Now that all our computers are full of USB 2 ports, here comes USB 3.

Here’s the thing.  Mint may be the coolest thing since the wheel, but anyone who thinks the average American is going to put his or her financial data (or the names and passwords that allow access thereto) into some online Web 2.whatever application is completely out of touch with mainstream America.  I want someone, anyone, who believes differently to debate me on this topic on one of our podcasts.  Please, I’m begging you.  Paul Stamatiou has a review that discusses Mint’s security measures.

I wonder if these cats know tomorrow is Talk Like a Pirate Day?

Good new music: The Spider Bags.  HearYa has some MP3s.

Can you think of anything more boring than social networking for lawyers?

Beware of Dog:  Pluto goes on the attack.

I don’t use Internet Explorer much, but those of you who do should check out IE7 Pro.  Dwight has the details.

Earl shares my boredom with the traditional tech-centric blogosphere.  At least TechCrunch 40 is over.  That might help a little.  Or maybe not.

My friend Mike Huffington had a frustrating iPhone experience.  It really irritates me when companies demand to collect more personal information than they reasonably need. 

I have concluded that most bloggers post too often.  When I go through my blogroll, I see a lot of quantity and not so much quality.  And while I am still testing the pattern, I have a working theory that the bloggers I enjoy the most post less than the ones I enjoy less.  I suspect this is because many of the people who churn out scads of posts are doing so in an effort to serve ads.  I’ll post more on the marginal utility of blog posts later.

The traditional tech-centric blogosphere bores me to tears.  Is anyone reading this stuff?

If you have a bunch of cassette tapes lying around and would like to convert them to MP3s, here’s a $116 answer.

On a related note, I really want to hear Graham Parker’s version of Chain of Fools off of the very hard to find That’s When You Know CD.  Can anyone help me out?

I was quoted in an article in the Dallas Morning News today.

Here are some Jeopardy mishaps.  Number 7 (SNL) is worth a visit all by itself.

Chris Brogan has some good personal branding tips: “Remember that branding isn’t logos, software, and usernames. It’s about presenting yourself in such a way that people get an impression of you and your value.”  Add an “s” to the end of that sentence, and you’ve just summed up effective personal branding in one sentence.

On a related note, Steven Hodson has a good read on blog improvement.

Claus Valca on finding balance. 

Dwight Silverman on the timeless question of updating drivers.  As a general rule, I update my drivers pretty regularly, even if I’m not experiencing any issues.  I have, however, completely screwed my computer on occasion by doing so.  The most catastrophic example being a failed update of some RAID drivers.  I am SO HAPPY to be rid of RAID.

Neither John Walkenbach nor Jeff Balke dig SpiralFrog.

Why does Bloglines (and random other sites) never finish loading in my (Firefox) browser?  This is very annoying.

Pandora is still hands down the best place in the universe to discover great new music.  Here’s my station.

Susan Getgood has a good read on the campaign to save Battlestar Galactica from a series of bad Sci-Fi Channel decisions.  The frustrating problem is that BSG is on life-support already, so the long breaks almost killed Lost argument won’t work.  And I, too, still miss Farscape, but not 1/3 as much as I still grieve over the premature death of Firefly.  Speaking of the Sci-Fi Channel, TDavid shows us how to discourage comments.  The way to be sticky is to make it easy for people to interact.  Not by making it hard to.

Louis Gray wrote the second funniest sentence of the year the other day, in a post about visiting family and getting schooled by his mom in Wii bowling:

As I battled to pick up splits for spares, she would methodically knock all the pins down – at one point, scoring five straight strikes, much to our joint delight, disillusionment and annoyance.

I so get that.  I can remember getting clobbered by my mom in games I’d played for years, just moments after teaching them to her.  I’d be at once happy for her and furious with her.  It was especially irritating when she pretended not to notice how bad she was kicking my ass.  Those were wonderful times.

Since you asked, the funniest sentence of the week, and perhaps in the history of the blogosphere, is this one from Rory Blyth:

We all would have visited with her on our own, but the four of us – separate or together – are about as organized as a thousand burning squirrels on meth trying to fly a 747 to the moon.

I am just waiting for the chance to use that line on someone.

Om asks the unthinkable question.

Penelope Trunk leaves it on the field more than any other blogger I read.  Her posts about her personal life are as raw and immediate as words can be.  And her 9/11 post is phenomenal.  She’s got stones.  And I mean that as a compliment.

Steven Streight has 9 ways to improve your web site.

