Many, many thanks to those who have wondered where I've been and if I'm OK.  The comments, blog posts and emails are very much appreciated.  It really demonstrates the depth and importance of the friendships and community we build in the blogosphere.

I'm fine.  Just pre-occupied with life's responsibilities.

I've been really busy at work the past few weeks.  Add to that the fact that I started a new job on Monday, and you end up with two or three chaotic and stressful weeks.  Things will settle down shortly and as soon as they do, I'll eagerly resume normal blogging activity.

In the meantime, thanks again for checking on me.

Happy Pi Approximation Day.

Only in the blogosphere: a guy who impersonates someone else complains about invasion of privacy.

I am going to use all of these in future blog posts.  Here's the first one.  Comic Book Guy: "Last night's 'Itchy and Scratchy Show' was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever.  Rest assured, I was on the Internet within minutes, registering my disgust throughout the world."

I knew there was a reason I rarely blog about my job.  Mario Sundar has more.  Those who promote blogging for one thing or another always pretend that corporate non-tech America has or is about to embrace blogging, when the reality is that other than email, corporate non-tech America hasn't even embraced the internet.

When I was a kid I would walk about 2 miles each way to Brown's Gift Shop in my hometown to buy a Matchbox Car every time I could scrape together the $1.25 or so they cost.  Spiders to steamrollers to 12,000 models.  What a great story.

I simply cannot describe how excited I am that Bebo is going to follow Facebook and launch a developer platform.  We're about a month away from every web site being designated a social network.  Give it 9 months and every web site will also have a developer platform.  It reminds me of when the anchovies pile out of their buses to eat at the Krusty Krab.  Part of the problem, of course, is that even social networking sites you didn't know existed get $20M.

I'm glad I dumped Norton Antivirus.  So far, I am really happy with Kaspersky.

People have been blogging blindly for years.  It's no wonder so many people Twitter the same way.

Twangville on the new Gourds record.

Scoble does a much needed Sam Donaldson on a post by Dave Winer about Feedburner.  I expressed my concern when Google bought Feedburner.  I think it's interesting that a lot of the people worried about Feedburner and Google taking over all the information in the universe still run their feed links through Feedburner, all in the name of some needless stat tracking.  You can't have it both ways.

Until today, I have unsuccessfully waged my own private war against tiny text size on the internet.  Some sites use a default text size that renders microscopically on larger monitors at higher resolutions.  Changing the default text size at the browser level isn't a solution, because then the text size on many sites is way too big.  It has been extremely frustrating.

Occasionally I google around in search of a solution.  Today I found one.  And based on 30 minutes of surfing around and actually being able to read the words on pages, I proclaim it the greatest Firefox extension ever.

NoSquint is the long awaited answer to the text size problem.

It allows you to set a default zoom level for all pages within Firefox (the suggested 120% works well for me).  The best part is that you can also set individual zoom levels on a per site basis.  This allows me to automatically increase the absurdly small Netvibes text to 140% and the almost as absurdly small My Yahoo text to 130%.

This may be the most significant advance in my internet experience since broadband.

I am very happy, though I can't resist firing one last shot across the bow of the young and eagle-eyed developers who ignore text size issues: why does it take an extension to do what the sites themselves should already offer via the personalization settings?

Steve Rubel and company have come up with a new way to measure influence.  I agree that Technorati's George Jetson on the link treadmill approach is flawed.  I sort of agree that activity behind the walls of the social networks needs to be considered.  The problem is that no matter how you pretty it up, the bottom line is that you are measuring popularity much more than authority.  The same factors that keep the blogstars at the top of the links list will keep them at the top of this new list too.  I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with that, and even if there is, sometimes the best mousetrap is the one we have.

Dwight on becoming a zombie ninja on Facebook and his Comcast experience so far.  Like Dwight, my internet access has been down intermittently since Comcast took over, whereas it was solid for years before.  Maybe it's a coincidence, or maybe not.  Time will tell.  I just got 6370 down and 355 up.

Frank has an interesting post on a different kind of Gatekeeper.

The Groundhog Post was back in my reader as a new post again today (see prior discussion).

Richard MacManus asks the question of the moment.  I think Facebook is the evolved AOL, but I think that content creators will ultimately gravitate away from walls placed between them and their desired audience.

Scott Adams on when the bull wins.  Funny, and hard to argue with.

InstaBloke has 10 ways to improve your blog.  I think all of them are spot on, but let me give a special shout out to way number 9.

Chris Brogan on 3 things LinkedIn does better than Facebook.  I have a 4th: create an experience designed for businesspeople as opposed to college kids looking to hook up.  I understand that Facebook has many more community-building tools, and for that reason I use it.  But I still feel a little embarrassed when I log in.  Just a terminology rewrite (poking someone, for crying out loud?) would be a good start.

In the Year 2525: Jeremiah Owyang on the future of corporate websites.  Good list, but I don't see how item 9 (which I believe in strongly) and item 5 are consistent.  My biggest problem with all the social networks is that they appropriate content created by users for the betterment of the social network's brand.  I also don't think mainstream corporate America is going to embrace anything remotely resembling social networking- the same sites many of them currently block completely.

I agree with Joe Wickert.  The only hope for newspapers is to go hyper-local.  I haven't subscribed to a "big city" newspaper in a decade, but I still subscribe to the weekly paper from my hometown- where I haven't lived since 1978.

I noticed when I searched for the above link that one of my old buddies, Bernard Stubbs ("De Duk Mon"), passed away this month.  He was a fine man.  I have many of his carved decoys, which are among the finest wood carvings I have ever seen.  He was the coroner in our county for years, which was the reason I referred to him in my song Ghosts in the Graveyard (mp3):

The duck man saw it from a mile away
The duck man saw it from a mile away
He knows first hand
The price you pay
When the need for love leads you astray
The duck man saw it from a mile away

I'll miss De Duk Mon.  He was one of a kind and loved by all.

iMacros for Firefox looks like a very useful application.  I'm going to give it a try.

Here's a neat trick to get your pigs back inside the fence.  I challenge every one of you to randomly tell this to an elevator full of strangers tomorrow and then blog about the response.

Will Truman is rapidly becoming one of my favorite bloggers.  Here's the latest on Kyle, who is also Quen and Quenton.  I still think about this post at least once a day.  Highly recommended.

PC World (and getting moreso every minute, but I digress) has 10 fast fixes for nagging PC problems.  None of them are as nagging as this one was, which is thankfully fixed.

Funny: The Great Web Crash of 2007.  (via JD Lasica)

Steve Spalding has done a lot of work and put a lot of thought into a very good read on defining Web 3.0.  My take: the problem with the evolution of the webs is the same as the evolution of everything else.  There is a developmental tension between those looking to create something for the greater good and those looking to create something to generate personal wealth.  My view (utopian as it may be) of Web 3.0 (or perhaps 4.0 or later) is that it exists outside of walls and the people who create the content receive the benefit of that content.  Currently, the people who host (nice word) or cage (another word) the content get the benefit.  Eventually, the content creators will realize this imbalance and the content will migrate to the vast open plains.  This will benefit the greater population, but will be bad for the prospectors who have staked their claims in social networking, etc.  Which is why it hasn't happened yet.

