It seems Twitter, which granted is a neat little application, is out looking to turn that neatness into cash.  Download Squad reports that Twitter is trying to raise its first round of venture capital funding, and then wonders if the old standby, getting bought by Google, may not be the answer.  As Download Squad says in the article: “Twitter is extremely focused on growing their network of users before making money, and they really don’t have an evident business model as of yet.”  There is a universal assumption by those looking to make money on the internet that traffic can always be monetized.  I don’t think that’s always the case.

JPEG Enhancer is a free application that promises to help clean up old blotchy photos from your first digital camera.

Martin Gordon does a mini-review of Lifehacker’s Top10 iPhone Applications.  He found some usability issues.

Mashable has a feature by feature comparison of 14 personalized homepages.  God, I hope social networking isn’t really “the next evolution of the start page concept.”  The more I see these start pages try to be average at everything instead of excellent at one thing, the more I think making your own start page is the way to go.

Dave Wallace has created a History of Disability in South Australia website that tells stories of Australians involved with disability issues.  Here’s Mike Seyfang’s review.

This guy’s baby book showed up on eBay.  Being a second child, I never had much of a baby book.  Delaney (our second) has a sparse one.  Luke (our third) doesn’t have one at all.  We promised ourselves we wouldn’t do that.

@Seth: I agree that marketing by fear in a way that benefits only the marketer is bad.  I really don’t like it.  But, as you mentioned, CNN and every other news organization do this all day, every day.  When all that matters is attention, what better way to get it than to shout danger at every opportunity.  It is a corruption of the preservation instinct in the name of a dollar.

Everyone may be gunning for YouTube, but the war is over.  All that remains in to see who gets the most scraps.

Techdirt, which has always been at the forefront of the music industry debate, has a must read post about the record stores doing their part to keep the industry screwed up.  I used to enjoy going to record stores…back in the 80’s.  If I can browse music from my desk, hear clips without having to use waxy communal headphones, click a button and have the CD show up two days later, I don’t need a music store.  Particularly if it’s going to take a page from the RIAA’s empty book of logic.

Thomas Hawk on iPhonestock.  I don’t know how you can read Thomas and not pull for Zooomr.  I guess that means he’s doing he job.  I just wish they’d make the sign-in process easier.  I signed up back when it first launched, lost my credentials and am caught in OpenID hell.

Donna Bogatin takes a look at iPhonestock too.  Justine has a post on the Summer of Phone.  Meanwhile Scoble has lost his buzz and noticed that he has a mild headache.  But at least he’ll be able to tell his grandchildren he was there, and be telling the truth.

Jeff Balke on mixing his band’s new CD and the loudness problem.  I’m not generally in the studio when my songs are recorded (being solely a songwriter at this point), but I have always felt that far too many records are mixed too hot.  The video Jeff found is spot on: when there is no quiet, there can be no loud.

All the people at this party
They’ve got a lot of style
They’ve got stamps of many countries
They’ve got passport smiles
Some are friendly
Some are cutting
Some are watching it from the wings
Some are standing in the center
Giving to get something
– Joni Mitchell

I’ve said numerous times that blogging has largely replaced songwriting as an outlet for my need to write, share and reach.  The more I think about it, blogging is very similar to songwriting.

Here are three reasons why.

1) They Both Need Good Hooks

Blog posts and songs both need good hooks to be successful.  In songwriting, the hook is the part of the song that sticks in the listener’s mind.  The part that is the most memorable.  It’s also often the first part of the song that is written.  Hooks can be, but are not necessarily, the title of the song.  In my song Your Turn to Fall, the hook is the line “Your face is familiar, but I can’t recall your name girl,” which was inspired by a button my sister gave me.  It was also the first part of the song I wrote.  Similarly, the rhyming couplets “sober” and “over” and “drank” and “thank” from the chorus of Bloodshot Eyes were the beginnings of that song.

Hooks in blog posts are even more important than in songs.  With hundreds of people writing about the same stuff, there needs to be something about the post to catch the attention of the prospective reader and linker.  In traditional journalism, the tag at the end of the article serves as the big send off.  But a good tag at the end of a boring blog post will never get read.  Thus, I believe that in almost every case the hook in a blog post needs to be the title.  When readers are skimming their feeds in a news reader, something has to grab their attention and cause them to slow down and read the post.  For me, and I suspect others, the second best way to get me to read a post is to have a catchy title (the best, of course, being to ping me with a link).