Will Wheaton captures a classic family moment.  Our classic family moment, to which the girls have given a Beowulf-worthy mythology through years of retelling, is the time I stepped in cat poop while walking barefoot through the den.  I hopped screaming on one foot to the bathroom and dipped my foot in the toilet to wash off the clinging remnants of said cat poop.  The girls quote lines from that story the way my friends and I used to quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail. 

Jeff Balke on my long awaited Led Zeppelin reunion.  Here’s Stereogum’s take.  Now we just need word of a tour.

More Louis: Great post on internal linking by some tech blogs.  Engadget is, in my way of thinking, an eMagazine more than a blog.  Plus, they have FAR too many posts, so I generally skip Engadget during my daily reading.  Mashable started out as the people’s TechCrunch, but needs to remember that as it gets more and more popular.  The problem, of course, comes down to the prospect of money.  Rather than double linking, I’d call it double ad-serving.  I’d love to know the average duration of those internal link page views.

Larry Borsato talks about a recent focus group in which college students said MySpace is over, Facebook might not last much longer, and their best source for information is word of mouth.  Paul Stamatiou is one college guy who has chilled on Facebook.  Thank goodness there’s all those grown-up bloggers to keep the hype going.

I think there should be a law, with a very stiff penalty for violations, that every person who opines on global warming has to disclose any potential conflicts of interest.  Who do you work for?  Who funds your research?  Who funds whoever funds your research?  Are you a spoon-fed Republican or Democrat?  Do you own a bunch of stock in companies who would be harmed by climate initiatives?  Do you have grandchildren?  The scientific debate around global warming is a complete joke and I don’t think you can believe any of the advocates on either side.  Since I am convinced that American culture and policy favors the dollar over absolutely everything else, I tend to believe that global warming is a real problem, and that the powers that be are trying to muddy the waters a bit longer so they can get even richer.  But I can neither prove nor disprove my theory since the entire conversation is one big ball of conflict and corruption.

Speaking of completely made up stuff.  The MPAA, the RIAA and Major League Baseball should have a televised world championship of bogus numbers.

Nick Carr and Pramit Singh talk about Adblock Plus.  I use it.  I love it.  Like most people, I don’t like ads.  Unlike most bloggers, I think the crash of the ads as the only source of revenue model would be a positive thing.  It would force people to create things with enough value that someone would pay for it.  I was able to get through the day back in Web 1.0 when everything didn’t have to be free.  Less science projects chasing stupid money and more brainpower applied to things that matter would be a step forward.

I’m not buying the analogy.  Mechanics don’t have to give away their services, because they provide a service people will pay for.  Well there’s that, and the fact that they were too smart to give away their services because in every part of business other than Web 2.0 non-paying customers are a bad thing not a good thing.  I’ve been blogging for years.  Other than the nickel I accrued, but never collected, during my month long AdSense experiment, and the occasional Amazon affiliate links to recommended books and records (note the long-present disclaimer in the left column), I’ve never had ads and I’ve made no money (other than via the aforementioned Amazon affiliate links).  If I was trying to make money, blogging would be about the last place I’d start.  Software development is a horse of a different color.  Rather than free (with ads that get blocked and don’t work long-term even if they don’t get blocked), the corner market software industry should go back to the shareware approach of the 1980’s: the donation model.  It is still a viable approach.  I gladly donated to Zen Habits because it provides value to me.

Hugh MacLeod looks back on almost 10 years of cartooning.  He shares 45 random observations.  Here’s one:  “I increasingly find that, as I get older, the only subjects worth writing about are Love, Loss, Religion and Ambition.”

Stowe Boyd muses naively about Facebook as the big corporate business tool that it ain’t.  First of all, one look at just about anybody’s Facebook page will tell you that unless you’re selling beer, iPhones or webcams, there are better ponds to fish for customers.  Secondly, I can think of very few reasons anyone in a real business setting needs to be farting around on Facebook all day, particularly those not in sales or marketing (the blogosphere seems to believe wrongly that 99% of the workforce is involved in one or the other).  Finally, there’s a troubling, though probably true in many cases, assumption that it’s perfectly normal to use Facebook primarily to sell a bill of goods, so to speak, to your “friends.”  Poking for profit.  Or something like that.

