BlogOrlando is an unconference that will be held in Orlando, FL from September 22-24, 2006.

This FREE event is open to bloggers and non-bloggers alike from Florida and anywhere else (so far we have one international attendee). We hope to bring together a good cross-section of folks to discuss blogging, podcasting, public relations, social media, citizen’s journalism and other related topics. In addition to the Friday event we are planning some outings at the local theme parks over the weekend. This event is as much a social/family gathering as it is a ‘work’ gathering, so bring the family (kids included).

Shown below is a tentative schedule for the weekend:

Thursday (9/21): Travel day for most, perhaps an informal dinner that night
Friday – day (9/22): BlogOrlando unconference at Rollins College
Friday – evening (9/22): Full-on geek dinner somewhere in Orlando
Saturday (9/23): Blogger day at one of the Disney parks
Sunday (9/24): Travel day, or stay an extra day at the Disney parks

For more information or to register, visit BlogOrlando.com.

Gawker Media has launched Valleywag, a tech gossip rag, focusing mainly on the people and stories of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The blog is edited by Nick Douglas who most recently was writing for Blogebrity. The Valleywag FAQ has the rest of the details.

The first few posts are a mixture of Photo-chop skills and inside-the-valley commentary. The site should get quite a bit of traffic from the left-coast folks and those wishing they were on the left-coast.

Usability guru, Jakob Nielsen has posted a Alertbox update on blog design: Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes.

Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author.

The top ten are:

• No Author Biographies
• No Author Photo
• Nondescript Posting Titles
• Links Don’t Say Where They Go
• Classic Hits are Buried
• The Calendar is the Only Navigation
• Irregular Publishing Frequency
• Mixing Topics
• Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
• Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

I think all these issues are a good starting point for discussion.

Over at the Burning Door, FeedBurner has announced PingShot, a new service that notifies aggregators and search engines when your feed has been updated. On the post there is an FAQ about the new service.

A quick check of my FeedBurner account shows the new option (click image for larger version):

The default services listed are Technorati and My Yahoo. You can check PubSub, Ping-o-matic and NewsGator and then add up to three other services which include: Feedster, Icerocket and Weblogs.com.

If you have a FeedBurner account you will need to activate this service via your control panel. Outside services such as web directories and search tools may submit their name to receive notifications of updates.

Don’t think you need to publish full-text RSS feeds? Think again.

Looking at the Search Engine Watch review of Google Blog Search:

Google’s blog search indexes all of the content it finds in feeds, but does not attempt to access and index the full content available on a publisher’s web server.

One more reason why you should consider publishing full-text feeds.

Last Friday, Duncan Riley from The Blog Herald posted a short item about another blog stealing his content. Today, Duncan follows-up with his case against WebProNews. In a lengthy post, Duncan provides a number of examples of how he feels that WebProNews has stolen his content without proper attribution.

Sure, a lot of bloggers are ametuers and don’t know any better, or if you dug through the archives of the Blog Herald I’ve probably done it by accident once or twice as well, but when your a paid writer for a leading internet portal you shouldn’t just know better, you do know better, and when you don’t play by the rules its not an accident, its a concious decision.

Duncan also provides examples of quotes taken from other publications without credit being given to the original source.

Update: Jason Lee Miller of WebProNews has provided a well-written response in the comments.

While battling reliability and scaling issues Technorati is forging ahead with new services. David Sifry announced the launch of their Blog Finder service. The basic premise is to rank blogs by category or technically speaking, by tags. David says in his blog that new service answers the question, “How can you find authoritative blogs on a subject?” This is what Robert Scoble was asking for on Monday.

I took a quick look around at the new service this evening and here are my initial impressions.

The initial version of the listings was built by using category and tag data that blogs had already submitted. Right out of the box, the lists are very BETA. For example, some bloggers use the category ‘PR’ instead of ‘Public Relations’. As such, Neville Hobson’s blog is listed as the Most Authorative blog on ‘PR’ but is nowhere to be found on the list for ‘Public Relations’ blogs. Fellow Business Blog Consulting contributor BL Ochman is listed as the Most Authorative blog for ‘Public Relations’.

My blog is listed as the Most Authorative blog for ‘Orlando’ even though I rarely write about Orlando. Why? I guess becuase I have tagged more posts Orlando than other bloggers.

There are other issues as well. In the ‘PR’ search, Neville’s blog is listed in three places, under three different URLs. (nevon.net/nevon/, nevon.typepad.com and nevon.typepad.com/nevon/) This is due to the fracturing of data within Technorati’s index. If you remember Neville discovered this when he was having problems with Technorati’s search tool.

In addition, Steve Rubel is not listed under ‘PR’ or ‘Public Relations’, but he is second for ‘Podcasting’ behind Dave Winer.

If you have a Technorati account and have claimed your blog, you can specify the tags you want associated with your blog. I looked at this option and it does allow you to specify up to 20 tags for your blog. One problem I noticed though was it didn’t always save my changes. I removed a few generic tags such as ‘Stuff’ (one of my categories) and replaced it with something else. A few minutes later I returned to the entry screen and a number of tags were repeated and some of my original tags were no longer there. Hopefully they’ll fix this.

Overall this should be a very talked about feature. The initial bugs I noticed should be able to be cleaned up. We’ll see how the rest of the blogosphere reacts in the coming days. And unfortunately, we’ll also see how soon the spammers begin to manipulate the results.

Update 9.2.05 I have posted some futher analysis of Blog Finder.