blogging

One of my favorite sites is Metafilter (aka “mefi”). I found it way back in ‘99 and became a member in March of ‘00. For years it has consistently been wonderful. The users are infinitely more mature and intelligent than the ones at digg. It’s really quite incredible how mefi has managed to stay so respectable while digg seemed to get overcome by what are apparently mostly invective teenagers.

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Okay, Dean got me into this. The idea is to share five things about yourself that people may not know, then tag five bloggers so they can rinse, lather and repeat.

I was tagged by Speaking Freely, who was tagged by MarketingGuy, who was tagged by Aaron Shear, who was tagged by Avinash Kaushik. The game was started by Jeff Pulver.

I’m going to pass it on to Kelly, Josh, Sunil, Steve, and Mikey.

(It’s been a long, long time since I joined a meme.)

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I have been planning to add an “About” page to this site for about four years. Everybody who’s anybody has an “About” page. People who visit and know not what a blog is must wonder what this site is “About”. I just never seem to get around to it. I have no idea what this site is “About”. And every time I take a crack at it I can never seem to be as pithy as all the other great “About” pages I’ve seen on blogs over the years.

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On Tuesday I attended a panel at SXSW titled “Video Blog Business Models“. The description of the panel — from the SXSW website — was “We have the technology, but where is the money? Learn the newest ideas for pulling revenue from the new world of blogged video content.”

It was moderated by (MOD) Chris Nolan, Editor & Founder of Spot-on.com. (I should note that of all the panels I attended at SXSW, she was by far the best moderator.)

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On Tuesday I attended a panel at the SXSW Day Stage titled “Democratization of the Moving Image” featuring Andrew Baron (AB) and Amanda Congdon (AC) of rocketboom. I’ve been downloading the show ever since TiVo recommended it to me, and I love it, so it was great to get to see these two explain their philosophy, the development of the “show”, and what they think about it.

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Today I attended a panel at SXSW titled “The New Startup Cultures“.

It was moderated by (MOD) Lane Becker Director of New Ventures, Adaptive Path.

The panelists were:
(BB) Ben Brown: Internet Rockstar, Consumating.com
(TC) Tony Conrad: CEO/Founder, Sphere
(TS) Tony Schneider: Automattic Inc
(AW) Anita Wilhelm: Co-Founder, Caterpillar Mobile

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Not many other people can say this: Today is the five year anniversary of my first blog entry. (This site’s been running for about nine years, but I didn’t start blogging until five years ago today.) It seems like just yesterday … but this is my 2,550th post …

So I took a stab at creating a header image. I used that crazy haettenschweiler font. I wanted to use the American Idiot font, but I could only find cheesy imitations and not “the real thing” in my five-minute Google hunt for it. This is actually the first time there’s ever been a header image on davidgagne.net — amazing when you consider this site’s been chugging along for over five years now. I just got an email and a gift certificate from dreamhost to congratulate me on my four-year anniversary with them.

What are the chances that after two+ years of little-to-no posting that anybody will be interested in visiting this site again? I’m guessing pretty slim. In my defense: I’ve been extraordinarily busy. Poor davidgagne.net here was also deluged with about 100 spam comments each day, which is one of the main reasons I finally switched to WordPress. I loved MovableType, but sometimes a man’s gotta bite the bullet. I’ve also learned more than most could hope to care to know about PHP and SQL (and Apache, and Linux, and ASP, and IIS, and …) in the last two+ years, so I’m seriously digging WP.

US President George W. Bush has been Google bombed. A search for “miserable failure” on the popular search engine Google brings up, as the first link, the official biography of Bush provided by the White House.

This can be done because Google does not only search the contents of web pages, it also counts how often a site is linked to, and the words which are used.

Hence it possible for a group of net-savvy individuals to influence the result of a Google search - a process called “Google bombing” - by linking any number of sites to a chosen one.

Once again I am probably several months behind on this one, but everyone knows I’m a sucker for a good meme. And it’s not my fault, I swear! I’ve just been working triple-time for the last few months. Anyway …
Here is my “blog family tree” from BlogTree.com. Look at all those siblings I have! Now, I know I have at least five other children … c’mon kiddies. Gimme some cred.

Wow! Alltheweb.com is a great ego-searcher …

Am I way behind the rest of the bus by just now finding this? I’ve been way out of touch with Bloggerville lately.

Blogging is on the verge of becoming a mainstream fad, and that fad will be exploited and commercialized. But blogging will not fade away when its faddishness passes, because it is built on the powerful code of written language.

This is part of blogging’s true power, the democratization of the distribution of information. Goldberg says that bloggers can only feed off the work of the mainstream press, but bloggers will lead, drive, and shape the news coverage of the major media, too.

from A Personal Look at Blogging

I finally sat down and worked on The Weblog Dictionary. I added a few new words and updated some links and terms. It’s also now using the same CSS file as most of the rest of the site, and - because I’m that much of a square - it’s now valid XHTML1.0 Transitional, whatever that means. If you know of any items that should be in there, please send them to me.