Here are 12 Things to do with Coca Cola.  Drinking it is not mentioned.  Randy Morin isn’t a big Coke fan either.  Mike went cold turkey.  I quit sodas cold turkey about 15 years ago.  Went without for about 6 years.  Then I got hooked on Schweppes raspberry ginger ale.  Then back to water for about 5 years.  About 3 years ago, I fell off the water wagon for Snapple Diet Peach Tea.  Like any good junkie, I graduated up to Diet Dr. Pepper, where I sit today.  At some point, it will be cold turkey again.  Rinse.  Repeat.

People seemed to like the kite video.  Here’s a pretty amazing hand shadow show.

TechCrunch has a preview of Delicious 2.0.  All I want is the ability to delete “for” links.  That should take about 30 seconds of coding.

The Positivity Blog has 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People.  I think it’s a really good list.  The biggest reason people in my business are ineffective is the failure to be accessible to the client and keep the client informed.  Not returning that call or email is never, ever the right decision.

Steve Spalding on how to save blogging from itself.  Nail, meet Mr. Hammer:

We jump on every trend, ride every wave, link bait, lambast, lie and kowtow all in hopes that it will drive up our CPM. Everyone needs to make a living, and I am the last person to tell anyone how to do it but I will say that this egotistical sense that we are on some noble quest to save the written word is a load of bull hockey that we need to stop buying into.

Steve has some solutions to ponder as well.  Great post.

Speaking of trying to make money, Twitter seems to be embracing the spam – er – commercial tweet.  Spam on Twitter.  Spitter.

This deserves a post of its own, but I want to point to it right away.  Susan Getgood on kids and social networks.  My two oldest kids, and all of their friends, are absolutely crazy about Webkinz.  The family computer is in my study, and I have watched them play in Webkinz World quite a bit.  Yes, it is sitting in front of a computer, but also yes, my kids who didn’t know a mouse from a monitor 2 years ago are now more computer literate than 75% of my adult friends.  There’s no way they would have allowed me to teach them in 3 years the computer-related stuff they learned via Webkinz in 6 months.  Like any tool, the secret is in moderation.  But I’m a Webkinz fan- of both the experience and the brilliant marketing plan.

TDavid had a thoughtful response to my anti-video blogging post.  TDavid is a smart dude, and when he addresses a topic, I pay attention.  That’s the sort of authority that matters to me- not the faux Technorati kind.

Why do developers feel the need to be sneaky to get their stuff on your computer?  It’s one thing when some company you’ve never heard of quasi-spams your address book.  Newsome’s Axiom:  sign up for more than 3 social networks and, by definition, you are not concerned about privacy.  It’s something else altogether when Microsoft does it.  I really like Live Writer.  I have bashed a lot of people, some of them my friends, for stupidly saying that Google anything is ever going to displace Office.  I have long ago written off and uninstalled Real Player for trying to take over my computer.  Microsoft should know better.

Claus has a good look at the new Live Writer version. Rick Mahn has a Live Writer wishlist.

Ayelet has a good read on effectively using social networks.  She has good, specific advice.  Not just intoxicated fluff like most social network posts.  Dave and Mike, when we pick an EELS guest from my blogroll, Ayelet is my first choice.  She’d be a great guest, and we’d break our own time zone record.

Blinding me with tennis: Brad Feld quotes Thomas Dolby in a post about tennis.  Now that’s what I call range.

Don Dodge has the best primer on network neutrality I’ve read yet.

I don’t really care that there are new iPods.  It doesn’t make me happy or interested.  It doesn’t make me angry or turn me off.  It lies at the perfect center of my apathy.

I think Facebook making profiles public has a lot to do with Facebook trying to generate more traffic and very little to do with knocking down walls and creating an autonomous collective of open and accessible content.  There is a reason why social networks maintain their walls.  It’s their attempt to keep their content from running away.  It’s a corral for the conscripted.

Hayden Shaughnessy on the Facebook vs Blog thing.  I completely agree that a lot of people overstate the depth of the friendship relationship within Facebook.  Shel Israel has also written thoughtfully about this.

Even famous cartoonists get crapped on once in a while.

You may be relieved or horrified to know that there may be money in meat goats.

Guy Kawasaki wants to know if you’re an egomaniac.

TDavid thinks there might be a Led Zeppelin reunion.  I’ve been hoping that would happen for years.  I’m about to get my 3rd wish.  Number 1 will never happen.  That leaves Led Zeppelin to break the tie.

A belated happy anniversary to Warner and his better half.

Earl Moore notes that redheads may be becoming extinct.  That’s sort of a bummer, since everyone knows a woman with red hair gets a +2 bonus.