When I wrote my Fear and Loathing post the other night, I almost called it “All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers,” after the Larry McMurtry book (a line I also used in Your Turn to Fall).  But as I thought about it (and counted to 10, given that I was seriously irritated at the time), I decided that more people would know of and relate to the Fear and Loathing title, which is obviously also a literary reference.  Plus, I thought the former title was too personal to me, and I wanted to make points that had application beyond me and my blog.  I wanted a title that was reasonably descriptive and likely to make people a little curious as to its content.

The post that really got things moving on this blog was my post from January 1, 2006 called Why It’s Impossible to Build a New Blog in 2006.  The title put me squarely in the middle of the gatekeeper debate, and not everyone agreed with me, so a lot of good discussion ensued.

2) Every One of Them Can Be Improved Upon, But Should You?

One of the hardest things about songwriting is trying to figure out when a song is finished.  That’s because, as every writer knows, every song in the world can be improved with a rewrite.  I have literally hundreds of songs lying around in boxes and on tapes that are not, in my mind, ready to be heard.  Heck, when I browse my Err Bear Music page I can’t find one song that I couldn’t make better with a tweak here or there.  I know writers whose songs are like the Winchester House– they keep writing them forever.  And never record or release them.  But at some point, if you want to get your material out there, you have to let it go.  Even if part of you believes it would become a number 1 hit with one more rewrite.

Blog posts are the same way.  When I read old posts of mine, I’m often amazed that I could write such drivel.  I see obvious and powerful points that I failed to make.  There’s not one post on my blog or any other that the writer couldn’t make better with an edit.  There are also posts made without all the facts and/or in the heat of the moment that you wish you could withdraw.  But there are no mulligans in the blogosphere- RSS and Google make sure of that.  So once it’s out there, new versions are just that.

On the other hand, much of the stuff we write about has a relatively short half-life.  So if we want to be part of the conversation, we need to get it out there.  My neighbors could hear me pounding on the keyboard the other night after I saw Louis Gray’s post.  All of this means that bloggers, like traditional journalists, are often under a deadline of sorts.  The beauty of blogging, however, is that it is sort of a hybrid between email and article writing.  It’s conversational nature is more forgiving.  Like email, the standards for typos and grammar are relaxed a little in the interest of immediacy.

So just because a song or a blog post could be improved with a few more rewrites doesn’t mean they aren’t ready for publication.  It’s a balance, but one that does not demand perfection.

3) Talent Does Not Ensure Success

I grew up listening to country music, but I haven’t tuned into an over the air country radio station in years.  Because the music that’s available there is not really country music- at least not the way I think of it.  It’s regurgitated pop made by pretty little media creations designed to grease the wheels of commerce.  The cycle goes like this: find someone photogenic who can at least croak out a melody, get the talented, starving and desperate songwriters in Nashville to come up with some commercial sounding songs, hire some magician-cum-producer to make it sound good and get the CDs into Walmart and Best Buy.  Much of the rock genre is the same way.  Meanwhile amazing talents like the Star Room Boys, the Drive-By Truckers and others gig away in obscurity.

The blogosphere is the same way.  You can write the best posts ever written, but if you don’t get the star making machinery behind you, few will ever read it.  On the other hand, if you can tap into the collective affection, all you need is cat pictures (I’m not dumping on the cats, as they have more readers than I have letters on my blog pages; but it’s not exactly Pulitzer material).

The music industry and the blogosphere are very inefficient entities.  But they are also similar avenues for self expression and the pursuit of a common experience.

Getting a link from another blogger and hearing your song being played, you know it’s the same release.

I’m glad to see Bill Liversidge blogging again.  I really enjoy his writing.

C|Net has a photo gallery of tech’s most hyped product launches.

Survival Topics has a good read on the 5 Basic Survival Skills.

I know a guy named Frank Smith, but HearYa has a write up on the band by the same name.  The clip sounds really good.  Love that steel.

Dave Taylor looks at whether the iPhone will be a business phone.  I love me some Dave, but if it won’t synch with Outlook, it won’t be a business phone.  Thousands of IT departments whose bosses already fear anything resembling online data storage are not going to risk their jobs by forcing the issue.  Not when there are so many Blackberries out there that accommodate the safe decision.

Stereogum is my Marc Andreessen.  I just have to link to it every day.  Here’s its list of the 20 loudest albums of all time.