I will be so happy when people stop trying to stuff corporate America into Second Life.  Russell Shaw nails it.  Which is not to say that Second Life isn't cool or fun.  But someone decided that cool and fun wasn't enough.  That was where things got screwed up.   

Looks like Deadwood may not come back to HBO at all.  Previously, there was a plan to finish the story via a couple of 2 hour movies.  Let me say it again: I will no longer watch ANY new network or cable shows that are designed to last longer than a season.  I will simply time shift by a season or two via Netflix.

Warner Crocker on the various sharing applications that compete for our attention and, as Warner points out, money.  I agree that Facebook might just implode under the weight of application bloat.  But I have also found that a lot of the people I converse with or want to converse with in the blogosphere are active on Facebook.  I get a friend invitation every couple of days, generally from someone I know via the blogopshere.  If people go where their "friends" are, it is hard to deny that Facebook has traction.  I just wish they'd change their interface and terminology to something more "grown up" so I could go there and not have to forget that I'm 46 years old.  I use both Twitter and Pownce a little.  I like the Pownce interface better at the moment, but there's a lot more activity on Twitter.

On a related note, Doc sums up in a few words the way I and many others feel about all these so-called social networks:  "Social groups to which I belong in the physical world do not compete. They do not carry advertising. They do not have business models. They are not gathered so somebody else can make money. Except maybe at work. Maybe."  We needed Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL back in the day to lead us to the gold we were seeking, be it money, information or fun.  The wilderness has been conquered now and the only network we need is the internetwork.

Chip Camden is now writing for TechRepublic.  Here's his first post.

Dwight has a must read for those who have hastily installed wireless routers.

The Groundhog Post was back in my reader tonight, as a new post.  Twice.  Then I noticed the URL for the first time.  Surely people are not going to start blasting out the same advertisement post feed over and over and over and over again?  Jake, please tell me this is a technical problem.

Twangville on the new Richard Shindell record, South of Delia.  Note that they mention Are You Happy Now, my vote for the best folk/rock song ever written, near the end of the post.  Told ya.

We just got home from a weekend at the Hill Country Hyatt in San Antonio.  I spoke at a conference there yesterday, so we went up Friday and made a weekend out of it.

It's one of our favorite nearby vacation spots.  Highly recommended for families.

While there, I heard a great Loudon Wainwright III song for the first time, which quickly became our vacation theme song.

Delaney and Cassidy by the pool

Behind the pool is a large, circular river, called appropriately the lazy river, where you can tube in a circle for hours on end.  We did.  It's impossible to overstate how cool and fun the lazy river is.

Delaney in the hot tub

Hanging out by the pool

I have a new batch of Pownce invites.  Post requests here via comment (with your email address if I don't already have it).  Same rules apply as last time (invitees must agree to come back to the comments here and invite anyone left in the queue).

281 channels and nothing to read.  Boring day in the blogosphere today.

I didn't know there were 10 Twitter applications, but here are the top 10 according to Read/WriteWeb.

TVSquad found out what would have happened had Drive not been canned like every other new network TV show.

Chris Kasten on the challenges of the no nofollow movement.  I delete spam every morning from my comments, and I have a captcha and a nofollow tag.  It just amazes me how many things assholes in search of an easy buck screw up for the rest of us: comments, telephones, email, fax machines.  The list goes on and on.

I need at least 3 more segments to make an Evening Reading post, so the next three posts that pop up in my reader and aren't about cats will get linked.  Bloggers start your keyboards.

10 minutes later, nothing.  I think everyone fell asleep in front of their computers.  I'm feeling a bit drowsy...need a diversion.

I visited Facebook.  Here's what's going on there.  Steve and Liz are my newest friends.  If they were really my friends, they'd publish a post so I can finish this one.  Liz says you should never finish a blog post, maybe this is nature's way of telling me in a blog (anyone remember Spirit?).  Ayelet and I are going to fight global warming.  I'm pretty sure if Ayelet told me to fight Evander Holyfield I'd do it.  Mario has a very interesting read about the blogging process.  It's available outside of Facebook on his blog.  I had not seen that Wikipedia excerpt.  I find this part very descriptive and compelling: "Some people describe feeling driven to keep a diary, often as a way to put their existence into perspective."

Need 3 more things to write about.  Back to my reader, and Eureka! 

1) Chris Kasten gets a two-fer, with a very good read on Omnidrive and Box.net.  I still want one of those online storage services to do a Pownce interface so I can save the songs Brian and others share to my online storage account right from Pownce.

2) Marek Uliasz on water photography.

3) Will Truman on Picture Day.  I almost wrote above about his earlier post today on The Middle Sister, which is some fantastic writing, but I felt like I might be tuning in halfway through the story.  If this doesn't make you dive for the link to go read that post, I don't know what will: "She's an avowed communist, crusading environmental lawyer, sometimes more proud of her Russian citizenship than her American citizenship and currently living in the Philippines."  Man, I want a 300, no 600 page novel about life on the Corrigan compound.

I did pretty darn good just picking the next 3 posts to show up.

I'm not sure what that says about all the effort I generally spend selecting posts the old fashioned way.

The first edition of Steve Gillmor's new videocast, Bad Sinatra, is online.  I just watched it, and here are my thoughts.

First a mild criticism: I had no earthly idea who some of those people are.  If (and I recognize this is an if) Steve is doing this for a wider audience than the deeply tech-connected, he ought to put the names of the people at the bottom of the screen, or at least say their names occasionally.

He also ought to turn off his phone, but since he didn't edit it out, the phone calls must be part of the vibe he's after.

Steve and Dan Farber debated iPods and iPhones in the lobby of The Palace Hotel in San Francisco, where I met Steve last year.  Their conversation was very interesting, and captured some of the magic of the good Gillmor Gang episodes.  Steve saying he loved Macs because they "suck a lot less" than PCs was funny.  Dan nailed it when he said iPhones are not corporate phones because they don't do corporate email...yet.

Steve was apparently mad at Dan for doing a podcast with Jason Calacanis.  It wasn't entirely clear why, maybe because it's too close to a Gillmor Gang reunion.  Again, maybe the insiders understand all the background, but lots of people will be left wondering.  I liked it that Dan tried to debunk the idea that Office is dead.  Given that corporate America, where the most profitable software is sold, is NEVER going to migrate to Google Docs, how can Office be dead?  Microsoft Works may be dead at the hands of Google Docs, but not Office.

Mike Arrington didn't seem all that happy to be on camera, and added nothing of substance other than his involvement.

I was happy to see Doc Searls participating.  He talked about VRM and conferences and some snack bar Steve had.  Smart and funny guy.  To paraphrase Christopher Walken, "more Doc Searls!"

I'm not much of a videocast watcher, so it's hard for me to make comparisons to other shows.  I found some of the stuff pretty inaccessible, as if I was eavesdropping on a conversation between some people I don't know (even though I know some of them).  It seemed sort of random and chaotic.

On the other hand, the whole of the videocast is somehow greater than the sum of the parts.  I can see how, with a little practice (and editing), Steve could capture some classic moments on film.

Bottom line: I'm not sold on it yet, but I'll watch the next episode and see if it grows on me.

