One of my favourite vodcasts embarrasingly has to be Revision3’s ‘Internet Superstar’. They often bestow the great honour of internet superstardom on guests on their shows, but what exactly is an internet superstar?

Wiktionary defines a superstar as ’someone who has accumulated a vast amount of fame and wealth.’ Very few people have accumalted a vast amount of both fame and wealth online, those who have are the likes of Larry Page, but many have received quite a bit of ‘fame’ or ‘wealth’.

It’s my opinion that superstardom is when you are so famous in your field, you’re known to people widely beyond it. How many non-YouTubers will have heard of, for example, Tay Zonday? Not many, yet apparently he’s an internet superstar.

An internet superstar doesn’t yet exist. Plenty of internet celebrities, who are well-known but only in their field (the Internet), exist.

The BBC reports that ICANN are going to vote on Thursday whether or not to open up top level domains, allowing more. This would means many more suffixes than the 281 top level ones (e.g. .uk, .org, .biz, .com, .int) we currently have.

I dislike this move. Why? It would remove the nice way domains are categorised, make domains even more open to intellectual property use and to be honest and create far too many suffixes for it to be convenient to use.

The beauty of domain names to me is what they were intended to represent. .com was supposed to represent a commercial entity, .org was supposed to represent a non-profit, .co.uk to represent a commercial British entity, .int to represent an international organisation and .su to represent the Soviet Union. A key problem with domain names is that ICANN is American-dominated, which messes up this nice system. .com is informally accepted as the US suffix whilst .gov and .mil are officially American; which is surely not ‘right’ due to the international nature of the Internet.

As time went on, domain name categorisation has grown even more polluted. Is there really a need for .name, .aero or .museum? The only reason obscure domain categories like these are introduced is surely to make money. Such obscure suffixes aren’t user friendly; which is easier to remember: www.co-operative.coop or www.co-operative.com?

Some registries polluted the system even more, by advertising their domain for something which wasn’t its original purpose. A famous example of this is .tv, which the Tuvuluan registry designated to be used for television shows. Other examples of ‘domain hacks’ which pollute this system are .at, .fm and .me.

I see no purpose in opening it up. It will confuse people more and make the system more susceptible to abuse (if people register domains for the same reasons they register .info). ICANN describe opening it up as ‘the process of opening up new real estate’ and I guess it is, in a way. In a Superman Returns fashion, they are terraforming to form this real estate. By providing this real estate, there will be more trademark disputes, domain squatting but I guess there will be more money for registries and registrars, but domains themselves will be less valuable.

Toluu is a service which allows you to upload their OPML files and share them. Sharing them allows you to discover more feeds which your contacts read, in addition to seeing which feeds you have in common with other users and new feeds you can discover from them!

If you don’t know, an OPML file is essentially a list of feeds which you subscribe to. Almost all newsreaders can export your feeds to one of these.

Nils kindly gave me an invite to Toluu and I immediately proceeded to exporting my OPML file from NetNewsWire, joining Toluu and importing my OPML.

Joining Toluu in itself is a fairly nifty process. Besides typing in your invite code, there’s very little else you have to do because you have the choice of using OpenID, letting Toluu import profile data off other social sites like Twitter or of course manually inputting it! Toluu can even import your avatar off third-party websites.

Toluu itself is remarkably simple to do, you simply upload your OPML and you’re good to go. You can add friends by finding their profile, but I think it would be fantastic if like Twitter you could download your email contact list into it. You can view your friends’ feeds and there is also a Twitter-like list of recent activity, in which you can see what feeds your friends have added lately.

You can also set Toluu up so that it updates your Twitter profile each time you add a feed. Adding a feed can be done by importing another OPML feed or manually entering the feed’s URL into Toluu.

You can discover new feeds by scouring your friends’ listings, by going onto the page for a feed you read (each feed has a page) and seeing who else subscribes to it and then scouring their listings or by using the ‘matches’ feature which gives recommendations and suggested contacts (it did a fairly accurate job too, pointing me to my fellow Grand Effect member: Paris Lemon!).

The site is fairly user-friendly and doesn’t unnecessarily use Ajax. The whole site is pretty self-explanatory, which is great!

Unfortunately, I have no invites but if you’re already a member feel free to add me as a friend. I’m computer.. I have 10 invites, comment if you want one.

Most people would consider the term ‘business ethics’ oxymoronic, but I imagine most people wouldn’t find the term ‘blogging business’ oxymoronic at all. Personally, I hold the view that a blog shouldn’t be operated as a business, even if it does generate large amounts of money, but should be operated as a ‘blog’.

Businesses generally aren’t social. Businesses operate to make profit. A blog operates to talk the audience, which is social. Whilst being social and profit-orientated can co-exist in any business, I feel that a blog should be more focused on the audience (and the blogger’s creativity) than the pockets of the blogger/owner.

A blog shouldn’t have a business plan, it shouldn’t have numerical targets or specific ways in which to achieve those targets.

Sure, a blogger can have targets, but my binding themselves to numerical targets, I feel that this would increase pressure which would only result in deteriation of quality of blog posts. Strive for quality; don’t strive for 1000 people to read that article. Strive to write things you believe; not what makes you the most money or what is the most popular view.

For me, blogging is a hobby. I realise that to many, especially in one of my blog networks (Grand Effect), it’s a livelihood. I have massive amounts of respect for full-time bloggers for the simple reason that I don’t believe I have enough creativity to churn out a couple of pieces of quality work daily.

My blogging schedule rotates around my real-life, hence the lack of posts over the past week, whilst it must take an awful amount of self-disciple to rotate real-life around blogging. Perhaps that’s why many full-time bloggers see blogging as a business, but I think what inspires a great blog post is experience from the real world… something which you will see much less of if you’re a fulltime blogger.

The minute a blog turns into a business, it ceases being a truly ‘personal’ blog. It’s importan, even if you are blogging for money, that you never truly let your blog become a business and always keep it personal… something which is key to social media and blogging.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation responsible for Wikipedia, are currently holding elections for their Board of Trustees.

Personally, I dislike the Wikimedia Foundation in many ways because I find it overly bureaucratic by furtherly complicating Wikipedia/Wikimedia’s structure, they don’t much (not taking an active role) and quite possibly corrupt (see the Jimbo Wales, our “benevolent dictator for life”, controversies). It’s still arguable that there’s a need for a board, to defend Wikimedia against legal threats and see the administration of donations.

The Wikimedia Community can vote one member to the board for a one year term and this is the time of year we vote. Unless you’re a somewhat active user of a Wikimedia project (such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons or Wiktionary), you probably won’t be able to vote as you need 600 edits on one wiki prior to 1 March 2008 and 50 edits this year on that wiki before 29 May.

This year, there are 15 candidates and Wikimedia are employing preference-based voting using the Schulze method. I have to admit I don’t know any of the candidates, but they generally live in a different wikiworld to users like me!

Many of these candidates are present and active on multiple wikis, which improves their ‘chances’ as they’ll get votes from more and it shows they can communicate across wikis. Some Wikimedians seem to want Wikimedia to be more commercial whilst others seem to want the role of the board reduce.

And do excuse the very boring, very specialist post!