Dennis the Peasant is hilarious.  “It’s only a short step from Cole Porter to Edith Piaf. But I’m not one to withhold credit when credit is due: You’ve got to be an authentic phoney to listen to Edith Piaf and then act like it was a treat. I mean, it isn’t just that she’s French – although that should be enough for most people – it’s, it’s that she sounds like someone is goosing her at a rate of about 30 times a minute.”

Pageflakes has apparently left the semi-crowded portal space and jumped into the insanely crowded social network space.  Social network is the most over used and meaningless term in the history of the internet.  It’s just links to people and information of interest, loosely wrapped around some commonality.  There have been social networks since the old BBS days.  All this stuff (I’m talking about the social network craze here, not Pageflakes) is just better technology aimed at capturing users to drive value for developers and venture capitalists.

I’m interested in Kevin Rose’s new instant messaging service, Pownce.  There needs to be a more intuitive and efficient way to share information.  Hey Kevin, want to hook me up so I can review it?

I guess the girls do get prettier at closing time. (via Obscure)

When we got married, my wife couldn’t name all four Beatles (she’s not all that into music).  Neither can Larry King.  Stereogum has the hilarious transcript. 

Dwight was a good write-up on the latest iPhone hype and mania.

Jeff Pulver is doing an Everyday Heroes project.  It’s a collaborative effort to feature amazing and inspiring stories of ordinary people.  I think it’s a great idea, and plan to participate.  I can think of several people who have a profound positive effect on the lives of those around them.  Now I just have to talk one or more of them into telling their story on film.  In the meantime YesButNoButYes has an everyday hero clip to kick things off.

Robert Hruzek has a list of interesting quotes.  I like the way Neil Young says it better that the way John Kenneth Galbraith does.

Scott Hanselman on escalating the communication.  There are a couple of people in my office who use the “Reply to All” button as a medium for self-promotion.  It drives most people crazy, but it also seems to work on occasion.  Sort of like spam, I guess.

MySpace for dogs?  Are you kidding me? What’s next DogPee, to help find the nearest fire hydrant?

I’ve noticed a trend I really don’t like.  In my feeds, many of the links to the post page for the blog entry are being redirected through Feedburner.  I suppose this is because (a) people want to track every possible statistic about their traffic, and (b) Google wants to get as far into our data as possible.  The problem is that if you, like me, want to link to the post page directly, you now have to click on the link, wait for the redirected page to load and get the URL from your browser’s address bar.  Previously, you could just right click and copy the link location.  This is a recipe for link discouragement.

AOL, who perfected the internet-like online experience, has launched a blog-like news service.

If the 6 people who watch your video cast make you nervous, EnjoyMyMedia will let you create a channel just for your mom.

The Dell XPS M1330 looks like a pretty sweet laptop.

I had 84 unread Gizmodo posts in my feed reader tonight.  I’ll ask once more- am I the only one who thinks that is way too many?  Is there one person in the world with a real job who reads all of them?  I unsubscribed.

Netvibes added some new features.  But not the ability to set the text size.  This seems like a 10 minute job that would benefit millions of users and potential users.  So why isn’t it happening?

Ethan Johnson has a good read on the credibility issue.  I like being compared to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.  I also like the fact that he linked to me and didn’t later remove it.

I had no idea Greg Hughes is a pyrotechnician.  Very cool.  I was invited to the VIP suite of a huge fireworks show a couple of years ago.  The control room was next door, and we were allowed to watch the guys do their thing.  Watching the activity in the control room was even cooler than watching the fireworks themselves.

I’ve discovered a lot of great new blogs to read via my swivel feeds experiment, but none that I am enjoying more than Penelope Trunk.  Great stuff.  Highly recommended.

I’ve been predicting (read hoping for) a Led Zeppelin reunion for years.  Today Stereogum says I might finally be right.

Leo at Zen Habits is asking for donations.  Zen Habits is a must-read blog.  I’ve given, and I hope you will too.

Impress your friends by solving the Rubik’s Cube.  Here’s part 2.

I’m not sure which surprises me more: that Apple passed Amazon in music sales or that Walmart and Best Buy are one and two.  I haven’t bought a CD in a bricks and mortar store in many years.  Amazon really missed its opportunity to dominate the downloadable music market.

Richard Querin has launched a new site for his Inkscape screencasts.  The picture quality is really good.  Inkscape looks pretty cool too.  I wish someone would make a series like this for Photoshop.  I rank using Photoshop and flying the space shuttle as equivalent on the difficulty scale.