I am very interested in the evolution of Rick Mahn’s reading list.  Hey Rick, how about more details on your speed reading process?  I could use a tool like that when slogging through my swivel feeds.  I find that when I am short on time or get too far behind in my reading, I make a split-second snap decision based on the title of a post about whether to read the first paragraph or not, to see if there’s something of interest there.  It is, to say the least, an inefficient and occasionally unrewarding way to read feeds.  It also drives home the importance of titles.

Many thanks to Ayelet for picking Newsome.Org as one of her 5 Blog Day Picks!

CD Baby is now selling DRM-free digital downloads.  Several of my musician buddies sell their CDs via CD Baby.  It looks like you have to buy the entire record, as opposed to individual songs, but this is still a good development.  Check out Deadwood, by my old buddy Mark Barker.  Good stuff.

Amazon, who would own the digital music download market if they hadn’t been deeply asleep at the switch, is about to start selling digital music too.

Photoshop College:  60 Advanced Photoshop Tutorials.

Nero, the only CD burning software that has a place on my computer, will release its new version 8 next month.  I hope it can avoid the siren-like call of the bloat monster.

Jeff Balke has a great and accurate post on the Houston music scene.  It’s been downhill for me since the Ale House went yuppie and got torn down.

InstaBloke on blogging myths.  My take in one of the worst sentences ever written:  You probably should post every day, but I don’t ’cause it’s hard, yet quality is probably better than quantity unless you’re trying to be like old media, in which case an Engadget-like posting tempo is probably better, yet it doesn’t really matter if you don’t post a lot or have a niche because good writing, unlike this sentence, is what will turn your visitors into readers, particularly if you write posts like Will Truman and not stupid elitist bullshit like Andrew Keen,  but don’t just comment on the news because there are better looking and higher paid people on TV who do that better than you can, however, if you are only trying to be yourself, there’s no need to fake it, so it doesn’t matter if you can or not, and it’s definitely not OK to make money any way you can.

Here’s another Simpson’s intro- this time Star Wars style.

I agree.  This is what the web was meant for.  Here are a couple of names I generously came up with for my friends’ kids, neither of whom saw the obvious beauty in them.  Bambi Lee Gunderson,  Jesus Earl MacLuckie.

Stowe Boyd sits in my corner of the video blogging debate.

Sometimes you have to slay a purple monster to get to the truth.  Here’s an amazing post and really neat story by Rory Blyth.  I hope we get updates.

The Struggling Writer found a cool Atari label maker.  Speaking of Atari… (WARNING: Very Explicit).  I remember the outrage (and deservedly so) over Custer’s Revenge.  I had no idea there was a cottage industry making that sort of game for the Atari 2600.

Charles Teague has a review of a recent Wilco show in Seattle, with a video to boot.  I saw Wilco not long after Uncle Tupelo split up, and Jeff Tweedy got pissed because people kept hollering out for Uncle Tupelo songs sung by Jay Farrar.  I like Wilco.  I really like Son Volt.  I freakin’ loved Uncle Tupelo.

Here’s a cool blog:  A Soviet Poster a Day.

The List Universe has a list (naturally) of 15 great science fiction books.  Good list, with one of the greatest books ever written at number 2.  I’d have to add Lucifer’s Hammer and Hyperion to that list.  Mike seems to agree about Hyperion.

Nobody took me up on my offer to break down the math behind partial RSS feeds for me, but thanks to EchoDitto Labs, I saw a (weak) explanation from the Freakonomics Blog.  Like South Filthy said in the excellent song Sandra Lynn’s Blues, like most things it came down to money.  Let me state my position on partial feeds:  My internet reading time is not designed to make you money.  It’s designed to get me information in an aggregated and efficient manner.  So unless you write a whole lot better than everyone else who writes about similar stuff, your partial feeds will not force me to click over to your web site.  Rather, they will cause me to unsubscribe from your blog.  It’s way past time to drag advertisers to the RSS model.

InstaBloke on turning lurkers into commenters.  I don’t have the secret formula, but one thing that helps is for bloggers to participate responsively in the comments to their blog posts- to make every post like a mini-message board.  Ed Bott is really good at that- people who comment there get a lot of value in return via Ed’s participation.

I don’t know much about it, but based on this post by Louis Gray, Ballhype looks pretty cool.

One of my favorite bloggers and new Alaska resident, OmegaMom, had a little scare recently.  Many years ago, a friend of mine experienced Pericarditis in the middle of the night.  We thought she was having a heart attack and called an ambulance too.  It’s pretty scary stuff when it’s happening.  I’m really glad OmegaMom is OK and am looking forward to reading more about her Alaskan adventure.