It's been six months, hasn't it?
In some circles that is half a year.
The Countess - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

The topic cycle in the blogosphere has spun back around to comments, and whether you ought to have them, not have them, moderate them yourselves, let users self-moderate, splice a blog and a message board together, or hire Scoble as your personal Vanna White.

The process begins when one egghead or another either gets too much comment spam or intellectual pushback (depending on the egghead's frame of mind) and declares that comments are either a pain in the ass or unnecessary.  Then some other eggheads (me in this case) mount a nerdy defense of comments.  After a day or so a third group of eggheads start saying some other ridiculous stuff and the nerd herd moves on.

Nerdily, I say unto thee...

Anyone who knows the first thing about blogging knows that to be successful a blog needs to create and nurture a sense of community.  Comments are by far the best way to do that.  Even those who naively view their blogs as a path to riches need comments because advertisers covet stickiness- the ability to keep readers onsite. Again, interactivity is the best way to achieve that.

This is why even newspapers have comments.

Recently when David Ritcheson tragically leapt to his death from a cruise ship, it was a commenter who first identified him (the victim of an earlier horrific attack that had been in the news), at the bottom of an early report that a then unidentified person had jumped or fallen off a cruise ship.  Take a look at the online edition of your newspaper, I bet you'll see an effort to develop a community of commenters.  Newspapers know how to sell ads, and they know the goal is to have a crowd of people interacting at your site.  Why do some bloggers ignore the need for interactivity by either not having or not nurturing comments?

I can think of four reasons, only the first of which is makes any sense.

First, if your blog is largely a vehicle used to market some larger product.  In my opinion, Seth Godin is an example of this.  Seth is, among other things, an author, speaker and a marketing guy.  His blog is a way to showcase his expertise in a way that gives the reader value while marketing his books and speaking services.  Seth believes that having comments changes his blog (and more importantly his writing) in a way that detracts from his vision and purpose for his blog.  I don't really agree with his approach, but it works for him.  Not coincidentially, Seth has a very high profile both in and out of the blogosphere.  Don't get me wrong, Seth seems like a cool guy and the fact that I, who am all about conversation, read his blog every day tells you all you need to know about my opinion of his value and writing skills.  But what works for Seth won't work for most bloggers.

Second, if you're not willing to spend the time to manage, nurture and moderate your comments.  Comments are mini-message boards and having developed a number of very popular message board sites, I can tell you that unchecked interaction performed in a remote and semi-anonymous way will descend into chaos 100% of the time.  Comments have a shorter half-life than message board threads, so the chaos takes longer to develop.  But between the spammers and the disrupters, chaos will eventually reign in comments left unchecked.  There are lots of ways to address the comment problem: pre-approval of commenters (too restrictive for me), holding comments for approval (not real time enough for me), using a captcha (my current approach), manually deleting spam and disruptive comments (my original approach, abandoned long ago in the midst of a spam flood), etc.  It takes a little work, but if you're trying to grow a blog without comments, you are making your job much harder than it has to be.  For 95% of the bloggers out there, I would say if you aren't willing to have comments, why are you blogging?  It would be much better to write 50% less posts and devote half your blogging time to moderating and participating in your comments threads.  Don't forget the participating part.  Lots of bloggers do.

Third, you start believing your own BS and forget that it takes luck and timing in addition to brains and hard work to be hugely successful- regardless of how success is measured.  These folks aren't interested in community building because to them they are the community.  And, of course, in our celebrity-driven culture, a number of tourists will eagerly line up at the door, hoping for a glimpse.  The tourists may get a souvenir or two, but that's a by-product of the greater purpose: for the celebrity-cum-blogger to remain in the anaconda-like grip of the self-congratulatory hug.  Some of these folks actually have comments, but they are generally intended for tributes as opposed to conversation and discussion.  I don't put any of the participants I have read in this latest discussion in that group, but there are a lot of them out there.

Fourth, of course, is to generate a response and get people talking.  Sort of like I'm doing now, which reminds me of a quote from Spaceballs (that under-appreciated classic).

"The Ring! I can't believe you fell for the oldest trick in the book! What a fool, what's with you man, c'mon?" 

In addition to the predictability of the blogosphere, there are a couple of other points to be made here.

As Mathew Ingram points out, there are a few people who read blogs who, um, don't have a blog (I think the number is small, but existent).  And then there's the fact that the very large majority of the people who think they don't need comments would rather drive an American made car than respond to cross-blog conversation from some blogger outside their circle.

Comments are integral to the blogging experience.  Sure, they take some work.

But for almost all of us, they are worth it.

Paging all RSS gurus.

I have a question.  In these media driven days, why do RSS feeds only have a single enclosure?  I'm sure there are plenty of good and/or bad reasons for this, and I suspect the topic has been beat to death by those more learned in RSS than me.  But I couldn't find a satisfactory answer when I googled it the other day.  It just seems odd that I can do a music post that looks like this on my blog, but only has a single enclosure in the feed.

It's sort of a disincentive for further music related posts.

What is the reason for this?  Will it ever change?

Can any of my RSS gurus (or anyone else knowledgeable) explain this to me?

Blender has 100 days that changed music.  Like all of these lists, it's very biased towards the present, but it's an interesting read.  I can't believe Justin and Britney splitting is number 12.  Are you kidding me?

Now you can post to Twitter and Pownce at the same time.  I'm not sure why I'd ever want to do that, but I'll sleep better tonight knowing it's possible.  If someone wants to do something useful, figure out a way to associate a Box.net account with a Pownce account, so you can automatically save files sent to you via Pownce.

Dave Wallace has the best post I've ever read on technology access, with emphasis on access by people with disabilities.

Micahville has a list of 69 tech sites that don't suck.  Many thanks for including Newsome.Org on that list.  It is an honor to be included. even if I am number 12, just like Justin and Britney.  Also, many thanks to Steve Spalding for including me on this list.

Tris Hussey on moving beyond blogging to community: "So if you're wondering why no one is reading your blog, or linking, or commenting... step out, find other blogs in your niche.  Read them, leave a comment or three, start a conversation, link to them, send an e-mail, just start that friendship building process and the rest will follow."  Good advice.  Here's some more good conversation advice from Penelope Trunk.

Someone please (really) explain to me how Ning is worth $214M.  If you follow the money in Web 2.0, where does it go?  In other words, who is pushing all the product that is actually getting sold as a result of all the ads that are served by all these web sites?  Or are we just moving money around like furniture...

Tom Morris has moved his blog to Tommorris.org.

I outsmarted them this time- I never watched a second of Traveler.

Chris Brogan explains that Twitter is the Matrix.

Groundhog Feed: this post from Jake Ludington has appeared in my reader as a new post almost every day since he wrote it.  I don't think he's tweaking it like a manuscript, so there must be some higher force at work.  There are several other feeds gone wild in my reader doing more or less the same thing.  Is this just a Bloglines problem?

Paul Lester has written the blogosphere equivalent of Free Bird.  I'm dead serious- that is one beautiful post.

Paging William Meloney.  I want to subscribe to your feed, but auto-discovery doesn't work and the feed link at the bottom returns only some old posts.  What is your feed URL?  And why isn't it at the top of your excellent blog?

