...more recent posts
I'm trying to put together an informal list of news related blogs to pass on to my friend A. who is contemplating moving his news media centered web site into a more weblog format (or maybe I don't have that right, but my task is the same regardless.) He knows there is something going on with "blogs" but I believe Drudge is as close as his personal experience comes. I'd like to point him to 10 - 20 real blogs that he could read to get a sense of what is going on out there. Maybe a very short summary along with each URL. Care to help?
Instapundit, Talking Points, Brad DeLong, Juan Cole, Daily Kos, all jump to my mind. A is a numbers man so, for instance, I think Kos is more interesting to him than, say, The Agonist, since Kos has lots of poll and media numbers while The Agonist is pretty much just repackaging stories from several media outlets for easy consumption.
No doubt there are much better examples. Feel free to help me out in the comments.
Mimi Smartypants has a book deal:
To smush the story down to a sentence or nine, because we are running overlong here, a wonderful woman from HarperCollins UK contacted me a while back and said, "We think your site should be made into a book." I laughed. If I had wanted to write a book I would have written a book. Then she kept talking and I realized it was not a prank call, and I realized I am JUST NOT PUNK ROCK ENOUGH to say no to HarperCollins UK and their checks. I feel very guilty about this book thing, because many incredibly worthy authors struggle and suffer to get their books published, and many more toil away at brilliant novels in obscurity. I go blah blah during my lunch hour on my happy little subdomain, writing something that is NOT A BOOK, and out of the blue comes a publishing contract.And best of all, it's already done:
100% no new content! All crap you have read before, just on the printed page and in a different order! However, maybe you will find that comforting.Congratulations Mimi! Everyone else should go buy it.
Holy cow that was hard. But I finally have my picture uploading scripts working. Parsing mutipart mime emails is not exactly my idea of fun. But now I can mail right from my phone to a special email address that then automatically posts the images to my new photolog.
No doubt you'll want to keep track of the nonstop excitement over there by adding it to your homepage. For guests I still have to enable email notification (as well as weblogs.com pings) for these auto posts.
Yesterday I downloaded a 3.5 meg MP3 to my phone as I walked around the LES. Not sure how long it took, but a while later I pulled the phone out of my pocket and it was done. I couldn't find the file at first, but then I opened up the MP3 player, and the song had gone right into the library. Automagically. And the MP3 player app isn't even a standard app - I downloaded and installed it myself, so this is some very sophisticated integration. Nice job Treo.
PIctures from my new Treo 600 moved to inside the comment thread...
Just got my Treo 600. It's charging now. I tried to make this post using it but it ate two consecutive attempts because I kept pressing a wrong key. I'll have to unlearn and relearn a lot of keyboard muscle memory. What I know as the comma key now means, apparently, go back to the main menu and don't bother remembering the current content of this textarea posting box.
This thing is significantly more sophisticated than my last mobile device. I think it lacks a bit of design elegance that the hiptop had (both in terms of the device itself, and the software interface,) but it more than compensates, as far as I'm concerned, by being much more like a small computer than like a phone. I can SSH into my server from it! Wow wow wow wow wow. It's not perfect, but you can see it from here.
Many more, possibly too many more, comments to come.
Wow. Technorati growth statistics:
Allow me to give you some growth statistics: One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we're adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We're also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds.
Squeezebox wireless interface between computer and stereo. I'd need to see the software interface before deciding, but this might be really useful.
Worlds smallest flying microbot. Controlled by bluetooth.
I am going absolutely crazy not being able to buy a Treo 600. Can someone clue me in as to how I can obtain one. Obviously some people are getting them. Yet the guy at the Sprint store in Manhattan told me their store had only gotten 2 units for sale!