My kids would not dig living here.  Now if it was a skittles powered house… (via Zoli)

Earl is developing a system for managing his reading list.  I don’t have them separated out, but I have a basic mental list that closely mirrors his groups.  Once my swivel feeds experiment is over, I’ll start on the process of classifying and prioritizing.

Wow, Kevin Tofel found some actual applications that work on Blackberries.  I’ve had one for years, but I have never been anything but unimpressed by the available applications.  Of course when you go to the Mobio page, there’s no way to tell what they are.  I don’t need the gas price deal.  I already do that wirelessly- with my eyes.

One of the interesting by-products of feeds and Technorati is the ability to watch posts as they are revised.  I find it curious when links sometimes disappear in subsequent edits.  Maybe you have to be careful who you’re seen hanging around with.  No more about this now.  Maybe later.

Dell is working on the bloatware problem by giving buyers the option to reduce the amount of pre-installed software.  Most of that stuff is thinly disguised ads or crippled versions aimed at an upsell.  The first thing I do when I buy a new computer is wipe the hard drive and do a clean OS install.  Now maybe I won’t have to do that.

Stardock TweakVista looks like another useful program.

Louis Gray tells us his 8 worst stock moves.  I was right there with him on numbers 1 and 2.  Some of my other bonehead moves: 360Networks, Exodus, not selling Enron when I was up 100%, letting Cramer talk me into buying JDSU, and going big in Nokia.  I made a fortune and almost immediately lost a fortune in the first dot.com boom and bust.  It’s relatively easy to know when to buy a stock.  The hard part is knowing when to sell one.

Blonde 2.0 on her favorite Facebook applications.  Brad Feld wonders what’s in it for the application developers.  I just wonder why Facebook’s interface is so confusing.

Chip Camden has worn a black shirt every Friday for the past 10 years.  His wife didn’t notice the pattern.  Chip says that’s because all his other weird habits obscured it.  Odd behavior is great camouflage.  I will not pick up a coin that is tails up.  I’ll flip it over first.  No one has ever noticed that.

Dan Santow on one of my grammatical pet peeves: the me, myself and I thing.  Dave Taylor on the legality of recording phone calls.  I’m not sure why I see a connection there, but I do.

I’m reading it, because it was a swivel feeds recommendation, but I’m not feeling the cats.  Having said that, there are probably a thousand secretaries at my firm who would live on that web site if they knew about it.  Media popularity is a funny thing.

Why didn’t my buddy Clayton and I have this when we were making those fake IDs back in high school?

Here’s a list of web applications for students.  The ones in my law school classes seem to just surf the net all the time.  One of my favorite tricks is to run up the steps without warning, just to watch all the laptops get slammed shut.

How do you feel about intro-tagging your web post titles?  Robert Andrews, one of my swivel feeds, begins many of his post titles with the tag “Blogging4Business.”  Over time, I have found that I tend to skip over those.  I wonder if that’s just me?  Maybe there are others who always read those and skip the others.

Umm, what do you think they talk about when they are face to face, church and public service opportunities?  Say it with me:  IM, like blogging, is a platform for content.  It does not create the content.  I agree with Will when he says “The worst that can be said of instant messaging is that it is enabling anti-social behavior. But it does that the same way that a phone does and a car does. By the time the kid is online trolling for cocaine, you’re no longer in prevention mode, you’re in damage control mode. Their unmonitored access to IM is the least of your problems.”

Dreamcrowd looks very cool to me.  I am fascinated by dreams, both mine and those of others close to me.  I have dreamed twice that I was a member of the Grateful Dead.  I also dream from time to time that I have mad hops on the court and can dunk a basketball like Dr. J.  I also have occasional, but recurring, nightmares in which some sort of creature is trying to break into the house where I grew up.  Once, a long time ago, I dreamed I was on death row (I don’t know why), and got escorted to the electric chair by my Administrative Law professor (whom I barely knew, even back in law school).  I am definitely the target demographic for this web site.

Mashable let me down today, so no Bebo update.  In the meantime, just remember: “Zingfu just hooked up with Bebo to offer Zingfu within Bebo Widgets.”

Copyblogger has some good advice for writing better blog posts: The 10 Second Rule.  Romance Tracker has 10 reasons why blogging is like dating.

Cassidy will be happy to read this, as will my (older) sister.

I have a feeling this is going to take the blogosphere by storm.  Who needs a lightsaber when you can have a tricorder?  Or even better, an iPhone.

Vispa seems like a pretty good application for tweaking Vista.