I'm not one of those complicated, mixed-up cats.
I'm not looking for the secret to life...
I just go on from day to day, taking what comes.
- Frank Sinatra

Steve Gillmor writes that he is about to launch a new show (which I interpret as a podcast) called Bad Sinatra.  It looks like this is the web site.  I wonder if the name was in any way inspired by the hilarious, and completely kid-unfriendly, movie Bad Santa?

Steve (hopefully with Doc Searls) doing a podcast is very good news and I look forward to hearing Steve and his guests talk about whatever they choose to talk about.  It got a little weird near the end, but discovering the Gillmor Gang podcast was the online equivalent of a before and after experience.  Some of the conversation on that show was as witty, intelligent and entertaining as a podcast can be.  I realize, as someone who created and then abandoned a podcast, that the reach of a podcast is an open question, but suffice it to say that when it was good, the Gillmor Gang set a podcast standard that hasn't been matched since.  And I continue to wonder why no one else has tried a similar format in Texas or other locales.

I'm looking forward to Bad Sinatra.  Now if we can get Steve to blog a little more.

So we can read more of his thoughts on the whole social networking mess that we've been wrestling with.  Spot on thoughts like this:

[W]e all make contributions to the state of mind we call this social network of ours. You can call it attention, or intention, or VRM, or Twitter, or whatever.  But it still represents our hope to make some difference, to leave a footprint in the cement out in front of the theatre of our lives. We take it a lot more seriously than we let on, but like high school we pretend that it doesn't hurt when we're insulted, passed by, snickered at, or worst of all, not noticed.

And this:

The politics of personality swamp us with messages that need to be triaged much like we used to parse advertising.  Is this the program wrapped in signals or signals disguised as programming?  Yes.  It's an ugly space we're in, and nobody holds the high ground. We're all selling something, and of course it's ourselves.

Yep, I'm looking forward to Bad Sinatra.

As an aside, I found the iPhonomics and podosphere domain stuff Steve wrote about interesting.  I remember when Stowe Boyd auctioned off the Podosphere.com domain name on eBay last year.  He got a whopping $103 for it.  Not much has happened with it since. 

Richard MacManus on how to turn a blog into a career.  Kent Newsome on how to make a small fortune in the blogosphere: "Start with a large fortune."

I love me some Mashable, but Pete Cashmore seems to be calling for more serious articles about serious tech and less blogospats about who did what to whom.  Where's the fun in that?

Consumerist says it caught a Geek Squad technician stealing data from a customer's computer.

I can't even decipher what this means, but I'm pretty sure I don't agree with it.  I'm also pretty sure there's a finger pointing pot in there somewhere.

Pramit Singh has some good thoughts on citizen journalism.

Chip Camden gives us a preview of Web 9.0.  There are sites today, Zooomr being one of them, that I would love to use, but can't log in.  And Chip is right- it's only going to get worse.

D'Arcy Norman on owning your content.  Amen.

Dan Santow has some more good grammar tips.  I often get the titled/entitled thing wrong.

Get your Blogging Tips from Douglas Karr at The Marketing Technology Blog.  I'm getting mine (maybe) via his blog-tipping series.

I vote for lima beans, which we call butter beans.  Great blues song too.  Hey Frank, who is that?

I'm still not feeling the cats, but this made me laugh out loud (as opposed to cringe).

Psychology Today has a list of 10 Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature.

Earl Moore has 10 really good tips for connecting with others, both online and off.  This is a must read.

That sinking feeling: I currently have a RAID 0 configuration, but I'm not sure I'd do it again.  I'd probably use RAID 1 for my data and a separate, regular hard drive for my OS.

Couldn't do the Presidents?  How about the states?  I get hopelessly lost on the New England states. (via Rob Gale)

Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana (that's one of Townes Van Zandt's old jokes).  Here's how to get rid of them with a soda bottle trap.

Liz Strauss on compliments and apologies.  I spoke with Liz the other night as a part of her BAD blogger series.  She's a smart and thoughtful person and a very good writer.

Dwight says the first beta for Vista SP1 will be out next week.  If they'd just fix the jacked up way Vista deals with the importation and review of digital photos, I'd be happy.  I find Windows Photo Gallery to be virtually unusable, mainly because it seems to advance through photos by eights (from 12 to 20 to 28, etc.) and I have seen entire civilizations rise and fall in the time it takes to move a large set of photos from a flash card to my hard drive.

(by and via Hugh)

I think I see a lot of people I know in there, probably because I have been their neighbor at times.  I suspect there will be psychology text books written one day analyzing the evolution of the blogosphere as the greatest social experiment of this century.

And we're still in the hunter gatherer stage.

Scott Adams, who is a hypnotist in addition to being the creator of Dilbert and an all-around interesting dude, has a very interesting and informative post about hypnosis.  I learned more about hypnosis in the few minutes it took to read Scott's post than I had learned from all the other information I've come across in my prior 46 years.  Including the time I was hypnotized by the Amazing Kreskin.

It was around 1979-80, while I was in college.  Kreskin came to Wake Forest and did a show in Wait Chapel, where large assemblies and concerts were held at the time.

Some buddies and I went to the show and, at some point, Kreskin asked for volunteers from the audience who would agree to be hypnotized.  After reading Scott's post, I suspect that taking volunteers is a way to increase the likelihood of success by obtaining a group of ready and willing subjects.  All I know is that I raised my hand and was picked, along with a few other people.  We went on stage and sat in some chairs that were placed in a semi-circle.

After giving us the pre-talk Scott writes about, he did a few inductions (I now know the proper lingo), and made us imagine that we were either really hot or really cold.  I don't remember too much about this part, but I must have responded, because he picked me to do a further, more detailed hypnosis.

First, he had me sit and talked me though the relaxation process, very much the way Scott describes.  I remember everything that happened.  I remember feeling very relaxed, but I also remember wondering during the early stages if it was "working."  As I soon found out, it was.

This was during the "who shot J.R." period of the then very popular Dallas TV series.  It was after J.R. was shot, but before we knew who did it.  I didn't watch the show, but like everyone else in America I knew who J.R. was and I knew the general story line.

At some point during the process Kreskin told me that when he brought me out of the trance (to borrow that misleading word), I would know who shot J.R.  I have some vague recollection of him telling me that, but I don't recall making any conclusions about who did it at that moment.

He then brought me back to normal consciousness and told me he had a question for me.  I said OK, and he said "do you know who shot J.R.?"  "Yes," I replied.  "Can you tell us?" he asked.  I immediately pointed at some lady I did not know in the audience and said "that lady right there did."  Everyone howled with laughter.  I remember thinking how weird it was to say that, but I don't remember anything about the decision process that led to me picking that particular lady.  I just somehow decided that she was the one, and for a moment or two it all made sense to me.

At no point was I unconscious or unaware of what was going on around me.  I just felt a little out of it, like I was sleepy or maybe in that state between reality and a dream- but closer to a sleepy reality.  It was weird.

But really fun.

As I've mentioned before, I've read a lot of blogs over the years.  During that time, I've developed some serious likes and dislikes.  My personal belief is that every reader is important, and unless you are at the very top of the Technorati 100, you should work hard to retain every reader.  Conversely, you should avoid things that may cause readers to unsubscribe from your blog.

