new comic a day this adds up). Whatever they'll come up with, Zope is likely to be ready for it. Now you all know my web reading habits. :) [industry pundit mode off] Regards, Martijn

Tom Deprez wrote:

I'm interested to find some information on the term 'weblog' (like Squishdot refers to). Anybody who can refer me to a place where it is it explained from where it comes, for what it is used, .... other systems

Slashdot (itself a WebLog) has three articles on the subject: http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=weblog and here is a story at SJMN: http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/columns/gillmor/docs/dg052599.htm Happy surfing! Michael Bernstein.