I enjoy Rick Mahn’s happiness posts.  This one would be very high on my personal happiness list.

Way to represent Miss my home state.

Susan Getgood has a good read on advertising on blogs.  Warner asks a darn good question about advertising on blogs (and elsewhere).  There must be a segment of the population who click on ads 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to make up for the rest of us who do everything within our power to avoid them.

Don Dodge Sam Donaldsons Mark Cuban.  He could have stopped after 6 words: “It is an attention grabbing headline.”  Saying something that everyone uses all day every day (such as Microsoft Office or the internet) is dead is dead and unoriginal.  Am I the only one who gets the irony of a blogger saying that something regular people actually use is “dead”?  Jay Neely has a good read on the so-called death of this and that.

A belated happy birthday to Shel Israel.  He has a great post about living life.  Excellent advice we should all take to heart.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there are a couple of troubling assumptions in this post.

Mario Sundar has an interesting read about the depth of social networking relationships.  I think social networking/online relationships often exist separately from real world relationships.  Sure, there’s more overlap in some circles- such as the technology industry.  But I think that’s the exception.  That’s not to say that networking/online relationships aren’t valid or important, because they are.  And because they are generally turn based and distributed, they have some advantages over real world relationships, which generally require proximity.

One by One Media has a new project for our neighbors to the north.  Tris Hussey is the editor for BlogNation Canada.

Test your media age against your real age.  I’m a baby boomer in real age and a generation X’er in media age.  Dave has more on generations. 

Chris Brogan has a newbies guide to Twitter.  I am still a Twitter user- barely.  And a Pownce user- barely.  I finally dumped my Second Life account.  It’s too much work trying to have all that fun.

Don Dodge has a list of 10 new companies ready to launch.  I see a few neat ideas there, but not one that looks like a business.  Web 2.0 blew it by making almost everything free.  It’s hard to go from free to not free.  Companies, as a general rule, need a product to sell.  I don’t see many products on that list.

I am a long time Donna Bogatin reader, but why in the world doesn’t she publish full feeds.  I might click over to her page to read one post in ten.  That leaves nine unread.  Someone needs to give me some math on partial feeds, because I can’t imagine they work.

Greg Hughes has a must read post on inadvertently funny business URLs.  Speedofart!

Jeff Pulver and some pals are putting together Jerusalem Rocks!, an international music festival.  Here’s the web site.  Ayelet has a post about it here.  Music and peace are a pretty wonderful combination.

Rex Hammock on CaringBridge.  I have followed more than one family’s struggles on that site- and shed more than a few tears as I pray and pull for friends, and sometimes strangers, facing difficult times.  Rex is right- it’s not a blogging platform.  It’s a highly effective social/support network.  And more.

Paul Lester has become one of my favorite bloggers.  If you don’t subscribe to his blog, here is the feed link.   Sign up now.  You’ll be glad you did.

Happy birthday to my wonderful sister Anne.

Lifehack has 18 tricks to make a habit stick.  If you want to go the other direction, The Thinking Blog has 8 easy steps to shrink your brain.

Many thanks to Rick for including me in his top 10 blogs.  Once my Swivel Feeds experiment is over, I’m going to do some pruning myself.  I am in the process of concluding that it’s impossible to read more than maybe 100 blogs in any efficient and rewarding way.  More on this later.

Now Netflix is drinking the social networking kool-aid.  The last thing Netflix needs is to dilute its focus on a momentum play that’s about 12 months too late.

Mike has a cool and funny family music post.  Musically, I have become my parents to my kids.  They play their music for me.  I play mine for them.  They think most of mine is boring.  I think most of theirs is associated with media creations who couldn’t play an instrument if their lives depended on it.  I remember how square I thought my mom was because she didn’t appreciate the Grateful Dead or the Allman Brothers.  Or even Howlin’ Wolf.  I guess I am the new generation of square.

Jeff Balke has a great post about making it on your own in the music business.  I get asked often by new or aspiring musicians how to “make it” in the business.  I don’t have the secret formula, but I firmly believe you start by playing as many gigs as possible, create a buzz and let the business find you.  I see a lot of young musicians trying to skip the playing part and jump straight to the selling records part.  That takes a lot of marketing effort, which requires a lot of money to sustain.  As Jeff describes, getting and playing gigs is hard work.  But your odds are better playing open mike nights than they are trying to become the next Hannah Montana.