I'll cover the likes in a series of posts when my swivel feeds experiment is over.  For now, in honor of 7-7-07, here are the seven quickest ways to get removed from my reading list.

1) Use partial feeds.  Unless you write like Cormac McCarthy, you are generally pissing up a rope by trying to force me to your web site in the name of ads, or whatever other illogical and self-defeating reason led you to use partial feeds.  This is especially true for newer and less known bloggers.  Darren Rowse may be able to get away with it, but you almost certainly can't.  If Scoble can push a full feed out the door, so can you.  When my swivel feeds list is complete and I start pruning my personal reading list, partial feeds will be the number one reason blogs get axed.  Not only will these blogs lose a reader, they will also lose the potential for links and cross-blog conversation.

2) Engage in excessive self/blog promotion.  When someone tells you how smart they are, they are almost always lying.  I don't want to read post after post about what a genius you are.  Let me make my own decision based on your writing.  I also don't want to read post after post about your latest give-away or whatever to get people to visit/link/subscribe to your blog.  Don't misunderstand, occasional give-aways, contests, etc. done the right way are both appropriate, fun and productive.  But if you're spending more time acting like a carnival barker than a writer, you are not going to stay on my reading list- or many others.

3) Don't reciprocate conversation/links.  While linking to me and/or commenting here is a very good way to get on my reading list, it's in no way a prerequisite.  It's simply a polite way to tell me about your blog (I subscribe immediately to the large majority of people who link and/or comment, and those who keep my attention get a permanent place in my feeds).  Once you get on my reading list, I will likely reach out to you conversationally.  But, over time, if you don't respond or, even worse, tend to link around me, I'll conclude that you aren't interested in conversing with me and I'll move on.

4) Add scads of junk or filler to your feeds.  One common example of this is posting a big series of photos on your otherwise non-photo blog as separate blog posts.  This results in the Engadget Effect, whereby I get overwhelmed by the sheer number of posts.  Get a Flickr account and post a link to a photo set instead.  You might think the photos of trees and buildings and whatnot from your recent trip to Peoria are fascinating.  I probably don't.  And even if I do, I can see them better via a Flickr set.

5) Bombard me with ads.  I understand about the need to make a little money.  Really, I do.  But just like TV, if the ads overwhelm the content, I will turn the channel.  I am willing to suffer through an unobtrusive ad or two - even in feeds - but I won't suffer through a bunch of ads for a bit of content.  And if you want to get deleted from my reading list immediately, combine partial feeds with banner ads in your feeds.  I dive for the unsubscribe button when that happens.

6) Use a lot of gratuitous profanity.  Anyone who knows me via my job knows that I have been known to curse like the proverbial sailor when provoked.  It's not one of my better qualities, but it demonstrates that I am far from a prude.  Nevertheless, when I'm reading a blog post or watching a video post and every other word is an F-Bomb, it really turns me off.  If you can't make your point without a bunch of gratuitous profanity, then either your point or your writing skills are lacking.

7) Ignore/dismiss the other side of the issue.  I can't stand most talk radio simply because the hosts can only see one side of the issue and either ignore or attack those who feel differently.  If there aren't two sides to an issue, then why write about it?  And if there is another side to the issue, then address it logically and rationally.  It's OK to feel strongly, but if you really feel that way (and are not merely regurgitating what someone spoon-fed you), you should be able to explain why.

Those are the fastest ways to get deleted from my reading list.

What are the fastest ways to get deleted from yours?

This is an update on my swivel feeds experiment, in which I ask bloggers I read to help me rebuild my reading list by adding 5 of their favorite blogs to the list.  I've had a very positive response so far, and my new reading list is coming together nicely, with a diverse and interesting mix of bloggers.  When the list is complete, I will share it and upload an OPML file for those who are interested.

Here's how it works.  Every few days I ask a group of 8 of my favorite bloggers to each recommend 5 blogs to add to the list.  I post the recommended blogs in a subsequent update, and add them to my swivel feeds list.  Each update has a list of the recent blog recommendations, followed by the next 8 bloggers I am asking to add blogs to the list. 

Here are the swivel feeds recommendations so far from the seventh group, plus any stragglers from prior groups.  Note that, when possible, I designate blogs by the name of the blogger, because I like to know who I'm talking to.

There has been some confusion about who is supposed to recommend what.  The single column list below are the new blogs that got added to the list by the last group of bloggers.  The new list of bloggers I am asking to add blogs to the list is near the bottom of this post.

RECENT ADDITIONS 

Blog Business Summit
Brian Oberkirch
Dogster Blog
FresHDV
Giovanni Rodriguez
Imagethief
Mike Manuel
One Degree
PaidContent
Paper Ghost
Shel Israel
Stuart Brown
TED Blog
Think

I have subscribed to all of the recommended blogs, and all but one are new additions to my reading list.

The blogs listed above join the following prior recommendations and participants in the sixth edition of my new reading list.  Links to inform others about our swivel feeds collaborative reading list experiment would be much appreciated, but are by no means a condition to inclusion.

SWIVEL FEEDS LIST TO DATE

From Group 7, I haven't received recommendations from John Dvorak, John Watson, Karl Martino, Kevin Briody, Kevin Hales, Kevin Maney or Larry Borsato.  From Group 6, I haven't received recommendations from JD Lasica, Jeneane Sessum, Jeremy Zawodny or Jimmy Huen.  My general policy is to assume non-participation after 2 weeks.

From Group 5, Guy Kawasaki, Henry Blodget and Hugh MacLeod did not make any recommendations.  All have been dropped from the swivel feeds list.  Hugh and Guy get a "sponsor's exemption" and will remain on my personal reading list.

Now for the next 8 bloggers each of whom I am asking to add 5 blogs to the list:

NEW LIST OF BLOGGERS TO ADD 5 BLOGS TO THE LIST

Louis Gray: We certainly don't always agree on everything, but I enjoy his blog- even when he is crapping all over me :)

Marc Canter: Marc is a long time read and the CEO of Broadband Mechanics, the company behind People Aggregator.

Mark Evans: Another long time read who writes about tech, telecom and other interesting issues.

Martin Gordon: One more long time read, who writes about tech, social networks and other interesting stuff.

Matt Moran: A relatively new blog in my feeds list, Matt is into family, tech and music- also my three favorite things.

Michael Parekh: Even though he's a Tarheel (Go Deacs), I've read his blog for a long time.  He writes about lots of tech-related topics.

Mike Seyfang: I met Mike through Dave Wallace, and enjoy both this blog and his podcast.

Niall Kennedy: I started reading Niall when he was at Technorati.  He's now a web technologist living in San Francisco. 

That's the eighth group of bloggers I'm asking to help rebuild my reading list.  If you're willing, please recommend 5 of your favorite blogs to add to the list.  Use your blog, the comments or email, whichever you prefer.

SiliconUser has an interesting read about the history of the compact disc.

Here's a neat little quiz.  Can you name all the U.S. Presidents in 10 minutes?  I thought I'd be able to, but nope.

