Time to climb back on the blogging train after a week in the country tubing the Frio River.

Looks like Dave Winer got in another fight while I was away.  Glad I missed it.  A middle school playground has nothing on the blogosphere when it comes to manufactured drama.

Hear Ya has some live Drive-By Truckers.  I love that band.  Check out Gravity’s Gone and my all time favorite DBT song, Women Without Whiskey.

Hugh has a good list of why people are blogging less.  I don’t think it has much to do with all the walled-in AOL substitutes.  I think it comes down to the inefficiency of the process and the declining return.  Blogging is a lot of work.

InstaBloke on reevaluating online relationships.  I agree with just about every word.  One good, long term friend, whether in the blogosphere or the real world, is more rewarding than 25 acquaintances.

Louis Gray is spot on that your blog is your brand.  I am amazed at how easily some web sites conscript hordes of people to build the web site’s brand, at the expense of the individual’s brand.  It’s Tom Sawyer run wild.

Phil Sim writes a reality check post that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the Web 2.0 business.  A must read.

Steve Rubel muses over his 25 years with a computer.  I still miss the excellent Island Apventure game from my brother in law’s Apple II.

Warner posts some of the many reasons I watch almost no professional sports anymore.  It’s all about the money.  Sort of like much of the blogosphere.

Dwight has an excellent post on getting your Vista computer ready to use.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.