Jeff Balke posts 5 albums that changed his life.  I like to read musicians writing about music they like to listen to.  The record that changed me the most was Europe 72.  I had never before heard the band that would become my favorite, and from the moment I heard that record my entire musical direction changed.  Another one is Otis Spann’s Biggest Thing Since Colossus.  It made me a huge fan of Otis, the blues in general and piano blues in particular, in one listen.

Fred Wilson took a break from not participating in my swivel feeds experiment and raving madly about Marc Andreessen to write something I completely agree with: Yahoo should not buy MySpace.  GigaOm handicaps who should buy Yahoo.

I was afraid that I wouldn’t get to do a Bebo update today (here’s the first and second), but Mashable once again came to my rescue with this delicious nugget: “Widget marketplace Widgetbox, together with Sugar Publishing, has launched Widgetbox Showcase for Bebo, a collection of interactive gossip widgets. The showcase includes a number of widgets pulling content from various gossip related sites, for example PopSugar, FabSugar and Perez Hilton.”  I actually understand what that sentence means, which is a first for my Bebo updates.  I have no idea what Bebo is, but I cover it daily- which makes me just like 80% of the other social networking exuberants.

TDavid, having licked TV, is now eradicating credit cards.  If you need a reason to get rid of TV, here it is.  If this story is true, it is a summation of everything wrong with our culture.

Dave wants us to link to him.  Tell you what Dave, give me some swivel feeds recommendations and I’ll link to you every day for a month.  Think of it like a virtual autograph.

C|Net reports that Google’s search share has grown to 56.3%  I’m not surprised it grew, but I’m surprised it’s only 56.3%.  I can’t think of a reason to use any other search engine.  Google search simply works.  Yahoo has 21.5%.  Next is Microsoft at a measly 8.4%.

Here are 20 video tutorials for the budding magician.

Looks like BarCamp is coming to Houston.  Here’s the wiki, where you can sign up.

I had 52 unread Engadget posts in my reader tonight, and 63 unread Gizmodo posts.  It there anyone who wants to read that many?  Anyone?  I am really close to unsubscribing.  Currently, I just get overwhelmed and ignore all of them.

I have another Bebo report, even better than the last one.  Today “BunnyHeroLabs was added to the Bebo Widgets lineup.”  I don’t know what that means, but I’m sure it’s important.  And hilarious.

Stowe Boyd still doesn’t want to address the preemptive use of the troll label, but he wants you to follow him on Twitter so he can make the Top 100.  I told you it was about personal brand building.  Recall that I generally sided with him in the original argument, but I’m curious about what he thinks about this preemptive labeling business and I’m just going to keep asking until he answers.

TDavid’s family has been TV-free for over a year.  He asks his family if they miss it.

Didn’t I say basically the same thing a few weeks ago?  Now people want to have job interviews in Second Life?  Second Life is about 80% game and 20% social network.  Generally speaking, jobs are about 0% games and 10% social network.  I’m not saying there’s not money to be made via Second Life- I’m simply saying that some people are going waaaaay overboard when it comes to actual business uses for Second Life.

Speaking of Second Life, C.C. Chapman has a review of the new voice features.

Jing Chen on encouraging more girls to pursue tech.

Scott Adams on how he makes a comic strip.  Very interesting.

I saw a bumper sticker today that blew my mind.  It was plastered across the back window of a minivan.  It said “Show Dogs, Don’t Tailgate.”  Are you kidding me!?  If I was barreling out of control and I saw that, it would be like a giant, irresistible bull’s eye.

A city without advertising.

Not in my case it won’t.  My computer is a bloatware-free zone.  The PC Doctor has more advice for avoiding software you don’t want. 

@Jeff Pulver:  In the real world, absolutely.  Particularly if the Blackberry user is someone charging by the hour for attending the meeting.  I have clients who have policies against their employees using Blackberries during meetings.  My policy is that if I am a material part of the discussion, I will not look at my Blackberry.  No one is so indispensable they can’t wait a hour to reply to an email.  Uninterrupted Blackberry use is more about addiction than efficiency.

I know (hope) this is tongue in cheek but the sentence “Zingfu just hooked up with Bebo to offer Zingfu within Bebo Widgets” is a more damning indictment of Web 2.0 than anything I could ever write.  I’m thinking about making it the slogan for this blog.  Really.

Paul Stamatiou has a detailed review of the Slim Devices Squeezebox.  Mama’s got a squeeze box she wears on her chest and when daddy comes home he never gets no rest, and all that.