Donna Bogatin: "As the virtual social networking 'friendship' race to claim more 'friends' than the next Web guy (or gal) intensifies, the real value of REAL social networking is obscured amidst the online popularity game."

Paul Stamatiou reviews the Slingbox AV.

I generally avoid political and religious topics, but this is about as messed up as something can be.

Rick Mahn on the Twitter advantage.   

Mike Malone on how Pownce came to be.

Here's the iPhone Musical.  Very clever.

Valleywag: When all else fails launch a social network.  Ain't that the truth.

Yahoo Bill Pay joins the deadpool.

Rafat Ali reports that Backfence, once the poster child for aggregated citizen journalism, is shuttering all 13 of its local-news based web sites.

You remember Backfence.  It is/was, to quote the American Journalism Review, "a series of hyperlocal, news-oriented web sites whose tone and content - news, commentary, blogs, photos, calendar listings - would be supplied primarily by the people who knew each community best, its residents."  It was one of 6 citizen journalism ventures that were mentioned in a December 9, 2004 article in the Washington Post that said:

Several notable ventures have launched or raised money this year to create local news sites online in which readers contribute all or most of the news. The big idea is that citizen-generated content lowers costs and creates more loyal audiences.

Of the 6 notable ventures mentioned in that article, here's how they fared in the ensuing two and a half years:

Three of them: iBrattleboro.com, NorthwestVoice and Wikinews are still in business.  The first two have overcome My-Space-like design problems and are still accepting submissions.  Wikinews doesn't seem all that local to me, unless North America is local, but is still going strong.

Advance Internet seems to have evolved into merely a directory of NJ-related blogs.  I can't tell if there is a more formal relationship between the blogs, thanks to a most unhelpful About page.

GoSkokie seems to have joined Backfence in the deadpool.

Which translates to a 50% survival rate.  That's probably better than the survival rates for a lot of other businesses over the same two and a half year period.  And, unlike Backfence, many of those businesses didn't have $3M in venture capital funding to work with.  That fact being the epitome of both a blessing and a curse. 

More significantly, I don't believe the failure of Backfence or the survival of iBrattleboro.com and NorthwestVoice says anything one way or the other about the future or viability of citizen journalism- at least not the way I view true citizen journalism.  All of those web sites, as well as more than a few others that have attached themselves to the citizen media movement, have the very distinct look and feel of old media- old media that is still not entirely comfortable with the whole online thing.  Sure, accepting submissions for publication is a neat idea (and no doubt helps lower expenses), but lots of old media offline publications do that.  True citizen journalism the way I view it is journalism by citizens, for citizens, published by citizens and controlled by citizens.

Not so much people writing and submitting articles to the online editions of a dying newspaper industry.  Or to web sites that look more like a newspaper than a blog.  Everybody always blows right past this point, but the citizens who create the journalism should demand the right to serve and control that content from their own platform and for their own benefit.  Not from some online quasi-paper, not behind the walls of some ad-happy social network and not for the pecuniary benefit of third parties.  A story submission button and a comments section does not equate to citizen journalism. 

It's the combination of content creation and aggregation that mucks everything up.  Just like musicians don't need the record labels any more, journalists don't need the newspaper platform- or a semi-collaborative photocopy of one.  The aggregation of content is better left to the Diggs, Techmemes and blog comments.  Or even better, to feed lists tailored to the interest of the reader.

Let me say it again.  If you are are a citizen (as opposed to a member of traditional media) working your tail off to create content to then turn around and give that content to others who control its distribution and/or make all or most of the money off of it, you are neither citizen nor journalist.  You are at best an employee and, more likely, an indentured scribe.  You are an ant in another's farm.  Why do people not get this?  Someone queue that Apple commercial.

Rather, the true citizen journalism is occurring simultaneously on distributed blogs of thousands of learned bloggers out there.  Bloggers like Scott Karp, Phil Sim, the guys and gals at Mashable, Nick Carr, Donna Bogatin, Mathew Ingram,  TDavid, Tony Hung, Twangville, Don Dodge, J.P. Rangaswami, Jeff Pulver, Stereogum, Rex Hammock and Rafat's PaidContent.Org.  And those are just a few that I noticed when glancing at my feeds list.  There are easily a hundred more on that list.  Maybe two hundred.

The future of citizen journalism is in the hands of people writing the blogs about the events that are happening around them.  The path of citizen journalism will be mapped starting from the citizen/blogger side of the phrase, not from the journalism/old media side.  At its core, citizen journalism is about learning how to distribute reliable information without being chained to a platform or gateway.  It's equal access reporting where the readership picks the winners.

Maybe Backfence was a pioneer and, as the AJR article says, destined to be the one with arrows in their backs. And maybe Backfence led the way for a segment of the trip.  But the journey has just begun and citizen journalism as it looks today is merely a working sketch of what citizen journalism will become.

Great Lake Swimmers are a Toronto based folk/rock band led by singer/songwriter Tony Dekker.  Their self titled first record was recorded in a silo in Ontario.  This sounds like my kind of band in more ways than one.

Their newest record, Ongiara, was released in May.  One look at the people and instruments on the album tells me I'm in for a treat:

Tony Dekker (voice, guitar), Erik Arnesen (banjo, electric guitar) and Colin Huebert (drums, percussion, glockenspiel, timpani), guest appearances by Serena Ryder (backing vocals, autoharp), Bob Egan of Blue Rodeo (pedal steel and dobro), Sarah Harmer (backing vocals) and Owen Pallett of Final Fantasy and Arcade Fire (string arrangements). Mike Overton (upright bass), Darcy Yates (electric bass), Mike Olsen (cello), and Mike Bonnell (organ).

The first song, Your Rocky Spine (MP3 clip), is a mellow mid-tempo number with a great banjo track.  Backstage with the Modern Dancers is a melancholy masterpiece that I can't get out of my head.

Catcher Song is a Byrdsy number, and my favorite song on the record (which is saying something). A 10 on the first listen.   

Changing Colours reminds me of a combination between Steve Goodman's Yellow Coat (perhaps the most wistful song I've ever heard) and America (the band) at its most melancholy.  It's hard to find anything not to like on this record.

The middle of the order is There is a Light, Put There by the Land and I Am Part of a Large Family (Mp3 clip).  The first two are fine songs, damned perhaps a little being on the same record as several 10s, including the latter.

Where in the World Are You is beautiful with great strings.  Passenger Song is another well written mellow number.

The last song the record, I Became Awake, is a pedal steel driven number that made me wish the other songs had more steel.  It's my second favorite song on the record.

This is an excellent record, highly recommended for those who like mellow, reflective, well written music.  It's not a record that will have you tapping your foot or dancing, but it will have you thinking...and smiling.

