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.

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:

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.

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.