Rating (5 point scale): 4

When in the Course of online events it becomes necessary for alienated and isolated bloggers to dissolve the existing blogging hierarchy and exclusionary behavior which have disconnected them from the A-List and made them feel even more nerdy, and to assume among the multitude of powers they wish they had, the equally unattainable station to which the Laws of It Ain't Fair entitle them, a decent respect for The Onion and Al Gore requires that they should write yet another post no one will ever read to declare the many real and imagined causes which impel them to the third party affected and now ironically embraced separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evidently pie in the sky, that all bloggers are created equal, that they are endowed by their Computers and iPhones with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are lots and lots of Links, Thoughtful Comments and the pursuit of AdSense Dollars. - That to secure these rights, lots of Wailing and Moaning is inserted into Blogs, deriving their literary powers from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical video-blogged nerdathon, - That whenever any Ze Frank or Ze Frank equivalent becomes destructive of these ends by monopolizing all the viewers who would otherwise be watching videos of Star Trek impersonations, it is the Right of the Bloggers to use their webcams, lightsabers and YouTube to alter or to abolish it, and to achieve new levels of self humiliation, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their rapidly diminishing Technorati Ranking and Google Juice. Technorati, indeed, will dictate that the Blogosphere long established months ago should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that new bloggers are better suited to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to deny the A-Listers the celebrity to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the Mythical Endless Ad Dollar and a link from Om evinces a design to reduce them to absolute Isolation and Silence, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw another Blogofit, and to demand a new relational structure for their future security. -Such has been the patient sufferance of many Bloggers; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to start posting cat pictures with misspelled and allegedly funny cat quotes. The history of the present Gatekeepers is a history of repeated exclusions and the turning of deaf, furry ears, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over the Blogosphere. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a sleepy world.

They have refused to respond to conversational overtures, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

They have ignored posts of immediate and pressing importance, unless emailed till their Attention should be obtained; and when so emailed, they have utterly neglected to reply.

They have called together ludicrously entitled conferences and unconferences at places unusual and uncomfortable, for the sole purpose of fatiguing us into believing that they were right not to invite us.

They have refused for a long time, to cause others to be admitted to Techmeme, whereby the Aggregating Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the Bloggers at large for their exercise; the Blogosphere remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from cat blogs within, and convulsions of laughter from little old ladies without.

They have made all of Web 2.0 dependent on Advertising alone for the tenure of its offices, and the amount and payment of its salaries.

They have combined with others in formal and informal affiliations to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our desires to be popular, and unacknowledged by our moms.

They have plundered our right to bigger feed counts, ravaged our prospective link counts, burnt out our minds, and denied us links from lots of other people.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Posted for Redress in the most irritable terms: Our repeated Posts have been answered only by repeated silence. An A-Lister, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a meanie, is unfit to be the ruler of a utopian and unrealistic blogosphere.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Old Media brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their laid off and soon to be reporters to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here at the end of the long tail. We have appealed to their journalistic standards and arrogance, and we have conjured them by the hair of our chinny chin chins to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our reader counts and inbound links. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the so-called New Media, Enemies when they ignore us, in Linkage Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the New Blogosphere, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Scoble of the internet for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the solitary bloggers, solemnly publish and declare, That these disjointed Blogs are, and of Right ought to be Free and Incoherent Blogs, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the old Blogosphere, and that all  connection between them and the old Blogosphere, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Incoherent Blogs, they have full Power to converse with each other, conclude open and free blogging Alliances, establish Cross-Blog Conversations, and to do all other nerdly Acts and other geeky Things which Independent Blogs may of right do. - And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of our day jobs, we mutually pledge to each other our Blogs, our Links and our sacred Attention.

Steve Spalding tagged me in the 8 Things meme.  So I need to come up with 8 random things about me...

1) I am left handed, but I write with my right hand because when I was in kindergarten, the teachers made me.  They thought that writing with your left hand was abnormal.

2) I am very impatient in most situations, except fishing.  I am a very patient fisherman, which I why I catch more fish than most people.

3) My first job was as a bag boy at IGA.

4) I love card and board games.  We played Euchre with our friends the Clarks last night.

5) I am profoundly apolitical.  Almost everything about politics and politicians bores me.

6) I was once on the cover of Money Magazine.

7) I think Spaceballs is one of the funniest movies ever made.

8) My cars in order are: 1972 Chevelle Malibu; 1978 Camaro; 1986 Saab 900; 1989 Jeep Cherokee; 1992 Ford Explorer; and 2001 Ford Expedition.

I'm going to follow Steve's lead and tag only 4 people (instead of the statutory 8):

Be a Good Mom: Because Mike already had his turn and I'm all about girl power.

Warner Crocker: Because, like me, he lives in the overlap of tech and the arts.

Dennis the Peasant: Because I can't imagine how funny 8 random things about him will be.

Bill Liversidge:  Because I enjoy his writing, and now here's something he'll have to write.

If you have already answered this meme, feel (somewhat) free to ignore this tag.

Chris Kasten on FolderShare.  I use FolderShare all the time, and have written about how underutilized it is many times, including here and here.  FolderShare could be the backbone behind some really useful technology, if Microsoft would just pay a little attention to it.

All FeedBurner features are now free.  UNEASYsilence has a summary of the new free features.  Unfortunately, I only got to read about 50 words of the post because they are doing partial feeds.  What is up with that guys?

InstaBloke on blog coaches: "On the face of it the term is self-explanatory, and the long and short of it is they are recruiting minions to click on their ad-laden blogs or hire them as consultants / speakers to make them rich."  The problem with the blogosphere is the same as with email, faxes and the telephone- those looking only to make a quick buck screw it up for the rest of us.  The blogosphere is Deadwood, full of prospectors and prostitutes.  Yet, like Deadwood, it is also full of adventure and potential.

Gary Reid: "Why there is no room for tech blogs is because they are eating each other, there's no real news, any scoop one gets the rest have blogged 5 minutes later. It's become a place of 'brands' [and] there's no real difference between any of them, so you read the brand you like."  This is about the best summation of the blogging problem I've ever read.
 

I already created me as a Southpark character.  Here's me as a Simpsons character (get yours via the link).

Jeremiah Owyang on the sustainability of Digg traffic spikes.  Organic growth is really hard to achieve in the blogosphere.  I am convinced that a little traffic from a lot of places is better than intermittent traffic spikes from one place.  But that's easier said than done.

It's not surprising that the Sci-Fi Channel is reaching out to bloggers, but it's smart nonetheless. 

This should go over like a lead balloon.  Here's my special offer: I can print, stuff, stamp and mail all by myself, thank you very much.

Note to Mashable:  I dig your blog, but Pownce isn't a Pownce rival.  Otherwise, they have a good read on the so-called "mini-blogging" applications.  Here's my take: the blogosphere is on the verge on self-imploding thanks to the collective attention span of a gnat and the resultant attention dilution.

Note to the guy/gal with the flashing MyBlogLog icon.  I'm blocking you here, and I suspect others will too.  Flashing graphics were annoying in the nineties.  They still are.

Pramit Singh has a really interesting idea for Michael Moore's next movie.  I think the privacy angle is the most compelling one, and I continue to be amazed that hordes of people are not demanding that Google stop sticking its nose (and its ads) in our business.

I would never have believed this is real, but Rob Gale and Snopes say it is.

@Scoble: The problem with Twitter is that the archival features of a blog post are absent.  It's like writing in invisible ink.

Valleywag has an update on the latest Federated Media conversation, advertisement, money making thing.  I really don't see the value to the advertiser in this, and I see no value whatsoever to the readership/public.  I predict this little experiment will die quietly on the vine.

I remember the first time I heard Steve Forbert's Romeo's Tune (off of his 1979 release Jackrabbit Slim) in my mom's old LTD on the way to the 1979 Tangerine Bowl.  My buddies and I were driving towards Florida drinking Coor's beer we couldn't afford (this was back when it was an import everywhere but Colorado).  I was wondering how much trouble I was going to be in when I returned home with a beer smelling and generally trashed car, when that song came on the radio.  I loved it from the first listen.  I bought the LP when we got back home, and I've been a fan of Steve's music ever since.

I saw him live a couple of times at the Mucky Duck, and up until a few years ago when a series of live records were released, I bought most of his records.  Last week, he released a new studio record, Strange Names & New Sensations.  This past weekend, I gave it a listen.

The first song was clearly written to my generation.  It's called Middle Age.  I thought I was back in 1979 for a second when I heard those 1979 television theme-like horns, but things quickly got a little better (horns are like Tobasco Sauce- they can make the right song much better and the wrong song much, much worse).  Middle Age contains some truth about the losing battle against time, but it's not particularly compelling.  Strange Names is sort of clever, but can't decide between being a Romeo's Tune folk/pop number and a quasi-novelty tune.  Brian Burns' retelling of I've Been Everywhere (in Texas) (Mp3 clip) sets a high standard for city names songs, that Steve's northeastern counterpart can't match.

I didn't know who Spaulding Gray was before he died.  Steve's tribute is probably wonderful (bag pipes and all), but neither the lyrics nor the arrangement moves me beyond the generally sympathetic place I start.

Man I Miss that Girl has a countryish arrangement, with a wistful vibe.  Since that's my menu order for a good song, it's my favorite cut on the record.  I give this song at least a 9.  Maybe a 9+.  This one is a good 'un.

You're Meant for Me is a mellow love song, which is not my preferred kind of song.  Not bad, just a little boring.  Same with Something Special and My Seaside Brown-Eyed Girl.  If I want to hear love songs, I generally opt for the Loudon Wainwright III variety (that record is one of my all time favorites, and highly recommended).

The Baghdad Dream rocks a little, but you have to seem convinced to pull off a protest song.  I like this one a little, but if you want a war protest song listen to Chairmen of the Board's Men Are Getting Scarce.  It was overlooked at the time, but man is it powerful.

Thirty More Years has a nice folksy arrangement with a Halloween connection.  I like it, but, again, the best Halloween song (and one of the best songs ever written) is Richard Shindell's Are You Happy Now.  The instrumental Around the Bend is my second favorite cut on the record, with a nice violin track and an engaging melody.  I bet he has some unsung lyrics to this one.

The last cut is a new version of Romeo's Tune (see above).  My old friend Mickey Newbury (God rest his soul) had a habit of putting his more popular songs on multiple records, but that was because he was in a battle for the rights to his earlier recordings.  Who knows, maybe that's why Steve did it.  The new version sounds more "mature," which is fitting.  But I still like the original version better.

All in all, this is not a bad record.  But it's not as good as some of Steve's earlier work.  That's not terribly surprising, as we all suffer from the passage of time.  It's just good to hear another middle aged guy still doing his thing.

Rating (5 point scale): 2.5

I finally got a Pownce invitation tonight (thanks Miles!).  Installation of both Abobe's AIR (a requirement to run the Pownce software) and the Pownce software itself was quick and easy.

Here's my Pownce page.  My user name is Kent N.  If you're one of my blogging pals, add me as a Friend and we'll put Pownce through its paces.

So far, it looks like it combines a web-based, Twitter-like conversation page with an IM-like application (pictured to the left) that allows you to send and receive messages, links, files and events.  The first three are self-explanatory.  Events are messages with associated dates- good for letting people know about, well, events.  You can send any of the foregoing to the public, all of your Friends (the Web 2.0 word for contacts), or just a specified Friend.  You can group your Friends into sets, which seems very handy for project collaboration, etc.

You can send files of up to 10MB.  For $20 a year (Paypal accepted), you can send 100MB files and have an ad-free experience (though so far I haven't seen any ads).

I sent my Friends an MP3 of my blues song Departing Passenger.  Lucky fellows.  The file uploaded reasonably fast and, presto, it was there on my Pownce page.  There is a player application that loads a tad slow, but sounds good.  The navigation below the player is a little jumbled, probably because of my monitor size and resolution.  A lot of pages have this problem, including both Morningstar and CNN, which is surprising to me. 

Finding friends is similar to Facebook.  You search for them and then send a Friend request.  The recipient can accept or decline.  If the recipient declines, you become merely a Fan of that person.  I'm going to apply my Pink Floyd Policy to Pownce, which means that I shall be merely a fan to no man (or woman).

Of all the times I have experimented with all the various IM and IM-like programs, right now and Pownce seem the most compelling to me.  Twitter brought a lot of folks into the collaborative IM space and Pownce may just be the next evolutionary step.  Stan Schroeder says Pownce may, in fact, be the Twitter killer (at least it isn't Quixotically aiming at YouTube like everybody else).  I think there's room for both, though Twitter is clearly behind in the feature race.  It's too early to tell how well Pownce will scale, though it did have a short outage earlier tonight.

If Pownce wants to seep deeply into the IM space, it will need to address the same incompatibility problems the other IM applications face.  As I have said before, IM needs to be like the telephone.  Not like a series of tin cans tied to a proprietary string. 

Now what I need is some Friends to use it with.

I have a few Pownce invitations to hand out.  I'll send them to the first 5 people who leave a comment asking for one, on the condition that everyone who gets one agrees to return to the comment thread here and send invitations to others in the queue.  I am particularly interested in getting my core blogging buddies signed up.

You know who you are, so let's get started.

Ever since I installed Vista on KN-1, my home built computer, I have had one extremely annoying problem.  After my computer runs for a while, the toolbar gets all out of whack.  Like this:

The buttons get all jumbled up and stop responding.  It is very, very annoying.

The only solution I could come up with was to reboot, which was very disruptive to whatever task I was working on.  The problem was even more irritating because when this happens, the restart button stops responding, and I have to do the control-alt-delete thing just to restart.  This mess has been a major drain on my efficiency and I had even begun to consider trashing my computer and starting over- in a desperate attempt to solve this problem.

Weekends in the Houston language translates to "rains all day."  So I decided to use my forced indoor time today to see if I could find a solution to this problem.  Of course, I started with the answer machine- Google.  After running down a few wrong trails, I came across this inviting Microsoft Knowledge Base page.  I first tried the work around:

1. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL.
2. Click Task Manager.
3. Click the Processes tab.
4. Click the explorer.exe process.
5. Click End Process, and then click End process.
6. Click the Applications tab.
7. Click New Task.
8. Type explorer in the Open box, and then click OK.

Lo and behold, that fixed the problem.  At least now I wouldn't have to control-alt-delete and restart every hour or so.

Next I installed the hotfix from that page.  It installed.  I was hopeful.  I rebooted, even though I wasn't prompted to.

Four hours later, I am still working and my toolbar looks normal.  And the buttons work.

I can't adequately explain how happy I am to (cross my fingers) have this problem solved.

If this post can help one other person solve this problem, it will be worth it.